Monica

I have an open-source project I am very enthusiastic about (Codidact). Mostly my role does not involve the code directly: I'm the community lead (i.e. primary talker-with-people-who-use-it and triager of feature requests), and I do some design of features, workflows, wireframes, internal documentation, and stuff like that. And I beat up on the test server a lot when there's work in progress to poke at. We have infrastructure to support all that.

But sometimes I'd like to get a little closer to the code, mostly for my own education and partly so I can maybe help do smaller things because our team is pretty small still. And there was that one time that I really wanted to fix a front-end bug that I admitted was limited in scope; it was bothering me, but not something to drag a developer off of something else for. And it was in the Javascript code, which I can bumble my way through, so ok, I figured, I can do this. (And there was that weird thing about dates in Javascript, but I digress.) But I didn't have a dev environment to test it with, and ended up putting it in a userscript to test and then asking somebody else to plug it in for real, which meant I needed help from one of the developers after all, and I shouldn't be that lame.

My Mac with its older operating system is not compatible with some library or other that we use (details forgotten; I just remember the long setup sequence that ultimately failed). And people said "why not update your OS?" and I said "ha ha no" -- not going to break what's working on a machine I depend on. Clearly, what I need is an inexpensive dev environment somewhere, maybe something I could connect to remotely or maybe outdated-but-more-current-than-mine hardware that would be good enough for this purpose.

I went to the elves for counsel, and one suggestion was a cheap AWS instance (considered it), and then our team lead said "a Raspberry Pi would be fine". And lo, Raspberry Pis are cheap, but they're also aimed at the do-it-yourselfers, and to say that I am not a hardware tinkerer would be an understatement. I am not at al enamored of the "ooh, let's take a bunch of parts and build a fabulous machine!" project; I just want a working machine. I will spend money to keep more of my hair attached to my head. I said this to our lead, who said "here's a place that'll sell you all the stuff including a pre-loaded operating system, but you have to put it into the case yourself", and I said "deal".

My box of Pi stuff came, but did not include any assembly documentation and there were a few things I was mystified about. (I had a package of heat sinks but no clue what to do with them, for instance. They were three different sizes, so I thought it was a general package from which I was supposed to choose one. Got that sorted.) With some further help from the elves I was able to sort out what goes where, and this afternoon I assembled it all, pulled out a spare monitor that I knew spoke HDMI because it still had an HDMI cable dangling from it... and found that the other end of that cable was not HDMI but some older fatter connector type with pins (yeah I've lost track of video-connector history), and I do not in fact have a spare monitor with an HDMI port.

But wait, I said. Surely in the vast world of gadgets and connectors and adapters, there is a thingie that lets you plug in two HDMI cables, maybe because you need a longer cable (extension-cord style). And lo, this is a thing, and when my $5 part arrives I will be able to set all this up and see if it works.

It's always something, isn't it?

(I believe that, longer-term, I will be able to set this up so that I can connect to it remotely, from a few feet away, and it won't need its own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, at least most of the time. But for now, it can have a corner of the desk to get up and running until I learn how to do that.)

I see one more benefit to doing all this, one that's not about Codidact. Someday I will need to replace my primary machine, as all hardware goes the way of dinosaurs eventually, and I'm not sure I want to keep buying into the Mac ecosystem. I moved from Windows to Mac some time back (the Windows option at the time was Vista), and maybe I will move from Mac to Linux next time. I'm comfortable on the Linux command line, but am unfamiliar with the Linux GUI setup. This seems a way for me to explore that world some.

I am using an HP docking station (I think it's this one) with my laptop. I actually have two of these docks, one at the office and one at home.

At the office, everything works correctly.

At home, the dock successfully handles video (external monitor) and power, but it does not "see" the USB ports or the ethernet port. I've been working around this by plugging USB directly into the laptop and using Wifi, but I'd like to actually solve the problem. Any ideas?

Everything I've found on Google leads to suggestions to update Thunderbolt drivers or change BIOS settings, but I repeat: it works at the office. That tells me the problem is not with the laptop but with the dock.

Does the dock need software updates of its own? I tried asking Google about that but kept ending up at instructions to update Thunderbolt drivers on the laptop.

I don't want to do anything to the laptop. I don't want to get back to the office (I assume that will happen someday) and find out I've broken things there. I can use these workarounds at home.

