Flashes of Panic

What's missing: how things work

We’ve done a lot of really cool stuff on the Internet in the last dozen years or so. Here’s something we haven’t done: explain how it all works in a way non-technical people can understand.

Don’t tell me there’s an Internet For Dummies book out there, because I’m sure there is. That’s not the point. That sort of book tells you how to double-click on the Internet Explorer icon, and how to tell the difference between an email address and a web address. Maybe it explains how to dissect a web address into a protocol, hostname and path, but I doubt it. That’s all fine as far as it goes (except for the Internet Explorer part) but there’s important information people need when things go wrong, and they’re never told they need to know these things, or how to learn them.

Here’s a good example: Most relatively competent people understand what domain names are. I wonder what percentage understand IP addressing? I don’t mean understanding the various ways of carving up address space, like class blocks and CIDR, or even the concept of localhost (there’s no place like 127.0.0.1) and unroutable addresses (192.168.1.1, anyone?) but just the bare fact of the numeric addresses under domains, and how they’re mapped to each other. And when I’m talking about understanding DNS, I don’t mean recursive queries, I just mean something as simple as “you send a request to this server asking for the numeric address of www.example.com, and it answers with the correct address.”

The fifteen minutes it might take to understand that concept might save five hours (or five days) troubleshooting a connectivity problem.

I’m thinking about this because tonight I fixed an email problem for a local couple who will remain nameless here because it’s not their fault. They could receive new email, and read it, but they couldn’t send any. Was this a virus?

Nope. It was their helpful ISP blocking port 25, the universal “I’m sending email” port, in an anti-spam measure which, while possibly effective, neatly shifts the burden of unsolicited bulk email off the sender and on to the confused customers of a big, faceless telco. Because seriously, what’s a port? And where were they supposed to have learned that?

There’s a generation of us out here who open up our car hoods and are completely mystified, because they work so well we never need to know the difference between a loose belt and a busted alternator. There’s also a generation who knew how to check their own oil and could diagnose engine problems by listening to them. (“Sounds pretty rough; have you looked at the timing belt recently?”) On the internet we seem to have skipped directly from the user class who wrote their own network drivers to the ones who don’t know ports from IP numbers, but we haven’t yet reached the stability that second group really needs.

While we’re working on the stability, how do we teach them the troubleshooting?

Posted by pjm at 8:34 PM | Comments (0)

A very little cash for a laptop

We replaced A’s laptop last fall, and when, this spring, she gave me the OK to dispose of the old one, I went looking for a route which would not lead to a landfill.

What I eventually found was CashForLaptops.com, which has an attractive model: you tell them what the machine is and what its condition is, they give you a quote and then send you the packaging (and a postage-paid UPS label) and you ship it back to them. They then cut you a check based on what they received.

This last stage is the part I wasn’t impressed with. The quote I was given for A’s laptop, a 4-year-old Dell with visible wear on the case and a bad monitor connection (an external monitor was needed to use it) was $55. The check we eventually received was $5.

My brother had slightly better luck, trading in my 2001-vintage G3 iBook with a busted hinge for $25 (original quote: $65).

I think the problem here is that the up-front questionnaire used to generate the quotes does not ask enough questions, or the right questions. It doesn’t ask how old the machine is, if the case shows wear, or the condition of several components, all things which are eventually used to set the final price. There is a check box for damaged LCD, which I checked, but nothing for estimating the condition of the case, for example.

To be fair, I might have had a more realistic quote had I called the listed toll-free number and questioned the original quote directly rather than simply sending in the machine and waiting for the quoted check. I haven’t seen much online feedback for the site; all the articles I can find read like they were paid for by the site owners (and some of them read like practice essays for a writing test).

In the final analysis, however, the laptop is not in a landfill (or at least most of it isn’t, I assume) and we didn’t have to pay to dispose of it, so I’m marking cashforlaptops.com as a net win.

Posted by pjm at 8:36 AM | Comments (0)

Excuses

The most exciting things happening at work (aside from that there are three of us now) are clients we don’t actually have yet, so I can’t talk about them. (You’ve heard of them. Unlike our biggest client to date, which is huge in Europe but most Americans I’ve mentioned them to shrug and ask, “Who?”)

