For example, my wife still has my iPhone 8 Plus I’d purchased in early 2018, and it just got a critical bug fix update even though it’s still running 16.7.7 while my up-to-date iPhone 11 Pro Max, purchased in September 2019, is running the latest 17.4.1, although not necessarily with the complete suite of features that you might find on an iPhone 15 whatever.

Both of us have decided that unless the battery completely dies in either phone that we will not update, especially for any “compelling” feature such as AI. I certainly don’t consider AI in anything “compelling,” more repulsive than anything else. I go out of my way to disable anything that has the whiff of AI taint on it.

For example I’ve managed to disable Siri on everything I own, because I get so sick and tired of having Siri pop up when I say something that the microphones on either my Apple Watch or my iPhone hears, which sends Siri off on a tangent to which I yell “Shut the fuck up!”, only to hear Siri tell me what a bad person I am (seriously). Again, fuck you Siri. And because it always disturbs me to hear Siri speak out of my Watch, I went into the app and completely turned off Siri, removing everything that had been gathered and was siting on Apple’s servers, which was another “feature” that really bugged me.

After that long drawn out rant, let me now show you what also really bugs me. First, mobile Safari the way it looked after the last few iOS updates.

This is my main Safari page. I use folders for a bit of organization to keep bookmarks on the main page to a reasonable minimum. You’ll note the four folders are Cooking, Photo, Tech and Following. Note they are blank. They aren’t supposed to be this way, and haven’t been blank since the day this feature landed in mobile Safari. Now let me show you have it should look.

What you see now is how it’s supposed to look. The empty folders now display little thumbnails of the links inside those folders. If there are more than nine links, then it shows just the first nine, which is just fine. But they aren’t blank. Some might say this isn’t such a big deal, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things it might not be. But I never had this issue, and when this bug cropped up several releases back it was jarring to see it and made me wonder what else was wrong that I couldn’t see.

What makes this even more problematic for me is that I didn’t reboot my iPhone to just clear up Safari, but to clear up my Apple Watch Series 7’s inability to install watchOS 10.4. It hung with the iPhone Watch app saying it was preparing to install the update, and it wouldn’t finish. After some number of days I rebooted first the iPhone, and that didn’t fix it. Then I rebooted the Apple Watch before whatever was wrong got cleared and my Apple Watch finally finished the update.

That’s not the only time I’ve had to reboot my iPhone to fix an issue. I’ve had to reboot it twice so far this year because I got started to get call failures both incoming and outgoing. Then several more times I couldn’t get my iPhone to properly sync with my Acura MDX and Apple Carplay. All of this has become noticable since these last few iOS 17 updates.

Do I think Apple is trying to push me to getting an iPhone update (or even an Apple Watch update)? No. Frankly I think this is just sloppy Apple software development pushing out buggy software to their products.

I’ve never questioned Apple’s quality assurance until the last 12 months. My complete trust in Apple software QA (and now, it would seem, hardware QA) has grown eroded a bit. I’m not about to leap over to Android, not because I’m “trapped” by Apple in spite what the Department of Justice might say, but because I’ve dealt with Android vendors and they are all, without exception, shit. I’ll stick with Apple not because they’re such as shining beacon in the night but because they’re the least of all crappy devices, and I’m looking straight and hard at Samsung when I say that.

I’ll stick with Apple for the foreseeable future, but if any manufacturer does manage to come along doing a better job, I will probably make the transition from Apple to this new mythically better vendor.

When people think of software language creators, they think of (if they even bother) Dennis Ritchie for C back in the 1960s, or Bjarne Stroustrup for C++ in the 1980s. One of the most powerful language designers and creators was Niklaus Wirth. Quoting from his Wikipedia page;

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardware design and simulation system.

He was most notable to me for Pascal, which I was introduced to when I purchased a copy of Borland’s Turbo Pascal for DOS in the early 1980s. I continued to use it through Borland Pascal for Windows when Windows 3.1 was introduced because Borland Pascal had full support for Windows. I was later to move away from Borland Pascal to Borlando C++ in large part because of Borlando’s OWL (Object Windows Library) application framework. I still miss Borland C++ to this day because of the powerful IDE that came as part of the complete development package. But the industry, especially Windows and Unix development, was moving towards C and C++ development, with Java thrown into the computer language mix when Java was first introduced in 1995.

I’ve often wondered how software development might have turned out if Pascal had remained central to software development (and continued to evolve) instead of slowly fading as more of a niche language. To paraphrase a certain movie, Pascal wasn’t as clumsy or random as C++, but an elegant language for a more civilized age.

Links

• Computer science pioneer Niklaus Wirth dies aged 89 — https://www.developer-tech.com/news/2024/jan/04/computer-science-pioneer-niklaus-wirth-dies-aged-89/
• Niklaus Wirth (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth
• Free Pascal — https://www.freepascal.org/
• Borland C++ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_C%2B%2B
• Object Windows Library (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library
• Dennis Ritchie (Wikipedia) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
• Bjarne Stroustrup — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup

What a surprise this morning when I went to search with Brave ( https://search.brave.com/ ) only to get an Internal Error 500 from the Brave search engine. It appeared to briefly succeed, as I could see results flash up briefly before being presented with the error screen you see at the start of this post. According to what Google search told me about the error;

What does “HTTP 500 Internal Server Error” mean?

Error 500, also known as the Internal Server Error, is a common HTTP status code that indicates an issue on the web server’s side. When you encounter an error 500, it means that the server has encountered an unexpected condition or configuration problem that prevents it from fulfilling the request made by the browser or client.

https://www.siteground.com/kb/internal_server_error_500/

In the mean time I’m back to using Duck Duck Go.

My first Google mail message was from Google itself. Re-reading it for this post, I came across this paragraph:

As you’re using Gmail, you might also see some ads or related links. We believe that you shouldn’t have to share your inbox with large, blinking, irrelevant ads. Gmail’s small text ads are matched by computers, and designed to be relevant to the messages you’re viewing. Which means for once, you might even find ads to be interesting and useful.

As the security self-righteous like to preach, don’t say you weren’t warned. I don’t ever remember having read that, or if I reacted to it, I don’t remember what the emotion was. I just dove in and started using it. It’s now over 18 years later and I’ve got nearly 10,000 emails. I would have had more if I hadn’t curated (i.e. deleted) my messages. If you’ll recall, in Google mail’s early years you couldn’t delete any emails, only mark them as hidden. Over time Google relented and provided a way to delete unwanted of no-longer-needed emails in their account.

What’s driving me towards separate email readers such as Thunderbird is search. Google’s search results now return way too many ads, and the results, once you get through the ads, are of poor quality. My number one search engine these days is Brave.

I’ve begun my journey away from all embracing Google mail by installing and using the Flatpak version of Thunderbird. I’d like to say Thunderbird is a slam dunk solution, but I have my issues with its quirks. I’m going to touch on some of them in this post.

