Chicago's CTA--Thumbs Up

The past few days I have used Chicago's subway and elevated train system extensively, and think it's one of the better systems around. Here are a few things of note:

1. The elevated tracks, the "L," are very nice for newcomers since one can spot the tracks from some distance, and once the tracks are identified, finding a station becomes a simple process.
2. The announcements are recorded, clearly recorded, as opposed to the garbled live announcements used by, for example, the DC Metro.
3. I saw a status display today that showed all elevators in the system in operation. The CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) web site today claimed all lines operating normally. The DC Metro hasn't been in such a state for a long while, unless maybe it was brief and I missed it.
4. At one station, and really at just one exit to one station, upon exit there are compass points embedded in the sidewalk. I left the Grand Station's NW exit (also labeling exits by compass points is great) wanting to go west, looked down upon exit, and saw that west was straight ahead. This is such a great thing, and so simple, I think all subway systems should adopt it (the red line at Grand is underground, as is much of the system). [ Added 2012-08-25: the Chicago Avenue stop on the Brown line also has compass points of this sort at an exit. ]

I guess part of my pleasure at how nice the CTA is comes from recent DC Metro ridership, but DC comparisons aside, the CTA seems to be doing a good job. It's nice to see some part of the country's infrastructure that still works.

Yes, I know that the phrase Chicago's CTA is redundant.

Canon vs. Lumix

I found myself rather suddenly in need of a new camera and it came down to a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS8 and a Canon PowerShot SX150. I've had digital cameras of each make in the past, and so, needing it right away and being busy, I decided to quickly buy a known quantity. The Canon is a solid, inexpensive camera, a bit less expensive than the Lumix, but with similar features.

The Lumix has a Leica lens, which is a significant advantage. I took this with a Leica-equipped Lumix (a DMC-TZ1), and don't think it would have been as good with a Canon. Really. But there were two drawbacks to my old Lumix (three drawbacks, really, but more on that later):
(1) The Lumix was noisy in low light situations. Right or wrong, I think Canon has done a better job with the electronics. The newer Lumix might be better.
(2) The Lumix uses a proprietary battery. Multiple times on my last trip with the Lumix, I used both of my batteries' charges, and was stuck. The batteries were expensive and degraded over time. The current Lumix batteries are apparently 1100mAh 3.6V, or just under 0.4Wh, but after a couple years, who knows?

The batteries were the deciding factor. The Canon uses a pair of AA batteries. Sanyo Eneloop NiMH are cheap, under $2.50 each, have long lives (1500 charge/recharge cycles advertised), and are 2000mAh each. So two Eneloops are 2 * 0.2 * 1.2 = 0.48Wh. Advantage, Canon, plus the Sanyo Eneloops have a low self-discharge rate and are cheap, and I can carry as many with me as I want. In a pinch I can pick up alkalines just about anywhere.

The third drawback to the Lumix? A drawback shared with the Canon, no optical viewfinder. With just an LCD viewfinder, the camera is very difficult to use in full sunlight. With both my old Canon and my old Lumix, I often thought that rather than point-and-shoot, I had to shoot-and-hope, not knowing what was in the picture until later.

No Wonder Best Buy is In Trouble

There is no search box on Best Buy's front page. Unbelievable. How much advertising copy do they expect me to wade through before I get to something interesting? For the first time ever, I am visiting hhgregg.com.

Dia Epiphany

For years now I've used dia as a diagram-drawing tool, and it's a good example of what open-source software should be: usable and useful. But I've often wished I could add to the set of available objects to use within diagrams. Tonight, rather than just getting the job done, I decided to RTFM. Adding an object is easy.

One of the last gadgets looks vaguely like the moon over a mountain. I never clicked it before, or if I did, I didn't get the point. Besides, who wants to virtually moon mountains? The idea is to click the moon & mountain and place it on the drawing. The result is a red X over the text broken image. Double-click on the  X, and then click on browse. Pick an image. So far I've loaded a couple png images, and it works like a dream--perfect!

I don't remember when I started using dia; perhaps as recently as '06. I used idraw on SunOS systems in the late '80s and early '90s. The alternative was xfig which was overly complicated, and impossible to use without reading a manual (like, e.g., the GIMP). After leaving OSU, through '98, I was often stuck using NT machines (NT 4 was Microsoft's most usable OS, however). I don't remember what I was using--probably I just avoided doing anything that wasn't easy in whatever Microsoft's drawing program was. But around the turn of the century I went full-time Linux on the desktop (had been using it for servers since '95 or so--Slackware, then Red Hat, then Debian) and it was a good move, though I believe I'll soon flush Ubuntu & Mint down the toilet where they belong.

But I digress. Dia: great! Dia: easy to add images! Dia: highly recommended! Dia: apparently available for Windows. Wikipedia has a bare-bones dia overview.

Google Does Evil and then Lies About It

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-09/google-said-to-face-fine-by-u-dot-s-dot-over-apple-safari-breach

Today Google agreed to pay apple $22.5M for allegedly breaching Safari users' browser settings to set cookies. That's evil.  The payment is apparently a record high, but for Google is just a slap on the wrist

But then the above-linked Business Week article quotes Google to say "...[we have taken] steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple’s browsers.” This strikes me as fundamentally dishonest. No, cookies gather no information. However, web servers accessing cookies left previously do gather information, so placing the cookies aided Google's gathering of information about users' browsing behavior. And a user's browsing behavior strikes me as private.

Really the Biggest Albatross Crippling Ubuntu and Mint

I'm an old Unix guy. Unix worked. When I saw the opportunity to blow away Windows junk with Linux, I jumped at it thinking it would be a simpler, more reliable OS. In the '90s that was a correct assessment. Now, Linux distros are continuously chasing new features and thus becoming bloated with partly-working software. I'd prefer to find an OS where attention is paid to quality.

