Tales from the Bitface (version 4.2) Profile Photo

Tales from the Bitface (version 4.2)

Writer. Software developer.

tech

    ∞

    Duck(Duck)ing the User Interface

    It must be well over a year now since I switched my main search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo. I changed partly because of concerns over Google’s handling of privacy issues, and partly just to try out the new one.

    DuckDuckGo’s results are usually fine, and if you ever can’t find something and you think Google might be better, it’s easy to redirect your search there by adding “!g” at the end. There are other special codes like this, such as “!w” to search Wikipedia.

    So it’s all fine. But what I’ve only gradually realised is that I much prefer the Duck’s user interface. And this is for one simple reason: infinite scrolling.

    Now, infinite scrolling isn’t always good, and I’m sure it has a negative effect on things like usability and caching, in at least some cases. But on DDG (as I’m sure no-one ever calls it), it makes the whole search experience better.

    Because sometimes there are more than ten Interesting hits. Or the interesting ones are long after the tenth. But with Google, you get ten on a page. And then you’ve got to click or touch a link to go to the next ten. And it just feels so old fashioned.

    After just a few months on DDG (as we should all start calling it from now on) you can’t go back to Google without feeling a weird interrupt at the end of a page, before you go, “Oh, yeah, gotta click that.”

    It’s just an inferior experience.

    ∞

    Surely There's a Better Answer Than That?

    For one reason or another we wanted to remind ourselves1 of the Spanish word for “south.” I like to ask Siri for that kind of thing, because speaking to your phone is just easier than unlocking and typing sometimes. And Siri is not bad. It quite often gets the right answer for this kind of thing.

    Fullsizeoutput 59f

    Not so much there, though.

    So it correctly understood my question; but instead of feeding it to Google Translate or another translation service, it sent it to Wolfram Alpha, seemingly. And that came back with intriguing answer that the Spanish for “south” is “about 99027 people.”

    Seems like an unwieldy way to specify a compass direction.

    1. I say “remind” because I learned Spanish at school, my beloved is a linguist, and our daughter is learning it, so we knew really. ↩︎

    ∞

    Things That Should be Easy

    It ought to be easy to install a software package on Linux. I mean, it usually is. All modern distros ship with package managers, right? So all you should have to do is type (Debian-based example):

    sudo apt-get install PACKAGE-NAME

    and away you go. Right?

    Well, usually. But today, not for me.

    I have a NAS box from Western Digital, which is really a little Linux server with a biggish disk drive. Some time ago I replaced the shipped distro with a newer one, but it was so long ago, and it’s been so quiet and reliable that I can’t remember what version, exactly.

    So first, there seems to be no way to interrogate it to see what distro it is. I mean, there must be, and this page lists several ways, but none of them work on this box. I mean, uname shows me the kernel version and all that, but not the distro.

    Anyway, all that doesn’t really matter. I was only doing it to install Node, and I was only wanting to install Node so that I could run AirSonos. We got a Sonos Play:1 for the kitchen recently, and it’s great, but the one weakness is that it doesn’t support playing from an arbitrary source one your phone, such as, say, your podcast app of choice (Overcast, obvs).

    AirSonos is supposed to effectively turn the Sonos into an AirPlay speaker, so you can easily send audio to it from iOS devices. And you want it to be running on a server, so it’s available all the time.

    But it turns out that Node does not want to install on my NAS. Either by apt-get, as above, or by downloading the binary and unpacking it. (That installs it, obviously, but it won’t run.)

    I’m going to try running SonoAir on my MacBook. That’s a wrapper round AirSonos, and obviously it’ll only work (assuming it does at all) when my MacBook is awake. But life’s too short.

    ∞

    Getting Rid of Offensive Publications in Apple News Widget

    This is not a “How To” article, it’s a “How Do I?” one. I’ve been googling (or duckducking) to try to find the answer, but to no avail yet.