The top image shows a partial default look-and-feel. When Thunderbird is first started, the way it wants to list messages is in ascending date order, which means that the most current emails are at the bottom of the list. Literally every other email reader, when it first starts, lists emails in descending order, with the most current emails at the top of the list. I can easily reverse Thunderbird’s date listing order by clicking on Date column header, but why it’s in reverse is a bit odd, and because I’ve grown so used to the descending date listing that Thunderbird’s listing caught me by surprise, and a bit of confusion before I got it sorted properly.

The three-column view you see isn’t a default view. Microsoft email clients, specifically Exchange, as well as Google Mail and Proton Mail, either default on startup to three column mode, or allow it to be quickly configured to three column mode. Not so much for Thunderbird.

The default layout is for all the folders on the far left, with the email list in a top window above the view of the selected email in a bottom pane beneath. To select three column mode in Thunderbird go to the hamburger menu on the top right, click it, then click View, then click Layout, then click Vertical View. Difficult to discover, but fairly straightforward to set up. That gives you the view that I believe the majority of the world prefers. I have, in the past, used a modified vertical view where the folders are at the top, then a second view of a selected folder is beneath the folders, and then the single email view on the right. This works for constrained screen devices, but for all practical purposes its still a vertical view. I have no idea if, or how, to configure that in Thunderbird.

Once the general layout is configured, you need to configure how images within an email are displayed. By default, nothing is displayed. With Thunderbird it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. Off to the upper right of the email is a drop down menu allowing you to select what items will be displayed. In other words, you have to opt in, rather than hunt down and opt out of things you want to block, such as trackers. Most, if not all other email clients, provide a way to block trackers, small 1 pixel square “invisible” graphic elements that have a link back to some server that is activated when you open the email. There is nothing like that convenience feature in Thunderbird. Instead you get a long list of all the graphic element’s sources in a drop-down menu, and it’s up to you to enable any of them, or just say to hell with it and select the bottom entry to accept everything.

Once all the necessary Thunderbird configurations are discovered and set the client visually functions pretty much every other email client I’ve worked with.

One surprising feature of Thunderbird is its use of tabs, a feature it probably borrowed from its Firefox roots (and before that Mozilla Suite, and before that, Netscape Communicator). If you double click on any email, it’s opened up in its on tab. If you click the Settings gear on the bottom left, settings are opened in a separate tab. This is much different from other email clients, and it’s a feature you have to be aware of from the get-go. I wasn’t, and was surprised to finally pay attention to the very top and see all the open tabs. What makes the Thunderbird tab feature not so welcome for me is that it’s using Firefox’s tab buttons, detached from the underlying page it’s associated with. I totally dislike that feature in Firefox, and I totally dislike it here. Whereas I could hack Firefox to eliminate it, I’m not sure how to eliminate it from Thunderbird. If I were planning to keep Thunderbird and use it extensively, I might research a solution, but I’m not motivated to do so.

Thunderbird isn’t the kind of email client I want to keep on my machine. The developers and users who support Thunderbird also support how it looks and works. Since I’m neither one of those types, and based on my decades long use of other email clients, I’m not a fan of Thunderbird. Technically I believe Thunderbird is a solid application. It’s in the details where I have issues, and those issues are important enough to me to keep using what I already use, even if I also look askance at what’s available, especially Google’s web email client.

If you’re interested in a local email client, then by all means give Thunderbird a whirl, especially the Flatpak version. It may suite you better than me. In the meantime I continue to look.

Apple sent me an invitation to participate in their latest public software betas. I was a bit surprised as I let my Apple Developer membership lapse some time ago. And I’m not one to install beta software from anyone, especially something as important as an operating system. I tried to run beta software from Apple, Microsoft, and a few Linux distributions, and every time I tried it turned out poorly to near disastrous. Running a beta OS isn’t the same as running beta application software. Application software can usually be installed in parallel with an existing release, allowing me to compare and contrast and actually send in bug reports. I’ve had it beaten into me not to run an OS beta unless it’s in a virtual machine. Even virtually it isn’t all that useful, at least not to me.

The offer is tempting, but I’ve learned the hard way to turn away from such temptation.

tl;dr — A problem I encountered building from source and then executing git, and how I solved it.

I am not afraid to download the source for a tool and to build a local copy on my Linux Mint system. I never had that fear, having learned to download and build GNU applications and tools back in the day when Unix ruled the earth. We’re talking decades ago. I’m also to the point that while I’ll run Linux Mint as my foundational operating system, I prefer to run the latest packages because those available in the Linux Mint repos are locked back in time to the Ubuntu 22.04 release cycle. Software advances quickly and 16 months is a log time. It’s even longer if you realize that Ubuntu 22.04 is based pretty heavily on Ubuntu 21.10, which makes the time differential even longer. Thus, when I want to run the latest tools I’ll first turn to flatpak or appimage versions. If that fails I’ll download the sources and build it myself.

I prefer my critical build tools to be fully up-to-date compared to what Linux Mint provides. The latest versions of those tools usually incorporate fixes and new features not available in the older distribution-provided versions. The version of git provided by Linux Mint 21.2 is 2.31.1. The latest git release version on the git website is 2.41.0. I checked to see if there was a flatpak version of git (there wasn’t) then proceeded to download the source and build it.

Git source requires you build it within the source directory itself, which I normally don’t like to do. I prefer to create a parallel build directory then configure and build within the build directory. It keeps the source directory clean and allows me to simply delete the build directory if I want to rebuild everything. Regardless, I ran configure and then make, and everything seemed to build. I installed in a non-root location (in my home folder under ~/tools/git). I set my path to point to my built version, and then set about testing it. I quickly ran into the following error message;

git: 'remote-https' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

A little bit of search showed that I was missing an installation of libcurl. So I executed the following;

sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev

Once libcurl was installed I deleted the git source directory, unpacked it again, re-configured, rebuilt and re-installed. When I used it after the second build it performed correctly. So far everything works as advertised.

Here’s a link to the source tarballs: https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/

Today was one of those days. I’ve got Wireshark installed on my Macs, and I’ve had Wireshark installed on all my Macs for years (decades, back to when it was called Etherial). Today after upgrading to macOS 13.2 I decided to do a bit of home network research and fired up the latest version of Wireshark, 4.0.3. That’s when I got the error you see below. I did a fair amount of internet research (i.e. “googling”) and finally constructed a solution that works for me. First my solution, then a partial explanation of what might be happening.

My solution consists of creating the following zsh alias:

alias wireshark='sudo /Library/Application\ Support/Wireshark/ChmodBPF/ChmodBPF && Wireshark'

When I open a shell (iTerm in my case) and type in wireshark I’ll get a prompt for my password, then Wireshark will start and execute correctly.

Why is this happening? Somehow, someway, the script ChmodBPF is not executing with proper permissions to create Wireshark pseudo devices, /dev/bp*. The script is supposed to execute every time I log in, and create many of those pseudo devices (256 on my machine) that Wireshark then uses. I don’t have a deep knowledge of Wireshark so I don’t know what Wireshark is doing with all those devices.

Because of ChmodBPF’s failure, only four pseudo devices were created, and they all had root:wheel ownership, not my username:admin. That then caused Wireshark to fail to properly work.

