What's it all about, Alfie?

I gave a look at Norsemen several months ago, and just couldn't get into it. But I know why now - the relationship between a character and his wife... it just reminded me of some painful memories. But hey... it is what it is. This is a funny show. Reminds me of Monty Python in many ways. The show has no laugh-track, or studio audience, so it's just the actors and the dialog.

What's so funny about this show is that the dialog is straight out of the current day - but the actions and people are still in the year 790. It's just what you'd expect from something like The Holy Grail. Very funny.

References to things like "Free Speech" and the jokes... it's just really funny, and the actors are just amazing. Worth a look.

UPDATE: OK... in the second season, the scene where one character talks about the dominos falling, and then explains it with "a chain reaction" - it's just too funny. I really like how they don't wait for people to laugh. They just say things that make no sense for 791 AD.

This morning I decided to turn on two-factor authentication on my GitHub account using the Authy app for my iPhone. I've been able to use it for different accounts, and it's always mine - not the company I work for, and while I've been using SMS for a while on GitHub - and others, I've just decided that it's probably a good thing to get moving on this = given the privacy issues that we are all reading about these days.

The thing that I needed was a simple file encryption bash script/function so that I could store the recovery tokens in a file without having to worry about it getting snatched. So now I've got it. The code is based on openssl, and it's pretty simple:

#
# These are simple functions to encrypt and decrypt files so that I don't
# have to hassle with extreme things in order to secure one file at a time.
# They use openssl to do the work, and it's pretty simple.
#
function jack {
    openssl des3 -in "$1" -out "$1.enc"
}
 
function unjack {
    openssl des3 -d -in "$1" -out `basename "$1" .enc`
}

and this simply allows me to encrypt a file and it adds .enc on the end of the filename, and then I can decrypt it as well, stripping that addition as well. Nothing fancy, but it really works just great.

This morning, I read this article about a problem in two small towns in Massachusetts when the engineers responsible for a normally reliable, safe, natural gas distribution infrastructure don't really think about what they are doing, and the consequences of their designs. It's shameful.

The NTSB report about what happened was very clear, and very troubling:

The contracted crew was working on a tie-in project of a new plastic distribution main and the abandonment of a cast-iron distribution main. The distribution main that was abandoned still had the regulator sensing lines that were used to detect pressure in the distribution system and provide input to the regulators to control the system pressure. Once the contractor crews disconnected the distribution main that was going to be abandoned, the section containing the sensing lines began losing pressure.

As the pressure in the abandoned distribution main dropped about 0.25 inches of water column (about 0.01 psig), the regulators responded by opening further, increasing pressure in the distribution system. Since the regulators no longer sensed system pressure they fully opened allowing the full flow of high-pressure gas to be released into the distribution system supplying the neighborhood, exceeding the maximum allowable pressure.

Why the control system wasn't smart enough to detect:

• Pressure Reading of Zero - the sensor was on the abandoned line - which had no pressure. Why didn't that fact alone cause an alarm?
• Zero Change on Output based on Input Change - when the first change was done, why wasn't the change seen on the sensor - at least in a percentage measure? Even, if you look at the first-derivative of the sensor reading, a simple thing to do even with analog control systems, and see that no change could be seen should have been an error.
• Upper Limit on Input - when you see that you have increased the input some percentage in the last "...few minutes..." - then sound the alarm. There is no reason to ramp the input like this. It's a leak - or worse, and needs to be corrected.

As an engineer, I'm stunned that the folks that created this control system didn't do these, or something similar, to them to sound alarms as opposed to letting four homes blow up. I mean, it's one thing to have a leak, with a bad scent in the house - but to actually have homes blow up - that's way past bad design.

An old friend and I have talked about this many times over the years - How do you really teach this kind of design? - and it's not easy. It comes from experience, and the problem is, most engineers don't have it - any more than most people are wise. You have to accumulate experience over years - to know what to think about... what to look for... all that needs to be considered, and it takes years to really gain that perspective.

But companies will pass things like this off to the junior engineers - because that's who they believe can do all that's needed. And if you ask the folks doing the work if they are ready to do this kind of work, they are always going to say "Yes!". That's just "confidence".

Until we come to terms with this gap in the education of engineers, we're going to have these problems, and they could be a whole lot worse.

Today I decided to open up some of the fortran code I wrote for my thesis - 30 yrs ago, and see if Sublime Text 3 would handle the syntax highlighting, and therein brought up an interesting point about the problem I had in upgrading from Sublime Text 2 to 3. So it made sense to write it all down just in case it happens on another upgrade in the future.

I found a nice Fortran package Sublime Text 3 - it did all the normal syntax highlighting stuff, and lots more. Very slick that it picks out the LaTeX formatting in the comments - Who thinks of this? Wild! So it seems like a great little find. Sweet.

I go to install it, using Package Control, and I noticed that Package Control wasn't installed. That's odd... I know I had it installed - maybe it didn't come over in the upgrade? So, let's install it again... No biggie.

Well... kinda... When I following the installation instructions, I didn't see it show up in the pop-up. Very odd. I checked the directory structure - it was there... but it wasn't showing up. Very odd...

So I Googled the issue, and it seems that it's something that happened enough to warrant a tip - it might be disabled. Go to the general settings, a JSON file, and then see if it's in the list of disabled packages. Sure enough - there it was! I simply deleted it from the config, and restarted Sublime, and Bingo!

