One of the electronics/computer repair shops in Moncton has been branching out into selling Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and a whole whack of, ahem!, "accessories" for them. Business is apparently brisk: One wall became two, then three. I alternate between referring to them as "Candyland" and "The Widget-pushers."
So I emailed the Alpha-Widget-Pusher last week to see whether he had a source for the ATMega328P DIP chip I've been having a difficult time tracking down...at least from Canadian suppliers. And since I'm probably going to be spending some time moving these from breadboard to breadboard, it's a good excuse to find a better chip-puller than the twist-prone cheapie that I picked up from Princess Auto. So I tacked a request for recommendation onto the email.
The reply was that their Alpha Chip-Puller is mostly using tools made in the 1930s. For which, mad respect. Plus a small side of jealousy. Take care of the tools and the tools will take care of you -- that's one of my tenets, and not just in electronics.
I griped to Dennis about how, after decades of Kanban, TQM, ISO-9001, and every other flavour-of-the-month underfunded QA push, they still "don't make 'em like they used to." That's something you shouldn't gripe about to a Recovering Manufacturing Engineer(TM). At least not unless you want an earful about how ISO-9001 only guarantees that your processes are executed as documented.
But he's right. A CNC machine capable of of 0.001% tolerances can't stop the cheap steel it just milled from warping or cracking in use. Consistency is not quality...or at least is only a part of it. In fairness, in some cases consistency is a Very Big Deal(TM). (Remember Intel's division-error and the resulting freak-out? Even the one-in-nine-billion odds were too much for everyone.) But consistency is a hard, easily-measurable metric. Thus its overweighted role as a surrogate for quality.
True quality, of course, is squishier, less easily shoe-horned into a database or aggregated into a colour-coded chart/graph. Let's face it; no one picks a tool off the wall at the big-box hardware store or out of a mail-order box and thinks, "My great-grandchild will maybe use this to build __x__ one day." So I very much doubt that, unless they were hand-made, the
manufacturer of those antique tools gave much thought to their
whereabouts in 2018.
That's not to say that no one cared about quality. In the Great Depression, people were more apt to look on non-daily expenditures as "investments," especially tools that would better allow them to mend and "make do" vs. having to buy new. Double that for the craftsperson putting food on the table. Print advertisements and radio jingles, doubtless, headlined "quality"* as a major selling-point.
But tracking down product made decades ago and measuring its longevity? Even scraping and comparing offerings on eBay is nothing any MBA could consider a "metric." No, the value is solely in the eye of the beholder--specifically, the craftsperson who imagines the spirit of previous generations of craftspeople echoing in their work with the tool in question.
I suppose that some savvy marketer could pitch tools as "future heirlooms." 'S'matter'a'fact, I'm kind of surprised they already haven't. (And if they already haven't, for the noodley love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, shhhhhhhhhhh...) Mind you, any such campaign will be waged by some giga-conglomerate offs-horing its manufacturing while writhing its last in the strangling grip of a Wall Street vampire squid. But maybe--just maybe--its last gasp will blow on whatever embers remain of the crafts(wo)man ethic.
Melodramatic? Eh, probably. But even for someone whose tool-belt can be so very ephemeral--wherever you are, PC-Write, know that I still love you!--it does matter. Particularly post-Christmas as I stare at a brass-rimmed steel thimble perched on my monitor-stand. Mom doesn't expect to have the fine motor control necessary for hand-sewing ever again. So I'm the heiress of a *whack* of embroidery floss and her thimble. Which turns out to be her Mom's thimble. It's clearly been stepped-on, and there's a patina of rust on the inside. Alas, my bone-structure takes after my other, more petite, Grandmother. But that's nothing a little padding and a skinny rare-earth magnet can't deal with. And it will be dealt with, and shortly. Enshrining tools on a shelf is the same as burying them. I'd like a bit of Grandma to live on, even if only in my crazy projects.
- - - - -
* A sound captured by Mark Knopfler in his dangerously catchy throwback tune "Quality Shoe." (You, Gentle Reader, have been warned.)
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Thursday, December 7, 2017
The limits of affordances
Just because I'm mostly a back-end (read database and business logic) developer doesn't mean that I don't care about UI or UX. Mom drilled the ethic of putting myself in another person's proverbial shoes into me pretty early-on.
For what I usually do, that plays out in well-organised data-sets, scads and scads of validation code, and fighting tooth-and-nail for the absolute rock-bottom minimum of data passing back and forth between client and server. Mostly do-able...assuming you aren't double-teamed by Marketing and Legal. (Pro Tip: Know your bandwith/hosting costs cold, have your calculator handy, and put the onus squarely on those noseyparker byte-hoovering data-slobs to quantify the ROI. Preferably in front of upper management. Chances are, they can't and won't. And they'll think twice before doing it again. Alas, twice isn't always enough times. Lather, rinse, repeat.)
While my world is largely ruled by, well, rules, front-end designers and developers wrestle with the container-of-fuzzy-spaghetti-from-the-back-of-the-fridge otherwise known as the modern human psyche. More power to them. I've wrestled heisenbugs a-plenty (losing more than a few rounds, mind you), and still would rather re-fight every single one of those battles than allow a random user to type a DateTime value as plain text. Seriously.
Thus I'm a starry-eyed fan of design folks like Don Norman, Mike Monteiro, Erica Hall, and Luke Wroblewski. (Viktor Papanek's magnum opus has been on my wish-list for years, but it's been out of print for so long. Some day...) Also behavioural psychologists like Daniel Ariely and Daniel Kahneman. Likewise Clay Shirky when it comes to pointing out the differences in how humans act individually vs. in groups (absolutely critical in this connected age).
The single most important take-away from all this reading is: Thou shalt make it easy for thy user to do The Right Thing(TM). (In an ideal world, thou shalt make it statistically impossible for thy user to do the wrong thing, but -- Mike Monteiro excepted -- nobody in this crowd is rocking anything like Charlton Heston's beard from The Ten Commandments, so...).
And yet, for all that reading--in most cases multiple readings because it's all crazy-good--I find its limits no farther away than the local co-op grocery store.
Several years ago, I had both the keep-you-on-your-toes challenge and the genuine pleasure (because they shouldn't be mutually-exclusive) of holding down the account for a household-name client. The kind of client that was flush enough to send holiday gifts to their vendors. As a matter of corporate policy, I donated gifts like the cheese-knives and cutting-board to the office kitchen. (Being the Patron Sinner of the office's "liquid potlucks," what else would I do with that kind of thing, I ask you.)
The two shopping bags were another story. Lovely things, those. Two sets of handles, for shoulder or hand. Constructed from the recycled (PET) plastic equivalent of Grade-A Wakandan vibranium, IMLTHO. (Or adamantium -- take your pick, Marvel fans.) Crossed with a Tardis to boot. They're awesome. Especially when compared to the branded "resusable" bags hawked by the local grocery stores. Two of which (in our household, at least) have been known to blow their seams in less than a month...one on the very next use.
So I, being a back-end developer aspiring to minimise my UI/UX sins, attempt to do the right thing by making it easy for my user (a.k.a. the cashier) to do the right thing. Which means the double-decker short cart rather than the monolithic monstrosities with the turning-radius of a battleship. Heavy stuff on the bottom (because Physics, nat'cherly) and little and/or smooshable stuff on top.
At the checkout line, the first thing dropped onto the conveyor-belt is the bags. With the awesomer ones unmistakably on top of the not-so-awesome ones. Then the groceries, carefully graded (front to back on the belt) from heaviest to lightest. The affordance couldn't be plainer: Put the stuff closest to you in these-here bags up-top.
Yet, well over 90% of the time (in my observations), the cashier dumps the awesome bags off to the side and loads the flour, the shortening, the canned goods, etc. into the el-cheapo bags and resorts to the industrial-strength bags only when the others have run out.
