The sting in the tail of the symlink
Finally got round to writing up my monthly garden flower page for this month. The big difference was removing the Acacia melanoxylon: How do I align them? I have scripts that align photos taken on a single day, but these are a week apart. And to add to the annoyance, my scripts really assume that the build directory and the directory for the day's files are on the same file system, and here they are not, so I need to use symlinks.
More Microsoft pain
Can I find other ways to avoid the hangs I had over the weekend? For reasons I don't understand, despise.lemis.com tries to access the eureka:/dump file system when I run DxO PhotoLab. What do I need /dump for? For backups, in principle. But this is a VM, and it's so much easier to back it up (and restore it if necessary) from behind the scenes rather than running a Microsoft backup program. So umount it, or whatever Microsoft calls it. What does Microsoft call it? No idea. I went through likely searches and drew a blank. Then played around with the file manager or whatever it's called, the one that with the right clicks will display a graphical representation of file systems and ?folders?.
Installing the Realtek driver
As planned, installed the net/realtek-re-kmod driver for the Realtek 8125 2.5 Gb/s NIC. The installation message was surprising: Add the following lines to your /boot/loader.conf to override the built-in FreeBSD re(4) driver. if_re_load="YES" if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko" How is that going to work? If the driver is built into the kernel, you can't load another driver. And of course that is what happened: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/5) ~ 4 -> kldload if_re.ko kldload: can't load if_re.ko: module already loaded or in kernel I had thought that it was a separate driver.
No weather!
Checking the weather readings from my weather station this evening. None! I had forgotten to restart the application after tiwi lost power on Saturday. OK, start it. ?Can't find libmysqlclient.so.18?. Damn, which version is it? I've been messing around with these things so long that I don't recall which I was using. In principle it would be in ~/src/weather/WH-1080-tiwi/, but there is no such directory, just directories with other system names and versions going back 12 years: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) ~ 26 -> l -rt ~/src/weather/WH-1080*/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 62,179 5 Jul 2012 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-amd64/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 54,368 29 Nov 2020 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-dereel/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 52,741 11 Sep 2022 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-eureka/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root lemis 61,048 23 Oct 2023 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-lagoon/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 54,312 9 Nov 14:53 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-hydra/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 52,788 24 Apr 22:15 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-teevee/wh1080 ...
Mobile Typing Pain
I ran a Fediverse poll asking how people go about entering text on mobile devices. The results shocked me: Half the population just taps away. Do you? Read on for details and speculation. This ongoing fragment embeds links to previous fragments, because I?ve been worrying and writing about this problem for a long time. Which in itself is interesting, more evidence that the problem is hard. The poll post and (long) chainof responses are here on Mastodon. People care First, 3.5K poll responses is more than I usually see on the Fediverse; evidence that plenty of people have feelings about this.
Understanding medical bills
Last time I was in Geelong for my eye checkup, Estelle asked me about paying my bill: $500 outstanding. But that should only have been $250, and finally I got round to checking. Yes, deducted far too early on 15 March. It looks for all the world like an organizational slipup. So what's going on? I received an estimate ahead of time for the sum they're asking, but clearly that was before they contacted Bupa, my medical insurers. OK, print out all the documents I have, not helped by the fact that Google Chrome produces PDFs that my printer doesn't want to know.
The daily Android pain
For some reason I found myself using fossil.lemis.com, Yvonne's phone, today. I wanted to access my local index, simplified for mobile telephones. But it wasn't there. How do I enter it? The URL isn't designed even for keyboards, let alone toy glass keyboards. But there was nothing for it. Try to type http://wwww.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no into the thing. Yes, says Google, you mean http://www.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no, right? No, you idiot, http://wwww.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no. Don't try to outguess me. But I couldn't find a way to enter the URL. OK, install firefox, which for some reason wasn't on the phone. Ah, you mean Firefox Fast & Private Browser?
hydra: the other shoe
Continued with the photo processing so rudely interrupted by the crash yesterday. And it happened again! In each case it happened while I was processing photos on despise.lemis.com, a virtual machine running on hydra. What caused it? Yesterday I had guessed a network adapter hang, based on the fact that everything else seemed to work, but I couldn't ping the machine, and any attempt to start a program hung, presumably because the PATH includes directories on other machines. But for some reason ARP seemed to work. Is that a counterindication? Other possibilities might include overheating, but I didn't have the issue when processing my house photos, which also maxes out 32 cores.
hydra crash!