I discovered a lot of half-assed solutions, such as changing permissions directly on the pseudo devices. Running the script as sudo came from reading a thread on Wireshark’s GitLab issue wiki: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues/18734 . It should be pointed out that if you reboot your Mac that the devices are wiped out, and you’re going to have to run the script as sudo again, at least once. I just combined everything into a terminal alias. I live in the terminal so it doesn’t bother me.

Once again another paper has been published about the extinction of humanity at the “hands” of artificial intelligence. This was surfaced to my attention in an article written on the Vice website ( https://www.vice.com/en/article/93aqep/google-deepmind-researcher-co-authors-paper-saying-ai-will-eliminate-humanity ). Follow the link in that article to the paper that has spawned this latest fear mongering and you’ll come across a paper that’s quite dense to read ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aaai.12064 ). I’m certainly no AI “expert”, and I strongly suspect neither is the Vice article’s author. But I do believe there is a fundamental flaw with the argument about AI causing our demise. That flaw is the idea our human-written software, which underpins all of AI, is somehow flawless. It’s certainly not.

All software up to this point is riddled with innumerable and undiscovered defects. I know this to be true in my heart because of my experiences as a both a developer and an end-user since I was introduced to computers and programming as a highschool junior in 1971. The computer at that time was an IBM 360 mainframe, and the language was IBM’s implementation of APL. The compiler wasn’t perfect, and I learned how easy it was to write software that had bugs. Since that time I’ve written assembly software for innumerable processors as well as using high level languages, and in turn using operating systems and applications that ran within those operating systems.

Based on my experiences software flaws come in two broad categories; structural and algorithmic.

Structural flaws are defects such as divide by zero, use after free (a memory area or object), buffer overflow, bad conditional logic, etc. These are the types of defects that malware authors look for in existing code, as abuse of these defects usually leads to privilege escalation and then complete control of the application or operating system it appears in to the detriment of the user(s) of said software. Sometimes a structural defect is a free (i.e. no work involved) gift to malware authors. An example of that kind of gift was Apple’s iOS 7 SSL/TLS bug back in 2014. Here’s the bug before the fix:

static OSStatusSSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange(SSLContext *ctx, bool isRsa, SSLBuffer signedParams, uint8_t *signature, UInt16 signatureLen){OSStatuserr;...if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &serverRandom)) != 0)goto fail;if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)goto fail;goto fail;if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.final(&hashCtx, &hashOut)) != 0)goto fail;...fail:SSLFreeBuffer(&signedHashes);SSLFreeBuffer(&hashCtx);return err;}

The problem is the highlighted line, which has a second goto statement that will always execute, short-circuiting the logic and never performing the final test. Furthermore, if err is zero, indicating complete success, the calling code will never be the wiser. For a more complete breakdown of this error see https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html . And if I do say so myself the code has a number of code smells that would demand a rewrite all the way through. But I digress a bit…

This is an example of a coding error that introduces a hard-to-test, hard-to-detect bug buried deep within the overall millions of lines of code of an OS. What test would you write for this?

The second category is algorithmic. An algorithmic defect is where the algorithm is either implemented incorrectly, implemented incompletely, or a bit of both. There are so may examples of this defect to choose from, so I’ll just pick the latest. On Thursday, 15 September, some enterprising Twitter users discovered how to perform a “prompt injection attack” against OpenAI’s GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 ), using an automated tweet bot front end operated by Remoteli.io ( see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/twitter-pranksters-derail-gpt-3-bot-with-newly-discovered-prompt-injection-hack/ ). Needless to say, great hilarity ensued. And needless to say, the issue isn’t with the bot front end, but with the GPT-3 back end, which OpenAI has spent enormous time hyping. I should point out that OpenAI is part of Elon Musk’s collection of companies, the same Musk who owns Tesla and constantly hypes Autopilot, and has been pushing Full Self Driving, or FSD, for years now. FSD isn’t there, and may never be there, at least as it’s currently designed and engineered. While I’m indeed picking on AI products that Musk is involved with because they’re currently hyped to the heavens, I’m also aware of many other so-called AI vision systems that have been shown to be easy to confuse/shut down. And on and on…

If AI does in humanity it will be because we humans allowed defective software to control critical systems such as transportation, energy, food production; in other words all the critical systems we depend on. It won’t be AI coming after us, it’ll be buggy software going haywire. And if it isn’t buggy and it’s still coming after us, then you can be sure there’s a human in the loop directing those AI demons to come after us. All AI will do is to amplify our destructive capabilities, just like all of mankind’s other technical advances through history.

Because I couldn’t update my existing Debian 10 container to Debian 11, I deleted my existing Debian 10 container. In the process I also removed all folders that showed up in the files application under Linux folders, and as to be expected all installed applications such as Visual Studio Code. It would later turn out that I could create another Debian container, which is a topic for a later post. Re-creating my first Debian 11 container allowed me to document the steps necessary to add additional software development tools to the container.

Once the container was installed I updated Debian 11 with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y to make sure the software was fully up-to-date. For those reading this post you’ll find a tremendous amount of older documentation where apt-get is used. The newer form just uses apt, and so can you, saving some typing. The older form is still aliased so copying and pasting instructions into a shell will still work, everything else being equal.

Once the update was finished I attempted to install htop (sudo apt install htop -y) and Visual Studio Code. In order to install Visual Studio Code you need to go to the Microsoft website and download the x86-64 Debian file (see https://code.visualstudio.com/download ). You’ll save the .deb file somewhere in your container’s home directory, and then install it with sudo dpkg -i code_1.66.2-1649664567_amd64.deb where you saved the file.

The problem with this is you’re going to get an error message from apt telling you that there are unmet dependencies for both packages. The error message will even tell you how to fix the problem. To meet those dependencies you’ll need to execute sudo apt --fix-broken install at the command line. I would recommend that if you want both, install both even though they’ll both fail, so that when you fix the broken install both of them will be fixed and installed. One last install is for Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code will throw a keyring error. To keep this from happening install gnome keyring: sudo apt install gnome-keyring.

While we’re installing applications, I would recommend you go ahead and install the utility tree as it’s not part of the base install. Read the man page for tree or check this online example: https://www.computerhope.com/unix/tree.htm .

Once all that is installed, you need to decide what languages you’ll develop for. Debian 11 comes with a reasonably current version of Python, version 3.9.4. So if all you want to do is Python development you can stop there. If you want to develop for another language you can install those as well. For example, I wanted to do Rust development, so I installed Rust in the container following the Rust installation instructions here: https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started . To support Rust development you’ll also need to install gcc because Rust uses the local environment’s linker cc, which is a part of gcc: sudo apt install gcc. If you do install gcc you get the side benefit of being able to develop in C. If you want to develop in C++ then you’ll also need to install g++ (sudo apt install g++ -y) and make (sudo apt install make). The tool git is already installed, so if you want to keep your work up on GitHub for example (which I strongly advise) you can do so out-of-the-box.

With everything installed, including a small repo, the total footprint of everything is a little over 4GiB. And I set up my container with a 40GiB disk area, which is probably too much considering what you might do. Since I’m not going to be compiling a Linux kernel, that’s quite enough elbow room to do non-trival work.