Why? Because when it's the difference between the known and the unknown, afforances don't mean jack. As far as the average customer and cashier are concerned, all branded "reusable" (in my case, the quotation-marks are there for good reason) bags are churned out by the same no-name offshore factory. (And, for all I know, they are. Booyah, race-to-the-bottom globalism, yo.) The default option -- i.e. the ultimate affordance -- is the known quantity. It's the same reason that the "Save" button still looks like a 3.5" floppy disk and not a USB flash drive or an SD card. The exact same reason.
Which, while it's frustrating as all get-out, is deeply humbling. It's why I consider darned near every UI/UX developer on the planet grossly underpaid. As much as non-programmers puzzle (perhaps shudder) at the inner workings of computers, I embrace them as fundamentally logical -- ultimately knowable. In contrast, stepping into the world of human-computer interaction means trading the near-certainties of Boolean logic for the fuzzier approximations of statistical norms...clouded by the occasional chaos of lizard-brained mob-thought. [shudder]
Alas, my patron-client must have custom-ordered the awesome bags, because they have no manufacturer's tag. (They're a dark olive green, slightly beveled bottoms, two sets of handles -- can ya do a girl a solid here, Intertubes??? Halp.) Or I'd cheerfully solve my weekly problem by ordering a few more. ("Thou shalt make it impossible for thy user to do the wrong thing," remember???)
The other, cheaper, solution, of course, would be to just tell the cashier to use the weirdo bags. Except that cashiers are basically just trying to optimise for ringing up as many sales as possible without getting yelled at. At the risk of sounding ancient, I'm old enough to remember when ringing up sales (and making small-talk about the weather) was all cashiers had to do. Another person not only bagged your groceries, but also loaded them into numbered tubs so that a third person could help load them into your car (if you so chose). Contrast that with the utter faceless dickishness of Home Depot, et. al., and their self-checkouts, and you'll understand why I refuse to participate in any further dehumanisation.
Ultimately, computer programming, like any discipline, has to push the boundaries to stay relevant. In the 1990s, we had the waggish adage of "Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away." And while I sometimes wonder whether an on-demand "serverless" world of ginormous anything-goes NoSQL databases and spaghetti-nets of asynchronous-microservices-du-jour will trash back-end coding as a legit. discipline, I have no such worries about UI/UX developers. Those boundaries, however mystifying to a left-brainer like myself, are vast, but relatively immutable. But certainly no less challenging for all that.
For what I usually do, that plays out in well-organised data-sets, scads and scads of validation code, and fighting tooth-and-nail for the absolute rock-bottom minimum of data passing back and forth between client and server. Mostly do-able...assuming you aren't double-teamed by Marketing and Legal. (Pro Tip: Know your bandwith/hosting costs cold, have your calculator handy, and put the onus squarely on those noseyparker byte-hoovering data-slobs to quantify the ROI. Preferably in front of upper management. Chances are, they can't and won't. And they'll think twice before doing it again. Alas, twice isn't always enough times. Lather, rinse, repeat.)
While my world is largely ruled by, well, rules, front-end designers and developers wrestle with the container-of-fuzzy-spaghetti-from-the-back-of-the-fridge otherwise known as the modern human psyche. More power to them. I've wrestled heisenbugs a-plenty (losing more than a few rounds, mind you), and still would rather re-fight every single one of those battles than allow a random user to type a DateTime value as plain text. Seriously.
Thus I'm a starry-eyed fan of design folks like Don Norman, Mike Monteiro, Erica Hall, and Luke Wroblewski. (Viktor Papanek's magnum opus has been on my wish-list for years, but it's been out of print for so long. Some day...) Also behavioural psychologists like Daniel Ariely and Daniel Kahneman. Likewise Clay Shirky when it comes to pointing out the differences in how humans act individually vs. in groups (absolutely critical in this connected age).
The single most important take-away from all this reading is: Thou shalt make it easy for thy user to do The Right Thing(TM). (In an ideal world, thou shalt make it statistically impossible for thy user to do the wrong thing, but -- Mike Monteiro excepted -- nobody in this crowd is rocking anything like Charlton Heston's beard from The Ten Commandments, so...).
And yet, for all that reading--in most cases multiple readings because it's all crazy-good--I find its limits no farther away than the local co-op grocery store.
Several years ago, I had both the keep-you-on-your-toes challenge and the genuine pleasure (because they shouldn't be mutually-exclusive) of holding down the account for a household-name client. The kind of client that was flush enough to send holiday gifts to their vendors. As a matter of corporate policy, I donated gifts like the cheese-knives and cutting-board to the office kitchen. (Being the Patron Sinner of the office's "liquid potlucks," what else would I do with that kind of thing, I ask you.)
The two shopping bags were another story. Lovely things, those. Two sets of handles, for shoulder or hand. Constructed from the recycled (PET) plastic equivalent of Grade-A Wakandan vibranium, IMLTHO. (Or adamantium -- take your pick, Marvel fans.) Crossed with a Tardis to boot. They're awesome. Especially when compared to the branded "resusable" bags hawked by the local grocery stores. Two of which (in our household, at least) have been known to blow their seams in less than a month...one on the very next use.
So I, being a back-end developer aspiring to minimise my UI/UX sins, attempt to do the right thing by making it easy for my user (a.k.a. the cashier) to do the right thing. Which means the double-decker short cart rather than the monolithic monstrosities with the turning-radius of a battleship. Heavy stuff on the bottom (because Physics, nat'cherly) and little and/or smooshable stuff on top.
At the checkout line, the first thing dropped onto the conveyor-belt is the bags. With the awesomer ones unmistakably on top of the not-so-awesome ones. Then the groceries, carefully graded (front to back on the belt) from heaviest to lightest. The affordance couldn't be plainer: Put the stuff closest to you in these-here bags up-top.
Yet, well over 90% of the time (in my observations), the cashier dumps the awesome bags off to the side and loads the flour, the shortening, the canned goods, etc. into the el-cheapo bags and resorts to the industrial-strength bags only when the others have run out.
Why? Because when it's the difference between the known and the unknown, afforances don't mean jack. As far as the average customer and cashier are concerned, all branded "reusable" (in my case, the quotation-marks are there for good reason) bags are churned out by the same no-name offshore factory. (And, for all I know, they are. Booyah, race-to-the-bottom globalism, yo.) The default option -- i.e. the ultimate affordance -- is the known quantity. It's the same reason that the "Save" button still looks like a 3.5" floppy disk and not a USB flash drive or an SD card. The exact same reason.
Which, while it's frustrating as all get-out, is deeply humbling. It's why I consider darned near every UI/UX developer on the planet grossly underpaid. As much as non-programmers puzzle (perhaps shudder) at the inner workings of computers, I embrace them as fundamentally logical -- ultimately knowable. In contrast, stepping into the world of human-computer interaction means trading the near-certainties of Boolean logic for the fuzzier approximations of statistical norms...clouded by the occasional chaos of lizard-brained mob-thought. [shudder]
Alas, my patron-client must have custom-ordered the awesome bags, because they have no manufacturer's tag. (They're a dark olive green, slightly beveled bottoms, two sets of handles -- can ya do a girl a solid here, Intertubes??? Halp.) Or I'd cheerfully solve my weekly problem by ordering a few more. ("Thou shalt make it impossible for thy user to do the wrong thing," remember???)
The other, cheaper, solution, of course, would be to just tell the cashier to use the weirdo bags. Except that cashiers are basically just trying to optimise for ringing up as many sales as possible without getting yelled at. At the risk of sounding ancient, I'm old enough to remember when ringing up sales (and making small-talk about the weather) was all cashiers had to do. Another person not only bagged your groceries, but also loaded them into numbered tubs so that a third person could help load them into your car (if you so chose). Contrast that with the utter faceless dickishness of Home Depot, et. al., and their self-checkouts, and you'll understand why I refuse to participate in any further dehumanisation.