Back home, I had plenty of photos to process. A good thing that I have despise, which gets through them really quickly. But then things froze up. Somehow the rdesktop window had focus and wouldn't let go. And vtys hung. Gradually it became clear: I had lost network connectivity. Nothing for it but the Big Red Button. Two crashes in one day! Not only that, of course. I've been holding off updating the X configuration on hydra until my eyes are OK again. And there's so much piled up: the window managers are a real mess. Managed to get the thing up and stumbling, but of course there was no time left for photo processing.
Google maps: the curate's egg
I've been using Google Maps for navigation even when I don't need it, but clearly today's journey to Keilor Park was a case where I did need it. It got us there with no problems at all, once again taking a short cut round the university which proved to be about 2 minutes shorter than going through Ballarat. But the user interface! Even by Android standards it's appalling. Today I had: Send the route to my phone. I would have liked to send it to Yvonne's phone, but it's too secure for that.
Power fail?
While cooking breakfast today, the lights over the cooktops went out. More investigation showed that another circuit breaker had tripped. Why? There's nothing outside that could have done so, but the water kettle thermostat had just turned it off. Is it on its way out? No idea, but it did demonstrate to us where circuit 5 (from the row of breakers) is: ?kitchen?, pantry, lounge room and dining room. So tiwi failed too. Fortunately it came back without too much trouble, but I hate it when computers go down.
Still more cats
Yvonne is really dead set on getting a brown Burmese cat. No other colour will do. We could have found a (small) number of chocolates, but no, it must be a brown. So she asked the seller for photos. And they came by mobile phone, of course. But what I didn't expect was that she couldn't download them. First she had to turn on mobile data and download them slowly and expensively! Only later did I find suggestions: More searching in the settings pages brought me to this: People, we've had machines with multiple interfaces for 40 years!
Meta.ai Oh My!
?Meet Your New Assistant? says the announcement, going on with ?Built With Llama 3?. And oh my goodness has it ever got a lot of coverage. So I thought I might as well try it. My first cut was a little unfair; I asked it about a subject on which I am unchallenged as the world?s leading expert: Tim Bray. (That?s probably overstating it: My wife is clearly in the running.) So I asked meta.ai ?What does Tim Bray think of Google?? Twice; once on my phone while first exploring the idea, and again later on my computer.
Solving the routing issue
I should have called Aussie Broadband yesterday about the routing problems that I discovered on Sunday. But I dreaded the encounter, so I put it off. But it had to be done, and today I called up and was connected relatively quickly to Ashika, who of course didn't understand. What kind of router do I have installed? She could only see one IP address. I tried to explain, and she decided to escalate to ?level 2? after only 3 minutes. And after a total of 5 minutes, the call was done: she would send me an email, to which I should reply with the problem details.
How to copy SMS, again
Callum Gibson read my article on how to save an SMS. He has a simpler method: Google messages. That way you don't need Microsoft, just a web browser. OK, sounds interesting. Off to take a look, but instead of https://messages.google.com/ I was redirected to https://www.android.com/google-messages/. Funny, says Callum, ?it works for me?. Still, the page is clearly related, full of advertisements and content unrelated to what I'm looking for, like ?With Google Messages, you can customize your experience, ensure private conversations, and enjoy the latest AI features.?. Dammit, all I want to do is to save an SMS with its metadata, like you can do with any sane MUA with a single click!
Off the net again!