Once you’ve install Visual Studio Code you can start it from the Chromebook desktop by hitting the search key on the keyboard (that’s the key on the left above shift with the magnifying glass glyph). It should look something like this:

The icon for Visual Studio Code in my example showed up in the upper left corner. Once you start it by clicking on it, it will show up on your shelf. You can then double-finger click on it to pin it to your shelf for even easier access. My shelf runs vertically on the far left.

I’ve already gone to the trouble to install VS Code plugins for Python and Rust. I won’t go into that because there’s lots of detailed online help if you need that. Suffice to say that the instructions work, even on a Chromebook. In my example I’m beginning to do some Rust development.

Rust will compile and execute either at the command line or within VS Code. I’m sure there are limitations to very large projects, but for quite a bit of work there is more than enough resources to work on this Chromebook.

Why would I push a Chromebook instead of a MacBook or Windows notebook? Cost. The best bang-for-the-buck development environment believe it or not is going to be a Chromebook. A Windows notebook might reach down to what a Chromebook costs, but my reason for avoiding Windows is how Microsoft is trying to turn Windows users into another revanue source with intrusive ads and the limitations against third party applications that is creaping deeper into the OS, especially Windows 11. If you’re an independent developer a Chromebook is the best all-around compromise, especially in these times of high costs for basics and increasing inflation. You can still spend upwards of $400 on a Chromebook such as this Lenovo, but there are all sorts of interesting offers at half that amount, and who knows what you can find used.

A Chromebook like this is even a better deal than say a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GiB or 8GiB, because you still need a keyboard, mouse and screen. And I do know all about the Raspberry Pi 400. But you can’t fold up a Raspberry Pi 400 or your Raspberry Pi rig and carry it out with you. Portability isn’t the Raspberry Pi’s forte.

I followed the basic directions for updating my installation of Pop!_OS from 21.10 to 22.04. The best directions are here: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-upgrade-to-pop-os-22-04-lts . It went smoothly, if a bit long. The time it took was more than likely due to the type of processor on my work system, which is an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2500U with built-in Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx. More than serviceable, but not some ground-pounding gaming rig. It runs with a 1 TB Western Digital WDS100T2B0B-00YS70 (415020WD) SATA M.2 SSD; fast enough, but not NVMe fast. This is a budget friendly rig, but a good solid workhorse none-the-less.

The tools I care about are all there. Stock Python is now at version 3.10.4, which means I can stop building my own for a while. GCC is at version 11.2, CLANG is at version 14, which means I can write and compile all of C++17 and most of C++20. People like to trash C++, but if you’re writing C++ source like you’re Microsoft in 1999, then you should be trashed. We’re now a good 20 years away from that historically horrid period. Quite a lot has been learned and fixed along the way. All the other tools I use are contemporary releases as well. A good solid workhorse is now even better.

The only peculiarity with the update is with Gnome Screenshot. It disappeared during the update. I had to reinstall it in order to grab the screenshot in Figure 1. It’s version 41, which makes me wonder if part of the update was to remove all old Gnome tools (i.e. version 41). In any event it works just fine after I recovered it.

I was wondering before I performed the update if I should use the opportunity to switch to Ubuntu 22.04. After all Ubuntu is upstream and from which Pop!_OS is derived. But Pop!_OS 22.04 came out quickly enough, so I upgraded what I had and didn’t make that drastic a change. And I’m glad I did. First, Pop!_OS 22.04 is running with a more recent Linux kernel, version 5.16.19 (Ubuntu is running 5.15). And the promise has been made that System76 will move to kernel version 5.17 in the months to come. I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this system and the older version of Linux, and haven’t had a single issue. Unlike Windows, nothing pops up to tell me I have a shit system that won’t be allowed to run the next major OS release, or bugs me about not running some sanctioned version of a browser or other tool. A Linux distribution is the best OS a retiree could ever run on their computer, except for perhaps macOS. But with macOS we’re still talking Unix. There is no way in hell I will ever run Windows again unless the computer is handed to me with Windows already installed, and I will use that computer as little as possible. If it’s hardware I own, it will always run something other than Windows.

Update

I have Fedora 35 in a Parallels VM on my MBP. I checked, and it’s already running Linux kernel version 5.17. I also checked some of the tools; Python 3.10.4 is installed as is GCC 11.2.1. Interestingly CLANG is at version 13. And I’m also waiting for Fedora 36 to drop, but it still hasn’t been released. Fedora 36 had two drop dates, 19 April and 26 April. It looks like both dates have been missed, for reasons I have yet to read about. Fedora was another distribution I’d strongly considered, but veered away from due to various rough releases I’ve had to deal with in the past. Ubuntu and Pop!_OS may not be bleeding edge, but they’re reliable and contemporary enough.

Arduino IDE 2 ( https://www.arduino.cc/en/software ) is a re-write of Arduino IDE 1 using the Theia Platform ( https://theia-ide.org/ ). The usage of Theia brings the Arduino IDE 2 interface up to date with its contemporaries, such as Visual Studio Code. While the main interface is great to work with, it’s some of the subfunctions that are questionable, such as Preferences | Additional Boards Manager URLS.

The current release of Arduino IDE 2 is at release candidate 5. It’s this release with which I have a problem. When I try to add new URLs to point at board support repos, the text box into which those URLs can be edited is a very narrow line that will not expand. I need this feature to work in order to try and use the Arduino IDE 2 to help write software for the latest ESP32 boards, such as the ESP32-S3 and ESP32-C3. This is a problem since RC2 was released, and has been a problem with each release candidate since.

It wasn’t a problem with the beta releases. This is how the dialog should look, using the last beta in the series, beta 12. As you can see the text box is open, and I have at least three separate URLs in the text box.

Another issue that has been in all the releases I’ve used, both beta and release candidate, is the placement of the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons. On the Preferences dialog it’s one way, while on the Additional Boards Manager URLs dialog it’s the opposite. I don’t care what order you choose, but the order should be consistent. It’s not a bug like the dialog text box, but it is just downright sloppy.

I have tried to report this to the developers, but it appears my reporting isn’t getting through. I hope I’m wrong and that this issue is fixed before the final release.

Background: My wife and I, together, have been State Farm customers since 1985. That’s 36 years. My wife had been a State Farm customer going back to her college years when she needed car and apartment insurance. When we married we just combined everything under State Farm because it was the better deal at the time.

Through those decades I’ve gotten four tickets, the last one back in 2009 (and which I documented here: https://flic.kr/p/6tu5Ek ). With the purchase of our latest vehicle, a 2020 Acura MDX, I wanted to really baby the vehicle, driving as carefully and infrequently as possible. After a little over six months driving, that seems to have worked out fine as far as Acura is concerned, because we only have 4,800 miles on it, and when I took it in last Friday for its six month checkup, everything on that vehicle was still green, meaning very good to excellent. After having turned all my other vehicles into daily drivers, I wanted to really take care of the MDX. Which is why I thought it was such a good idea to sign up to Drive Safe & Save.

