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Further to my rant about the speed of current versions of Firefox, I'd like to add one about LibreOffice. At the same time I upgraded Firefox, I upgraded from LibreOffice 4.0.x to 5.2.x and the difference was spectacular.

Now, I have to wait while I watch the buttons on the GUI being repainted.

I think I'll change to Siag Office. Bah!

Over Christmas, I upgraded my main box to Slackware64-14.2. I put in a pair of new hard disks (Western Digital Blue 3TB) and noticed quite a speed improvement over the Green 2TB ones they replaced.

Slackware64-14.2 still comes with a broken version of vim (it was broken in 14.1 as well) so I rebuilt the vim-7.3 that comes with 14.0. The breakage is that it doesn't redraw the screen properly when run in a terminal window (xterm).

I've been using Firefox as my main web browser for many years, and I know that for a while it's been sub-optimal in a number of ways, technically and politically, but I've been too busy to try anything else. I did look at PaleMoon a few months back, but never went any further. Slackware64-14.2 comes with Firefox 52.x and it's painfully slow. Recent security updates have made it unusable. It's very sluggish when scrolling, and you can see it repainting. When it renders an image or a video, you can see a bright green box behind it! Forget trying to watch a video.

Perhaps I should upgrade my hardware? I've got an AMD Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz, 6 physical cores) on an ASUS M4A 77D motherboard with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. It's five years since I bought the CPU.

In the mean time, I thought I'd try rebuilding firefox. Being very short of time nowadays, I decided to use the Slackware build scripts to do the build rather than trying to do it myself from scratch. I figured rebuilding on my own machine might result in slightly faster binaries if the gcc options were more machine-specific.

I set of a build without looking too much at the build script. The SlackBuild script has to run as root (yuck) which makes me nervous, but I went ahead. I made the mistake of firing up a web browser at the same time to do some googling about firefox performance issues at the same time.

Very soon, the machine was using over 2.5GB of swap. No web browser was usable. After taking several minutes for the browser windows to die, I looked at the build script. It was defaulting to doing seven jobs in parallel (-j7). Obviously, there's not much point in filling up your CPUs if you don't have enough RAM to keep them fed. And Firefox is written in C++ (don't get me started - we have 64GB machines at work that aren't big enough).

It turns out that lots of people are frustrated with the speed of newer versions of Firefox, so I decided to try to rebuild version 45.9.0esr that comes with 14.1 on 14.2. I carefully read the SlackBuild script first, and ensured that it only used a maximum of two cores in parallel. That was a success. In a little over 99 minutes I had a nice mozilla-firefox-45.9.0esr-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz which installed and is running.

The question is, how much RAM do you need nowadays?

Back to the C++: one of my colleagues is working on a project that runs on 32-bit Linux, and when he was building his C++ which used a lot of template code, it used to run out of memory (address space).

It's amazing how much RAM and CPU cycles (and network bandwidth) you can eat up with C++, Java, Ant and eclipse. There are some particularly perverse ways you can abuse C++ and Ant should be burnt in an incinerator for biological warfare agents.

And who in their right mind designs a build system that depends on an IDE? Eclipse? Argh!

I miss these. They're good for a little better math representation, and '/s' as superscript is worthy, among other similar typographically expressed soupçon of flair.

So I've written a markup macro language, yclept "aa_macro", and I am using it for generating web documents using a doc system wrapper I wrote for that specific purpose. I'm pretty happy with the language itself as it's already doing everything I was able to think of so far, but am very interested in extending it further to provide more functionality, as there's no reason not to, and power is addictive, and, well, just because.

So if anyone would be so kind as to share any ideas as to what they would like a general text markup macro language to do, or pointers to same, I would be most appreciative. There's no pressing need to go looking at the docs to see what it already has in order to make suggestions, either, I'll just respond here with the relevant details about whatever might be put forth. All input is welcome, including "wtf."

Slashdot... it has many problems. Corporate overlords, yes, certainly. That's the root of a lot of it. But beneath that, there is:

• the moderation system where anon posts are started off with less value than a logged-in post (makes no sense at all and directly harms the conversation)
• the character set issue (I understand this may have been addressed, in which case, mad kudos)
• the inability to post
  • images
  • emoticons
  • a reasonable subset of html/inline css (I see more HTML is already available, awesome)
• format text more fully than the pitiful 1990's era formatting subset slashdot allowed (again, I see a basic start has been made on this, yay)
• moderation being sum-total only rather than the holy trifecta of sum, up and down which would (of course) be much more useful and informative... Reddit only has a shadow of this, sum with everyone participating, and they have flourished... SoylentNews moderation could be even better liked, in fact a lot better
• moderation being "today's privileged users, who are wholly unqualified by anything sane" rather than everyone saying up, down or nothing at all, which would actually, you know, let the community participate
• the whole "Yeah, the firehose loved it, but no, we're not going to post it, because" thing that makes firehose participation (and to a large extent, story submission) a waste of time (and insult to injury, the stories that do get posted... sometimes it's just insulting.)