Idly checking ping times today brought a failure: I couldn't ping eureka.lemis.com from lax.lemis.com. Nor anywhere else, for that matter. Firewall problem? No, a traceroute stopped much earlier than that. Is there something wrong? The block has been routed here for nearly a year, and in May last year I confirmed: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/24) ~ 33 -> whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 192.109.197.0" AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name NA | 192.109.197.0 | NA | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | NA 4764 | 192.109.197.0 | 192.109.197.0/24 | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | WIDEBAND-AS-AP Aussie Broadband, AU ...
Capitalists Hate Capitalism
Today for my podcast, I read Capitalists Hate Capitalism, my latest column from Locus Magazine. It’s a meditation on the difference between feudalism and capitalism, and how to know which one you’re living under. I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The... more
Understanding depth of focus
One of the things I learnt as part of my cataract operation was the term depth of focus. I know that, right? No, what I know and use is depth of field. And while they're closely related, there's a subtle difference: depth of field is measured in distances, the closest and furthest distance in acceptable focus when you focus on a specific point. I've known this for ever, at least since I started using cameras 60 years ago. The lenses had a depth-of-field scale on the lens, here a Diaxette that looks just like the one I had at the time: The top (black) scale is distance, in feet, and the lower (red) scale is depth of field.
How to save an SMS
I've been trying for years to find a way to save or copy an SMS. Based on my almost complete lack of success, you'd think that somebody wanted to avoid it. Even the mobile phone apps that promise to save or forward them don't work for me. But finally I've found a way to at least save the text, if not the metadata: Start Microsoft ?PhoneLink? and display the message. Select text. This only works with the text itself, not the rest of the display.
Manipulating data in the Microsoft space
I've been running autocutsel for a while now, and it works, up to a point. If I copy something on Microsoft, it automatically updates the clipboard on the machine that runs the rdesktop. If I mark text on an xterm, it also appears in the clipboard. But it doesn't change the cutbuffer in any way, and that's not what I understand from the documentation: When the clipboard is changed, it updates the cutbuffer. When the cutbuffer is changed, it owns the clipboard selection. The cutbuffer and clipboard selection are always synchronized.
despise photo processing times
House photo day today, a total of 111 images to convert. And despise did it in 3 minutes, 50 seconds, an average speed of 2.07 s per photo. That's far better than I have ever seen. But then I converted another 17 images from the afternoon. 1 minute, 30 seconds, or 5.3 seconds per image. Why? My guess is that there's some amazing inefficiency in DxO PhotoLab that applies at the start of every processing batch. Even the values given are inaccurate: it can take up to 15 seconds after pressing ?export? before it even starts.
Finding rwhod
despise.lemis.com is now running as well as you can expect of a Microsoft system, but I'm still running into this irritating loss of rwhod on reboot. Last time I noted issues, but not how to fix it. What I need to do is: Start CMD.EXE as administrator with c-s-mouse1. cd to \Program Files?(x86)/rwho. Try running rwhod. If this fails, find RWHODINSTALLER.EXE, which is somewhere else, location not divulged. This time I didn't need it.
Reprocessing old photos
Fifteen years ago I spent a lot of time comparing photo processing. A lot has changed since then. In particular, I was concerned with gradation, and I took a lot of photos with different camera settings. I made a comparison between ?muted? and ?vivid? profiles, which showed no obvious difference. I thought that I had not understood that ?muted? and ?vivid?, like many of the settings, only applied to the in-camera JPEG images. But that's not the case: these were JPEGs (which I took alongside the raw images), and there was really almost no difference: There's really almost no differencd.
Topfew Release 0.5
Back in 2021-22, I wrote a series of blog posts about a program called ?topfew? (tf from your shell command-line). It finds the field values (or combinations of values) which appear most often in a stream of records. I built it to explore large-scale data crunching in Go, and to investigate how performance compared to Rust. There was plentiful input, both ideas and code, from Dirkjan Ochtman and Simon Fell. Anyhow, I thought I was finished with it but then I noticed I was using the tf command more days than not, and I have pretty mainstream command-line needs.
Bloody Microsoft again!