But it seems like I ought to be able to fix this so I don't have to?

I got a new laptop at work last week, so naturally it came with Windows 10. Some of the software my group uses requires Windows; I'm currently still on Win 7 on my old machine. (And haven't gotten updates since last November. Eventually IT would have noticed. But even aside from that, the machine is five years old and starting to become unreliable.) The migration has been...challenging, with some accessibility regressions I don't know how to fix.

On Win 7 I defined a custom theme which had the following important properties:

• Window background is not bright white but a light tan: bright white backgrounds hurt my eyes a lot, especially over a sustained period. This is set at the OS level, so all applications get it by default.

• Font size for menus, window titles, and assorted other UI elements is increased so I can actually read them.

• Colors for the title bars of active and inactive windows are very different so I can easily spot which window is currently active.

On Windows 10 I can do none of those. In their themes I can set a "color" and an "accent color". The color is used as the background color for the start bar (well, whatever they call that now) and, if you check a box, all window title bars (active and inactive). I think the accent color is used for highlighting. Alternatively, I can apply a "tint" to everything, but (a) that would mess up graphics somewhat and (b) I can only choose one of a few baked-in colors, none of which is a good choice for me. If I'm going to go the "tint" route, I should attack it via monitor settings.

There is a "high contrast" option, but high contrast is exactly what I don't want so I gave it only a passing glance at first. (The choices there are white or bright yellow on black or the reverse of those. Ow.) Then a helpful Microsoftian who saw my plaintive tweet (thanks!) pointed out that in high-contrast mode you can change foreground and background colors (not at all obvious in the UI!), so I tried that as a way to change the background color. Unfortunately, high-contrast mode changes some other things that make it harder for me to see things (regardless of what colors you use). For example, it removes color from all the icons that sit on the task bar. I'm used to identifying some of those by "small blob of green", "blue squarish thing", and so on. It made other changes I found difficult too; don't remember what exactly.

Somebody else, either on Twitter or Super User, told me that the color setting for the window background is actually in the registry so I could brute-force it that way. Aha! So I did that, and... some applications honor it and some do not. Windows the OS seems to not. But hey, progress! While I was in there I couldn't help noticing that there were also registry entries for things like active-window color, menu font size, and more, so I exported all my settings from Win 7, loaded them into the registry on Win 10, and...saw no change, even after rebooting. Those registry settings are there, but apparently most of them are ignored? Or overridden somewhere else?

On the font-size front, there seems to be no help for me. All application menus and the Outlook navigation pane use a font that is too small for me to see without leaning in. Note that I have a pretty high-end monitor and prescription computer glasses that work just fine for me on Win 7. I got them to fix the ergonomics problem of having to lean in too close to the monitor. But I can't increase that font size on Win 10.

The answer from Microsoft's help and forums seems to be: increase the "text size" setting at the OS level. I currently have it at 125%, same as I did on Win 7. Oh, if only it were just text size! When I bumped it to 150% I discovered that that setting does a lot more; it's effectively zoom for the whole desktop. So, for example, I would have to make browser windows proportionally even more humongous to avoid the ill effects of "responsive design" that assumes wide windows and perfect vision. I'd have to make Emacs and shells that much wider to support 80-character lines. I'd have to make the file browser that much wider to still see the details view on listings. And so on. It's the equivalent of lowering the resolution on my monitor. I'm not sure the documentation IDE I use (Madcap Flare) will even fit on the screen at that zoom level; it certainly wouldn't let me see at least a little rendered output or the contents of a shell at the same time. No. That Does Not Work.

(Get a bigger monitor? I'm kind of at the limits of my vision now. If I have to move my head back and forth to read a line of text in an application, on a web page, or in an editor, that's going to be both inefficient and terrible ergonomics.)

This has all been terribly frustrating. From my perspective Microsoft removed accessibility controls that I relied on. (From their perspective they redesigned everything to take advantage of the benefits of Metro, I imagine.) It feels very "one size fits most, and the few don't matter", an attitude I previously only experienced with Apple. (Yeah, I can't control these things on my Mac either, but on my Mac, at home, I mainly use Emacs and browsers, and I can customize those directly.) In principle I could switch over to Linux and run some stuff in a Windows VM, but in practice I would be on my own for making that work and the last person in my group who tried that found the performance of Flare in a VM to be unsatisfactory. And if I'm going to have to manage everything myself with no help from IT (for not being the standard image), I might as well install a rogue Win 7 and carry on. But I'd probably get in trouble for that.