And for a while, it was. I was getting scores on the app all the way up to 100%. If I got dinged it was usually for speeding, such as traveling 40mph in the short road segment within Universal Studio before turning onto I-4, because Universal had marked it as 30mph. Most of the time I didn’t cross over.

But then a funny thing happened to the numbers starting in February. I started getting dinged for actions I’d never seen before, specifically turning and accelerating from a stop at traffic lights or going down the on ramp onto the expressways. Turns on roads within my neighborhood suddenly turned into these “dangerous” encounters, where if you were to interpret the raw presentation in the app indicated I was some wild and reckless driver. Except I hadn’t changed, but something else within the app or the app’s backend processing. I don’t know where, but the change was noticeable, with my overally score starting to trend down. I don’t mind being called out on something truly egregious, like excessive speeding (which I wasn’t), but turns and moving away too quickly when the light turns green? Give me a break.

Here’s an example of the last trip I made with this app active, and the final trip that made me remove it.

Note I’ve been dinged with one “bad” turn and two “bad” accelerations. Let’s examine the turn first, because that one is outrageous.

The right turn from Conroy onto Turkey Lake looks insane. If you believe the app I made a hard right turn into the oncoming traffic. In reality, the turn off of Conroy and onto Turkey Lake is a big intersection, and there’s a gentle curving turn lane which is shown on the map, and that’s what I always take (along with everybody else). Instead the trace shows a snap of my first traveling east, then immediately south. And in the wrong lane into heavy oncoming traffic. If I’d done that I wouldn’t be here right now writing this blog entry, I can assure you.

The other detail of this is just as bad.

Those little rockets indicate I was “rocketing away” from my stop. I don’t know how a regular acceleration from a full stop is supposed to be conducted, but here in Florida you pay attention to when you stop, and then move away reasonably quickly depending on how soon the driver in front of you moves, or if you’re first, how quickly you move. You linger at all and you get honked at almost immediately after the light turns green. This section next to the Mall at Millenia is full of stop lights. And lots of traffic. I have to move through this to get to Costco. And back again on the way home. And the reason you don’t see the trip back home is because there were zero events to show.

What This All Means

• I’m in a unique position to have a pretty good idea how all of this is working together. My 50 years of software development, going back to when I was a junior in high school in 1971, give me a unique perspective and an instinctive feel as to how software should be working. And my “feels” tells me that based on my recollection of the travel I took compared to how it’s being judged, shows that there’s some serious measurements and/or machine judgement flaws (i.e. “bugs”). And it’s gotten worse over time.
• There is no way to appeal any of this. The only path to appeal anything is a one-eight-hundred number to appeal speeding, but speeding isn’t my problem here, and hasn’t been for some time. It’s turns, starts, and on occasion, stops. There’s no way to provide feedback to help correct the interpretation of whatever it is the Start Farm puck is measuring.
• I can’t speak for others, but if you keep seeing this often enough you grow paranoid, and driving becomes not a pleasure but yet another task to be endured. I’m retired, and I retired to get away from commuting into work every day. That was a task to be endured, followed by working at the facility with its hard-to-deal with rules. I worked at what is known in Orlando as the IDE, which is controlled by PEO STRI. The IDE is the most developer hostile environment I ever worked at, and was another reason for me to retire and never go back.
• Because I came to distrust the app so much, I began to distrust State Farm as well. In other words my dissatisfaction with the product was negatively coloring my satisfaction with the company. It was more than once that I thought perhaps I should just chuck the entire State Farm package and go find insurance elsewhere. There’s no guarantee I’ll always stay with State Farm, but I need to make that decision rationally, not irrationally because of my growing anger with one of their products, “Drive Safe & Save.”
• Considering the paranoia and anger this product generated in me, it wasn’t worth the extra $20 to $30/month I was saving on car insurance. I’ll spend that money to get back my peace of mind and enjoyment of driving.

Words can’t begin to describe what a relief it was to ditch all of that, and how much I immediately began to enjoy driving again. Products like this just aren’t worth it.

I don’t know how blunter to make the case, but blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. Using it to make voting software more secure is a joke. A very bad joke. If you won’t take my word for it, try this formal paper on for size.

“Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting” — https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

The impetus for this came from an email letter called “Crypto-Gram” published by Bruce Schneier. I strongly recommend you sign up for it here: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/

The following article was originally written by Jesse Frederik.

In front of a sea of coders sitting on folding chairs, their laptops on folding tables, a man appears on a purpley-blue lit stage.

“Seven hundred blockchaingers,” the man shouts at his audience. He points at each programmer in the room. “Machine-to-machine learning … ” And then, at the top of his voice: “Energy transition! Health! Public safety and security! Future of pensions!”

We are at the Blockchaingers Hackathon 2018 in Groningen, the Netherlands. And something really, really big is happening here, according to the speakers. Earlier on, a film trailer voice asked those present if they could imagine that right here, right now, in this room, they were about to find solutions that would change “a billion lives”. A planet spontaneously combusted in the accompanying video.

And then the Dutch state secretary for the Interior, Raymond Knops arrived, decked out in tech couture: a black hoodie. He’s here as a “super accelerator” (whatever that means). “Everyone senses that blockchain is going to change government drastically,” the state secretary said.

I’ve been hearing a lot about blockchain in the last few years. I mean, who hasn’t? It’s everywhere.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought: but what is it then, for God’s sake, this whole blockchain thing? And what’s so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve?

That’s why I wrote this article. I can tell you upfront, it’s a bizarre journey to nowhere. I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution.

‘Agents of change’ in a small Dutch town

They knew nothing about the blockchain yet in Zuidhorn, a town with just under 8,000 people in the north-east of the Netherlands.

“What we did know is that it’s coming for us and that it’s disruptive,” a civil servant from the town told a Dutch weekly news magazine. “We could sit back and wait, or choose to move forwards.”

In Zuidhorn they decided to move forwards. A municipal poverty aid package for children would “be put on the blockchain”. Maarten Velthuijs, a student and blockchain enthusiast, was given an internship with the municipality.

His first job was to explain what blockchain is. When I asked him, he said it is “a kind of system that can’t be stopped”, that it’s “actually a force of nature”, or rather, “a decentralised consensus algorithm”. OK, it’s hard to explain, he conceded eventually. “I said to Zuidhorn: ‘I’ll just build you an app, then you’ll understand’.”

So he did.

The children’s aid package gives families living in poverty the right to a bicycle, trips to the theatre and the cinema, and so on. In the past, that was a nightmare of bureaucracy, receipts and documentation. But thanks to Velthuijs’s app it became simple: you scan your code in the shop, you get your bike, and the shopkeeper gets their money.

Suddenly, the tiny town was proclaimed “one of the international forerunners in blockchain technology”. There was national media attention and even awards: they won a prize for pioneers in municipal work and received nominations for an IT project award and a civil service award.

Local administrators became more and more enthusiastic. Velthuijs and his team of “students” were the ones who shaped this new world. But that term didn’t show enough respect. In Zuidhorn some people already preferred to call them “agents of change”.

How does it work?

OK, OK, agents of change, revolution, nothing can stay the same. But what is blockchain?

