Blog Archive: September 2017
Determining entrance pupil: no progress
Last month I worked out a way to use Hugin to determine the entrance pupil of a lens based on the parallax error in the control points. But two weeks ago I tried it in earnest, and it didn't work out the way I had hoped. What caused the problems? I don't know for sure, but I had a couple of ideas to follow up: just plain sloppy measurements, inappropriate choice of control points, phase of the moon... One thing was sure: the entrance pupil was in a position that caused that the end of the focus rail to intrude into the image.
My CppCon 2017 session is now on YouTube
My CppCon talk yesterday is now on YouTube. You can read more about in my July blog post on “Metaclasses: Thoughts on generative C++” which contains links to the current paper and some examples that work so far on the live prototype compiler cppx.godbolt.org. Thanks again to Bjarne Stroustrup for making C++ so general and powerful with […]
My CppCon 2017 session is now on YouTube
My CppCon talk yesterday is now on YouTube. You can read more about in my July blog post on “Metaclasses: Thoughts on generative C++” which contains links to the current paper and some examples that work so far on the live prototype compiler cppx.godbolt.org. Thanks again to Bjarne Stroustrup for making C++ so general and powerful with … Continue reading My CppCon 2017 session is now on YouTube →
Package upgrade: the bloat
I've been meaning to keep my software packages up to date on all machines, but it's not easy. I was going to catch up today on lagoon, Yvonne's machine, but the upgrade process wanted to remove Emacs and not replace it. That looks dangerous, so I've put it off until I upgrade the machine, which should happen when I get my new disks next week. Today I upgraded teevee, where the upgrade process wanted to remove Samba. I can live with that: I don't use Samba on that machine. But why does the upgrade remove software and not replace it? Is this a political statement?
Refresh Is Sacred
There are two kinds of client applications: The first kind has a refresh or reload button to make sure your apps in sync with its servers view of the world. The second kind is broken. Of late, I have to deal regularly with several apps, notably including an emailer and a car-sharing service, that lack such a button. I can imagine why a customer-focused product manager said Steve Jobs taught us that fewer controls are better and we should just take care of making sure were in sync with the cloud. So lose the button. Except for, it doesnt work. Apparently nobody in the world is smart enough to arrange for flawlessly reliable hands-off client/cloud synchronization.
Power fail!
Into the office this morning to notice an eerie silence. All computers were off. Power failure? No. The RCD had tripped. Why is not longer important, but there's a good chance that it's related to the fact there's only one for the whole house. Next time we have an electrician here, I should get a separate RCD installed for my office, in place of the current circuit breaker. Back for the eternal fsck (I can hear friends chanting ZFS! ZFS! ZFS!) . Used the time to do a much-needed tidy up of papers to be filed, and in the process noted that /home took something over a hour to complete.
October NYCDevOps: Two meetings! DNSControl and Storing Secrets in the Cloud
We will have two meetings in October. The extra meeting will be on Mon, Oct 2 co-located with the VelocityNYC conference. You don't have to be registered for the conference to come to the meeting. Topic: DNSControl: "DNS as Code" from StackOverflow.com Speaker: Thomas A. Limoncelli, SRE Manager @ Stack Overflow Date: Monday, October 2, 2017 Time: 6:30-9:30 PM (SPECIAL TIME AND LOCATION) Location: Madison Suite, Hilton Midtown, 1335 6th Ave, New York, NY 10019 https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/243369226/ VelocityNYC is in town this week. They've graciously provided space for us to host an additional meeting. Space is limited! RSVP soon! Full details and RSVP.
eBay's clear policies
Bulk mail from eBay today, announcing reasonable changes to their policy. But the wording confirms my general opinion: Our updated User Agreement will take effect on 25 October 2017 for new users and upon acceptance for new users. And for me? ACM only downloads articles once.
As-Salaam-Alaikum: The cloud arrives in the Middle East!
Today, I am excited to announce plans for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring an infrastructure Region to the Middle East! This move is another milestone in our global expansion and mission to bring flexible, scalable, and secure cloud computing infrastructure to organizations around the world. Based in Bahrain, this will be the first Region for AWS in the Middle East. The Region will be in the heart of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and we're aiming to have it ready by early 2019. This Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, and it will provide even lower latency to users across the Middle East.
As-Salaam-Alaikum: The cloud arrives in the Middle East!