    Take a look at this screenshot:

    Screenshot of Apple News widget on an iPad.
    Screenshot of Apple News widget.

    Note that those “Top Stories” include headlines from the Sun and Sky News. Two publications whose names and words I do not want to see polluting my iPad or iPhone.

    But I can’t find any way to get rid of them. The widget details are linked to the Apple News app, and in the app itself you can specify preferences, but it doesn’t seem to affect what appears in the widget.

    So if anyone has any idea of how to influence what appears there, please drop me a comment, or tweet me a link or something.

    And yes I know I could disable the widget and/or delete the app, but I quite like the idea of it, in principle at least. And yes, I also know that avoiding the views of publications I dislike is only going to increase my own bubble effect. But you’ve got to have standards. I could cope with the Telegraph or even the Times (though I’d prefer not to). But the Sun? Come on.

    ∞

    On the Pronunciation of "X"

    Now that the new version of Apple’s PC operating system has launched, some thoughts on something that’s been bugging me for a while.

    Apple’s OS was called “OS X” from about 2000 or so. At one time it was “Mac OS X,” then at some point they dropped the “Mac” part. Now, of course, they’re dropping the “X,” (and the capital “M”) and going over to calling it “macOS.”

    In the old version, I knew that the “X” was the Roman numeral for 10. It was release 10 of their operating system, so that was fine. But I always pronounced it as the letter “X” in my mind. Not least because, as the version numbers incremented, they were presented like this: 10.2, 10.3, and so on. Or more fully, “Mac OS X 10.2.”

    So how were we meant to say that? “Mac Oh Ess ten ten point two”? Surely not. You can see why my internal monologue pronounced it “Oh Ess Ex ten point two”.

    And so it was and so I left it. I knew the “X” had originally meant “ten,” but I couldn’t imagine that anyone would still pronounce it that way. Until I started listening to podcasts.

    Wherein erudite, knowledgable Apple users such as John Gruber, or the hosts of the Accidental Tech Podcast were clearly heard to talk about “Oh Ess ten.” Though they mostly avoided saying the full, convoluted, Roman and Arabic mix of numbers. I think I did once hear David Sparks on Mac Power Users saying “Oh Ess ten ten point eight” (or whatever minor release number it might have been).

    Still, I didn’t let it bother me. It wasn’t doing any harm, after all.

    But then people started talking about relative sizes. I think I first noticed it when retina screens were being discussed. If you’re going to provide graphical resources to support both retina and non-retina screens, you have to provide versions of the image files at different resolutions. These are referred to in writing as “1x” and “2x” versions.

    Now, it is obvious to me that that isn’t a letter “x” there (even thought that’s what I typed), but a multiplication symbol. More properly rendered as “×”.1 The idea being that you have the original file, and one at twice the resolution. The multiplication symbol is said as “times.” So we have “one times” and “two times.” Right?

    But those pesky podcasts.

    Soon they were filled with “one ex” and “two ex.” It was the OS X problem all over again — but this time in reverse!

    But I gradually realised I might be wrong in my assessment. Graphics files are complicated beasts, after all. A file suitable for a retina screen doesn’t have twice the pixels needed for an older screen, for example: it has four times as many. There are twice as many on the x-axis and twice as many on the y-axis.

    And that’s when I realised that the “x” might refer to the x-axis. Saying a file was “2x” could be shorthand for saying that it had twice as many pixels on both its x- and y-axes.

    In which case pronouncing it “two ex” would be right after all. Perhaps the terminology came from developers and designers referring to size of the files.

    Except… I have subsequently heard people say other numbers followed by “ex,” when what they clearly meant was a multiplier. Specifically, I heard CGP Grey saying “ten ex” when talking about a tenfold increase in something like YouTube subscribers. And he used to be a maths teacher, so he should really know better.

    Can we ever escape from this insidious invasion of “ex” into spaces where “times” belongs? Probably not. But it’s disturbing when otherwise-smart people make themselves sound so ignorant.

