What's it all about, Alfie?

Well... Apple's concluded it's Watch/iPhone event, and I have to say, the rumors were not wrong, and it's still interesting and exciting to see the new iPhones and Watches. Some of the things they are doing on the Watch now is just amazing. ECG on the Watch - one finger on the crown and then the watch's sensors. Crazy.

The new iPhone Xs sounds amazing... faster Face ID - which I use all the time, and the specs on the CoreML engine - 9x the performance on 1/10th the power... 6 cores on the A12... it's just amazing what Apple - Apple is doing on these machines. It's a company that just always makes me smile.

Needless to say, at 2:00 am on Friday, I'll be sitting at my computer and ordering my iPhone Xs and it'll ship a week later. Add in that iOS 12 drops next Monday, and macOS Mojave on the Monday after that, and it's just a big banner September for Apple.

What a company!

I've just finished a book that I really enjoyed, but I'm glad I read it last of the three - in fact, I'm glad I read each of them in the order in which I did. It made for a much smoother reading experience - because I started with Pragmatic Scala and this was really based on the fact that we are using Scala in The Shop, and as such, I felt it was important to get up to speed on the language, and the Pragmatic Books have always been pretty good, in my experience.

Well, this was a fine book on Scala, but I have to say, I'm stunned that Scala is as popular as it is. I understand that one of the key design goals of the language was to be a pure Object Oriented language - and as such things like static methods and variables are not allowed in the instance variables, but they solve that with partner classes, and that's OK... but it is confusing for many folks - simply because most coders are not going to have a Theory of Languages in their past.

Still... Scala is a language we use at The Shop, and that means for better or worse, this is something that I needed to know. The next book was a little more fun because it was all about Xcode. In Xcode Treasures, the author walks through the tool not the SDK. This is nice, because in my recent work, I've re-written my crypto quip solver to Swift 4.2, in Xcode 9, and the times are really not horrible - compared to ObjC and Ruby, but Clojure still wins the speed race, but that's to be expected.

And while I spent plenty of time in Xcode quite a while ago, it's nice to see how much progress has been made in Xcode recently. The handling of assets like icons and images, and being able to load them without worrying about the resolution is really nice. Also, the entire Gatekeeper and Code Signing is now simple, and it used to be a pain. That's a great relief.

So this was a really good chance to catch up on a lot of the capabilities with Storyboards in Xcode and the scripting and such... very nice book. The final book was Mastering Clojure Macros and this is one I've been trying to get through for quite a while - many months, in fact. It's not a long book, but it's dense, and it takes time to make sure you understand the concepts because macros in Clojure are hard enough, and some of the examples are compact - as Clojure is want to do, and that just makes it all that much harder.

But the book was just amazing! What a great study of the subject. This was one of the few topics I really wanted to get better at with Clojure. Yes, I'd like to get a little more into spec, and core.async could be very useful if you're making small, independent apps, as opposed to big, multi-host apps where you typically share messaging queues, etc., but still... macros are in everything when you really get into things and I have been able to do quite a bit with them to date, but I wanted to know more.

Of the three - they are all worth reading - if you want to learn the material, but I really enjoyed the last two far more than the Scala book, but that's because of the subject - not the book.

I've finally decided that I've had enough with the sad state of my wireless networking. To be honest, the wired networking is going pretty well. I've got the best DOCSIS-based Comcast service (75Mbps) and I'm on the list for the 1Gbps. I've thought about the 2Gbps fibre, but that seems like a steep $300/mo for the service. I'd really like to see what 1Gbps works like, so we should be able to see later this year.

Anyway, the service is not all bad. It comes into their modem/router/hotspot, and then out the back of that I had an older WiFi Router that just kept giving me issues. Sure, it was 3 yrs old, but it shouldn't have had that hard a life - but it's just not that reliable. And the coverage in my bedroom is really pretty disappointing.

So it was time to upgrade. But to what?

I looked at a lot of the "Best of" lists, and they were all nice, and then I read another review saying why folks might want to buy Apple's AirPort Extreme networking - configuration simplicity. And he was right.

Yes, their network equipment is not the best price/performance of all the routers out there. But face it - it's Apple - so it's going to be easy to configure... easy to monitor... easy to upgrade... all the things that I've not done a lot of with my old router because it's just not that simple. Sure... I know how to do it, but it's not as clean and easy as Apple's work.

So I went to the local Apple Store, and got a 3TB Time Capsule, and an AirPort Extreme for the bedroom, and set down to setting them up. What an amazing experience!

The Time Capsule properly detected that the Comcast router did NAT, so it didn't set that up. It also picked everything up for nice defaults. All told - it was a few minutes on my laptop, and it was very easy. The AirPort Extreme was just as easy. It detected the Time Capsule and suggested a bridge, and it worked perfectly! Just as simple as could be.

This is why I got the Apple equipment. I can look at things from my iPhone, monitor things, update code... it's simple. It's powerful. And it works like a champ.

Fantastic.

This morning I saw that iOS 9 dropped from Apple, and I upgraded my iPhone right away - why not, right? I've been hearing of all the nice things in iOS 9, and one of the things I was really interested in was the Ad Blocking in WebKit/Safari. I've worked in the Ad business now, and I have to say that while it has the potential to be a very useful thing, it's really degenerated into a cheap way for some folks to get a little revenue for their web sites without having to do anything other than a little code added to their pages.