At its core, blockchain is a glorified spreadsheet (think: Excel with one table). In other words, a new way to store data. In traditional databases there’s usually one person who’s in charge, who decides who can access and input data, who can edit and remove it. That’s different in a blockchain. Nobody’s in charge, and you can’t change or delete anything, only view and input data.

The first, best-known – and practically only – use of blockchain technology is bitcoin, the digital currency that allows you to transfer money from A to B without the involvement of a bank.

How does this work? Imagine that money needs to be transferred from Jesse to James. Banks know how to do this. I ask the bank to send money to James. The bank carries out the necessary checks – Is there enough money in the account? Does the account number exist? – and taps into its own database: send money from Jesse to James.

This is slightly trickier with bitcoin. You announce the payment request in a kind of giant chat: one bitcoin from Jesse to James! Then there are users (so-called miners) who collect various transactions in little blocks.

In order to add these blocks of transactions to the public blockchain ledger, the miners have to crack a complicated puzzle (actually, they have to guess a very large number from a very, very long list of numbers). Solving that puzzle takes about 10 minutes – and if it’s solved more quickly, for instance because people use more hardware to solve the puzzle, it automatically becomes more difficult.

Once it’s been solved, the miners add the transactions to the latest version of the blockchain ledger, in the version they have saved locally. They post an announcement in the chat: we solved it, see! Everyone can verify that the solution is correct, and everyone updates their own blockchain ledger. Voila! Transaction complete. As a reward for their work, the miners receive a handful of bitcoin.

What’s with the puzzle?

Why is there a puzzle? If everyone behaved honourably, you wouldn’t need it. But imagine someone wanted to spend the same money twice. I tell both James and John: I’m giving you this bitcoin. Someone needs to check if that’s possible. And miners do the work that a bank usually does: they decide which transactions can be carried out.

Of course, a miner could try to scam the system by being in cahoots with me. But other people can see straight away if I spend the same money twice, and they can refuse to update the blockchain. So a malicious miner who’s done his best to solve the puzzle gets nothing. Because it’s so hard to guess the number, it pays to stick to the rules.

This is pretty inefficient. And it would be a lot less complicated if you trusted someone to manage your data (a bank, for instance). But that’s not what Satoshi Nakamoto did, which is what the inventor of bitcoin calls himself. He thought banks were bad news. They can make money disappear from your account. So he invented bitcoin.

And bitcoin works, it exists, and according to the latest count, there are nearly 1,855 other bitcoin-like currencies out there.

And yet, bitcoin isn’t an unqualified success. There are very few shops that accept the digital currency – and rightly so. It’s very slow (sometimes a transaction takes nine minutes, sometimes nine days!), a lot of hassle (try it for yourself – cutting open hard plastic packaging with scissors is more user friendly), and very unstable (its price rose to €17,000 euros; dropped to €3,000; rose again to now €10,000).

Not only that, but the decentralised utopia that Nakamoto dreamed about, namely avoiding trusted third parties, is still far out of reach. Ironically, there are now three mining pools – a type of company that builds rooms full of servers in Alaska and other locations way up above the Arctic circle – which are responsible for more than half of all the new bitcoin (and also for checking payment requests).

For the time being, bitcoin has been especially successful for speculation. Someone who happened to buy 20 or 20 euros’ worth of the cryptocurrency in its early days now has enough money for several round-the-world trips.

Which brings us to the blockchain. Because impenetrable technology that brings sudden wealth is a tried and tested formula for hype. Councillors, managers and consultants read about a mysterious currency in the papers that turns people into millionaires. We need to get in on that, they think. But you can’t do much with bitcoin. But blockchain, on the other hand: it’s the technology behind bitcoin, which makes it cool.

Blockchain generalises the bitcoin pitch: let’s not just get rid of banks, but also the land registry, voting machines, insurance companies, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, the Lung Foundation, the porn industry and government and businesses in general. They are superfluous, thanks to the blockchain. Power to the users!

A €600m industry

Meanwhile, Bloomberg estimates the worldwide blockchain industry at around $700m (over €600m). Large companies like IBM, Microsoft and Accenture have entire divisions dedicated to this revolutionary technology. In the Netherlands there are all sorts of subsidies available for blockchain innovation.

The only thing is that there’s a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed. The Honduran land registry was going to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved. The Nasdaq was also going to do something with blockchain. Not happening. The Dutch Central Bank then? Nope. Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte.

Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”

I’ll list a few of the problems. Firstly: the technology is at loggerheads with European privacy legislation, specifically the right to be forgotten. Once something is in the blockchain, it cannot be removed. For instance, hundreds of links to child abuse material and revenge porn were placed in the bitcoin blockchain by malicious users. It’s impossible to remove those.

Also, in a blockchain you aren’t anonymous, but “pseudonymous”: your identity is linked to a number, and if someone can link your name to that number, you’re screwed. Everything you got up to on that blockchain is visible to everyone.

The presumed hackers of Hillary Clinton’s email were caught, for instance, because their identity could be linked to bitcoin transactions. A number of researchers from Qatar University were able to ascertain the identities of tens of thousands of bitcoin users fairly easily through social networking sites. Other researchers showed how you can de-anonymise many more people through trackers on shopping websites.

The fact that no one is in charge and nothing can be modified also means that mistakes cannot be corrected. A bank can reverse a payment request. This is impossible for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So anything that has been stolen will stay stolen. There is a continuous stream of hackers targeting bitcoin exchanges and users, and fraudsters launching investment vehicles that are in fact pyramid schemes. According to estimates, nearly 15% of all bitcoin has been stolen at some point. And it isn’t even 10 years old yet.

Bitcoin and Ethereum use the same amount of energy as the whole of Austria

And then there’s the environmental problem. The environmental problem? Aren’t we talking about digital coins? Yes, which makes it even stranger. Solving all those complex puzzles requires a huge amount of energy. So much energy that the two biggest blockchains in the world – bitcoin and Ethereum – are now using up the same amount of electricity as the whole of Austria. Carrying out a payment with Visa requires about 0.002 kilowatt-hours; the same payment with bitcoin uses up 906 kilowatt-hours, more than half a million times as much, and enough to power a two-person household for about three months.

And the environmental problem is only going to grow. As miners put more effort into solving the puzzles (ie, building more of those dark server caves in Alaska), the puzzles will automatically become more difficult, requiring more calculation power. It’s an endless, pointless arms race in order to facilitate the same number of transactions with more and more energy.

And for what? This is actually the most important question: what problem does blockchain actually solve? OK, so with bitcoin, banks can’t just remove money from your account at their own discretion. But does this really happen? I have never heard of a bank simply taking money from someone’s account. If a bank did something like that, they would be hauled into court in no time and lose their license. Technically it’s possible; legally, it’s a death sentence.

Of course scammers are active everywhere. People lie and cheat. But the biggest problem is scams by data suppliers (for instance: someone secretly registers a hunk of horse meat as beef), not by data administrators (for instance: a bank makes money disappear).

Some people have suggested putting the Land Registry on the blockchain. That would solve all kinds of problems in countries with corrupt administrations. Take Greece, for example, where one in five buildings is not registered. Why are these buildings not registered? Because the Greeks just start building and then there’s suddenly a house that’s not in the Land Registry.