    (And don’t get me started on the full-stop or period character that splits up those version numbers. Hint: it’s “point”, not “dot.”)

    1. That may or may not look any different from the letter, depending on the typeface you are seeing it in, but it’s a different unicode character. ↩︎

    ∞

    Pokémon Gone

    I am so not a gamer.

    Oh, I loved Asteroids back in the day. I solved Monument Valley, and I got on fine with Alto’s Adventure. But I’ve never got more sophisticated modern games. There’s a whole big post about that that I’ll maybe write one day.

    But Pokémon Go has lit up the internet for the last week or so, and it sounded kind of fun. So I thought I’d give it a try. Probably more healthy than arguing about the Labour leadership crisis on Facebook, anyway.

    I was just out at the shops, and I remembered I had it, and sure enough, there was a wild Golbat outside the local supermarket. You’ve got to throw the pokéball to catch them, right? I’ve seen enough of the TV series with my kids to get that.

    A hovering Golbat superimposed on a shop called 'Local Supermarket'.

    But could I catch it? Could I buggery. No matter how many times I flicked up on the screen to send the ball towards it, it just would not connect. I must have tried like fifty times, standing outside the shop like an idiot.

    This is why I never get into games. I soon hit upon something frustrating and get bored with them. No doubt I was doing something wrong. I’ll try again, I suppose, but it’s very discouraging.

    Oh, and I couldn’t get the name I wanted. “Devilgate” was taken, but so was it along with just about every suffix I could think of, including just random strings of numbers.

    Kind of cool to see the pokéball rolling off under the vegetable racks, though.

    ∞

    I Upgraded my MacBook

    And it's like having a new machine.

    I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro, mid 2010 model. I bought it in about September or October 2010. Which means it’s getting quite long in the tooth. The MacBooks have come on a long way in what they offer since then. Mine had 4GB of memory and a 320 GB hard drive. Nowadays they have solid-state drives by default and start from 16GB of memory, I think.

    Thing is, it was still fine in most ways, but it was getting very, very slow. It wasn’t too bad once everything was up and running, but waking it from sleep meant I’d be seeing what Ginger out of The Wildhearts called the “spinning fucking rainbow” (and everyone else calls the beachball) for a long time.

    Even when it was up, just switching apps could trigger the slowness. So I was thinking about upgrading. But I figured there was life in the old beast yet. I took inspiration from Jason Snell who writes of upgrading a 2009 model.

    According to Apple, the most memory this model can support is 8GB. But according to Other World Computing, this particular model, though no others from around then, can actually take more – up to 16GB.

    I went to Crucial, which is noted as the best site for Mac upgrades in the UK (OWC is only in the US). Its tool said it could only take 8GB. But I looked around various forums and decided that there was enough evidence that OWC were right. Plus memory is so cheap these days that the difference in price between 8 and 16 was very small.

    So I took a chance and ordered 16GB, plus a 500GB SSD.

    Installing the memory was trivially easy. You don’t need more than a small Phillips screwdriver to open the case, and the memory modules themselves pop out and slot in very easily.

    But with the two 8GB modules in, it wouldn’t boot up. I just got series of three beeps, repeated every few seconds.

    A bit of googling told me that means “bad memory,” essentially.

    I tried taking it out an putting it back in, swapping round which module was in which slot, and so on, but to no avail. I put the old memory back just to check that I hadn’t damaged something, and it started up like before.

    So it looked like OWC were wrong, and I was restricted to 8GB. I was considering sending the memory back to Crucial and hoping I could get I refund. But then I tried one more thing. One of the new 8GB sticks along with one of the old 2GB ones.

    And it booted up, smooth as a cliche.

    Of course I tried swapping out one 8GB stick for the other, to check for the possibility that one of them actually was bad. But both of them worked. So it seems that this MacBook can take more than 8GB, but not as much as 16. Which is strange, but never mind.

