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bwooce

121 karma · joined November 12, 2007

bruce@fitzsimons.org
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bwooce··on Investors Grumbling, Twitter CEO Struggles to Define Vision
I've dropped Twitter. Their iOS client regularly pushed so many ads down my throat (in stream) that (a) I noticed and (b) I noticed it every day.

When I got to the point of blocking every advertiser (confirmed views +1!) but they popped back up under different special handles I resigned myself to defeat.

I will miss the serendipitous discovery of tidbits of information that it enabled, but the signal/noise (or rather, content/ads) ratio was overpowering. It needs to make money, but I think it's killing itself or at least transforming itself into the equivalent of TV -- content producers broadcasting to a largely passive audience.

bwooce··on Golang 1.4 Internal Packages
What magic directory names? The special case for "pkg" is the only one I saw.

The main proposal is one of scoping by directory hierarchy - /a/b/c can import a/b/d but a/g/x can't.

bwooce··on Shortwave: iBeacon-powered messaging
Can you remove/align the localizations on the phone number in loopd? I'm in Australia and can't put in a phone number.

Looks good otherwise, I'll try it around Sydney tomorrow.

bwooce··on Show HN: Kiwichat – group chat of people who are within 1 mile
It's cute that you're both naming your products after New Zealand's national bird.

Both of your products sound like dating sites dedicated to meeting New Zealanders. That's....a niche market.

Kiwi != kiwifruit, if you talk if eating a nice juicy kiwi in the rest of the world you're either salacious, a cannibal, or undertaking some kind of illegal feast (main course: roast bald eagle perhaps)

bwooce··on Rarely Used Postgres Datatypes
the only bit I'd prefer clarification on is:

Timestamp with Timezone

There’s seldom a case you shouldn’t be using these.

For recording most event times that's true but:

Birthdates (which can include times) shouldn't use them.

Calendaring should think very carefully too, should the 9am meeting move to 10am due to DST? or should it "stay put" but potentially move for other timezones?

bwooce··on OpenBSD disables Heartbeat in libssl, questions IETF
If you want to know if the connection went down in a reasonable timeframe e.g tens of seconds, then you need to implement heartbeating over TCP. This is the first thing any new protocol on TCP usually does.
bwooce··on BLAKE2: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” Than MD5
Go impl: https://github.com/dchest/blake2b
bwooce··on Show HN: Available .com's in /usr/share/dict/words
New words for my vocabulary:

congaed - past tense&participle of conga scrod - young cod/haddock/white fish split and boned. (also schrod, also available).

bwooce··on Blackphone
"Strip out the baseband" of a dongle and you won't have a device that can connect to the network, authenticate, shift cells or anything else. It's like stripping the firmware off your disk drive.

Fully support the initiative for an open baseband. One reason it's not open is the (fairly legit) fear that intentional and unintentional DoS attacks would occur, affecting everyone in the area. It's really really simple to be an obnoxious cellular network citizen and it's pretty damn hard to police.

Baseband bugs that impact networks are common too due to the complexity. I saw a function point analysis of GSM vs 3G once, seem to remember 1-2 orders of magnitudes difference. Ahh Function Points, you flawed devil of a management metric.

bwooce··on Vatican, Oxford put ancient manuscripts online
Is this not what you want? http://www.leonardodigitale.com/index.php?lang=ENG
bwooce··on The Frameless Geodesic Dome I currently live in
Dome houses are initially appealing but ultimately and practically have too many flaws to be useful. Single room houses may be an exception.

Read this http://www.shelterpub.com/_shelter/domebuilder's_blues.html and see how many of the concerns are addressed in this design.

Lloyd was passionate about domes, but came to realize their flaws. Most of these are applicable today despite the materials improvements over the last 30+ years.

bwooce··on Deutsche Telekom, Web.de and GMX launch "E-mail made in Germany" initiative
US Citizens have some (reasonable) expectation they won't be spied on without some cause. They may even get back to that situation eventually through legal challenges against the supra-legal shit going on.

The rest of us, well, we were always subject to this oversight and it won't change. We just didn't have our noses rubbed in it very often and US media don't give a damn. I expect Chinese companies are just as paranoid about data flowing through the US as the US are about their data being in China.

It's a timely reminder for us all. Remember that putting your data elsewhere doesn't mean anything if (a) it transits the US unencrypted or (b) the parent company is US owned.

bwooce··on The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When
Agreed. This is why the scientists playing with creating influenza variants freak me out. I suspect they have the 1918 variant on hand, combine that with something a bit slower to present and we'd have a winner.
bwooce··on Urbanization is supersizing spiders
As David from 27b/6 is wont to say: (In Australia) "... practically every living creature can kill you in under three minutes. Our primary spoken language is screaming".
bwooce··on How I Busted a Thief Who Tried to Sell My Camera on Craigslist
Not when you could have sold the TV for $10K. This is the shoplifting issue; the shop loses both the product and the potential profit on the product.

It gets a bit existential e.g. can you lose what you never really had? But even if you fall on the NO side of that, the cost of re-obtaining a product is not zero.

bwooce··on Zero-downtime restarts in Go
There appear to be some philosophical differences that mean this won't occur.

Specifically the "let it fail" aspect of OTP, which begets supervisor hierarchies and the consequent lack of exception handling required.

This has been brought up before and dismissed (not the unix way perhaps? I forget), and supervisors have been implemented in go by others from Erlang backgrounds. It's just not quite the same as being built in.