Ultimately, computer programming, like any discipline, has to push the boundaries to stay relevant. In the 1990s, we had the waggish adage of "Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away." And while I sometimes wonder whether an on-demand "serverless" world of ginormous anything-goes NoSQL databases and spaghetti-nets of asynchronous-microservices-du-jour will trash back-end coding as a legit. discipline, I have no such worries about UI/UX developers. Those boundaries, however mystifying to a left-brainer like myself, are vast, but relatively immutable. But certainly no less challenging for all that.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
"Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else."
That was the little bio. tag-line for someone on the Arduino forums. (I didn't make a note of their handle. Apologies!) Granted, if you're trolling through the Arduino forums, you're already feeling that. But boy howdy, that hit a little too close to home for me.
Backstory: The chicken coop is almost finished from a structural standpoint. For monitoring temperature, humidity, and ammonia (NH3) levels, I decided to take the cue from my neighbour and roll with a wifi-based interface vs. Bluetooth/Android.
The wifi breakout board that I'm holding up below is the ESP8266: Version 1.0 form-factor with the Version 12 firmware. Go figure.
I've known for well over a year what a difficult little beastie it is.
But this, in addition to being my first full Internet of Things project (well, first non-proof-of-concept project, anyway) was only my second rodeo with a smaller microprocessor. I've already gone a few rounds with the Atmega328 chip running on a breadboard. It's the same chip used in the Arduino UNOs, which streamlines development (as much as development can be streamlined).
The squee little ATtiny85 is the baby of the Arduino family. Its surface-mount form-factor is the brains of Adafruit's Trinket, so I'm already familiar with some of its...errrrr..."quirks." (So, yeah, the "baby" can sometimes swing to more of the "Stewie Griffin" than the "Maggie Simpson" end of the spectrum.)
The biggest quirk is that peeking inside the head of the ATtiny chips is almost impossible. (I've done it with another full Arduino and an FTDI/UART programmer, but the wiring alone would make Rube Goldberg shake his head.) All the usual protocols you'd use with a full-size Arduino chip (I2C, SPI, full Serial) are not supported. The best that the ATtinys can manage is the SoftwareSerial library. Which looks all fancy-schmancy on the surface, but under the hood does something known as "bit-banging."
Now, without wading into the intricacies of two- and three-wire communication, let's just compare bit-banging to an intersection where the drivers only sorta-kinda follow the protocol of taking turns and where the cars don't always arrive at neat intervals.
The bigger Atmega328 chips require you to supply an external "clock" (a crystal oscillator plus a couple of capacitors) to time the exchange of ones and zeros. And while you have that option with the ATtinys, you do it at the cost of two pins -- of which there are only five on the ATtiny85. The remaining (and default) option is to rely on the chip's 8 MHz internal clock.
As it turns out, that clock doesn't exactly run with the tightest tolerances. According to one reply on the Arduino forums, the slop can be as high as +/- 10%.
Yeeeee-OWCH.
The upshot was that the hit-to-miss ratio of the HTTP GET request even making it to the router intact was absolutely abysmal. By contrast, when I ported the code to a full Arduino UNO, the ratio flipped. Still not perfect, but more than acceptable. When I wired up an Atmega328 on a breadboard and uploaded the self-same code to it, the results were the same as the UNO. The relative reliability of the external clock made all the difference in the world.
Pity. I had high hopes for that little cutie-pie of a chip. I still plan on wiring up and coding a Bluetooth-based proof-of-concept with it. Mainly to get a handle on its reliability.. As I mentioned, HTTP GET is hella-finicky. The AT-commands used with Bluetooth are simpler, so there is some hope there.
In the meantime, I'm going into production with a slightly over-engineered "Mark I." I still need to pick up a replacement NH3 sensor from BJW in Moncton (because guess who hosed up soldering headers and then nearly ripped off a couple of pads trying to de-solder them?), burn it in, and kick its tires. And, finally, knock together a screened enclosure to proof the whole contraption against, ahem, "re-wiring" by a trio of curious -- and probably bored -- chickens. (I've seen the movie Chicken Run, y'all, and I would not put it past any of them. Related: Remind me never to let them watch Iron Man either.)
For the longer-term, I have a couple more sketches for the "library" of Arduino code accumulating in a Mercurial repository. For this project I imported the temperature and humidity code lock, stock and barrel and it worked right out of the box. Which is the whole point of a well-organised code-library. And with a tenacious sinus infection knocking me flat in the middle of this project, don't think that I don't appreciate my past self for that!
And, most important, this radically expanded my notes. Most especially the "Gotcha" section of an Arduino-on-a-breadboard ("Boarduino") presentation that I might give sometime in the next few months. Because while I consider this latest round of butt-kicking just another installment of paying my dues, I benefited hugely from the forums, etc. And so I'm paying that forward. Mind you, I don't worry about the next generation becoming soft and spoiled. Because even if I spare someone this particular butt-kicking, there are plenty more lurking out there with each new project. Oh yes, yes there are...
Backstory: The chicken coop is almost finished from a structural standpoint. For monitoring temperature, humidity, and ammonia (NH3) levels, I decided to take the cue from my neighbour and roll with a wifi-based interface vs. Bluetooth/Android.
The wifi breakout board that I'm holding up below is the ESP8266: Version 1.0 form-factor with the Version 12 firmware. Go figure.
I've known for well over a year what a difficult little beastie it is.
- The above form-factor's pinout is downright breadboard-hostile. (Two rows of pins? Just...whyyyyyyyyyy????)
- It runs on 3.3 volts (vs. 5 volts for most other things).
- Like all electronics that transmit a signal, it's a PIG for current (~300mA peak).
- Constructing and sending an HTTP GET request is super-fussy about syntax (including carriage returns) and timing. At the time of writing, HTTP POST is above my pay-grade.
But this, in addition to being my first full Internet of Things project (well, first non-proof-of-concept project, anyway) was only my second rodeo with a smaller microprocessor. I've already gone a few rounds with the Atmega328 chip running on a breadboard. It's the same chip used in the Arduino UNOs, which streamlines development (as much as development can be streamlined).
The squee little ATtiny85 is the baby of the Arduino family. Its surface-mount form-factor is the brains of Adafruit's Trinket, so I'm already familiar with some of its...errrrr..."quirks." (So, yeah, the "baby" can sometimes swing to more of the "Stewie Griffin" than the "Maggie Simpson" end of the spectrum.)
The biggest quirk is that peeking inside the head of the ATtiny chips is almost impossible. (I've done it with another full Arduino and an FTDI/UART programmer, but the wiring alone would make Rube Goldberg shake his head.) All the usual protocols you'd use with a full-size Arduino chip (I2C, SPI, full Serial) are not supported. The best that the ATtinys can manage is the SoftwareSerial library. Which looks all fancy-schmancy on the surface, but under the hood does something known as "bit-banging."
Now, without wading into the intricacies of two- and three-wire communication, let's just compare bit-banging to an intersection where the drivers only sorta-kinda follow the protocol of taking turns and where the cars don't always arrive at neat intervals.
The bigger Atmega328 chips require you to supply an external "clock" (a crystal oscillator plus a couple of capacitors) to time the exchange of ones and zeros. And while you have that option with the ATtinys, you do it at the cost of two pins -- of which there are only five on the ATtiny85. The remaining (and default) option is to rely on the chip's 8 MHz internal clock.
As it turns out, that clock doesn't exactly run with the tightest tolerances. According to one reply on the Arduino forums, the slop can be as high as +/- 10%.
Yeeeee-OWCH.
The upshot was that the hit-to-miss ratio of the HTTP GET request even making it to the router intact was absolutely abysmal. By contrast, when I ported the code to a full Arduino UNO, the ratio flipped. Still not perfect, but more than acceptable. When I wired up an Atmega328 on a breadboard and uploaded the self-same code to it, the results were the same as the UNO. The relative reliability of the external clock made all the difference in the world.