    I’d have to say, though, that the difference in performance wasn’t obvious. But I didn’t spend lot of time with it like that, because I still had the SSD to install. That’s very slightly more involved, needing as it does a Torx screwdriver. But it’s very easy.

    Before all that I had made sure my old hard drive was thoroughly backed up, you won’t be surprised to hear.

    I booted up in the new configuration and told the Mac to set itself up as a new installation. It downloaded El Capitan over the air and installed away.

    There was one slight glitch in this process. Something went wrong with the installation and I started getting a kernel panic on bootup. I don’t quite recall the details now, but I just reformatted the SSD and installed again, and it all went fine.

    And the difference… The difference is astonishing. Even with many apps open (I currently have twelve), and a whole stack of tabs in Safari, using it is effortless. Apps switch without the slightest lag. I can start anything up with only a few bounces. I’ve hardly even seen the rainbow.

    Even Lightroom, which is the heaviest-weight app I use on here, starts in under ten seconds.

    In short, this is the way a computer should be.

    ∞

    Java isn't slow

    So if your Java code is doing something easier than processing 6 million events a second, and it’s slow, you can maybe make it faster!

    Source: Java isn’t slow

    Great piece by Julia Evans on some really fast Java applications. Notably LMAX.

    ∞

    URLs and searching

    URL hiding

    A while ago, I read a piece called “Improving the URL Bar" (turns out it’s almost a year old, but never mind). I made both mental and Pinboard-based notes of it, because my response to it was, “That’s not improving the URL bar, it’s destroying it."

    Reading it again now, I don’t feel quite so strongly; I partly agree with what the author was getting at. But I feel we lose something important as we make URLs less visible. They show something of the hierarchy of a site, its structure — or at least that’s the origin of the path part.

    The argument against that of course is that the path part is an implentation detail that doesn’t need to be seen by users, and perhaps more importantly, the whole thing is meaningless at best, confusing at worst to most users.

    Well, maybe so. But to those of us who do understand them, hiding them can be confusing, even annoying.Of course you can click in the URL bar, or press Cmd-L or Ctrl-L, to see the whole thing. More usefully, In Safari, which I’m currently using, there’s a preference called “Show full website address”, which overrides the behaviour. So you can have your choice.

    Searching

    But then there’s this whole thing that we have now, of browsers doing a search when you type something in URL bar; especially (though not exclusively) when it’s not obviously a URL that you’ve typed or pasted.

    I don’t like it.

    Or I didn’t. I’ve been using Safari since I wiped and reinstalled this Mac because it was getting really slow (successfully, I might add). I decided to keep things as stock as possible (within reason — I wasn’t going to switch back from Lightroom to iPhoto, for example, or from MailMate to Mail.app). And Firefox can sometimes be a bit of a resource hog.

    But I spent quite some time trying to find out how to give Safari a separate search bar like FF has (or can have — it may be a plugin, but if so it’s one that I install without thinking). I had muscle memory that went Cmd-T, Cmd-K (or Ctrl-T, Ctrl-T when I’m on Windows) when I want a new tab I’m going to search in. Still have it, actually, because I still use FF on Windows on my work machine.

    It turns out that you can’t have that on Safari. You just have to search from the URL bar. So I just got into the habit of doing that. And now I find I do it even on Firefox (you have both options there).

    I don’t know; I still feel that the URL bar should be for URLs, and searching should be something else. but it doesn’t offend me like it used to.

    Still, the effect is to further blur the distinction between searching for a site and going to a specific site. I see people — even experienced, technically knowledgable people — going to Google’s home page and typing “facebook.com” into the search box. I mean, what?

    Oh, and of course if you search from Google’s home page in Chrome, your cursor jumps to the URL bar! Or it did the last time I used Chrome. Which blurs the distinction between site and browser, as well as between site and search.