After that, everything was working just fine:

I know we all just want to have some sense of satisfaction in our lives. To feel that we matter - somewhere. To feel that we make a difference. It's universal... but so many don't have that because of circumstance or society. But that's another issue. What we, in the US Tech Industry have created is a class of people that feel entitled to things that they have no entitlement to. My sister calls these The Soccer Trophy generation.

If someone is told - at every possible turn - that they are amazing, valued, better than the rest, then their sense of reality is being formed in those moments. If all you allow a person to see is a mirror, reflecting back to them that they are the center of the world, then they have no opportunity to see what reality is like outside those mirrors. It's not surprising then, when these people get angry when the context is changed, and it's time to work together with others of differing opinions, and then all of a sudden, things go very badly.

Over the last five years, I have been working with folks that fit this profile perfectly. They are fine people - at least in comparison to most federal inmates. But they are employees that feel the company owes them a sense of purpose, a job that fulfills them... and they have every intention of getting that. But that's not how the world really works. Sometimes it's just a lot of hard work for very little short-term payoff. Life isn't fair. But telling this to our little monsters usually creates such a stink that it's avoided at all costs.

I'm all for being nice. I'm all for being generous. I think these are fantastic qualities, and I try to be as graceful as I can be. All the time. But some days I just want to say "Someone did you a disservice by making you think the world revolves around you. It doesn't." Now let's have a little moment to deal with that, and let's get back to work!

But that's not done... Go figure.

Some of the recruiting folks at The Shop have been asking me to update my LinkedIn profile so that I can be seen as working at The Shop, and get some additional recruiting cache - which I kinda doubt, but who am I to say? This morning, I decided it was time to help them out - I've put them off enough, and that's just not nice. So... it's updated.

I spent a little time on the HTML version for the web site as it wasn't showing the employer or city, and that was kinda important... so I had to work up the CSS to make it look right, and I have to say, I can't believe how much simpler it'd all be if I just always used divs, and then set the font properties and left it at that. Just crazy... but hey, at least it's done.

Now I can be the poster boy for The Shop as recruiting wants. Such is life, right?

This morning, while looking at Google Chrome on my work laptop, and with John Gruber's words ringing in my head:

Man oh man, did Google hit the Mac version of Chrome with the ugly stick or what? Worst looking tabs I’ve ever seen — they look like a rendering bug.

and to be fair, that's what I thought of the changes they put in, yet after working with it for a few weeks I was more accepting of it's new design. But that was just me getting used to it - it wasn't that I was seeing the design factors they were going for.

So this morning, I just decided that on my laptop, I'd stop using it. There was a time that Chrome was a great alternative to IE, yes - on the Mac, and Firefox wasn't really all there, and Safari was still getting going, and if you wanted to have a fast, stable, browser, you went with Chrome. Period.

But those days are no more. Chrome is not a good citizen of the machine - it's got real tracking and security concerns, and in general, I just was getting tired of looking at the app that didn't at all look like a Mac app when I was posting and viewing my blog. So enough. It's over.

I'm using Safari Technology Preview because I like to test what's coming, and while I would not use it for my "main" browser activities, I am more than happy to use it for viewing the blog, and making my football picks with some old friends. Nothing is critical, and everything is OK.

We will see who this goes - I'm betting it'll be just fine, and I'll be happier to not be running a Google app that doesn't look like they wanted to make a native Mac app. That's up to them - and fine if that's what they want to do - I just don't have to like it. Or run it.

Late yesterday, a friend of mine was laid off. It happens, but he was on a new project at a new company... probably hadn't been there three months, and the project was cancelled. He was the only US-based employee for the company, and so that was it. No new project. No other opportunity in the company. Gone.

While a part of me understands this logic - you hire for a project, and if it is cancelled, then you don't need the people you hired for it, and so they can go. This makes perfect sense to me as a business owner. There is no fat. But at the same time, when the company has more than 50, or so, employees, and you find a good one, you have to wonder why they didn't plan for the possibility, and find a place for a good person to do good work?

I'll never know why they didn't, and how close they were to pulling the plug when he hired on, but it seems like the relationship between tech worker and employer is at an all-time low. The workers expect the world from the employer - tons of money, ping-pong, meals, stock, etc. and in return, they seem to want to work 4 hrs/day and be treated like royalty. Employers want to hire who they have to, and then drop them when they don't need them.

I suppose it's only fair, but it's sad at the same time. We're getting more like nature where the strong survive and thrive, and the weak, or unlucky, are eaten. Kinda harsh.

We are entering a very exciting week for Apple folks, such as myself. Today it's iOS 12 with the Memoji, automation with Siri, more efficient code to make a lot of things faster on older hardware, and soon - multi-person FaceTime. That last one is interesting to me as it really challenges Google Hangouts and GoToMeeting. They are good products, but this will be in all iPhones, and that's got a really big advantage in market-share.

I also read the comparison of the iPhone Xs Max with the 13" MacBook Pro - and the iPhone was certainly on par with the laptop... it's just crazy how much capability Apple is packing into these phones... I think I need to do a little looking into ARKit and see what it's got. I'm not really sure that I have an augmented reality idea in me, but it might be really nice to see how to do these things. You just never know.

Exciting week!

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!