Except a blockchain can’t do anything about that. A blockchain is a database – it’s not a self-regulating system that checks all data for correctness, let alone one that calls a halt to unauthorised building works. The same rules apply for blockchain as for any database: if people put garbage into it, what comes out is also garbage.

Or as Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote: “My immutable unforgeable cryptographically secure blockchain record proving that I have 10,000 pounds of aluminium in a warehouse is not much use to a bank if I then smuggle the aluminium out of the warehouse through the back door.”

Data should reflect reality, but sometimes reality changes and the data stays the same. That’s why we have notaries, supervisors, lawyers – actually, all those boring people that blockchain thinks it can do without.

Very little blockchain under the hood

So what about that pioneering town of Zuidhorn, wasn’t blockchain successful there?

Well, not quite. I had a look at GitHub – a site where programmers post their software – and there was very little resembling blockchain under the hood of the children’s aid package app. At any rate, there was one lonely miner working away, on a server, not connected to the internet, for internal research. But what those families living in poverty and shopkeepers were using was a very simple app, using very simple code, running on very simple databases.

I called Maarten Velthuijs.

Hey, I noticed that your app doesn’t actually need blockchain at all.

Velthuijs: “That’s right.”

But isn’t it strange that you won all those awards, even though you aren’t actually using the blockchain?

Him: “Yes, it’s weird.”

So how is it possible?

Him: “I don’t know. We keep trying to tell people, but it doesn’t seem to stick. You’re calling me about it again now … ”

So where is the blockchain?

Zuidhorn is no exception. If you look carefully, you’ll see that there are all kinds of blockchain experiments that only contain a suggestion of blockchain now.

Take My Care Log, another one of those award-winning experiments, this time in maternity care. All Dutch people with a newborn baby are allocated a certain amount of maternity care. Just like the children’s aid package in Zuidhorn, this was a bureaucratic nightmare, but now there’s an app on your smartphone where you can log how much care you have received and see how much you have left.

The final report shows that My Care Log doesn’t use any of the features that make blockchain so unique. A number of third parties were identified beforehand as exclusive miners: in other words, they have the right to veto any maternity care data logged. Better for the environment and in accordance with privacy regulations, the report notes. But wasn’t that the whole point of blockchain, that you could do without these trusted third parties? So what are they doing here?

If you ask me, they’re building a completely normal, run-of-the-mill database, but extremely inefficiently. Once you’ve cut through all the jargon, the report turns out to be a boring account of database architecture. They write about a distributed ledger (that’s a shared database), about smart contracts (that’s an algorithm) and about proof of authority (that’s the right to veto whatever is entered in the database).

Merkle trees (a way of unlinking data from checks on that data – long story) are the only blockchain element to make the final cut. And that’s perfectly good technology, nothing wrong with it. The only thing is that Merkle trees have existed since 1979 and have been used for years, for instance in Git, a version-control system (which is used by pretty much every software developer in the world). They are not unique to the blockchain.

There’s a market for magic, and that market is big

I already said it earlier: this story was a bizarre journey to nowhere.

While writing, I decided to have a chat with one of our developers. There are actually real, live developers roaming around our editorial office. This developer, Tim Strijdhorst, didn’t know much about blockchain. But he did tell me something else.

“I work with code, so people see me as a magician,” he said proudly. It was always rather surprising to him – a magician? He spends half his time yelling at his screen in frustration, while he programmes strips of duct tape to repair creaky PHP script from years and years ago.

What Tim meant was that ICT is like the rest of the world – a big old mess.

And that’s something that we – outsiders, laypeople, non-tech geeks – simply refuse to accept. Councillors and managers think that problems – however large and fundamental they are – evaporate instantaneously thanks to technology they’ve heard about in a fancy PowerPoint presentation. How will it work? Who cares! Don’t try to understand it, just reap the benefits!

This is the market for magic, and that market is big. Whether it’s about blockchain, big data, cloud computing, AI or other buzzwords.

Still, this kind of magical thinking might be necessary sometimes. Take the maternity care experiment. OK, so that’s not going anywhere. But Hugo de Kaat from insurance company VGZ, which took part in the study, says that “Facet, the biggest software provider in maternity care, has been mobilised by our experiment.” They are going to make a similar app, but without all the fuss, just traditional technology.

And Maarten Velthuijs, could he ever have made that wonderful children’s aid package app without dousing it in blockchain? No, he admits. But he is anything but dogmatic about the technology. “Look, before we could fly, things also didn’t always work out either,” Velthuijs says. “Have a look on YouTube, there’s a man who just jumps off the Eiffel Tower with a home-made parachute! Yeah, he fell to his death of course. But we need those people, too.”

So if Maarten manages to make it work with blockchain – great! And if he doesn’t manage with blockchain, that’s good too. At least he will have learned something about what works and what doesn’t work. And the town has a nice app to show for it.

Maybe this is blockchain’s greatest merit: it’s an awareness campaign, albeit an expensive one. “Back-office management” isn’t an item on the agenda in board meetings, but “blockchain” and “innovation” are.

Thanks to all the hype, Maarten was able to develop his children’s aid package app, maternity care providers began talking to each other again, and many businesses and local authorities were gently made aware of their ramshackle data management.

Yes, it took a few wild, unmet promises, but the result is that administrators are now interested in the boring subjects that help make the world run a bit more efficiently – nothing spectacular, just a bit better.

The smartest thing about blockchain, Matt Levine wrote, is that the rest of the world was forced to “pay attention to those back-office technology upgrades, and to think that they might be revolutionary”.

Links from the original story. I deliberately separated these links from the story body. They are supporting information for the story.

1. https://blocksplain.com/2018/02/28/transaction-speeds/
2. https://bitcoinera.app/arewedecentralizedyet/
3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-31/blockchain-once-seen-as-a-corporate-cure-all-suffers-slowdown
4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-honduras-landrights-tech/modernizing-land-records-in-honduras-can-help-stem-violence-says-analyst-idUSKBN1AR151
5. https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/DNBulletin2018/dnb376502.jsp
6. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-services/evolution-of-blockchain-github-platform.html
7. https://www.martinhenze.de/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/mhh+18.pdf
8. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.07501.pdf
9. https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.04748
10. https://www.wsj.com/articles/buyer-beware-hundreds-of-bitcoin-wannabes-show-hallmarks-of-fraud-1526573115
11. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-18/hackers-have-walked-off-with-about-14-of-big-digital-currencies
12. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
13. https://github.com/teamforus/

On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 6:08 AM David Laight <David.Laight@aculab.com> wrote:
>
> A wide monitor is for looking at lots of files.

Not necessarily.

Excessive line breaks are BAD. They cause real and every-day problems.

They cause problems for things like “grep” both in the patterns and in the output, since grep (and a lot of other very basic unix utilities) is fundamentally line-based.

So the fact is, many of us have long long since skipped the whole “80-column terminal” model, for the same reason that we have many more lines than 25 lines visible at a time.

