Author Archives: Pat

Things that puzzle me

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This has been happening with increasing frequency:

  1. Celebrity reveals something personal.
  2. I read it, I shrug. Why are you telling me?
  3. The internet erupts with opinions, for and against.
  4. People write angry and/or condescending essays, claiming to know what I think about the celebrity and explaining why I’m stupid / homophobic / sexist / just plain evil to think that way.
  5. The flamewar roils on for weeks, until the next celebrity announcement.

Interest in strangers’ personal lives is unhealthy, and no good will come of it.

Summer

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When does summer begin? It depends:

  • For University of Illinois students, summer begins today.
  • Most people think summer begins on Memorial Day weekend.
  • For Jake & Sam, summer doesn’t begin until the end of the month.
  • Astronomers think summer begins at the moment of the solstice, June 21st at 5:04am (GMT).

I don’t worry too much about seasons any more; instead, I divide the year into four parts:

  • Shoveling
  • Bagging yard waste (#1)
  • Mowing
  • Bagging yard waste (#2)

Docked

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Yesterday’s project was to back up, reset & restore the iPhone: this, according to AT&T, is the final step in unlocking the iPhone. Alas, there were…distractions.

When I docked the iPhone (for the first time since January), iPhoto popped up with an offer to upload the 159 new pictures – new vs. last January, that is – that it found.

Sure, go ahead, thought I.

Alas, the upload process did not include any of the titles, descriptions, tags, etc., etc., that I had set in iPhoto on the iPhone. iPhoto for iOS is off in its own little world, and will not give up any of the data entrusted to it.

There’s a word for that sort of behavior, but it isn’t a very nice word. I imagine I won’t be using iPhoto on the iPhone any more.

iTunes also offered to download available updates for sixty-three apps. Never mind that most of those are tried-once/didn’t-like, or apps I bought for the iPad & don’t want on the iPhone; never mind also that the iPhone has been happily downloading its own updates for the last six months; the bandwidth gods must have their offering.

With resignation bordering on despair, I clicked the Download all updates button, and watched the blue progress bars crawl slowly across the screen.

(It turns out Jake had his own download running, so my completely-pointless download included a bonus starved-for-bandwidth waste of time.)

After a while, I gave up & went out to watch television with Jennifer. I never did get the iPhone backed up. Maybe tonight….

Meanwhile, in Cambridge…

The BBC says:

An all-male Cambridge University drinking society has cancelled its annual female-only jelly wrestling contest after it was labelled sexist.

Reading that, I wondered: Why is this sexist?

  • Is it because men were not allowed to participate? (Probably not. I think the point of the protest was that nobody should be allowed to participate.)
  • Is it because women were doing something silly & undignified? (If that constitutes sexism, we’re all in big trouble.)
  • Is it because the silly & undignified acts were done largely for the entertainment of men? (If so, what does that say about ‘male revue’ acts like Thunder From Down Under?)

Blink

A few weeks ago, the Wii’s message light started blinking. I wonder what that’s for, thought I. A message from Cousin Ryan? An available software update?

The Wii has been sadly neglected, ever since the Xbox arrived. All those games, all those controllers & their goofy accessories – they sit in baskets near the television, gathering dust.

So the Wii’s efforts to gain our attention met with little success, until last Sunday evening. The kids were in bed, Jennifer was elsewhere in the house; it was time to solve the mystery of the pulsating blue glow.

It turned out to be nothing exciting, nor even very interesting: just an advertisement for the Wii U. Nintendo must be desperate to boost sales, if they’re nagging Wii users.

Once the Wii home screen came up, I noticed that somebody had left a Call of Duty: Black Ops disc in the drive. (I hate it when the kids do that. Alas, my attempts at teaching proper CD handling to the next generation have failed.) After ejecting the CD & returning it to its case, I brought up the Wii calendar thingy, to see when Blacks Ops had last been played.

The answer: somebody played Black Ops for five hours on February 3rd. And that’s the only time all year anyone has used the Wii.

Birthday party, etc.

Cousin Ryan’s birthday is coming up – his tenth, it is to boggle – and so is Mother’s Day; so we went to Normal for a joint party.