I’ve posted most of my recent writing projects on my running blog. I have an interesting one due for release soon in a not-exactly-running periodical, which I will probably mention when it goes out.

So I wind up writing about how I multi-task on my walk back and forth to work (NPR podcasts, charging the wind-up flashlights) and the odd photo which went through my Flickr stream recently. That would be how I avoided throwing out a step-to-open metal trash can (used for Izzy’s scooped litter) when the lid hinge broke.

I dug in to my toolbox to find a handle from a previous Ikea project (three drawers and handles which came two to a packet, I think). I used an eight-penny nail to whack holes in the can lid, and screwed on the handle. Now the can works again (A says better than before) and the handle is a lot more solidly built than whatever flimsy plastic bit broke in the hinge. Built to throw away, indeed.

Posted by pjm at 6:07 PM | Comments (0)

Sugar

We went out last night to see Sugar, a (fictional) movie about a minor-league pitcher from the Dominican Republic, Miguel “Sugar” Santos, and his adventures in single-A baseball.

The basic plot premise sounds fantastic, and aside from some pacing issues I think it’s done pretty well: Santos, who was signed with the Kansas City “Knights” (all his gear has the “KC” of the Royals) at age sixteen, gets called up to spring training in Arizona at twenty and eventually is assigned to the single-A Swing in “Bridgetown”, Iowa, which seems to be a stand-in for the Quad City River Bandits in Davenport. (They were known as the “Swing” for several years, and the home game scenes are shot at their park.)

So, drop a young, inexperienced and non-English-speaking Dominican into Iowa, playing baseball at the very edge of his ability, and what happens?

Well, things get vague there. The movie is pretty good at spelling out Santos’s difficulties with language and culture (it takes him days to learn to order anything but french toast at a diner in Arizona), but less so at showing his growing disillusionment with baseball. One friendly Iowan asks Santos about a scar on his forehead, and when he stumbles for the words in English, tells him to go ahead in Spanish; his explanation, then, is presented without subtitles, and we get a quick dose of how confusing the English-speaking world is for him, and we can see from the blank expression of the questioner that she isn’t picking up any more than we are.

There’s a vivid contrast with a teammate who was drafted out of Stanford, particularly when the pair discusses what they might do if baseball doesn’t work out for them. Sugar itself is definitely a theme; it’s another Dominican export and comes up in different forms, from rum to syrup, at the oddest times, though I don’t have anything intelligent to say about the symbolism.

It’s not clear if this is a baseball movie and it’s definitely grimmer and tougher than the “making it as a pro athlete” movie from 2005, Goal!. I wonder if a similar scenario, given a full-on Hollywood treatment, would have been a more gripping story, or too sweet.

Posted by pjm at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)

Believing your own hype

I have a new hypothesis: any page containing the words…

You’ve come to the right place if you are looking to acquire mad skills.

…probably has nothing useful to offer me. (Bolding from the original.)

Posted by pjm at 2:05 PM | Comments (0)

Preservation Nation

I read a (private) blog of a guy in New York who does theater reviews. He’s concocted a rating system he calls the “Yes System” which is most easily summarized as the beginning of any sentence in response to the production’s argument: “Yes, And…”, “Yes, Or…”, “Yes, If…” or “Yes, But…”. It’s not just a good-and-bad rating; it engages the project.

I feel that way about a link my mother sent me yesterday. The link was the Flickr feed for “Preservation Nation”, the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The NTHP is using the photos for a photo mosaic project, and there are quite a few buildings and places which “matter” in the stream that are in my hometown, or the nearby small city. It’s pretty cool to be flicking through the list and see whole blocks of our downtown. It’s a great use of Flickr.

And here’s where I get to “Yes, If.” If you just see the Flickr stream, why hasn’t an effort been made to geo-tag these photos? It would’ve made a great connection to other parts of Flickr, bringing new people in to the photo stream who might not otherwise have found it. And those browsing the stream could have had more context for the other intriguing photos they found.

There’s a Google Maps chart of NTHP sites on the main site, but it’s not integrated with the Flickr stream. The NTHP is starting to use these tools to create an intriguing presentation of their projects and mission, but there’s another step to be taken. The next step would be tying those tools together to create a more seamless experience which can be entered from any of the components.