And honestly, I don’t want to see patches that make the kernel reading experience worse for me and likely for the vast majority of people, based on the argument that some odd people have small terminal windows.

If you or Christoph have 80 character lines, you’ll get possibly ugly wrapped output. Tough. That’s _your_ choice. Your hardware limitations shouldn’t be a pain for the rest of us.

Longer lines are fundamentally useful. My monitor is not only a lot wider than it is tall, my fonts are universally narrower than they are tall. Long lines are natural.

When I tile my terminal windows on my display, I can have 6 terminals visible at one time, and that’s because I have them three wide. And I could still fit 80% of a fourth one side-by-side.

And guess what? That’s with my default “100×50” terminal window (go to your gnome terminal settings, you’ll find that the 80×25 thing is just an initial default that you can change), not with some 80×25 one. And that’s with a font that has anti-aliasing and isn’t some pixelated mess.

And most of my terminals actually end up being dragged wider and taller than that. I checked, and my main one is 142×76 characters right now, because it turns out that wider (and taller) terminals are useful not just for source code.

Have you looked at “ps ax” output lately? Or used “top”? Or done “git diff –stat” or any number of things where it turns out that 80×25 is really really limiting, and is simply NO LONGER RELEVANT to most of us.

So no. I do not care about somebody with a 80×25 terminal window getting line wrapping.

For exactly the same reason I find it completely irrelevant if somebody says that their kernel compile takes 10 hours because they are doing kernel development on a Raspberry PI with 4GB of RAM.

People with restrictive hardware shouldn’t make it more inconvenient for people who have better resources. Yes, we’ll accommodate things to within reasonable limits. But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn’t “reasonable” any more as far as I’m concerned. People commonly used 132-column terminals even back in the 80’s, for chrissake, don’t try to make 80 columns some immovable standard.

If you choose to use a 80-column terminal, you can live with the line wrapping. It’s just that simple.

And longer lines are simply useful. Part of that is that we aren’t programming in the 80’s any more, and our source code is fundamentally wider as a result.

Yes, local iteration variables are still called ‘i’, because more context just isn’t helpful for some anonymous counter. Being concise is still a good thing, and overly verbose names are not inherently better.

But still – it’s entirely reasonable to have variable names that are 10-15 characters and it makes the code more legible. Writing things out instead of using abbreviations etc.

And yes, we do use wide tabs, because that makes indentation something you can visually see in the structure at a glance and on a whole-function basis, rather than something you have to try to visually “line up” things for or count spaces.

So we have lots of fairly fundamental issues that fairly easily make for longer lines in many circumstances.

And yes, we do line breaks at some point. But there really isn’t any reason to make that point be 80 columns any more.

Linus

I haven’t paid attention to the 80 column limit in decades, and got in trouble over it on past programs. If I have a line limit it’s around 120 characters. Any unbroken line that long is an alarm to me to go back and ask why it’s that long, and if necessary, fix it.

As for “wide tabs,” I’m not sure what that’s all about, but in my code I always substitute four spaces/tab, and never use tab characters. Four spaces helps to view code structure at a glance while allow reasonable density in any given body of code. And all of today’s editors and IDEs will provide visual aids to show block scope, so that you can see any given scope in a block. It works with curly brace languages, as well as those that don’t use curly braces (Python primarily).

If you read the README, you’ll see I grew disillusioned with Julia September 2018. Coming back nearly a year later and a lot has changed, and working with Julia is now (for me) a lot more enjoyable. I also see the potential of Julia.

First to install;

#!/usr/bin/env bashfile=`ls powershell*`[ -z "$file" ] && echo "Cannot find powershell installer" || sudo installer -pkg ${file} -target /

Then to uninstall;

#!/usr/bin/env bashsudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/powershell /usr/local/microsoft/powershell

You can name these whatever you want (I chose install-powershell.sh and uninstall-powershell.sh respectively) and remember to set their permissions respectively. Make sure the install script is in the same directory with the the Powershell dmg file, otherwise you can run the uninstall script from anywhere.

It turns out that there is, practically speaking, no way for me to do that. As much as I despise Oracle, the use of the language throughout the last 21+ years of my software engineering career (Java officially turned 20 in 2015) isn’t something I can just blithely walk away from. As I came to discover over the last 60 days, while there are a lot of very good programming languages besides Java, there are some things for which Java is the better fit, warts and all.

That’s not to say I didn’t find the other languages I looked at as less than Java. I found them all quite compelling in their own rights. The languages I did go back and look into included Python, C-Ruby, JavaScript (via node.js), the latest stable version of C++ (C++14 via gcc and clang), Google Go (up to 1.7) , and Rust (up to 1.11). Notable by its absence is Swift. I chose not to dive into Swift because it’s still only on one platform (OS X, soon to be called macOS) and because it’s still in a state of flux as it transitions to Swift 3.

All those languages I did look deeply into were quite compelling in their own rights and offered powerful solutions for different classes of problems. And while they tended to overlap some features and capabilities of Java, they could never replace Java for the types of software problems I like to work on. And please note, when I speak of the languages I also speak of the development, build, test, and deployment tools that wrap a language and help make it a powerful problem solver.

I don’t consider my two months looking elsewhere a waste of time; far from it. It was an eye-opening trek into languages I would have never taken otherwise, as well as a deeper dive into some languages I’d had considerable experience with before, such as Python and Ruby (in fact, working with Python 3.5 was almost like re-learning the language, as the last version I’d touched was 2.4). With Java I’d grown a bit stale in my thinking, which is never a good thing. Looking at other programming languages fosters opportunities to expand perspectives and offers alternative solutions to tough problems for which Java might not be the best fit. It also illustrate ways to weave these “new-ish” solutions back into new and existing Java solutions.

And finally, by taking two months away from my Java work, I discovered when I came back that tough problems I couldn’t quite solve before were suddenly solvable, some of them quite easily so. I really needed a break away from Java.

So it’s back to Java, or more precisely, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). For with the JVM I also have Scala, Groovy, Gradle, and JRuby, not just Java 8. I’m using the Actor pattern Futures and Promises and the Parallel Collections Library supported by Scala for modeling and simulation, while using Groovy and JRuby to solve unique problems while calling down into the Java libraries, especially for UI bits. And finally I’m getting the hang of using Gradle as my primary build, test, and deployment framework. I am so tired of Ant and I’m no fan of Maven either.

I need to do this again, at least once/year, to maintain a clear mindset and fresh perspective. I look forward to my next walk-about through the programming language landscape.

This is the prior blog entry with a Makefile and a C++ source file. The Makefile is being displayed properly. Note in particular how the text is of the proper size and alines correctly with the line numbers to the left. Now look at Chrome on iOS 9.3.1, the current release, on an iPad Air 2.

The source code file for the Makefile is grossly oversized. This poor source file display shows like this on any iOS browser, not just Chrome. And that’s because Apple forces all browsers to use the same Apple-provided rendering engine. Thus, it’s not just a problem with Chrome on iOS, but with every browser on iOS, because it’s an Apple problem. I should note that all browsers on Android render source code on my WordPress blog correctly. They each have their own rendering engines, and they all handle this correctly.