Pity. I had high hopes for that little cutie-pie of a chip. I still plan on wiring up and coding a Bluetooth-based proof-of-concept with it. Mainly to get a handle on its reliability.. As I mentioned, HTTP GET is hella-finicky. The AT-commands used with Bluetooth are simpler, so there is some hope there.
In the meantime, I'm going into production with a slightly over-engineered "Mark I." I still need to pick up a replacement NH3 sensor from BJW in Moncton (because guess who hosed up soldering headers and then nearly ripped off a couple of pads trying to de-solder them?), burn it in, and kick its tires. And, finally, knock together a screened enclosure to proof the whole contraption against, ahem, "re-wiring" by a trio of curious -- and probably bored -- chickens. (I've seen the movie Chicken Run, y'all, and I would not put it past any of them. Related: Remind me never to let them watch Iron Man either.)
For the longer-term, I have a couple more sketches for the "library" of Arduino code accumulating in a Mercurial repository. For this project I imported the temperature and humidity code lock, stock and barrel and it worked right out of the box. Which is the whole point of a well-organised code-library. And with a tenacious sinus infection knocking me flat in the middle of this project, don't think that I don't appreciate my past self for that!
And, most important, this radically expanded my notes. Most especially the "Gotcha" section of an Arduino-on-a-breadboard ("Boarduino") presentation that I might give sometime in the next few months. Because while I consider this latest round of butt-kicking just another installment of paying my dues, I benefited hugely from the forums, etc. And so I'm paying that forward. Mind you, I don't worry about the next generation becoming soft and spoiled. Because even if I spare someone this particular butt-kicking, there are plenty more lurking out there with each new project. Oh yes, yes there are...
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Security SNAFU Solidarity
I could have applied by mail for my first Canadian passport. But I figured that it worth the heavily-detoured trip into Shediac to have Service Canada double-check my work. Turns out, my paranoia was rewarded by the fact that the agent caught two errors.
One was just a brain-burp on my part. The other, though, is on Service New Brunswick.
See, to prevent counterfeiting, our drivers' licenses are watermarked (for lack of a better term) with both grey and silvery-irridescent text/patterns. Then "personalised" information (number, name, DoB, etc., etc.) is printed over that. In my case, the watermarking seemed to affect the printing of one number so that it looked very much like another. Especially given that that the numbers are printed in red instead of black.
Fortunately (and unsurprisingly), I had to supplement the application with photocopies of photo-ID. In black and white, the number in question is far more legible. Which is how the Service Canada agent caught the mistake. (Whew!)
Needless to say, as a member of the I/T tribe, I found this more than a little ironic. I kept a straight face, but I couldn't help but think (sarcastically), "Hmmmm...securing information by making it less usable and its users more error-prone: Where-oh-where have I seen this before? Oh, riiiiiiiiight..."
Scarier thing is, my British-born neighbour told me that the UK passports now require biometric data--e.g. retina scans. I can only begin to imagine how securing digital-based data with meat-based data is going to complicate things in unintended ways. (True, glaucoma and diabetes don't seem to affect retinal biometric reading too adversely. But still, I'm totally thinking about that scene from The Avengers. Of course I am. Blech.)
One was just a brain-burp on my part. The other, though, is on Service New Brunswick.
See, to prevent counterfeiting, our drivers' licenses are watermarked (for lack of a better term) with both grey and silvery-irridescent text/patterns. Then "personalised" information (number, name, DoB, etc., etc.) is printed over that. In my case, the watermarking seemed to affect the printing of one number so that it looked very much like another. Especially given that that the numbers are printed in red instead of black.
Fortunately (and unsurprisingly), I had to supplement the application with photocopies of photo-ID. In black and white, the number in question is far more legible. Which is how the Service Canada agent caught the mistake. (Whew!)
Needless to say, as a member of the I/T tribe, I found this more than a little ironic. I kept a straight face, but I couldn't help but think (sarcastically), "Hmmmm...securing information by making it less usable and its users more error-prone: Where-oh-where have I seen this before? Oh, riiiiiiiiight..."
Scarier thing is, my British-born neighbour told me that the UK passports now require biometric data--e.g. retina scans. I can only begin to imagine how securing digital-based data with meat-based data is going to complicate things in unintended ways. (True, glaucoma and diabetes don't seem to affect retinal biometric reading too adversely. But still, I'm totally thinking about that scene from The Avengers. Of course I am. Blech.)
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Don't egg me on
Our current neighbourhood is a little more communal than the previous one. Maybe it's an Acadian thing. But the borrowing and sharing (especially when the gardens are coming in) has an old-time small-town feel. Thus, I was seriously-and-for-realz not at all surprised to see a text from the across-the-back-lawn neighbour asking (out of the blue) whether Dennis would want to borrow his spare chicken-coop in lieu of Dennis having to scramble one together before the snow flies.
Because that's just what good neighbours do, right?
Dennis will probably build to his own design anyway, but it's good to know that it's there in case the weather makes the tarp-covered Quanset-hut run inadequate for the three remaining birds. Because of the need for a heated waterer, we'll need to run electricity out to the coop. Which opens up other possibilities for monitoring things like temperature, humidity, and overall air quality, etc.
The app. I have in mind is Bluetooth-enabled, allowing an Android app. to check in on the current status of those numbers and setting off an alarm if the numbers get out of whack. And there's less than no sense in keeping that design/code to myself if someone else can get the benefit of it for the cost of a few electronics components. So I texted our neighbour to see whether they have any Android devices in the house.
Because that's just what good neighbours do, right?
(Well, not one hundred percent: A second set of feathered guinea-pigs for field-testing benefits me, too. Let's not get too crazy with the altruism angle here...)
Nope, texts the neighbour: They're strictly an Apple household. (Fooey.) But then he asks how they would keep the stored data.
Hoo boy: That's a whole 'nuther basket of eggs. Because now we're talking back-end: Databases, a web application, all that jazz. Granted, that's basically my core competency as a developer. But it's also scope-creep (on radioactive steroids!) at this proof-of-concept juncture.
And yet. It's also useful to know that someone's already thinking long-term. Assuming that I ever wanted to jump through all the UL-type certification hoops to sell this kind of contraption to backyard chicken-herders. Mind you, two data-points do not define a market, but the fact that a single text dragged the scope so far outside the pale tells me that I wasn't thinking "holistically" enough. Even for this six-chicken neighbourhood.
But, then, that's just what good neighbours do, right?
Because that's just what good neighbours do, right?
Dennis will probably build to his own design anyway, but it's good to know that it's there in case the weather makes the tarp-covered Quanset-hut run inadequate for the three remaining birds. Because of the need for a heated waterer, we'll need to run electricity out to the coop. Which opens up other possibilities for monitoring things like temperature, humidity, and overall air quality, etc.
The app. I have in mind is Bluetooth-enabled, allowing an Android app. to check in on the current status of those numbers and setting off an alarm if the numbers get out of whack. And there's less than no sense in keeping that design/code to myself if someone else can get the benefit of it for the cost of a few electronics components. So I texted our neighbour to see whether they have any Android devices in the house.
Because that's just what good neighbours do, right?
(Well, not one hundred percent: A second set of feathered guinea-pigs for field-testing benefits me, too. Let's not get too crazy with the altruism angle here...)
Nope, texts the neighbour: They're strictly an Apple household. (Fooey.) But then he asks how they would keep the stored data.
Hoo boy: That's a whole 'nuther basket of eggs. Because now we're talking back-end: Databases, a web application, all that jazz. Granted, that's basically my core competency as a developer. But it's also scope-creep (on radioactive steroids!) at this proof-of-concept juncture.
And yet. It's also useful to know that someone's already thinking long-term. Assuming that I ever wanted to jump through all the UL-type certification hoops to sell this kind of contraption to backyard chicken-herders. Mind you, two data-points do not define a market, but the fact that a single text dragged the scope so far outside the pale tells me that I wasn't thinking "holistically" enough. Even for this six-chicken neighbourhood.