    In the end it doesn’t matter that much — people mostly get where they mean to go — but by making it less than clear what is going on when we navigate around the web, we make it harder for people to understand how it’s all put together, and I think we lose something important in doing so.

    ∞

    Thin

    We used to call this “thin clients”; or just a terminal logged on to a server or mainframe. Jason Snell writes of something newish that Adobe and Google are doing with Chromebooks:

    This week I got a demo of Photoshop running inside Chrome, and while it was really interesting, some of my assumptions were faulty. It turns out that when Adobe says Photoshop is a “streaming app,” they mean it—it’s much more like screen sharing than native software. Photoshop runs remotely on a Windows-based server, and video of the app’s interface streams to the Chrome browser.

    via Six Colors: Adobe streams Photoshop to Chromebooks.

    ∞

    Aye, (Head)Phones

    I’m not in the market for a new pair of headphones. My venerable Sennheiser HD450s are still doing fine for over-the-head use, and the same brand have provided me with a series of earbuds for mobile use. But I tried a pair of Beats by Dre phones in an HMV the other day, just to see what all the fuss was about.

    They looked pretty good, felt comfortable, and sounded great. But the price!

    Apparently Apple bought Beats more for the streaming service than the phones. That makes sense: if they’d wanted a headphone company they’d have gone for Sennheiser, obviously (and if they cared about earphones in general they wouldn’t have made horrible ones for years).

    But you’d think that if they wanted a streaming service, they’d have gone for Spotify, which is surely more established.

    So I suspect the truth may include a combination of the two, plus a degree of cool cachet, in what is perhaps a demographic that they don’t currently reach.

    Either way, if the next iPhone or Mac comes with a cool pair of phones (unlikely though that may be) I won’t be unhappy.

    ∞

    Weirdest Customer Request?

    This is one of those unpublished posts I told you about. I don't know why it wasn't published (well, except that I hadn't written the last couple of sentences).

    A while back I heard the strangest ever request from a customer.

    As you might know, I work for a software house.1 We write financial software for banks. As a thing to talk about it tends to be boring, but it can have interesting challenges.

    Anyway, one of our product’s problems, as a web-based app, is that it was written to specifically target the Internet Explorer browser.

    I know that seems at best charmingly retro, and at worst appallingly non-standards-compliant, but there are a couple of good-ish reasons. Principally the fact that the original version of the web app was written by contractors who both only knew IE, and were told that our clients only cared about IE. The latter was probably true at the time, and as for the former, well: let’s just say that sometimes people in companies make some stupid decisions, and leave it at that.

    Inevitably, and especially as the browser landscape has matured and Apple and Google have come to rule the world, there have been calls to fix things. But there have always been higher-priorities. Getting new features done takes priority over making things work better, sadly.

    One of these years we’ll fix it – personally I don’t think it’ll be as difficult as people always think (that fear is another reason why we have resisted doing it).

    But what it would really take to force us to sort it out would be if a client demanded it.

    If it were going to make or break a sale, we’d be all hands on deck.

    So it’s interesting that we got a query a while back wherein a client was concerned about the fact that the app doesn’t work properly in Firefox. This was causing some of their users distress, as FF is their chosen browser. Was this it? Was this the opportunity, at last, driven by customer demand, to bring our app into the late twentieth century?

    No.

    No, the client had a better idea. They wanted us to to change our app such that it would detect that the user was running something other than IE…

    … and prompt them to use IE instead.

    Oh dear.

    (We didn’t agree to their request.)

    1. Incidentally, why “house”, I wonder? By association with “publishing house”, obviously, but why are those “houses”? I’m reminded of a discussion I had on a software mailing list in the nineties regarding the American tendency (then, if not now) for referring to a “shop”, meaning a programming entity, including an old-school IT department within a company. ↩︎

    ∞

    Google is Buying Sparrow, but not Updating the Apps

    Google buys Sparrow, current apps will not get any new features | The Verge.