Now that it doesn't use any significant power, I have taken the easy way out and let despise.lemis.com (Microsoft ?Windows? 10) carry on running. Bad idea. Microsoft did its usual update without asking me, and after that ?Perfectly Clear? didn't want to know about registration. Back to where I was at the beginning of the month. Grrr! But despise is a virtual machine, and I do backups religiously. Can I revert to the state of yesterday evening? No, it seems. Restoring the backup was trivial, but every attempt to restart it failed with VERR_ACCESS_DENIED. But not only despise: all VMs. More searching, and found what I've seen before less than a month ago: I need to be in the voxusers group.
Authenticating calls
Returning to the issue of authentication, I have had contact with three different health service providers this week: Specsavers, St John of God in Geelong and Health First. All accepted my call without identification, at least once: on calling back to Health First, I was asked for the inevitable date of birth. Why not the others? Because they recognized my phone number. Health First did that once too, but they ?up?graded their booking software. Specsavers knew all my data without having to ask. And the things that they were doing were more ?high risk? than anything I do with Aussie. And Aussie of all people should be able to identify the phone, since it's with them.
Aussie Broadband: Go away
Another message from Aussie Broadband complaints today. It seems that they have completely misunderstood the complaint, something that could only have happened if they had read neither the complaint nor my messages. But the content is amazing: I understand your concern at this point in time. However, what you are requesting is not something we can accommodate. I have reached out to our compliance team for further input. He understands my concern? There's no evidence whatsoever of that. And why can't he ?accommodate? what ?I am requesting?? My guess is because he has so little understanding of the issue that he can't do anything.
18 years of blog!
Mail from LiveJournal today, enclosing (if that's the word) a ?virtual gift? for being with them for 18 years. That was a reaction to people calling my diary a ?blog?, and it was very short-lived, round 2 days. I seem to have barely mentioned it in my diary.
Aussie complaints make contact
Mail from Aussie Broadband about my complaint. In summary: Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention regarding the difficulties you've encountered with unauthorized access to the account. We understand the importance of addressing this matter promptly and appreciate your patience as we work to find a resolution. As per the guidelines outlined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), our company is required to adhere to strict customer identity authentication rules to safeguard the privacy and security of our customers' information. This includes verifying all points of identification to ensure compliance with privacy laws.
despise performance comparison
Comparison of photo processing times using DxO PhotoLab DeepPRIME: Machine Number Time Time/photo despise 133 41:20 19..5 s distress 29 ...
More Aussie Broadband pain
Response from Aussie Broadband support accounts to my authentication questions yesterday. No attempt to address my issues, just I strongly suggest you contact our team on 1300 880 905 with CJ so we can arrange a solution to this issue. And I explained why that won't work 2 days ago. OK, up a notch: Please note the TIO deadline tomorrow and forward this matter to your complaints team. I expect to see a complaint number with details (not just asterisks) by this evening.
VoIP problems: resolved!
Mail from CJ Ellis this morning: Good morning Greg .good news , the phone is working It seems that their message bank is now working properly for me , but I am 26 in the que , I am hope to get a message bank on the phone as it was as I wanted in the first place with themm .. Sore y for all you troubles with them ... It was good to get to the computer to find all the lights working on the router & the phone working ..
More fun with Aussie
To my surprise, two messages from Aussie Broadband support accounts today. One was an acknowledgement that I had complained about not being allowed access to CJ's account yesterday with no suggestion about what went wrong. That's enough. A stiff reply with a threat to take the matter to the TIO if they don't respond by Tuesday. The other message was more to the point: Unfortunately we are unable to access the modem as our logs are show a connection to a dell devices at the moment. Are you able to confirm the Ethernet coming from the NBN box is connected to the WAN port on the modem.
DST ends
Daylight Saving Time ended today. Lots of clocks to change, including my cameras. In days gone by I have used this horrible OI.Share, mobile phone app to set the time on the OM-D cameras. But it's such a pain. It has the advantage of setting it almost exactly correct (why do mobile phones, which use NTP, still have times that vary by a couple of seconds?) . But is it that important? Yvonne's Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III proved to be 3 minutes fast. That's 1 second per day since DST started, but should I (or Yvonne) constantly reset it? I'd be for resetting only when it really makes sense, and then I can do it with programs after the event, like this case 14 years ago ...
disaster? despise!