But, then, that's just what good neighbours do, right?
Friday, August 4, 2017
Frivolous Friday, 2017.08.04: Gamification gone bad
A pal of mine's applying to immigrate to Canada. Not just the usual huffing, mind you: We're talking about actually jumping through the hoops here. And boy howdy, there are plenty of them. As an American expat proud to call Maritime Canuckistan home, I can totally vouch for that. Frankly, I suspect that at least some of the paperwork is there just to see how badly you really want it.
For instance...
How long would it take you to generate a list of all your previous addresses since the age of 18? I was lucky; I'm a pack-rat and I have friends who are pack-rats. For everything else, there was a vague recollection and Google Street View. I'm even not kidding.
Do you know where your birth certificate is right now? How about your marriage license (and/or divorce papers)? College transcripts? High school transcripts (again, not kidding)? Don't have some of them? Better send away for copies. (Cha-CHING!) Then have those copies copied (in colour). Eh, might as well have 'em notarised while you're at it so they look all official 'n such.
Hey, U.S. residents: Did'ja file away those annual earnings statements from the Social Security Administration so you can back up your claims about employment history (which I certainly hope you can just snag off your resume, btw.) If you tossed them, womp-womp: The SSI folks do not supply replacements at any price.
Speaking of employment history, if you immigrate as a Skilled Worker, you might be called upon to prove that you have enough years of experience in specific job types (National Occupation Codes, a.k.a. NOCs; best familiarise yourself with them--and hope they don't change before you submit your app.--because they are make-or-break).
How do you "prove" your work history? The preferred format is letters of reference from your current and/or previous employers. On company letterhead. Stating your position, your tenure, your responsibilities, and your pay. Let's get one thing straight: Your previous employers have ZERO interest in complying with that. Oh, did one or more of them close? Maybe bought out by another company? That sucks. Also? You probably want to work up an explanation for your current employer if you need their help in documenting your work history. I was extremely lucky that my employer was willing to let me work remotely as a contractor.
Criminal background checks (which in the U.S. is done by having your fingerprints taken by the local constabulary and sending them to the FBI for cross-checking) have a shelf-life. With a non-trivial processing-time (of course). So there's some timing you have to do with your actual application. And if, for some reason, there's a problem with your application, you might have to do it again.
You of course have a current passport, right? No? Uh-oh: Better make an appointment to have your photos taken and take them and your birth certificate and your photo ID and head down to the Post Office to set that in motion. You usually have to make an appointment for that too, by the bye. During regular business hours: Whee!
And, assuming you make it through the first rounds of vetting, you'll be expected to take a medical exam which is only offered at a limited number of offices and correspondingly spendy. Blood draw, uninalysis, chest X-ray, the whole shootin' match. Oh, and you have a rather limited time in which to do it. (Our consultant dropped the ball on our file and we had ten days to scramble that together.)
I could dig up my notes for fuller detail, but that's what sticks in my memory just now. There's more--trust me.
Bottom line: You'll bleed toner ink and money and time off from work and even a little bit of real blood before they punch your ticket. If they punch your ticket.
What with all the obstacles and requirements and a few time constraints, it hit me: Why not gamify it? Heck, it's kind of already gamified. I mean, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada already calculates eligibility on a points-based system. And some immigration programs are run as a lottery anyway, which means you're rolling the bones. So it's almost like CIC is asking for it, amirite?
Now. Apart from being eligible in the first place, the most challenging part, by far, is the paperwork-gathering mentioned above. Because it sometimes walks the line between weeding out the posers and bureaucratic sadism. (I mean, seriously, the all-addresses-since-the-age-of-eighteen thing? Just....whyyyyyyy does that even matter?????)
But, wait! People will go to limb-and-life-risking lengths to collect completely imaginary stuff in, say, Pokémon Go. So why not real stuff?
When I pointed that out to the afore-mentioned friend, their response was basically, "OMG--if I spent as much time on that as I have on Pokémon Go, I'd be in Canada already!"
And that's when the light bulb went on. And, after roughly thirty seconds of scoping out the DB structure, back-end infrastructure, and riffling my memory for the names of the iOS/Swift developers I know, I pulled the plug on that light.
As it should be.
Because the reality is that I've already put serious thought into a checklist version of this sort of application. To the point of picking the brains of a (willing) immigration consultant. And the central issue is that keeping up with the myriad of requirements for dozens of immigration programs (e.g. Skilled Worker, Family Sponsorship, Provincial Sponsorship, Entrepreneur class, etc.) is pretty much a full-time job. Which doesn't work for a part-time pro-bono project.
Also because, as (to quote Mark Andreeson) software continues to eat the world, making a difference means resisting the urge to fix what's not really broken. If you want to become an immigration consultant in Canada, the barrier's already fairly low. About $8K plus your time for the course-work. Silicon Valley-style "disruption" only makes sense when markets are un-/under-tapped. And the number of cases the Government of Canada can and wants to handle is a fixed number. In fact, there's a backlog (hence, the lotteries).
The case could be made that turning the Permanent Resident application process into Pokémon Go might improve the overall quality of applications (see "weeding out the posers" above). I didn't say it was a good case: Ain't no AI out there gonna tell you whether, say, a birth certificate looks cromulent. At best, it makes people more organised before they submit their PR application. Frankly, I'm not holding my breath for until that happens.
Worse, though: What happens if the "game" goes viral? And the tsunami of applications hits the CIC's processing centers. I mean, we already saw their website crash in the wake of a single election last autumn. (Shudder.)
Worst, the furor will eventually die back. Then they'll track me down and kick me out of the country. And, frankly, I couldn't find it in my heart to blame them when they do.
For instance...
How long would it take you to generate a list of all your previous addresses since the age of 18? I was lucky; I'm a pack-rat and I have friends who are pack-rats. For everything else, there was a vague recollection and Google Street View. I'm even not kidding.
Do you know where your birth certificate is right now? How about your marriage license (and/or divorce papers)? College transcripts? High school transcripts (again, not kidding)? Don't have some of them? Better send away for copies. (Cha-CHING!) Then have those copies copied (in colour). Eh, might as well have 'em notarised while you're at it so they look all official 'n such.
Hey, U.S. residents: Did'ja file away those annual earnings statements from the Social Security Administration so you can back up your claims about employment history (which I certainly hope you can just snag off your resume, btw.) If you tossed them, womp-womp: The SSI folks do not supply replacements at any price.
Speaking of employment history, if you immigrate as a Skilled Worker, you might be called upon to prove that you have enough years of experience in specific job types (National Occupation Codes, a.k.a. NOCs; best familiarise yourself with them--and hope they don't change before you submit your app.--because they are make-or-break).
How do you "prove" your work history? The preferred format is letters of reference from your current and/or previous employers. On company letterhead. Stating your position, your tenure, your responsibilities, and your pay. Let's get one thing straight: Your previous employers have ZERO interest in complying with that. Oh, did one or more of them close? Maybe bought out by another company? That sucks. Also? You probably want to work up an explanation for your current employer if you need their help in documenting your work history. I was extremely lucky that my employer was willing to let me work remotely as a contractor.
Criminal background checks (which in the U.S. is done by having your fingerprints taken by the local constabulary and sending them to the FBI for cross-checking) have a shelf-life. With a non-trivial processing-time (of course). So there's some timing you have to do with your actual application. And if, for some reason, there's a problem with your application, you might have to do it again.
You of course have a current passport, right? No? Uh-oh: Better make an appointment to have your photos taken and take them and your birth certificate and your photo ID and head down to the Post Office to set that in motion. You usually have to make an appointment for that too, by the bye. During regular business hours: Whee!
And, assuming you make it through the first rounds of vetting, you'll be expected to take a medical exam which is only offered at a limited number of offices and correspondingly spendy. Blood draw, uninalysis, chest X-ray, the whole shootin' match. Oh, and you have a rather limited time in which to do it. (Our consultant dropped the ball on our file and we had ten days to scramble that together.)