    This is annoying. The only thing that was stopping me from making Sparrow my default mail client on my iPhone was the fact that it doesn’t do rotation to landscape mode yet. Now it looks like it never will.

    It’s rarely good in the long run when big software companies hoover up small ones, it seems to me.

    ∞

    Cluttered by Google, Lost by Bing

    I was reading The Clutter Didn’t Kill the Love by Brent Simmons, about how he was trying Microsoft's Bing search engine, instead of Google. His reason was the current worry that Google is becoming less than trustworthy.

    Google losing trust would be a shame. But at least a Google search for “martin mccallion” (without the quotes) has this blog as the number one hit. Try that on Bing at the moment and you get a whole pile of other Martin McCallions.1 The worst part to me is that the first six are Facebook or LinkedIn profiles (the seventh is one of those annoying directory sites, then you get me).

    I wouldn’t mind other people with the same name appearing above me, if it was their proper sites; but to me social-network profiles feel like distinctly second-class web entities.

    Or is that snobbish?

    1. As an experiment, and to ensure a like-for-like comparison, I signed out of Google, and went to the .com version (I normally use .co.uk by default). I was still at the top. ↩︎

    ∞

    Maccetty Mac

    So, I've had this here new MacBook for a couple of weeks, and I've yet to post anything from it. I am, not surprisingly, loving it.

    The initial weirdnesses (I’ve never used a Mac before, apart from once very briefly, before OS/X) include the absence of a hash-key (though you can get the character using Alt+3: #); the plethora of modifier keys: Ctrl and Alt, of course, but also Cmd and Fn. Though actually, most laptops have Fn, so it’s really just one extra. But they get a lot of use.

    The nicest thing is probably the multitouch trackpad: scroll with two fingers, navigate with three, do some other weird navigation thing (Exposé, I think it’s called) with four. Pure dead brilliant, in the vernacular of my homeland.

    Most annoying thing is the American positioning of the @ and " keys. I’d like to remap those back to where my muscle-memory says they should be, but haven’t worked out how to do that yet.

    I’ve installed various pieces of software on trial or demo options. I’m typing this entry using MarsEdit. I’m gathering notes for the the thing I intend to write for NaNoWriMo using Scrivener. And so on.

    All in all, it’s the beginning of a big adventure.

    And now, let’s see how this posts.

    ∞

    I phone, you phone

    So, I've got an iPhone. I walked into the O2 shop near work the other day, and came out half an hour later with an 8 GB phone and a £30-a-month contract.

    The device itself is a thing of beauty, in both hardware and software terms.

    iTunes, however, is an ugly piece of dingbat’s kidneys.

    Don’t get me wrong: it does its thing well, from playing music, through purchases, to synchronisation. But my god, it looks ugly.

    And nor do I like the way it presents the music it knows about; but then, I’ve never seen an application that does that very well.

    As to typing with the on-screen keyboard, well, it’s actually not that bad; it’s never going to. Be fast, bit there are some smart optimisations, like automatically switching back from the symbol keyboard to the letter one when you hit space after a comma, or immediately after you type an apostrophe.

    And I almost cry with happiness every time I see the transition from one app to another.

    ETA: As you can see from the typoes above, I wrote that on the shiny device. I’ll leave them in for posterity.

    ∞

    One Device to Do It All?

    So, my new phone arrived today. It’s a Sony-Ericsson M600i smartphone. Most excitingly, with T-Mobile’s Web ‘n’ Walk service, I get unlimited (though capped) mobile internet.

    All that remains (apart from ugrading the firmware, sorting out backups and synchronisation, and generally finding my way around the thing) is to get Orange to send my PAC code (actually I suspect the ‘C’ stands for ‘code’, but never mind), so that I can get my number transferred. Which they’ve said they’ll do, but I’ve heard it can be difficult.

    Anyway, I’m typing this on it, and will try posting from it next.

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