Today, I am excited to announce plans for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring an infrastructure Region to the Middle East! This move is another milestone in our global expansion and mission to bring flexible, scalable, and secure cloud computing infrastructure to organizations around the world. Based in Bahrain, this will be the first Region for AWS in the Middle East.
eBay beats Google
More pain with eBay today, trying to get my money back from the person who took money for the disk I ordered two weeks ago, but didn't deliver. It seems that eBay won't help much because I paid by bank transfer, so I'll have to take legal channels. But eBay told me what they thought of what I did today: We have reason to believe that your eBay account has been used fraudulently without your permission. Weve reset your eBay password. If you had your PayPal account linked to your eBay account, we've disabled your PayPal link to protect your funds.
Old panoramas revisited
An indirect result of our discussion about Piccola yesterday, I noted an entry describing the pain of taking house panoramas. Back to look at the images again today. Things have improved considerably, and I was through with the whole thing in less than 30 minutes, with considerably better results. Here before and after: Strangely, the old images don't look as bad as I thought.
VoIP problems, worked around
CJ Ellis has problems with his MyNetFone VoIP service again! That's the fourth time that he has had the same issue: outgoing calls work normally, but incoming calls divert immediately to voice mail. This time it happened at a particularly inopportune time for me, with the Arne Koets clinic taking up most of my time, so by this morning I had had time to consider what I could do without getting MyNetFone support involved. Clearly there's something wrong if the ATA thinks it is registered, and can make phones to prove it, but the network thinks it isn't. But what's causing the problem?
Where's my disk?
On Monday I discovered I hadn't paid for an eBay item, so I rectified that quickly. Sent a message to the seller. No reaction. Sent another message to the seller. Still no reaction. OK, time to take further steps. Where eBay had claimed that the item was paid when it was not, it now claimed that it was not paid when it was. Back to eBay's confusing web site. Take action . What action? I've been there before on Monday. OK, get eBay to call me valued customer and walk me through. Maria called back pretty quickly. Problem: she had a strong fake American accent (probably originally from the Philippines), and I really couldn't understand her.
Boring, complex and important: the deadly mix that blew up the open web
On Monday, the World Wide Web Consortium published EME, a standard for locking up video on the web with DRM, allowing large corporate members to proceed without taking any steps to protect accessibility work, security research, archiving or innovation. I spent years working to get people to pay attention to the ramifications of the effort,... more
MediathekView insights
Why can't I download Mediathek videos that I can watch online? It all sounds like a web proxy issue. So how do I set a web proxy for MediathekView? Once again Google to my aid. It pointed me at this forum discussion (!) , which states that you should start MediathekView like this: java -dproxyset=true -dproxyhost=<proxy server> -dproxyport=<port> -jar mediathekview.jar And how about that, that did the trick. It's not clear why, but who am I to complain? ACM only downloads articles once.
You Might Be Evil
Or at least, your employer might be. Over the years we in the tech sector have gotten used to being well-regarded. After all, we make peoples lives better, on balance. Thats changing. At the moment its rumblings from thought leaders, not pervasive popular anger. The other thing thats new is that theyre thought leaders who are progressives and liberals; just like most of us in the tech professions. It notably involves the M-word and those of us on the inside need to be thinking about it. The general public, by and large, love reading the news of their friends and the world on Facebook, buying stuff cheap on Amazon, using Google maps and mail for free, and using recent Windows releases at work.
Where in the world am I?
There's something funny about MediathekView: sometimes it doesn't find things that are listed in the Mediatheken, and sometimes it can't load things that I can watch directly, claiming forbidden (HTTP error 403). Why? One reason could be something that I've frequently observed: my network block ( Class C ) was allocated in Germany in the dark ages, round 1992. When I moved here, it moved with me, but much software still thinks I'm in Germany. In general it's a minor nuisancesome broken sites of Big Business decide to redirect to their German subsidiary when I access their site, for examplebut in this case it appears to tell the Mediatheken that they can display the contentif I use a Class C address and not the gateway address.
Intuitive error messages
I've mentioned in the past that I'm quite happy with the Mendhak GPS logger. It works well, while the corresponding function in OI.Share is fiddly to turn on, and it frequently turns itself off again for reasons that I haven't established. But today I had no logs at all. The entire directory was empty. But the logger was working: Only nothing got written to disk. Why was the message Gpx10FileLogger.write in red? Is that an even more polite way of saying failed, but I don't really want to tell you ?
eBay: Unpaid bill
This time last week I bought a disk on eBay. Unlike just about everything nowadays, there was no PayPal option, so I had to pay by bank transfer. But this morning I received a mail message from the seller, and discovered that he had opened a non-payment case. How could that happen? No idea, but after checking my bank accounts, no transfer had been made. Either I forgot it (unusual), or the bank messed up, which wouldn't be the first time. There's no way to tell which it was any more. Either way, the seller was right that he had almost certainly not received any payment.