I could dig up my notes for fuller detail, but that's what sticks in my memory just now. There's more--trust me.
Bottom line: You'll bleed toner ink and money and time off from work and even a little bit of real blood before they punch your ticket. If they punch your ticket.
What with all the obstacles and requirements and a few time constraints, it hit me: Why not gamify it? Heck, it's kind of already gamified. I mean, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada already calculates eligibility on a points-based system. And some immigration programs are run as a lottery anyway, which means you're rolling the bones. So it's almost like CIC is asking for it, amirite?
Now. Apart from being eligible in the first place, the most challenging part, by far, is the paperwork-gathering mentioned above. Because it sometimes walks the line between weeding out the posers and bureaucratic sadism. (I mean, seriously, the all-addresses-since-the-age-of-eighteen thing? Just....whyyyyyyy does that even matter?????)
But, wait! People will go to limb-and-life-risking lengths to collect completely imaginary stuff in, say, Pokémon Go. So why not real stuff?
When I pointed that out to the afore-mentioned friend, their response was basically, "OMG--if I spent as much time on that as I have on Pokémon Go, I'd be in Canada already!"
And that's when the light bulb went on. And, after roughly thirty seconds of scoping out the DB structure, back-end infrastructure, and riffling my memory for the names of the iOS/Swift developers I know, I pulled the plug on that light.
As it should be.
Because the reality is that I've already put serious thought into a checklist version of this sort of application. To the point of picking the brains of a (willing) immigration consultant. And the central issue is that keeping up with the myriad of requirements for dozens of immigration programs (e.g. Skilled Worker, Family Sponsorship, Provincial Sponsorship, Entrepreneur class, etc.) is pretty much a full-time job. Which doesn't work for a part-time pro-bono project.
Also because, as (to quote Mark Andreeson) software continues to eat the world, making a difference means resisting the urge to fix what's not really broken. If you want to become an immigration consultant in Canada, the barrier's already fairly low. About $8K plus your time for the course-work. Silicon Valley-style "disruption" only makes sense when markets are un-/under-tapped. And the number of cases the Government of Canada can and wants to handle is a fixed number. In fact, there's a backlog (hence, the lotteries).
The case could be made that turning the Permanent Resident application process into Pokémon Go might improve the overall quality of applications (see "weeding out the posers" above). I didn't say it was a good case: Ain't no AI out there gonna tell you whether, say, a birth certificate looks cromulent. At best, it makes people more organised before they submit their PR application. Frankly, I'm not holding my breath for until that happens.
Worse, though: What happens if the "game" goes viral? And the tsunami of applications hits the CIC's processing centers. I mean, we already saw their website crash in the wake of a single election last autumn. (Shudder.)
Worst, the furor will eventually die back. Then they'll track me down and kick me out of the country. And, frankly, I couldn't find it in my heart to blame them when they do.
Friday, July 28, 2017
"One app. at a time"
A couple years ago, Dennis bought a laptop on the cheap that swiftly demonstrated its shortcomings as a "portable" Windows machine.
For tasters, it's a leviathan: A Dell Precision M6400, boasting a 17" screen and tipping the scales at 8.54 lb / 3.88kg. During its limited use, its Windows 7 OS never could be convinced that it was Genuine Microsoft(TM), despite entering the registration code over and Over And OVER. It's also a battery hog, running less than two hours on a full charge. Which is not at all surprising, considering how, were you to flip it upside down while it's running, I'm not convinced that you couldn't pop popcorn with the vents.
It was Dennis's tablet purchase that ultimately consigned this bully-boy to the corner and dust. But my go-to Linux laptop ("Big Grey") is about eight years old. Also, it spooked me a week or so back with a bad HDD sector. So it was time to think about migrating. Dennis swore that he really-most-sincerely had zero use for the Dell (not even as a doorstop).
So, booyah for a free laptop, amirite? (Uh-huh: I can already hear the DIY computer-geeks start to snicker evilly already...)
Normally I run on AMD chips, but this laptop is Team Intel. Welp, turns out that, somewhere along the line, I missed the memo that the "AMD64" distributions of Linux now apply to 64-bit Intel chips as well. And I didn't realise my mistake until after making it about halfway through the a Debian 16.04 installation/configuration. (Side note: Whatever improvements the Ubuntu team may have made to the base product, their installation is still as unpolished as ever, so it took two attempts to make it that far.) And that was with the wifi drivers working right out of the box. (A not-so-small mercy which does not go unappreciated.)
That-all basically shot a day.
But, hey, a free laptop's a free laptop, right?
Disgusted, I made the i386 system image dig its own grave by downloading the AMD64 Ubuntu .ISO file and burning it to DVD. Except that ISO file was corrupted sometime during the burn-in. (Do not go gentle into that good night, i386 -- I gotta admire your spirit.)
Fine. Screw you, Ubuntu...and the godsforsaken Unity desktop you rode in on.
Debian 9 ("Stretch") is barely over a month old, so I'll get all the latest/greatest stuff, right? Also, its system requirements are muuuuch friendlier to older hardware than Ubuntu.
So I dug out my notes -- OF COURSE I HAVE NOTES -- from previous Ubuntu/Debian installs; more a collection of URLs than anything else because why write it down when you can look it up, I ask you.
That was my first (big) mistake. Not the notes themselves, but forgetting how long it had been since I'd installed and customised a Debian OS. That would have been "Big Grey," about two Debian versions back, to be precise. (Raspian doesn't count b/c the Raspberry Pi is its own beastie, and most certainly not a the Swiss Army knife that a desktop/laptop is.)
Now. One of my oldest friends is a fan of old cars -- the antique auto show in Iola, WI, was the highlight of his summer (and his bonding time with his Dad). No surprise that it was he who introduced me to the Johnny Cash song "One Piece at a Time." Lyrics (courtesy of Google) are at the end of this post, but the tl;dr is a how guy schemes to assemble his very own Cadillac from parts smuggled out of the factory. Over the course of a multi-decade career working in the GM factory.
My Gentle Reader doubtless sees the punch-line coming...and can well understand that the parallels were not lost on me. Because technology moves so much faster in I/T, and I'm not convinced that there weren't about as many moving parts by the time that beastie was fully functional.
All told, it cost me the better part of three days to set up this "free" laptop. A few reasons:
Gnome Apparently, it's a different flavour ("Metacity" vs. just "Gnome Classic") that allows for the civilised amenity of app. launchers on the top bar. Except Metacity didn't show up in the login options for multiple boots/reboots. Once it was an option, fighting custom launchers to make them retain the designated icon took a few tries to get right.
Dropbox Installed from binaries, not repos (Boo!) This version refused to start on startup; needed to create autostart file. Still figuring out how to terminate its process at shutdown and wondering why in name of Mordor that isn't a part of the .desktop file vocabulary in the first place.
The "AMP" part of "LAMP" I'm spoiled by having this install from a single terminal command. I forgot how crazy-simple this made things. And I was about to be forcibly reminded...
Apache User directories are enabled differently in 2.4 than they are in 2.2. So two tries there.
PHP Well-behaved, though I had to briefly go spelunking for the .conf file.
MySQL Absolute NIGHTMARE. Debian 9 actually installs the MySQL fork "MariaDB" and masks it with "mysql" executables. In a PR juke worthy of K Street, MariaDB is billed as a "drop-in replacement for MySQL." Uh-huh...yeeeeeah...so, about that... There's no prompt for a root password during install, which was the root (pun intended) of a morning's worth of hair-pulling. I could "anonymously" interact with the command-line UI, but all GUIs refused to connect. Between 2 separate Q&A sites, I managed to piece together the info. I needed to disable the anonymous command-line access and create an uber-sooper-dooper admin. user to take the place of root. Oh, and installing the mysql binaries from Oracle? Fuggedabouddit...I couldn't even connect to the server from the command-line UI (much less Workbench), so I went back to MariaDB after forcibly ejecting the borked MySQL installation.