...and I'm sure others have their hot buttons as well. Those are mine, or at least, sorta.

Beuhler? Anyone?

Trump voters don't believe he has played more golf than Obama in first 3 months

During his first three months in office, Trump spent 19 days at a golf course and played golf on at least 13 occasions, according to The New York Times.

The Times found that Obama spent no days at a golf course during his first three months. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also spent either no time or very little time golfing during their first 90 days — Bush made no trips to a golf course, while Clinton spent three days at courses.

A smattering of hypocritical quotes from Trump:

The 26 times Donald Trump tweeted about Barack Obama playing golf too much

It seems like almost every day a new story comes out about yet another unsavory practice by Uber.

First it was the sexual harassment allegations and apparent cover up, then it was the angry rant by their CEO, then an expose concerning their deceptions to avoid law enforcement scrutiny.

As if that weren't enough, Google/Waymo then sued Uber for the theft of documents by Tony Levandowski. Uber and Levandowski's lawyers continue to stonewall Google's lawyers and the courts.

And now, it seems that Uber has been skimming fares by quoting one (higher) fare to customers and another (lower) fare to drivers, then pocketing the difference.

So what is it with these folks? Is their culture so ethically sparse that this seems normal? Or does every corporation act this way and these guys just aren't very slick?

I hope Uber gets sued into oblivion. Sadly, the folks who perpetrate this stuff are protected by the corporate veil. They should go to PMITA prison until they lose all sphincter control.

Mayor Catherine Pugh vetoed legislation Friday that would have raised the minimum wage in Baltimore [state of Maryland, US] to $15 by 2022, leaving the measure's future in question.

The council — which next meets on April 3 — would need 12 of its 15 members to vote to overturn the veto. On Friday, the 12-member coalition that originally backed the higher wage began to disband.

Councilman Edward Reisinger of South Baltimore said although he voted to pass the bill, he would not support a veto override. Over the next seven years, the Pugh administration estimated the bill would cost the city $116 million, including the expense of paying city workers a higher minimum wage.

Reisinger said the cost is especially concerning given the city's outstanding fiscal challenges: a $20 million deficit, a $130 million schools budget shortfall and new spending obligations associated with the U.S. Department of Justice's police consent decree.

"The mayor has some very persuasive arguments," Reisinger said. "Baltimore City doesn't have a money tree."

Pugh also was concerned that requiring employers in the city to pay a higher minimum wage could send them fleeing to surrounding jurisdictions. That would worsen unemployment in the city and make it harder for low-skilled workers and ex-offenders to get jobs, she said.

She emphasized that Baltimore's minimum wage is increasing along side the rate statewide. The rate in Maryland will rise to $9.25 on July 1 and $10.10 a year later.

So here we have all the usual ugly concerns about minimum wage laws on display. It encourages employers to move, it makes more poor people unemployed, and it significant drives up costs for employers who don't or can't move (here, the City of Baltimore - $116 million in additional cost on top of a budget of $2.64 billion).

Tom Wheeler: Telecom/Cable Industry lobbyist, FCC Commissioner, protector of network privacy.

I always thought he just went with the flow to make sure he was getting a piece of the pie. Now I'm not so sure. In a March 29, 2017 OpEd piece in the New York Times, Wheeler decries the actions of Congress in weakening (some might say destroying) online privacy protections:

On Tuesday afternoon, while most people were focused on the latest news from the House Intelligence Committee, the House quietly voted to undo rules that keep internet service providers — the companies like Comcast, Verizon and Charter that you pay for online access — from selling your personal information.

The Senate already approved the bill, on a party-line vote, last week, which means that in the coming days President Trump will be able to sign legislation that will strike a significant blow against online privacy protection.
[...]
Here’s one perverse result of this action. When you make a voice call on your smartphone, the information is protected: Your phone company can’t sell the fact that you are calling car dealerships to others who want to sell you a car. But if the same device and the same network are used to contact car dealers through the internet, that information — the same information, in fact — can be captured and sold by the network. To add insult to injury, you pay the network a monthly fee for the privilege of having your information sold to the highest bidder.

This bill isn’t the only gift to the industry. The Trump F.C.C. recently voted to stay requirements that internet service providers must take “reasonable measures” to protect confidential information they hold on their customers, such as Social Security numbers and credit card information. This is not a hypothetical risk — in 2015 AT&T was fined $25 million for shoddy practices that allowed employees to steal and sell the private information of 280,000 customers.

I would have thought Wheeler wouldn't want to rock the boat, but apparently is willing to stand up for online consumer privacy.

Did I have him wrong? I don't know. And now I'm not really sure I care.

Today Theresa May's letter triggering Article 50, the UK's withdrawal from the EU, was delivered to Donald Tusk. Far-right populism appears to have triumphed over post-WWII cooperation. We live in interesting times. Scotland has voted to have another independence referendum, and Northern Ireland's regional assembly is in limbo as a result of a corruption scandal and republican parties have increased their presence. The UK's days are numbered.