Yvonne had some photos to process yesterday, and she did it ondisaster, which worked well. I checked the processing times, and they seemed significantly faster than her normal processing on distress, but I forgot to write them down?something like one photo per minute, because all her photos are done with DxO PhotoLab's DeepPRIME feature. But that increase in processing speed didn't seem as dramatic as I had noticed But why limit myself to 8 CPUs? hydra has 32 logical CPUs. I could easily increase the number on distress to 16. And, probably, invalidate my license keys.
Aussie: You are not worthy
Another day half wasted trying to get Aussie Broadband to fix their configuration problem. Once again a message explaining the situation and asking them to do something about it. Then called up Aussie, and for a change I was connected to an Australian, Harrison. He wasn't the brightest: I gave him the details at the outset, but he wanted to hear my date of birth no less than three times and CJ's address twice. After a quarter of an hour he still had not managed to identify me, and I asked to be connected to his supervisor. After a few minutes I was connected to Paul, who also couldn't find the message I sent.
disaster processing photos
disaster.lemis.com seems to work well now, though I still need to confirm my software licenses. But one was a surprise: ?Perfectly Clear? has decided that it's licensed after all! I need to tread carefully now to ensure that it doesn't change its mind.
Aussie: no support any more!
So what's wrong with CJ's VoIP service? The obvious thing to do would be to try it on my own ATA and see what happened. And indeed, it still didn't work. The same symptoms: call in rang, but the caller got a busy signal, and it stopped trying to call after a few seconds. Clearly a service configuration issue. So I sent Aussie a summary of what has happened so far, and then called them at 14:20, and was connected to a very quiet Mohammed after only 4 minutes. The same old pain, at least 10 minutes of identification before we even got started.
named death
As if I didn't have enough to do, after CJ left I discovered that I hadn't received any external mail for nearly 6 hours. Local mail was still coming through, so checked things on lax.lemis.com (also mail.lemis.com). At first sight things looked OK. Nothing queued bar the usual messages from MAILER_DAEMON to non-responsive spam sites, maillog showed the usual rejections because of name lookup issues. Sent a message from freebsd.org. It didn't arrive! A bit more searching and I discovered that all DNS lookups were failing: named had stopped. Why? No idea, except that I added disaster.lemis.com to the configuration yesterday.
More Aussie pain
Back home at 15:00 and tried to catch up with the day's work. First this diary. I was in the middle of describing yesterday's pain with CJ's phone when the doorbell rang. CJ, with a car full of hardware. It seems that he didn't just power cycle the router, he disconnected a number of cables. Did he put them back correctly? Anyway, took the router in and connected it to dereel, which is seeing more use lately. All works, the phones register, as the Aussie status page shows. And I still can't call in! So effectively we're where we were before I called Aussie the first time.
More Aussie VoIP pain
So why didn't CJ Ellis contact me about the success of power cycling his modem? Checked the status page. Both phones not registered. Did something go wrong with the router? Is he maybe completely off the net? What a time! I was in a hurry because of an appointment in Geelong, but called up Aussie support and was told that there was a two minute wait?every two minutes for 8 minutes. Finally I was connected with Pranil, who asked all sorts of questions that I didn't know (CJ's mobile phone number, for example, which for Aussie's purposes doesn't exist). Finally I got through to him that I just wanted to check whether CJ was on the net or not, but he kept returning to VoIP configuration.
I?m coming to Los Angeles, Boston, Providence, Chicago, Turin, Marin, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and Tartu, Estonia!
