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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!

She was gone again, shortly before my elderly cat died. I refer to my muse, of course.
        I looked everywhere I could think of, to no avail. Stolen again? I went for a walk, on the lookout for that aged black aged Lincoln with that blonde and that brunette and the kind of weird-looking driver, the ones who stole my muse before. It cost me fifty bucks to get her back!
        They had been right about the weather.
        But this time, there was no ransom note, or any other sort of clue. Almost every day I would go walking, in search for, if not my muse, an idea for a story.
        Maybe she had gotten trapped in a tavern. I went there looking for her, or an inspiration. I had no luck.
        Weeks went by with no trace.
        I was starting to get worried; had the Grim Reaper taken her, too?
        Finally I got a text message: “On vacation, asshole. I’ll be back when you quit crying over that damned cat.”

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.

Guys, I lurve arguing with you lot dearly but when I look at my message box and it says I have 35 messages from comment replies after taking a two hour nap, that's just too many to bother with. Anything over 20 and I'm probably just going to skip replying to any of them. My apologies.

Half a century ago I was reading a book by Isaac Asimov. I don’t remember what book, but I know it wasn’t I, Robot because I looked last night and it wasn’t in that book. But in the book, whichever one it was, Dr. Asimov wrote about the origin of the word “robot”; a story by Karel Capek titled R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.
        I searched every library I had access to, looking for this story, for years. I finally gave up.
        Then a few weeks ago I thought of the story again. I have no idea what triggered that thought, but it occurred to me that there was no internet back then, and since the book was so old, it would probably be at Gutenberg.org.
        It was! I downloaded it, and to my dismay it was written in Czech. So I fed it to Google Translate.
        Thirty five years ago when I was first learning how computers work and how to program them, I read of a program the US government had written to translate Russian to English and back. To test it, they fed it the English phrase “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Then they fed the Russian translation back in. The re-conversion to English read “The wine is good, but the meat is spoiled.”
        I figured that in the decades since their first efforts at machine translation, it would do a better job.
        I figured wrong. What came out of Google Translate was gibberish. It does a good job of translating single words; paper dictionaries have done this well for centuries. But for large blocks of text, it was worthless.
        When I first saw the Czech version I could see that it was, in fact, not a novel, but a stage play. I kept looking, and found an English language version translated by an Australian. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons, so I may add it to my online library.
        Wikipedia informed me that the play was written in 1920, and a man named Paul Selver translated it into English in 1923. So I searched Gutenberg for “Paul Selver” and there it was! However, it was in PDF form. Right now I’m at the tail end of converting it to HTML.
        After reading it I realized that this story was the basis for every robot story written in the twentieth century, and its robots aren’t even robots as we know robots today. Rather, they were like the “replicants” in the movie Blade Runner—flesh and blood artificial people. That movie, taken from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would have actually been a sequel to R.U.R., had R.U.R. ended differently.
        The Terminator was R.U.R. with intelligent mechanical robots instead of artificial life. Their aim, as the “robots” in Kapek’s story, is to destroy all humans.
        Asimov said that his robots were an answer to Frankenstein and R.U.R. He thought the very idea was ridiculous, so he made his own robots inorganic and mechanical rather than organic, and added his “three laws of robotics”. His laws weren’t physical laws like the inability of anything to travel faster than light, but legislation; similar to Blade Runner, where the artificial people weren’t allowed on Earth. In a few of his books, like The Caves of Steel, robot use on Earth is strictly limited and controlled and people hate them.
        I thought Asimov had the first mechanical, non-magical robots, but I was wrong. There were fictional mechanical robots before Asimov was born. The first US science fiction dime novel was Edward S. Ellis’ 1865 The Steam Man of the Prairies, with a giant steam powered robot.
        One thing that put me off about this play (besides the fact that it’s a play, which is far better watched than read) was that the original story was written in a language I don’t understand. That’s why I don’t read Jules Verne; his stories were written in French, and I don’t speak that language, either.
        I dislike translations because I used to speak Spanish well, according to South American tourists, and a smattering of Thai. And I’m a reader. It’s more than just the story, it’s how it’s written. There are word plays and idioms that are impossible to translate. For instance, a beautiful English phrase that uses alliteration would lose its beauty in any translation. And, there are no boring stories, only boring storytellers. I suspect that Kapek may have been an excellent writer, but Selver wasn’t, to my mind. Little of the dialog seemed believable to me.
        But in the case of this story, even the poor translation (Wikipedia informs me it’s abridged) is worth reading, just for the context it places all other robot stories in.
        It will be at mcgrewbooks.com soon.

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.