I realize that my problems are specialized and finicky, but if anyone reading this has input on any part of it, please share.

Update: I found System Font Size Changer, which let me set font sizes independently if needed for menus, title bars, message boxes, and a few other things. And it worked! Outlook uses one of them (not sure which) for the navigation pane, so I can even see the names of my folders and stuff now! Alas, the color-changer application by the same person didn't have much of an effect. At the end of Wednesday I installed f.lux to see if that can help me, after discovering just how much Madcap Flare does not honor settings in Win 10. I can't work with that tool without some fix for my color problems. It hurts too much.

Because of corporate changes (spun off from one company and merged with another), we have to remove our last dependencies on the old company's IT infrastructure. In this last round, they move our email and our (Windows) login accounts to a new domain. My migration was today.

They've sent lots of email about this over the last few months, but they left out some important details. A coworker who's been through it alerted us that they would be uninstalling and reinstalling Office, for no particularly good reason that I can see. (I mean, there's a good reason if you were on the wrong version or something, but I moved from 2013 to 2013.) The only hint they gave was telling us that we'd need to update our email signatures. Yeah, a bit more than that... maybe most people don't customize Outlook much, but I have to for accessibility. So a couple weeks ago, after finding no way to export all my client settings, I walked through all the configuration panels taking screenshots. Today I reapplied them all -- and there's a critical thing that's still broken and I haven't found a solution. I started customizing the web interface instead to see if that can meet my needs, but am feeling the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Maybe that's userscriptable. Dammit, Outlook is a PITA sometimes but it was working and now it's not.

They also created new user profiles for us. They said they would move "your files" over, but coworkers warned that this was incomplete. My browsers are very important to me, so I did my best to save bookmarks (easy), tabs (reduces to bookmarks), and session state. Chrome came through just fine. I was quite surprised, when launching Firefox post-migration, to be staring at the default configuration -- it didn't occur to me that I might lose about:config settings, add-ons, and other UI customizations. Frantic, I dug around in Users/me/AppData, found a Mozilla directory under Local, and copied the profiles therein. No effect. Eventually I went to Google to find out how to put things back the way they were (and sighing deeply about the customizations that don't sync, which I'd have to reconstruct), when I found something that pointed out how to ask Firefox where it's reading profile data from. Aha! Under AppData there is also a directory named "Roaming" (WTF is that?), and it was under there. Once I copied that directory I had my old browser state back. Whew! (Also backed that up for safekeeping.)

The actual migration process (not counting email, which they moved overnight) took about six hours. A chunk of that time was spent blocked and waiting on hold with IT. (An hour on hold the first time, 1:15 the second. Sheesh.) Because I knew the hold times would be long, as soon as I smelled a potential problem the first time I placed the call while I continued to work on it. Alas, the second blockage was a surprise error from their tool. By the way, they helpfully offered links to the FAQ and "contact support", both dead. At least they also displayed a phone number (which I'd secured in advance so I didn't need, but some would).

They moved most Windows settings over; for example, my large fonts, desktop icons, custom colors, and classic taskbar styling were intact. But, I discovered, they didn't move environment variables -- and I have no idea how to get those, since I can no longer log in with the old profile. I discovered this when Emacs didn't read my configuration -- it depends on HOME. So I reset that one, but I wonder what else I've lost.

Tomorrow I get to find out what else broke. I know the main doc tool will need intervention; the domain change confuses the license. I haven't tried git yet.

My laptop is getting on in years. On the one hand, this would have been a good time to replace it, given that there's going to be a lot of disruption anyway. On the other hand, it would come with Windows 10, which hasn't been making friends on my team. Also, I brought in a Windows 10 tablet to use during the migration, and yesterday when I was testing some stuff it announced that it couldn't start and I would have to reinstall the OS (!). I hadn't done much on it so I didn't lose a lot (had to reinstall the VPN and the browsers), but...really? In all my years of computer use, I've never once gone from "works fine" to "start over" in a span of hours. I wonder if I accidentally picked up that virus latest OS update, the one that was damaging data because it didn't check to see if there's enough disk space before starting. Every time that tablet asks me if I want to install updates I say no, but maybe something slipped through?