The way goroutines are not linked to their parents or children is related to this. It's a conscious design decision, but I am still adjusting my style to it.

bwooce··on Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
It appears so, that red stamp appears to be different every time it appears.

The clueless idiot that got their stamp pad out that day is probably long retired or dead.

That big black stamp on page 2 doesn't look original either though, to be fair."ex dono" = as gift.

bwooce··on Labeled Tab-separated Values
Ok, it's sensible to make these logs easier to parse.

I don't understand why an entirely new Tag-Value scheme was invented though, and this article doesn't attempt to justify it. Maybe it's not new and I just haven't heard of it?

Why not use: JSON ASN.1 BER Or any other scheme with existing, mature, encoders and parsers.

bwooce··on Why Is Flu Common in Winter?
The irony is that they're excellent for preventing aerosol droplets filled with virus from the wearer. Wearing one when infected is therefore responsible.
bwooce··on iOS 6: Do Not Disturb mode stays on after scheduled time
Well, no there are several good cases where storing a time in UTC as seconds since an epoch is wrong.

It's a common mistake.

The first usecase is Birthdays. For most purposes people do not want to store the extract time and date of their birthday in the original time zone. Apple do this, much to my annoyance - it means people's birthdays change as you move around our planet, and that doesn't align with how they work in the real world. If I'm born in Utah on 1/1/1980 it does not mean I celebrate my birthday on 31/12 when I'm in Australia.

The second usecase is recurring meetings, particularly with global participants. The mind bending case is where you have DST in some or all of the TZs. The only remotely correct thing you can do is keep the meeting at the same wall-clock time in the TZ of the meeting owner (9am meeting stays at 9am). Most apps don't, and there is no perfect answer (consider a participant in a different TZ - the meeting changes to a possibly conflicting time).

Sometimes storing the absolute time/date is correct. Other times storing the original UTC offset, as well as the time in UTC is. But most of the time, yes, store it in UTC in whatever form you prefer.

bwooce··on Mapping the Census: A Dot for Every Person
Neat. I've often thought about setting up an installation with one pixel per person...in the world.

With HDTV's it's not too extravagant either - about 3345 panels. A lot (of drivers too) but doable.

Any support for it? I was thinking that a circular dome ring of panels would be an amazing visualization tool.

Ideas: 1. current age of every person, represented by color 2. Language 3. Religion 4. State (health, nourishment, etc)

But then I run out - but I think it would be an incredible tool for a variety of data sets.

You could start smaller too (country level)

Has anyone done this yet? I'm aware there are no new ideas on the Internet.

bwooce··on Google Maps for iOS
It is positively beautiful for public transport. It shows the next service leaving and how far (time) it is.

I'm still looking to see how the option to save Home and Work addresses helps me - it makes home and work function as search terms but there must be more to it?

bwooce··on "Why don't you sell Triple Town for 99 cents and make tons of money?"
I agree, and remove these sorts of games from my son's devices. We try and steer clear of them in the first place, but its not always obvious.

Hayday was the last one, and I carefully explained the extortionate business model before doing it. I enjoyed and appreciate Hayday but t'aint no way I'm going to get either of us into that open-ended financial sink.

bwooce··on An Amazon Engineer Had a Little Idea That Turned Into a Billion-Dollar Business
I hear its almost twice as fast as Javascript, and runs the Internet.
bwooce··on New AWS Region in Sydney, Australia
Rackspace has opened in Australia too though right? They launched it a few months ago.

It's s necessary thing since you can't store any customer-identifying data offshore without explicit permission (see National Privacy Principles).

bwooce··on Lockitron: $500K of Reservations in One Day
Nice, if you put an IR sensor on both sides then you can easily bias it (and not do anything if both are active - manual unlock is fine in that case)

Sunlight will be an issue though...maybe IR and ultrasonic?

bwooce··on Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It
I struggle with this. I acknowledge all your points, but it doesn't cover the usecases of: 1. Changing ISP and getting a new email address. This is really common. 2. Having multiple addresses (work/home, etc). Also see #1

This breaks password resets and creates a "I want to change my credentials" flow that doesn't exist with usernames. It is especially complicated as emails to the old address won't work/are not accessible.

Most companies want to keep track customers over their lifetime and not have them create a new account when they change ISP/job.

If you want to see an example of this not working at all well, see Apple IDs. The pain surrounding them, purchases, @me.com, @mac.com, changing countries and the attached purchases is inspirational in its depth and breadth.

bwooce··on 9/11 tragedy pager intercepts
Misleading title - these are pager intercepts (people still use pagers? Who knew?)

Text messages would commonly be referring to SMS for mobile phones.

bwooce··on The App Store Nightmare
There is, although via iTunes and it is a little subtle. It may also depend on your country (but Australia and Peru work).

1. In iTunes, go to your account (iTune Stores, then click on top right login name assuming you're logged in). 2. Edit your Payment information 3. Choose CC type of "None" 4. Save

It is a desirable thing to do if you expect children will be using your iDevices -- the password doesn't stop them buying more $$ stuff after you've just authorised them buying something for free. And I'm assuming you didn't type your password in front of them...

bwooce··on What I Hate About Working At Facebook
This is the same kind of person who discovers that people, and rooms, are "available" from 12-1pm, and 6pm-

After too many days of back-to-back meetings from 10am to 3pm I've taken to creating a repeating lunchtime meeting with myself. Then I discovered the people who don't care if you're available or not...they consider themselves important enough that you'll drop everything for their meeting.

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