(Illustrated version here)
        After buying copies of books from my book printer, finding errors to correct, and giving the bad copies to my daughter who wants them, rather than discarding them I realized I was stupid. It would be a lot cheaper to buy a laser printer.
        An inkjet wouldn’t work for me. The printer is going to be sitting idle most of the time, and inkjet nozzles clog; I’ve had several, and all clogged if you didn’t use them at least every other day. Plus, the ink dries out in the cartridges. Being a powder, toner has no such problem.
        So I went looking at the Staples site, and they badly need a new webmaster. This little four year old laptop only has a gig of memory, and a lot of people have far less. The poor little machine choked. That damned web site took every single one of my billion bytes!
        Or rather than firing him, make him design his websites on an old 486. Or even 386.
        So what the hell, I just drove down there; I didn’t want to wait for (or pay for) it to be shipped, anyway, I just wanted to see what they had.
        Buying it was easy. They had exactly the printer I was looking for; Canon, a name I trusted since we had Canons and other brands at work, wireless networking, and not expensive. They had a huge selection of lasers; it’s a very big store. I paid for the printer and sheaf of paper, and man, lasers sure have gotten a lot less expensive. I expected at least $250 just for the printer, maybe without even toner, but the total including tax and paper was just a little over a hundred.
        When I got home, of course I pulled out the manual like I do with every piece of electronics I buy—and it was worse than the “manual” that came with the external hard drive I ranted about here earlier. Cryptic drawings and very little text. At least the hard drive didn’t need a manual. All there is is a network port, a USB port, a power socket, and an on/off button. Plug it in and it just works. With the printer, I really needed a manual.
        Kids, hieroglyphics are thousands of years out of style and I don’t know why you’re so drawn to emoticons, but there was an obvious reason for these hieroglyphics: globalization. Far fewer words to be written in three different languages.
        I could find nothing better on Canon’s web site. So I followed the instructions in the poor excuse for a manual for unpacking it and setting it up, as best as I could.
        I couldn’t find the paper tray.
        I’ve been printing since 1984 when I bought a small plotter and wrote software to make it into a printer. Afterwards I had ink jets at home until now, and lasers at work. All the lasers were different from each other in various ways, usually the shape of the toner cartridge, but all had a drawer that held the paper no matter what brand of printer.
        I couldn’t find it. Sighing and muttering, I opened the lid to the big laptop and copied the CD’s contents to a thumb drive to install the printer on the smaller notebook. There’s no reason to make two calls to tech support, because an installation screwup is never unexpected when you’ve been dealing with computers as long as I have.
        And why send a CD? Fewer and fewer computers have CD or DVD burners any more. Why not a thumb drive? All computers have USB ports these days, and have had for over a decade.
        The installation was trouble-free but still troubling; I didn’t think the wi-fi was connecting, as it said to hold the router button until the blue light on the printer stopped flashing. I held the button down until my finger hurt and was about to call tech support, but as I reached for the phone the light stopped flashing and burned steadily.
        Maybe it was working, but I’d have to find the paper tray to find out. But it had installed a manual, one I couldn’t find. So I plugged the thumb drive back in and searched it visually with a file manager, and found an executable for the manual. Running it took me to an offline web page which wasn’t too badly designed, but I would have far preferred a PDF, as I could put that on the little tablet to reference while I was examining the printer in search of where to stick the damned paper, instead of a bulky, clumsy notebook.
        I finally found it, and it wasn’t a tray, even though that’s what the documents called it. I haven’t seen anything like it before, and the documentation was very unclear. But I did manage to get paper in it, and sent a page to it, and it worked well.
        Meanwhile, I wish Staples would fix their web site, and Canon would fix their documentation.
        When did clear, legible documentation go out of style? Hell, the lasers we had at work didn’t even need docs. Good thing, too, because IT never left them when they installed crap. Another reason I’m glad I’m retired! Work sucks.
        At any rate, a few hours later I printed the cleaned up scans of The Golden Book of Springfield so I could check for dirt I missed looking on a screen. I saved it as PDF and printed it from that. And amazingly, this thing prints duplex! It only took fifteen or twenty minutes or so to print the 329 pages.
        I’m happy with it. Man, progress... it just amazes me. But when I went to print from Open Office, the word processor I’ve used for years, I didn’t try sending the print job to the printer, but it looked like Oo won’t print duplex.
        Then I discovered that they may stop developing Open Office because they couldn’t get developers; the developers were all working on Libre Office.
        Damn. The last time I tried Lo it didn’t have full justification, which was a show stopper when I’m publishing books. I’d tried it because someone said it would write in MS Word format. I was skeptical, and my skepticism was fully warranted. It could write a DOC file, but Word couldn’t read it. Plus, of course, the show stopping lack of full justification.
        I decided to try it out again, since Oo may be doomed… and man! Not only does it have full justification, it has a lot Oo lacks that I didn’t even know I needed. It appears to now actually write a DOC file that Word can read, even though when you save it in DOC the program warns you it might not work in Word.
        And it might… I haven’t tested it… might arrange pages for a booklet. I’ll test it with this article… when it’s longer than four pages, as it is now.
        This was all over the course of the last week as I was working on a PDF of the Vachel Lindsay book. The computer nagged me that the printer was running low on toner (it has a small “starter” cartridge), with a button to order toner from Canon. I clicked it, and damn, the toner cost almost as much as the printer did.
        Then I ran out of paper, so I went back to Staples, where I discovered that the printer I had paid eighty something plus tax for was now twice that price! So I got the toner and five reams of paper.
        At any rate, I tried to print this as a booklet, and this is what came out:

        It’s backlit; the picture on the top left and the grayer text on the bottom right are on the other side of the page.
        But a little fiddling and yes, it will print booklets. It isn’t Libre Office doing it, it’s the printer itself!

        I like this printer. I’ve figured it to about a penny per page, and I don’t think that’s too expensive, considering a page is both sides.
        And then I had this document open in Libre Office, tried to insert a graphic (the second one in this article), and it simply didn’t insert. Maybe it doesn’t like JPG files, I don’t yet know. A little googling showed me that I’m not the only one with this problem, and none of the fixes I found fixed it. I have Open Office open now.
        And here I was going to uninstall Open Office. I’d better not, I guess. I’ll need it if I want to insert a graphic; inserted in Oo they show in Lo. Puzzling.
        A week later and I’ve found that sometimes it will insert a graphic, but only if you go through the menu; using text shortcuts never inserts it. And sometimes it simply doesn’t insert the picture, and sometimes it says it doesn’t recognize the format when I’d just put the same graphic in another Lo document.
        Well, I’m not uninstalling Open Office yet, anyway. Not until Lo solves the graphics show-stoppng bug.
…
        I wrote that a few weeks ago, and have been using both. Libre Office has a horrible problem with keyboard shortcuts, and those shortcuts save a LOT of time. But except for its horrible bugs, it’s a better word processor than Open Office. So both will remain installed.
        It’s possible I may uninstall Microsoft Office, depending on how well Lo’s spreadsheet works. I haven’t even fired it up yet, but Oo’s spreadsheet is almost useless.
…
        The above is several months old now. Lo does lack one important thing Oo has: controls to move to the next or previous page. Not good when you’re writing books. Also, it still has graphics problems. Often, simply opening a document in Lo removes any graphics.
        After sitting idle for a month or so, I needed to print a return label. I’m starting to become wary of buying anything from Amazon. I’d bought a new battery for this laptop a year or two ago, and the battery came from someone other than Amazon, and it was the wrong battery. I got the right battery directly from Acer.
        Then I ordered a long throw stapler to make booklets with, and staples for it. The stapler came a week later; no staples. So I bought a box from Walgreen’s. A week later, the staples came, again not from Amazon, and they had simply thrown the box of staples in an unprotected envelope. The box was smashed, the rows of staples broken.
        Then I ordered a DVD, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I watched the first six, put the seventh in the DVD player—and it was region coded for the UK! Some company from Florida sent it. WTF is wrong with people? So I needed a return label.
        It wouldn’t print; it just hung in the print queue until it timed out. After a little digging, I found that the router had assigned a new IP address to it.
        So after a lot of googling, I gave up and cringed; I was going to need tech support, which is usually a nightmare. I wind up on the phone talking to someone with an accent so heavy I can barely understand them, if at all, who is ignorant of the product and reading from a checklist.
        I found Canon was one of those few companies that actually care about keeping their customers happy. Support was over email, painless, and effective.
        I have to say, it’s the best printer I’ve ever owned.

Some highly paid people seem to not be very good at thinking straight... or at all.

We’ve all seen robot bartenders in movies: Star Wars episode one; The Fifth Element; I, Robot, etc. Ever notice that human bartenders often have a lot of screen time in movies, but robot bartenders don’t? The reason is simple: robots are boring. Which is why we won’t see many robot bartenders in real life, and this real life robot bartender is going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon.

I suspect that the engineer who designed the thing doen’t frequent bars, but likes science fiction movies, because nobody goes to a bar to drink. From my upcoming Voyage to Earth:

“Is Mars still short of robots?”

“Not since that factory opened two years ago.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have robots tending bar, then.”

“Screw that. People don’t go to bars to drink, they go to bars to socialize; bars are full of lonely people. If there’s nobody to talk to but a damned robot they’re just going to walk out. I do have a tendbot for emergencies, like if one of the human bartenders is sick and we don’t have anyone to cover. The tendbot will be working when we’re going to Earth, but I avoid using it.”

Someone who doesn’t visit bars inventing something to use in bars is about as stupid as Richardson in Mars, Ho!, who assigned a Muslim to design a robot to cook pork and an engineer who didn’t drink coffee to make a robotic coffeemaker.

Just because it works in the movies doesn’t mean it works in real life.