This morning while I was having an uncomfortable annual preventative exam, the technician apologized for something taking so long and said the computer was slow today. I asked "you got the patch for the Intel thing?" and she gave me a blank look; she hadn't heard of the Meltdown/Spectre problem. I gave her a super-high-level summary and suggested what she could Google for later.

She asked me how much things would slow down and I said it's hard to tell -- could be 5%, could be 30%, could be worse -- depends on lots of things. She got a look of horror on her face and said "if it's that bad, we're going to have to change how we schedule appointments!".

Wow. That kind of effect had not occurred to me. I mean, there are computers with affected chips in everything these days -- medical equipment, air-traffic-control systems, sensor networks, self-driving cars... I presume that many of those systems will have to get patched, and that hardware replacements are big productions that won't happen until current systems reach the end-of-life mark, and that the consequences of slower execution could matter in some of those use cases. (Car: "stop at that red light... oh, that was back there".) Even if it's "just" diagnostic scans taking longer, what happens, logically and financially, when providers can see fewer patients per day?

I asked if the machine she was currently using was networked. It's on the facility's network only, as I expected. I said that perhaps their IT people will opt for securing the network and not applying the patch, but to myself I wondered if that opens them to liability claims or regulatory problems. It's also possible that some of these machines are specialized enough that they don't have the affected chips. I know next to nothing about embedded systems, specialized equipment like mammogram scanners, and so on.

I assume that in time this problem will be dealt with or worked around. I've already seen recommendations suggesting which patches to take and which to disable to walk that balance between reduced effects and security. I'm not trying to paint a picture of doom and gloom here. I just wonder how some of the bumps along the way will manifest.

Somebody asked me this morning for help finding reliable advice about anti-virus software for his PC. He's currently using Norton (I don't know details, including what updates he's getting). I think he's going to need to find something simple -- fire-and-forget would be best (so automatic updates, at least). Who out there is currently doing reasonable neutral product comparisons in this area (Windows, not Mac)? If I could point him to one site where he could learn enough to make a decision, what would that site be?

I did talk with him about hygiene, it being far better to *avoid getting* viruses than to clean them up after. He says he's not opening unknown attachments or browsing in bad neighborhoods (though we didn't talk about how he would know, so I don't know if that's correct), but he's getting a lot of viruses and trojans. Or warnings about them, anyway; I haven't dismissed the possibility that he's picked up some malware that's doing that.

Today I got the following notification on my Android phone, allegedly from Google:



I haven't typed my Google password on my phone recently, nor has my account changed. Hmm. I saw a few possibilities:

1. Google legitimately wants me to re-enter my password, but their notice is wrong.

2. Phishing, though there's no obvious vector (no recent apps or suspicious web sites).

3. Compromised account, though that seemed very unlikely. (I use a very strong password for Google.)

When I got home (and thus to another computer) I verified that #3 was not the case. I then began searching for explanations for this notice. I had a wisdom of the ancients moment -- people have been having this problem since at least 2014, but no solutions were extant. I saw enough to decide that the notice really was from Google (so, #1) and re-entered my password, and lo, email returned to my phone.

So what was that? It's ok with me if Google wants to require re-authentication periodically on small, stealable devices with access to significant personal information, but if that's what happened, couldn't they tell us?

Dear Brain Trust,

Some years ago, manufacturers of computer monitors (and TVs, which have a lot in common with monitors) decided that the most-critical use case now is watching widescreen movies. The result is that a monitor in landscape orientation is too short, and (for me, with larger fonts) one in portrait orientation is too narrow. At home I've still got a monitor with the classic aspect ratio, but it's only 20" (would like a little bigger, but the same aspect ratio). At work I have two of the other kind (22"? 24"? haven't measured, but something like that).

Arguably I have enough screen real-estate, but it's the wrong shape. Before I just give up and order a mucking huge single monitor (a coworker has one that's about three feet wide, so I guess nominally a 42" monitor or so), does anybody know whether it's still possible to get the classic aspect ratio? I want to look at code, documentation, web pages, and stuff like that, not movies. I watch movies on my actual TV, thankyouverymuch.

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

This is (basically) a rant I posted on the work wiki, with serial numbers filed off of course.