Photos of the Sky
I mean No Mans Sky the game, which Ive been playing again lately. Its been accused of being mostly a platform for generating cheesy sci-fi book covers, but thats not true, and also I love cheesy sci-fi book covers, so this is mostly to show you some. With a few words on the game. Oh, just flying my starship over the landscape ofa planet I recently discovered and named. As one does. Updates No Mans Sky launched just over a year ago, preceded by a massive hype wave and followed by howls of disappointment when it fell short of expectations.
Who are the Publishers of Computer Science Research?
To answer this question, I downloaded the DBLP database and used the DOI publisher prefix of each publication to determine its publisher. I grouped the 3.4 million entries by publisher and joined the numeric prefixes with the publisher names available in the list of Crossref members. Based on these data, here is a pie chart of the major publishers of computer science research papers.
September NYCDevOps: Habitat in Production (Seth Thomas)
This month's NYCDevOps meetup speaker will be Seth Thomas talking about "Habitat in Production". Date: Tuesday, September 19, 2017 Time: 6:30 PM Location: Stack Overflow HQ, 110 William St, 28th floor, NY, NY Space is limited! RSVP soon! https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/240064742/
Gmail: more intrusions
For reasons I forget, I accessed Gmail from the browser on my :0.1 display instead of the normal :0.2. Same browser (outdated firefox), same computer. But I still get a message: I suppose things are getting better: now at least it gives a (correct) IP address. But how does it recognize the device ? It's the same one I use all the time, and so is the browser. I wonder if I will get new messages when I upgrade the browser. ACM only downloads articles once.
The Origins of Malloc
The 1973 Fourth Edition Unix kernel source code contains two routines, malloc and mfree , that manage the dynamic allocation and release of main memory blocks for in-memory processes and of continuous disk swap area blocks for swapped-out processes. Their implementation and history can teach us many things regarding modern computing.
Strange umount issue
While making a regular backup to my external backup drive, I had a strange experience: at the very end, it didn't complete. Checking, I found that the backup drive was no longer mounted. But umount was the very last thing that happens in the script. Further investigation showed: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 31 -> ps aux | grep umount root 3267 0.0 0.0 12384 1968 5 DL+ 9:30am 0:00.41 umount /photobackup === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 32 -> ps alx | grep umount 0 3267 1364 0 31 0 12384 1968 biord DL+ 5 0:00.43 umount /photobackup So umount had umounted the disk, but it was still reading.
Canadian Tax Wrangling
Our media, pro and social, echo with blasts of self-righteous anger over proposed legislation which would eliminate a few popular tax dodges. Weirdly, I see no-one arguing the other side; that the tax proposals are reasonable. I think Im qualified to make that argument, so I will. [If youre not Canadian, you can probably stop reading here.] The proposed tax changes Theyre summarized pretty well here. Basically, if you have a business and its incorporated say youre a doctor, lawyer, contractor, accountant, that kind of thing you can use your corporation for tax tricks, the effect being that you pay less tax on the same income.
The pain of online purchases
I've been buying things online now since the end of the past millennium, and it would be my favourite way to buy thingsIF. You'd think that by now people would have got their act together, but in fact, on reflection, there seem to be problems Every Single Time. Today I finally came to the conclusion that I needed a new lens, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. What do they cost? B&H are my price benchmark: not necessarily the cheapest, but reasonable. They want US $999, but of course they're in the USA, so the very cheapest shipping is another $39.
Scary spam
Call from CJ Ellis today: Gmail was preparing to delete his email account: From: gmail.com <[email protected]> Date: 6 September 2017 at 13:04 Subject: Your account will be -deactivated To: [email protected] Hello cjhimself, This is to inform you that your request on: 9/3/2017 1:30:15 p.m. to remove your account from gmail.com server has been approved and will initiate in one hour from the exact time you open this message. Regards. ignore this message to continue with email removal or Please confirm if this is genuine as i have not made any such request.
How many car displays?
Last week ALDI had some special offers: a dashcam and a wireless reversing camera. I've had a reversing camera before, which connected to my GPS receiver, but it required running wires through the car, and I never got round to installing it. This one least obviates that problem. The reality, as so often with ALDI special offers, is different: the camera part can be mounted either wired to the reversing lights, or unwired with a switch. So when you want to reverse, you get out and press the On button. If it's wired, it only works when it's powered, either by the reversing lights or the tail lights.