I get it... you pay $20/yr for a site, and you'd like to see $30/yr in revenue, but the "easy money" is not in advertising - at least not now. It's the wrong game to let Double-click or AdWords into your site. They just they show is just not good stuff - and they'll say it's not their fault - it's the publishers - and it is, but it's all a race to the bottom.

So I've just gotten sick of it, and got Peace, the ad blocker for iOS 9 from Marco A. as he's one of the good guys, and he teamed up with Ghostery, the desktop Chrome/Safari ad blocker, and it's pretty slick. The point was just to get a better experience on my iPhone as well as getting rid of all the tracking. If a site wants data about me, and they offer a decent reason, I'll do it. But as it is now, Google is the company that's collecting all this data, and I'm not so sure I like them knowing so much.

Just too much power.

So I turned on the ad blocking with Peace on iOS 9, and with Ghostery on my laptops. I have whitelisted a few sites: Bank of America, Loggly, Daring Fireball... they are OK. But the rest - no thanks. Too much.

This morning I have nothing to do at The Shop, and so I decided to catch up on all the Faces work I needed to do in Apple's Photos app. It's getting to match the iOS Photos app a lot more, and while there are a few things to get used to, it's not bad, and if you just give it a few minutes, you're likely to find what you need right there in the app.

For example, setting the 'default' picture in a Faces collection used to be a scrolling and selecting deal - could be hard with a lot of faces, but now you look at all the pictures for a given face, and then right-click to set the one you want. Very simple. Very easy.

It's really a great little app.

I wanted to make a head-shot for my brother, and Faces had picked out a nice one, but it didn't allow me to set it as the contact. But it did allow me to duplicate the one picture... crop it... save it... and then the Contacts app allowed me to use that from the Faces for this contact. I mean it's just super simple.

At the same time, I have a somewhat unique problem in that two of my kids are trans. This means their names have changed - and not just a little. Once I got all the pictures under one name, then I simply clicked on the name in the Faces view, and changed it. Simple. And for me, that's a lot of pictures. So much easier than having to do each picture.

Finally, the camera metadata. Wow! I looked a a picture we all took a while back. It had all the metadata - not just the geolocation tags, but also the camera, the conditions... it's crazy what a camera will stuff into the metadata, and Photos accurately stores all that.

Very slick tool. Very. Thanks, Apple.

I have been doing a bit of updating in the last 24 hours, which includes getting the latest Apple compilers and support tools - git 2.3.2, even (nice!)... but I've also been checking with Homebrew for the grc command, and updating it based on the new compilers, etc. from Apple. And it just hit me (again), that a tool like Homebrew makes installation of hundreds of Open Source tools so incredibly easy. It's just almost impossible to think that it's necessary to compile many programs from source on a Mac these days.

Lots of great software is in Homebrew - with sections for Science and all kinds of things. Just an amazing community resource. Amazingly all built on Ruby and git. What a way to build something great.

This morning I was reminded that I read on Twitter last night that Xcode 6.3 was out, and along with OS X 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3, it was time to update the build tools to get the latest in Swift, as well as the libraries for the new platforms. It was a simple update right out of the App Store.

No mess... No fuss... Just better tools. Gotta love this company.

After updating my iPhone, I realized that I hadn't checked for updates to my laptop this afternoon, so I checked there, and sure enough - OS X 10.10.3 dropped as well. This is a 2.02 GB download and updates the Rescue Disk as well as several parts of Yosemite - including the new Photos app.

Now, I've been struggling with the Guest WiFi for a while, and to a point, I understand that there's a limit to the bandwidth they want to provide. But it's kinda silly to limit the bandwidth to what they have now given that you can get Comcast to deliver 50 Mbps to your home. It's kinda silly to cheap out on the network bandwidth.

So it's going to take me over two hours to download 10.10.3 to my personal laptop. It's OK... I've got time... it's just this kind of thing that makes it hard to convince people that this is a Software Company and not the traditional Service Company.

Until then, I wait and watch the download progress...

[3:28pm] UPDATE: finally finished, and then the 10.10 Command Line Tools needed to be updated as well. In the end, it was all done before I had to leave, and that's a win in my book.

I saw a tweet from Wil Shipley about iOS upgrading, so I decided to check and see is indeed there had been an update drop, or if it was a developer update for something he's working on. Turns out iOS 8.3 dropped, and so I spent the few minutes to download it and make sure it runs well.

They re-did the emoji keyboard, and it looks a little more dense to me, which is fine because before it was pages and pages of emoji. Not bad. They also said that it was a few bug fixes that impacted performance, and who doesn't like a little performance boost now and again?

After I was sure it was all OK, I sent out a text to me family saying that it was ready to use, and that I'd checked it out already. I know they don't need me to say this, but it's nice to know what someone is thinking of you - even if it's as silly as an automatic update of iOS.

They'll get it when they can, and that's fine.

I had to update my work MacBook Pro, and I got the dreaded "login" Keychain problem because I guess the tools they created/used to update my local password were not up to snuff, and now that I've created a new KeyChain, I've also found that they have just horribly managed this laptop to the point that I'm surprised that it works at all.

It's this kind of lame administration that really makes me upset. They bought this bill of goods from some enterprisey shop about how to "Easily" and "Securely" administer their laptops, and rather than just teach people, or make it clear what to do, and not do, they have this crap with no way to remove it for those of us that simply don't need it.

It's frustrating. Yet in the end, I have to follow the advice I gave a friend just this morning... take it easy, this is just another indicator that this is not the place you really want to work. Simple.