I have (customer-supplied server) running on a (corporate) laptop with a scrawny little hard drive. The C partition is only 83GB, and while there's another 40GB languishing on D, IT can't repartition without risking data loss and it took too long to get this set up in the first place. So there's a "why can't I just use Partition Magic to fix it?" rant wanting to get out here, but that is not this rant.

This week I ran out of space on C. Usually this means the server has written a bunch of logs that I need to delete, but that wasn't it this time -- I reclaimed maybe 2GB that way. Defrag wouldn't even run well because it didn't have 15% free and couldn't buffer on D -- but that is not this rant.

No, the rant is that when I went looking for the culprit (it's a pretty lean machine as these things go), I found that Proventia Desktop (firewall -- it ought to be called Prevent-ya, as in "prevent ya from getting any work done"!) had written 70GB of logs -- and tampering in any way with firewalls can be a firing offense, not that I have privileges anyway. 70GB -- really? On an 83GB partition? Haven't the guys who make that ever heard of rolling logs? Or archiving? They zipped down to a hundredth their original size. Sheesh!

(Fortunately we have a very helpful on-site support person who was able to fix this for me.)

It should not be this hard for me to break into my own wireless network. Hrmpf.

Once upon a time we decided to go the "authorized MAC addresses" route instead of the "shared password" route or the "leaking open wireless all over the street" route. I no longer remember what I had to do to add the Roku last winter, but it was pretty straightforward. I strongly suspect that it involved a link like "add MAC address" on the router's wireless-settings page. Now I have a new wireless device and want to add it.

Problem the first: the new device doesn't have an obvious way to cough up a MAC address. Problem the second (and this makes the first irrelevant, at least temporarily): the router interface for managing MAC addresses seems to be hosed. I can't even find a way to just turn the MAC filtering off (which would allow the new device to join the network, at which point the router would tell me its MAC address and I could theoretically add it and turn the security back on). The router reports that this filtering is enabled but on the configuration page the check-box is unchecked; checking it does not then give me access to the list to manage. So I guess I've reached the wrong part of the configuration, despite this being the only plausible part I've found so far.

Google was no help, at least in a first round. Verizon's tech support (they supplied the router) claims that my only option is to reset to factory defaults and start over. Since I don't now remember everything we changed from factory defaults, I don't know how big a task this is. There is an interface to save and restore a configuration file, which I thought might give me something to poke around in, but "save" does not mean "save somewhere where a mere administrator can actually see its contents".

Leaking open wireless all over the street is looking better and better to me. If I can figure out how to turn the MAC filtering off I may well just leave it off. Meanwhile, I will take the Kindle I received as a birthday present to a coffee shop to register it.

It's entertaining when malware distributors are both bold and stupid, like with this email I got today: "Dear customer, we have disabled your email account because we believe it has been compromised. To restore, run the attached executable and use the following password: 12345". (Yes, it was sent in the clear.) How many things are wrong with that ploy? Sheesh.

Serendipitiously, 15 minutes after seeing that scam I saw this excellent tutorial on password management by vonstrassburg. No, not the "how to choose a good password" hints you already know, but, rather, how to deal with the fact that that doesn't really work. I particularly like his suggestions for managing the database file.

From browngirl: Mordor or Iceland? Match the pictures to the source.

I have recently been participating in a small discussion of renaissance music notation... on a mailing list for Jewish worship. No, I didn't start it, but I could hardly let those comments just sit there... And now I have pointers to other editions of Salamone Rossi's music that seem worth investigating (Don Harran in particular). The edition I have is funky; the music is fine, but it's a transcription of a 19th-century French edition and Hebrew transliterated into French phonemes breaks my brain. I transcribe pieces from this book if our choir is going to do them. (What I really want to see is a facsimile edition...)

This tiny horse (link from anastasiav) gave me a serious case of the "aww, cute!"s.

Some iGoogle plug-in served me this cat picture, and all I could think was "yeah, I've had days like that". It's tempting to turn it into a userpic, but I don't know whose property it is.

Erik sometimes makes a squeaking sound now where I would have expected a meow to come out. He still has a full-voiced meow, so it's not like he's caught kitty laryngitis or something, but it's still odd. Embla's normal mode is a sort of chirp (I've only heard her actually meow two or three times), but this sort of thing is new for Erik. Weird.