There was lots of food, including not one but two hash-brown casseroles. (Oops.) After lunch, there was cake & ice cream, and presents for Ryan & Grandma. (We didn’t bring any Mother’s Day presents for Jennifer; I hope she wasn’t too disappointed.)

The cousins played badminton in the back yard. Funny how badminton is the sport of the year; the kids are playing it everywhere they go.

The weather cooperated, mostly: it was warm, but cloudy and also very windy. (On the way home, I saw semis going down the highway at a most alarming angle.) The rain stayed away, except when it forced cancellation of Jennifer & Jake’s lawn-mowing plans.

I’m sure they were very disappointed.

Nullification

Suppose you have a MySQL table, that contains a field like this:

start_time datetime default NULL

As it turns out, the start_time field is never null: it always contains a value. Every record in the table has a value, and new records are never created without one. So, in the interest of good data hygiene, you do this:

alter table …
modify start_time datetime not null default ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′;

This should be a very fast operation: the data type isn’t changing, the current values are all valid under the new schema. MySQL could just update the schema, and leave the data alone.

Alas, it does not. It insists on making a copy of the entire table. If the table is large – say, because it contains thirteen years of data – this can take a rather long time.

Annoyance, I have it now.

Passwords

I’ve been thinking about passwords.

Long ago, passwords were short & simple, usually a single all-lowercase word: cabbage, turkey. Those turned out to be easily guessed, since most people chose from a fairly small set of words.

Then everybody started mangling their passwords, replacing letters with vaguely-similar digits: ca66ag3, turk3y, that sort of thing. They were harder to guess, but also harder to remember.

The bad guys responded with rainbow tables: tables of pre-computed password hashes. They’re huge – 8GB or more – but disk space is cheap.

The latest (proposed) solution is to string together several words: supposedly, an easy-to-remember password like “correct horse battery staple” has 44 bits of entropy, and at 1,000 guesses/second would take 550 years to crack.

A few thoughts:

Some web sites won’t accept a twenty-five-character password, or one that’s all lowercase letters.

There are already storage systems large enough to hold a 44-bit rainbow table. They’re insanely expensive, for now; but soon enough they’ll cost $100 at Best Buy. What then?

As passwords get larger, is there a risk of hash collisions – two passwords with the same hash? (I know very little about cryptography. Maybe there is no risk.)

Passwords are obsolete. (No, I’m not the first person to think that. Thanks for asking!) I hope clever people are working on a replacement.

Spring is here

Today we gave the mower its first push around the yard of the new year.

It was a cooperative effort. Jennifer went to Sears for mower supplies: blade, spark plug, air filter. Jake & I installed everything, scraped off last year’s grass clippings, and changed the oil. (Oil? Jennifer didn’t buy any. We had some left over from last year, and used that.) And then we all mowed.

(Sam didn’t. He’s still too young for that.)

The yard – the front yard, anyway – is a bit tufty & lumpy. I hope it fills in soon (mostly because if it doesn’t, I have no idea how to fix it).

Insurance

A few months ago, Jennifer had an eye exam & new spectacles, from our regular optometrist. We’ve been going there for years, they’re…okay. (Jennifer likes them. I’m not so sure.)

In previous years, an eye exam and new spectacles would cost $50: a pretty good deal. But this year, we got a letter: Provider out of network. Claim denied.

What?

Jennifer called the insurance company, whose customer service person said: Provider out of network. Claim denied.

The provider in question was in network, last year. What happened? Some warning of their change in status would have been appreciated, but I wasn’t really surprised to have had none. (I’m cynical about insurance companies. I expect to be treated shabbily by them. They seldom disappoint me in this.)

Weeks passed. We received an invoice from the optometrist: Claim denied. You owe $385. Pay up, deadbeat.

I procrastinated a bit, but finally put a check in the mail. (What else could we do? Argue with the insurance company? That trick never works.)

Imagine my surprise, then, to receive in today’s mail a second Explanation of Benefits letter from the insurance company: Jennifer’s eye exam is covered, and instead of $385, we owe…$50. There’s no hint of who screwed up what, the first time around; now, suddenly, all is well again.

Is it worth the effort of trying to find out why? Probably not. (I am too cynical to expect an insurance company to own up to its mistakes.) But if the optometrist doesn’t refund $335 very soon, they’ll be hearing from me.