I’m about to hit the road again for a series of back-to-back public appearances as I travel with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle. I’ll be in Los Angeles, Boston, Providence, Chicago, Turin, Marin, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and Tartu, Estonia! Los Angeles: UCLA Institute for Law, Technology and Policy, April 10, 1215PM https://pages.e2ma.net/pages/1972582/47480 Boston:... more
Bigger disaster
Carried on playing around with disaster.lemis.com today. It was my intention to use it seriously, and 1 CPU wouldn't cut it. But hydra has 32 logical CPUs, so we could easily allocate 8 to disaster. Did that, and fired up DxO PhotoLab. Please activate. OK, we're getting used to that. But when I tried to activate ?ViewPoint?, it told me ?too many activations?! Three activations on the same disk! Another support request, and all I could do for today. But I did try processing Saturday's photos. 140 images processed in 5 minutes! 28 images per minute, where I previously only had about 5.
CJ off the air
Mail from CJ Ellis today: Hi Greg It seems that I have had no phone signals since we last spoke & you had been in touch with Broadband for me to be able to have message bank .. I thought it might have been the storm that has stop my phone , from having signals , but to even now there is nothing there .. Sorry to trouble you ,but it has been a saga with broadband since we have changed to them with the phone service .. What's wrong now? Clearly the loss of VoIP has nothing to do with the bad weather.
Where's my New York Times?
No surprisingly, I got no response to my open letter to the New York Times. During the week they relent and keep their 1-800 phone number manned beyond dawn until 10:00 (in the morning), so called up there, where a grating artificial voice asked me for the 10 digit code. Huh? What's that? Somehow worked past that and was connected to Robert, who told me that all was OK with my subscription. I explained (hopefully to his comprehension) that I wasn't getting any email. He said that he would contact technical support (medium wait), after which he said that I should now be receiving email.
Pre-ACCU interview video is live
On Friday, I sat down with Kevin Carpenter to do a short (12-min) interview about my ACCU talk coming up on April 17, and other topics. Apologies in advance for my voice quality: I’ve been sick with some bug since just after the Tokyo ISO meeting, and right after this interview I lost my voice … Continue reading Pre-ACCU interview video is live →
50 years of microprocessors
It has been well over 50 years since Intel introduced its first microprocessor, but for me the first one was the 8008. Spent a while comparing it with my most recent processor: Feature I8008 Ryzen 7950X factor Introduction April 1982 September 2022 Transistors ...
Another disaster
Response from not one, but two people at EyeQ today, saying that the license details were correct, but because the product is no longer supported, they can't do anything about it. They did offer me a discounted upgrade to Radiant, the new replacement, but that would still cost money. OK, one thing's for sure: changing hardware messes up licenses. So let's do what I had been planning all along and set up a virtual machine on hydra. What shall I call it? Yvonne was for discard or dismiss. She would have liked disgust too, but we've already had that one. But by the time I asked her, I had already started with the name disaster.lemis.com, so one of the next ones will be Yvonne's choice.
distress: disaster?
Into the office first thing this morning and wanted to continue with yesterday's photo processing. That involves waking distress.lemis.com, the ThinkCentre running Microsoft, which is usually hibernated. That goes via rdesktop, so I first hear the sound of the DVD drive seeking. But then nothing. More problems with this bloody Microsoft? No, the machine wasn't running at all. Even the power light was off. More searching, and ultimately came to the conclusion that the box had some hardware failure. Not to worry, I have a number of these boxen. Took out the disk and put it in another one, same model.
OSQI
I propose the formation of one or more ?Open Source Quality Institutes?. An OSQI is a public-sector organization that employs software engineers. Its mission would be to improve the quality, and especially safety, of popular Open-Source software. Why? The XZ Utils backdoor (let?s just say #XZ) launched the train of thought that led me to this idea. If you read the story, it becomes obvious that the key vulnerability wasn?t technical, it was the fact that a whole lot of Open-Source software is on the undermaintained-to-neglected axis, because there?s no business case for paying people to take care of it.
Subprime gadgets
Today for my podcast, I read Subprime gadgets, originally published in my Pluralistic blog: I recorded this on a day when I was home between book-tour stops (I’m out with my new techno crime-thriller, The Bezzle). Catch me on April 11 in Boston with Randall Munroe, on April 12th in Providence, Rhode Island, then onto... more