C++17 is formally approved
[revised 9/8 to reflect that there is no need to wait till the next WG21 meeting] As I mentioned in my Kona (March) trip report, WG21 (the ISO C++ committee) completed work on C++17 at our March meeting. At that point it was technically finalized, and since then we have been in the final procedural […]
C++17 is formally approved
[revised 9/8 to reflect that there is no need to wait till the next WG21 meeting] As I mentioned in my Kona (March) trip report, WG21 (the ISO C++ committee) completed work on C++17 at our March meeting. At that point it was technically finalized, and since then we have been in the final procedural … Continue reading C++17 is formally approved →
Our technology is haunted by demons controlled by transhuman life-forms
In my latest Locus column, “Demon-Haunted World,” I propose that the Internet of Cheating Things — gadgets that try to trick us into arranging our affairs to the benefit of corporate shareholders, to our own detriment — is bringing us back to the Dark Ages, when alchemists believed that the universe rearranged itself to prevent... more
Walkaway won the Dragon Award for Best Apocalyptic Novel
Yesterday, I left the Black Rock Desert after Burning Man and my phone came to life and informed me that my novel Walkaway had been awarded DragonCon’s Dragon Award for Best Apocalyptic Novel! I couldn’t be more pleased. My sincere thanks to all the voters who supported the novel! By the way, Tor.com published Party... more
Update on October seminar in London
As I mentioned earlier, part of my fall schedule is to give a repeat of this spring’s sold-out seminar: “High-Performance and Low-Latency C++” (October 9-11, London, UK). I am still getting mails about whether there are alternative/additional European dates for this seminar. Unfortunately, the answer is still no, but since I’m getting inquiries about it let […]
Update on October seminar in London
As I mentioned earlier, part of my fall schedule is to give a repeat of this spring’s sold-out seminar: “High-Performance and Low-Latency C++” (October 9-11, London, UK). I am still getting mails about whether there are alternative/additional European dates for this seminar. Unfortunately, the answer is still no, but since I’m getting inquiries about it let … Continue reading Update on October seminar in London →
Of BOOL and stdbool
The C99 standard has added to the C programming language a Boolean type, _Bool and the bool alias for it. How well does this type interoperate with the Windows SDK BOOL type? The answer is, not at all well, and here's the complete story.
More MyNetFone problems
CJ Ellis has problems with his MyNetFone connection again! It's the third time now: for reasons that nobody has been to explain, outgoing calls function normally, but incoming calls divert immediately to voice mail. This first happened two years ago, then repeated six weeks ago. CJ is non-technical and deaf, and has difficulties understanding non-Australians (including Yvonne), so I offered to talk to support for him. On each occasion the MyNetFone support people told me that the ATA (a Mitron MV1) was not registered. Wrong! The ATA was registered, otherwise CJ would not have been able to make outgoing calls, including the ones he made to report the problem.
AI for everyone - How companies can benefit from the advance of machine learning
This article titled "Wie Unternehmen vom Vormarsch des maschinellen Lernens profitieren können" appeared in German last week in the "Digitaliserung" column of Wirtschaftwoche. When a technology has its breakthrough, can often only be determined in hindsight. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), this is different. ML is that part of AI that describes rules and recognizes patterns from large amounts of data in order to predict future data. Both concepts are virtually omnipresent and at the top of most buzzword rankings. Personally, I think and this is clearly linked to the rise of AI and ML that there has never been a better time than today to develop smart applications and use them.
AI for everyone - How companies can benefit from the advance of machine learning
This article titled “Wie Unternehmen vom Vormarsch des maschinellen Lernens profitieren können” appeared in German last week in the “Digitaliserung” column of Wirtschaftwoche. When a technology has its breakthrough, can often only be determined in hindsight. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), this is different. ML is that part of AI that describes rules and recognizes patterns from large amounts of data in order to predict future data.
Murder at Adolfs Cottage
I recently read Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr. Its good a Fifties-Iron-Curtain spy thriller gracefully mashed up with a pre-war murder mystery set in Hitlers Bavarian country getaway, Berghof. Its a repeat appearance for Kerrs Bernie Gunther, an appealingly hard-boiled veteran socialist cop who finds himself working for National Socialist management. And yep, there are Nazis in this story; the real not tiki-torch flavor. A couple of mega-Nazis, Bormann and Heydrich, and some relatively minor odd fish like Karl Brandt and Gerdy Troost. Nazis are convenient for a novelist, because they are reliably evil and twisted, so he can economize on characterization and leave room for plot and atmospherics.
Android usage
One of the big issues I have always had with mainstream computers is that it's difficult to use more than a few programs at a time. Not surprisingly, mobile phone operating systems like Android are the worst. I find it really difficult to switch between the four or five apps that I use for camera and location services. So it's not surprising to see this statistic, which notes that most users don't use more than 3 apps on a regular basis: ACM only downloads articles once.