MySQL Workbench Special mention b/c I literally lost track of how many times I installed/uninstalled it. Blows up on login, even with a valid username/password. No surprise--it's been trouble since the days (15 years ago) when "MySQL Query Browser" refused to run at all on Windows 2000. For now, PhpMyAdmin and the Database tool in NetBeans will, between them, do what I need to do.
PhpMyAdmin Speaking of which, there's now an extra step to install the missing mbstring and gettext modules. Otherwise, it worked like a charm after the main authentication issues were sorted out.
NetBeans Lesson learned: Go with the platform-independent version. Designate the base JDK folder, not the path to the executable. (That screw-up was sheer PEBKAC on my part, btw.) Blessings upon the Moncton Java guru who saved my bacon on that one. May the fries in his poutine always stay crispy. (I think that's a legit. Canadian blessing, but don't quote me...)
Fritzing Is in the Debian repos, but the parts bin is a separate install. (Whyyyyy???)
Geany Apparently changed the per-language syntax highlighting sometime between versions 1.23 and 1.29. Have temporarily thrown in the towel for custom keyword highlighting for OpenSCAD. (On the plus side, this version of OpenSCAD doesn't lose the menu-bar, so booyah.) But there went most of the afternoon.
And that's just the high points...
Along the way, of course, I learned a few new SysAdmin-type tricks. Mind you, I have no illusions that I'll remember them, but at least we won't be strangers when inevitably we meet again. I have a renewed & enhanced appreciation for the "Ask Ubuntu" community and the global treasure that is StackOverflow. And I would be remiss not to note an array of independent bloggers and the Google algorithm-finders that put them at my fingertips.
In the past, I've had a few sharp things to say about "free" software in the context of modern capitalism. And, let's not pussy-foot around it: I use this software gig-in and gig-out to earn my crust. But there is less than no question that my hard-won knowledge (not to be confused with "wisdom" because that's another beastie) cost me scarcely a drop compared to the Great Lake that is the sum of FOSS efforts going back decades.
Yes, I've drastically expanded and revised my notes. Mainly because I have a DisplayPort to DVI adapter on the way that will allow me to plug this laptop into the KVM switch (or so I trust) and take the place of the current workstation. (Sort of a two-for-one win-win.) If that-all pans out, I might just spring for the SDRAM to bring the memory up to 8GB. And after that goes down, it's finally Big Grey's turn for a rebuild and (likely) rebirth as a dedicated "maker" machine (Arduino, AVR, and 3D printing).
After that, of course, the value of the information in those notes will incrementally decay from "asset" to "liability." Next rebuild, I'll know better than to just whip them out thinking, "It's cool--I got this." "How can you be so sure?" my Gentle Reader might (justifiably) wonder. Don't be silly, GR: Of course I added a note IN ALL CAPS at the very top of the document. If you can count on a recovering tech. writer for anything, it, it's reading the documentation.
- - - - -
"One Piece at a Time" - Wayne Kemp
Well, I left Kentucky back in forty nine
An' went to Detroit workin' on a 'sembly line
The first year they had me puttin' wheels on Cadillacs
Every day I'd watch them beauties roll by
And sometimes I'd hang my head and cry
'Cause I always wanted me one that was long and black.
One day I devised myself a plan
That should be the envy of most any man
I'd sneak it out of there in a lunchbox in my hand
Now gettin' caught meant gettin' fired
But I figured I'd have it all by the time I retired
I'd have me a car worth at least a hundred grand.
I'd get it one piece at a time
And it wouldn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around.
So the very next day when I punched in
With my big lunchbox and with help from my friends
I left that day with a lunch box full of gears
I've never considered myself a thief
But GM wouldn't miss just one little piece
Especially if I strung it out over several years.
The first day I got me a fuel pump
And the next day I got me an engine and a trunk
Then I got me a transmission and all the chrome
The little things I could get in my big lunchbox
Like nuts, an' bolts, and all four shocks
But the big stuff we snuck out in my buddy's mobile home.
Now, up to now my plan went all right
'Til we tried to put it all together one night
And that's when we noticed that something was definitely wrong.
The transmission was a fifty three
And the motor turned out to be a seventy three
And when we tried to put in the bolts all the holes were gone.
So we drilled it out so that it would fit
And with a little bit of help with an adapter kit
We had that engine runnin' just like a song
Now the headlight' was another sight
We had two on the left and one on the right
But when we pulled out the switch all three of 'em come on.
The back end looked kinda funny too
But we put it together and when we got through
Well, that's when we noticed that we only had one tail-fin
About that time my wife walked out
And I could see in her eyes that she had her doubts
But she opened the door and said "Honey, take me for a spin."
So we drove up town just to get the tags
And I headed her right on down main drag
I could hear everybody laughin' for blocks around
But up there at the court house they didn't laugh
'Cause to type it up it took the whole staff
And when they got through the title weighed sixty pounds.
I got it one piece at a time
And it wouldn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around.
Ugh! Yeah, RED RYDER
This is the COTTON MOUTH
In the PSYCHO-BILLY CADILLAC Come on
Huh, This is the COTTON MOUTH
And negatory on the cost of this mow-chine there RED RYDER
You might say I went right up to the factory
And picked it up, it's cheaper that way
Ugh!, what model is it?
Well, It's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56
'57, '58' 59' automobile
It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67
'68, '69, '70 automobile.
For tasters, it's a leviathan: A Dell Precision M6400, boasting a 17" screen and tipping the scales at 8.54 lb / 3.88kg. During its limited use, its Windows 7 OS never could be convinced that it was Genuine Microsoft(TM), despite entering the registration code over and Over And OVER. It's also a battery hog, running less than two hours on a full charge. Which is not at all surprising, considering how, were you to flip it upside down while it's running, I'm not convinced that you couldn't pop popcorn with the vents.
It was Dennis's tablet purchase that ultimately consigned this bully-boy to the corner and dust. But my go-to Linux laptop ("Big Grey") is about eight years old. Also, it spooked me a week or so back with a bad HDD sector. So it was time to think about migrating. Dennis swore that he really-most-sincerely had zero use for the Dell (not even as a doorstop).
So, booyah for a free laptop, amirite? (Uh-huh: I can already hear the DIY computer-geeks start to snicker evilly already...)
Normally I run on AMD chips, but this laptop is Team Intel. Welp, turns out that, somewhere along the line, I missed the memo that the "AMD64" distributions of Linux now apply to 64-bit Intel chips as well. And I didn't realise my mistake until after making it about halfway through the a Debian 16.04 installation/configuration. (Side note: Whatever improvements the Ubuntu team may have made to the base product, their installation is still as unpolished as ever, so it took two attempts to make it that far.) And that was with the wifi drivers working right out of the box. (A not-so-small mercy which does not go unappreciated.)
That-all basically shot a day.
But, hey, a free laptop's a free laptop, right?
Disgusted, I made the i386 system image dig its own grave by downloading the AMD64 Ubuntu .ISO file and burning it to DVD. Except that ISO file was corrupted sometime during the burn-in. (Do not go gentle into that good night, i386 -- I gotta admire your spirit.)
Fine. Screw you, Ubuntu...and the godsforsaken Unity desktop you rode in on.
Debian 9 ("Stretch") is barely over a month old, so I'll get all the latest/greatest stuff, right? Also, its system requirements are muuuuch friendlier to older hardware than Ubuntu.
So I dug out my notes -- OF COURSE I HAVE NOTES -- from previous Ubuntu/Debian installs; more a collection of URLs than anything else because why write it down when you can look it up, I ask you.