Posted by pjm at 7:43 PM | Comments (0)

Plug

If you’re reading this, you should seriously consider reading the blog of my former colleague, Alisa Bowman. The target audience is married people, or people who think they might eventually be married, but if you’re not one of those you should consider it anyway, just so you can say you were reading it before it became a book.

(Because it wouldn’t be the first blog of a contemporary of mine which became a book… or a movie.)

Posted by pjm at 7:41 PM | Comments (1)

Just a host

I don’t know when I crossed the line to where bug-fixing began to be the sort of thing I want to tell stories about. In the last week I’ve had several incidents where code has started to have its own stories.

Like the time I was sitting in a conference room where another developer was discussing a related-but-not-mine component of the larger project. By the time he got around to the bug in my project, which stemmed from code checked in by the team on the other end of the call… I had a fix on my screen.

Today, on the other hand. We have VM images which are supposed to be a clone of the production environment, made to work with VMWare. Naturally, I have to work around two or three problems to get this working (the VM can’t see the code repository, for example, so I can’t check out recent code) but I hack around it until it’s working.

But shouldn’t I test the fix before I check it in? In multiple browsers?

So this was how I found myself firing up Windows XP in Parallels Desktop, so I could use one virtual machine to test an application running in another virtual machine. I felt a little bit like I was juggling chainsaws.

Posted by pjm at 8:27 PM | Comments (0)

Slow down

My running log advises me that if I want to lose weight, I should eat more slowly. The idea is that if I give my body a chance to register that it’s full, I would stop eating sooner.

Their suggestion to slow my pace down is to “converse more at the table.” Anyone who’s eaten with me knows this is not an issue, but Iz hasn’t been holding up his end of the conversations recently.

My alternate strategy: I’ve been eating as many meals as possible with chopsticks. I’m actually developing chopstick calluses.

Posted by pjm at 8:23 PM | Comments (0)

My work here is done

Speaking of finding money… this morning on the run I found an entire wallet.

Cash in the billfold, cards in the pockets, the works. (It was a pretty stuffed wallet. Not the wallet of a neat freak.) I didn’t count the cash but there were plenty of bills. My Friday morning running group, who already give me grief for my well-established magpie tendencies, ran right by; naturally I noticed it and picked it up.

We found the driver’s license and checked the address, in case it was someone nearby and we could drop it in the mailbox or something. No dice: Acton, and a 1989 birth date. Most likely a student.

I made a detour from the usual warm-up to drop it off at the police station. Their door was locked, and I had to call in to the dispatchers to be let in. An officer met me at the front counter and I pushed the wallet through the little ticket-office gap in the window.

Someone suggested later that I should have counted the cash, or at least gotten a receipt when I handed it over. Maybe I’m too naïve for a big town like Amherst. But nobody took my name, and I didn’t take any cash (though I could have) so I am not worried about my karma.

Posted by pjm at 7:12 PM | Comments (0)

Less beneficial thought patterns learned in grad school

“Hey, I need to invoice for my Boston Marathon work. I should start by reinstalling TeX!”

Posted by pjm at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)

The tight credit market trickles down

Today’s mail included a notice from one of my credit card issuers, telling me they have “adjusted” my credit limit based on “the way [I] have historically used [my] account”. (All previous noticed about my credit limit were explicit about how they had “raised” my limit, so I am forced to conclude that “adjusted” is bank double-speak for “lowered.”)

The new credit limit, approximately half the previous limit (sound familiar? Same lender) is still 15 to 20 times more than I generally use the card for in a given month. I can still buy a car with the credit card, just not as ridiculous a car as before. Put another way, this new credit limit is more appropriate than the last one… so what business did they have offering me the previous amount of credit?

As another victim put it,

It’s kind of emotionally painful to be told that yesterday you were considered dependable to pay back up to X$, but today you’re only good for 0.5X$, for no reason. …

But what pisses me off the most is that a few months ago, when the bank itself was having a spot of financial trouble, and needed a loan to hold them over, I sent them $146.92. I did, and so did every other living U.S. citizen. That was money I really could’ve used for something else. They haven’t paid me back for that yet, and I kind of doubt they ever will. So they really have a lot of nerve, after taking my helping hand, to write me a letter saying they’re cutting my credit.

Posted by pjm at 1:16 PM | Comments (0)