In the late '80s I taught intro CS on Macs, and they were utter crap. Cooperative multitasking? One-button mice? Give me a break. A former colleague used to say that a computer user's intelligence is directly proportional to the number of buttons on his mouse. I realize, as did he (I think), that the generalization doesn't hold, but copying and pasting in Windows is really clumsy due to the 2-button mouse limitation, and it's hard to imagine a Mac being any better. Of course, Macs still use one-button mice, and my early-learned disdain for Macs survives, though without any actual Mac usage in the past couple decades.

I've been married more recently than I've spent more than 10 minutes using a Mac.

Is Solaris any better? The word on the street suggests not, especially since Sun got bought out. How about BSD? I want the system to be invisible and let me do my work. I guess I want SunOS 4, but not really...

Audio Working (Today); Maybe Popping Mint & Ubuntu from Active Stack and Pushing them to Used Stack

Audio is working today on my Linux Mint 13 64b system, which is a pleasant surprise. It's been stuttering the last few weeks, and after much Googling it appears to be a known problem with PulseAudio, one of Linux's several albatrosses. As soon as I read speculation that it would be fixed in Mint 14, I spent a little while pondering OSS, but I have work to do, and clearly the Ubuntu/Mint flavors of Linux are not cut out for that. Is it time to go back to Debian? My recollection was that, as of a few years ago, Debian mostly worked. Or do I try out Arch Linux?

The biggest albatrosses around Ubuntu/Mint's indistinguishable necks? Unity and Gnome Shell, and the notion that we're more interested in crippling desktop and laptop computers to look like smart phones than in, again, actually getting our work done.

Corporate Culture Wars

Starbucks, J.C. Penney, Oreo, and now Amazon (or Bezos anyway) have stepped forward in favor of gay rights, and apparently seen no negative impact on their sales. Chick-fil-A, on the other hand, came out against gay marriage and is seeing business consequences, to the extent that they now seem to be backing off. What is one to think? That there are many more supporters of gay rights than opponents, or that the supporters are better informed or have more disposable income than the opponents? That the opponents, e.g., Chick-fil-A's COO, are quicker to abandon principles in favor of money? Probably there isn't really much to be gathered from this.

Here is Chick-fil-A President and COO Dan Cathy's statement that sounded tremendously ignorant. From CBS News:

I don't think I'll ever understand all the energy expended by some to take away other peoples' dignity. And I don't think anyone is shaking fists at god. OTOH, I think Rahm Emanuel probably went a bit far in his sweeping pronouncement of what Chicagoans do not believe.

I will not be taking part in any Chick-fil-A boycotts; no need: I never go there anyhow. UMBC unfortunately opened one on campus, and it is unbelievably bad. They have nothing that tastes like chicken.

I might, OTOH, patronize a Chick-fil-A Wednesday as Santorum suggests: "Oh Chick-fil-A, you have such good chicken sandwiches." Of course, we would both know that's not true.

Finally, Steven Colbert weighed in on the issue:

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Chrome as Nagware

Now whenever I start Chrome, it asks me to sign in to the browser. Why? It's a browser, not an OS. Apparently this will let me sync my bookmarks, history, and settings on all my devices: "With Chrome's sign-in feature, you no longer need to fret about your bookmarks or apps being "stuck" on one computer." Who's enough of a dweeb to fret about this stuff?

Different machines have different characteristics, so maybe I want different settings. Maybe I want different bookmarks, history, and apps at home and at work. Maybe I want to try out a setting or an app, but not spread it across all my systems until I decide I like it. Maybe an app is stealing data. Do I want it spread across all my machines quickly and automatically?

I think this is a feature that some people will want. But the way Google is going about it, nagging us to log in every time we start the browser, apparently with no setting to disable the request, feels coercive. And when a corporation attempts coercion, I worry about ulterior motives.

A sign of the times

Firefox's US English spell checker doesn't come pre-loaded with the word 'bookstore.' They still exist, really.

Stop the Regressives

A short video from Robert Reich.

Teaching Networking?

Guido Appenzeller and Nick McKeown have a great pair of TCP congestion animations at http://guido.appenzeller.net/anims/

Think Stratford!

Drove past a billboard this morning entering Catonsville from the west on 144, and there was a billboard that this morning stated "The Stratford! Stratford University, Baltimore." Who the heck are they? Visiting their web site, it's clear they are not accredited by a regional accrediting body, so credits from Stratford University won't transfer to a real university, so their students are largely throwing their money away.

Why do people give shysters like this their money? Interestingly, they provide very little info online. That in itself should be a red flag.

If it walks like global warming and it quacks like global warming...

Over the weekend, track on the DC Metro's green line kinked causing a derailment, a plane sank into the melted tarmac at Washington National Airport, and east-bound lanes of US 50 east of DC buckled, closing the highway.

Amazon Cloud Reader: Almost Useless

This morning I wanted to look something up in an e-book that I had previously read and archived on my Kindle. Rather than download it to the Kindle, re-read small portions of it, and then put it back in the archive, I figured I could just use the Amazon Cloud Reader. I opened the book, and tried to search the book. No joy. ^F just does a find on the visible portion of the book, and there are no other search controls.

After a search (powerful idea, no?) of the Kindle help forums and learning there is no search, I sent Amazon customer service a query in case there really was, but no.

So how could a text-based application, like an e-reader, possibly be shipped without a search function? How could Amazon possibly make this omission? Really, how could they consider the Cloud Reader ready to ship without a convenient way of searching a book?

How can an organization that did such a great job on the Kindle do such a poor job on the web-based stand-in?