That was my first (big) mistake. Not the notes themselves, but forgetting how long it had been since I'd installed and customised a Debian OS. That would have been "Big Grey," about two Debian versions back, to be precise. (Raspian doesn't count b/c the Raspberry Pi is its own beastie, and most certainly not a the Swiss Army knife that a desktop/laptop is.)
Now. One of my oldest friends is a fan of old cars -- the antique auto show in Iola, WI, was the highlight of his summer (and his bonding time with his Dad). No surprise that it was he who introduced me to the Johnny Cash song "One Piece at a Time." Lyrics (courtesy of Google) are at the end of this post, but the tl;dr is a how guy schemes to assemble his very own Cadillac from parts smuggled out of the factory. Over the course of a multi-decade career working in the GM factory.
My Gentle Reader doubtless sees the punch-line coming...and can well understand that the parallels were not lost on me. Because technology moves so much faster in I/T, and I'm not convinced that there weren't about as many moving parts by the time that beastie was fully functional.
All told, it cost me the better part of three days to set up this "free" laptop. A few reasons:
Gnome Apparently, it's a different flavour ("Metacity" vs. just "Gnome Classic") that allows for the civilised amenity of app. launchers on the top bar. Except Metacity didn't show up in the login options for multiple boots/reboots. Once it was an option, fighting custom launchers to make them retain the designated icon took a few tries to get right.
Dropbox Installed from binaries, not repos (Boo!) This version refused to start on startup; needed to create autostart file. Still figuring out how to terminate its process at shutdown and wondering why in name of Mordor that isn't a part of the .desktop file vocabulary in the first place.
The "AMP" part of "LAMP" I'm spoiled by having this install from a single terminal command. I forgot how crazy-simple this made things. And I was about to be forcibly reminded...
Apache User directories are enabled differently in 2.4 than they are in 2.2. So two tries there.
PHP Well-behaved, though I had to briefly go spelunking for the .conf file.
MySQL Absolute NIGHTMARE. Debian 9 actually installs the MySQL fork "MariaDB" and masks it with "mysql" executables. In a PR juke worthy of K Street, MariaDB is billed as a "drop-in replacement for MySQL." Uh-huh...yeeeeeah...so, about that... There's no prompt for a root password during install, which was the root (pun intended) of a morning's worth of hair-pulling. I could "anonymously" interact with the command-line UI, but all GUIs refused to connect. Between 2 separate Q&A sites, I managed to piece together the info. I needed to disable the anonymous command-line access and create an uber-sooper-dooper admin. user to take the place of root. Oh, and installing the mysql binaries from Oracle? Fuggedabouddit...I couldn't even connect to the server from the command-line UI (much less Workbench), so I went back to MariaDB after forcibly ejecting the borked MySQL installation.
MySQL Workbench Special mention b/c I literally lost track of how many times I installed/uninstalled it. Blows up on login, even with a valid username/password. No surprise--it's been trouble since the days (15 years ago) when "MySQL Query Browser" refused to run at all on Windows 2000. For now, PhpMyAdmin and the Database tool in NetBeans will, between them, do what I need to do.
PhpMyAdmin Speaking of which, there's now an extra step to install the missing mbstring and gettext modules. Otherwise, it worked like a charm after the main authentication issues were sorted out.
NetBeans Lesson learned: Go with the platform-independent version. Designate the base JDK folder, not the path to the executable. (That screw-up was sheer PEBKAC on my part, btw.) Blessings upon the Moncton Java guru who saved my bacon on that one. May the fries in his poutine always stay crispy. (I think that's a legit. Canadian blessing, but don't quote me...)
Fritzing Is in the Debian repos, but the parts bin is a separate install. (Whyyyyy???)
Geany Apparently changed the per-language syntax highlighting sometime between versions 1.23 and 1.29. Have temporarily thrown in the towel for custom keyword highlighting for OpenSCAD. (On the plus side, this version of OpenSCAD doesn't lose the menu-bar, so booyah.) But there went most of the afternoon.
And that's just the high points...
Along the way, of course, I learned a few new SysAdmin-type tricks. Mind you, I have no illusions that I'll remember them, but at least we won't be strangers when inevitably we meet again. I have a renewed & enhanced appreciation for the "Ask Ubuntu" community and the global treasure that is StackOverflow. And I would be remiss not to note an array of independent bloggers and the Google algorithm-finders that put them at my fingertips.
In the past, I've had a few sharp things to say about "free" software in the context of modern capitalism. And, let's not pussy-foot around it: I use this software gig-in and gig-out to earn my crust. But there is less than no question that my hard-won knowledge (not to be confused with "wisdom" because that's another beastie) cost me scarcely a drop compared to the Great Lake that is the sum of FOSS efforts going back decades.
Yes, I've drastically expanded and revised my notes. Mainly because I have a DisplayPort to DVI adapter on the way that will allow me to plug this laptop into the KVM switch (or so I trust) and take the place of the current workstation. (Sort of a two-for-one win-win.) If that-all pans out, I might just spring for the SDRAM to bring the memory up to 8GB. And after that goes down, it's finally Big Grey's turn for a rebuild and (likely) rebirth as a dedicated "maker" machine (Arduino, AVR, and 3D printing).
After that, of course, the value of the information in those notes will incrementally decay from "asset" to "liability." Next rebuild, I'll know better than to just whip them out thinking, "It's cool--I got this." "How can you be so sure?" my Gentle Reader might (justifiably) wonder. Don't be silly, GR: Of course I added a note IN ALL CAPS at the very top of the document. If you can count on a recovering tech. writer for anything, it, it's reading the documentation.
- - - - -
"One Piece at a Time" - Wayne Kemp
Well, I left Kentucky back in forty nine
An' went to Detroit workin' on a 'sembly line
The first year they had me puttin' wheels on Cadillacs
Every day I'd watch them beauties roll by
And sometimes I'd hang my head and cry
'Cause I always wanted me one that was long and black.
One day I devised myself a plan
That should be the envy of most any man
I'd sneak it out of there in a lunchbox in my hand
Now gettin' caught meant gettin' fired
But I figured I'd have it all by the time I retired
I'd have me a car worth at least a hundred grand.
I'd get it one piece at a time
And it wouldn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around.
So the very next day when I punched in
With my big lunchbox and with help from my friends
I left that day with a lunch box full of gears
I've never considered myself a thief
But GM wouldn't miss just one little piece
Especially if I strung it out over several years.
The first day I got me a fuel pump
And the next day I got me an engine and a trunk
Then I got me a transmission and all the chrome
The little things I could get in my big lunchbox
Like nuts, an' bolts, and all four shocks
But the big stuff we snuck out in my buddy's mobile home.
Now, up to now my plan went all right
'Til we tried to put it all together one night
And that's when we noticed that something was definitely wrong.
The transmission was a fifty three
And the motor turned out to be a seventy three
And when we tried to put in the bolts all the holes were gone.
So we drilled it out so that it would fit
And with a little bit of help with an adapter kit
We had that engine runnin' just like a song
Now the headlight' was another sight
We had two on the left and one on the right
But when we pulled out the switch all three of 'em come on.
The back end looked kinda funny too
But we put it together and when we got through
Well, that's when we noticed that we only had one tail-fin
About that time my wife walked out
And I could see in her eyes that she had her doubts
But she opened the door and said "Honey, take me for a spin."
So we drove up town just to get the tags
And I headed her right on down main drag
I could hear everybody laughin' for blocks around
But up there at the court house they didn't laugh
'Cause to type it up it took the whole staff
And when they got through the title weighed sixty pounds.
I got it one piece at a time
And it wouldn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around.
Ugh! Yeah, RED RYDER
This is the COTTON MOUTH
In the PSYCHO-BILLY CADILLAC Come on
Huh, This is the COTTON MOUTH
And negatory on the cost of this mow-chine there RED RYDER
You might say I went right up to the factory
And picked it up, it's cheaper that way
Ugh!, what model is it?
Well, It's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56
'57, '58' 59' automobile
It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67
'68, '69, '70 automobile.
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