Mechadarwin

Oh Right, That’s Why I Hated Libraries

I dunno, back in, like, 2010, I was working on software that had something like 1 zillion dependencies (or, you know, 50. Same thing) and keeping track of consistent versions of all the dependencies was a real pain in the neck. Our organization had a dedicated CM team who set up Artifactory and Ivy and we worked pretty hard at being flexible with which version of commons-lang we actually required.

But note, that was a full time job, just managing the artifact repo and the build system. So now here I am, managing a team and we’re developing a suite of programs. We’re building some custom code, but a lot of what we want to do is accomplished with off-the-shelf libraries, each of which is available from Maven central. Of course, each one pulls in a different version of slf4j or bcprov or whatever. With only a couple of dependencies, it’s okay, there are no collisions. But last night I pulled in jets3t and *poof*, the app would no longer start because jets3t’s version of bouncycastle collides with the version I was already using, so uh oh, we can’t do encryption because the class loader is confused.

Easy enough to solve (downgrade bouncycastle to the version jets3t plays with) but this is my reminder that configuration management is actually a full time job, and there are best practices and frameworks and all that good stuff.

When Should You Have Lived?

So, Lise is off in Minneapolis for AWP. Neither one of us sleeps particularly well when we’re apart anyway, but she’s out there to talk to lots of people (not her favorite activity) and get them excited about Lithomobilus. And in the frenzy of packing, she remembered earplugs but forgot melatonin. The love of my life, on day 3, had slept for maybe 8 hours out of 72 and she was not doing well. This is where the Internet, the telephone, and modern banking combined to make me look like the best husband ever in the history of business travel.

I know that Trader Joe’s sells melatonin for not a lot of money. I know they’re a national chain. So I used Google to find out that, hey, in Minneapolis there are three Trader Joe’s stores, each less than half an hour’s drive from the hotel.

But wait, Lise is stuck on the book fair floor; she doesn’t have time to run off to TJs! The hotel concierge isn’t answering the phone! Oh noes, what do I do?

Google “personal concierge minneapolis” and come up with Twin City Concierge. Call ’em up, “Hey, my wife is in town for a convention and forgot to pack melatonin. Could you hit Trader Joe’s, get a bottle, and drop it at the hotel for her? Sure, just sometime before tonight. Sure, here’s my credit card info. Thank you so much!”

Boom. Lise was nearly in tears with gratitude (chalk that up to sleep deprivation) and was kind of surprised when I mentioned how reasonable the cost was. She pointed out that many people would not even consider making that call, assuming that it would be too expensive. This, she said, is an unseen privilege of money. We have enough money that, sure, we’d rather not spend money we don’t have to, but we have a different definition of, “have to,” than we did when we were broke, and that gave us the confidence that let us find out that this kind of personal service is way more affordable than we thought.

Lise told me that now I am:

famous at AWP as the best husband ever and
hated by all the other husbands for making them look bad.

To this latter point I can only say, dudes, that didn’t take me; y’all had that down all by yo’self.

Oh yeah, the title of this post. There are a zillion ridiculous quizzes on the web, which Harry Potter character would you invite on your dragon, and what would your job have been in which century should you have lived?

Telephones. Modern medicine. Lightning fast access to useful information about exotic and remote places. Currency that spends just fine 2,000 miles away. Currency that travels 2,000 miles faster than you can say the words, “two thousand miles.” Consumer protection laws and food and drug safety regulations that mean I can trust, sight unseen, that the pills are what they purport to be and do what they claim. You know what? Now. Now is good.

Decent Encryption Is Getting Easier

I just found out a thing that makes using PGP with GMail on a Mac easier.

The problem: PGP encrypting an email means that, at the time of hitting the “send” button, the computer where the plain text message is stored needs to have your secret key and the public key of the recipient, and in general webmail (like GMail) means that the message is actually resident on a computer that is far away from the one that’s attached to your keyboard. There’s a manual workaround for this, but it’s a pain in the neck and anyone using it will not wonder why PGP isn’t more common.

Also, I love the way that with GMail (and other webmail services) I can get to my email messages even when I’m far away from my computer. That’s why I have never hooked the Mail app up to my GMail account; because I didn’t want to download my mail and then have it unavailable on the web. But I accidentally hooked it up last night and nowadays it uses IMAP instead of POP, which means that the messages can stay on Google’s servers but I can now use the GPG plugin to encrypt and sign my emails with ease. And you can, too:

First, get GPGTools. You’ll want that.
If you don’t already have a key pair, generate one.
Hook up Mail.app to your GMail account:
Feel good about the security of your shit.

Artisanal Is the New Organic

As we now know, organic food isn’t a health issue for the consumer but for the producer, but back in the 1970s only a very few people were hip to that. Back then, “organic,” vegetables meant that they were:

more expensive
weird looking
small
only available at the hippie stores

Nowadays, you can find organic vegetables in Safeway. I’ve noticed that some stores (Nob Hill Foods, for one) only carry certain things in the organic section and don’t offer a pesticide and fertilizer version (which, by the way, is fine with me). Heck, even Costco has a huge organic section. It’s gone mainstream, and that’s probably good for the long term. The price markup is dropping a bit, too. So where are the retailers making their huge bucks off the hippies? “Gluten-free” and “artisanal”. I swear, I saw a package of meat that was labeled gluten-free. Whew! That’s a relief!

So yeah, my hypothesis is that today, things are labeled, “artisanal,” and what that really means is that the artisanal product is:

more expensive (see packaging, below)
lumpy in unexpected places
small (but probably hand-wrapped in tissue and tied with raffia)
only available at stores where rich people shop (if it’s at a little corner market, it’s not artisanal, it’s just fresh made by the owner, same as it has been for years; do you want that pupusa or are you just gonna take a picture of it?)

Smart

Dagmar just got her teeth cleaned. I was waiting in the front office for the tech to bring her out and one of the staff asked me if she was smart. I was nonplussed. I never even thought about it. I said she’d never done the kid’s math homework. I should have said I have a problem labeling as smart any creature that will eagerly eat cat shit.

Remembering my People

Tonight is All Souls’ eve. The QBCPS tradition for this evening is to have our family dinner and, during dinner, we go around the table and tell stories about our loved ones who’ve died. But this year, we are all in different places. I’m at home with the creatures, the Goddess is at a sleepover, and Junglemonkey is hosting a celebration in another town. She’s got people and she’s got photos and I know she’s going to tell the stories for me there. But I still want to tell the stories myself, and the Internet is here. So I’m telling you, The Internet, and I’m telling the creatures.

Continue reading “Remembering my People”

Going Anonymous

A friend posted a link to this story about the crypto and anonymity tools Edward Snowden used to communicate with journalists before his big reveal. It’s an interesting read, by itself, with lots of links out to various privacy tools. One that especially caught my attention was Tails, an operating system that, “you can start on almost any computer.” I had to check that out. Sure enough, after a couple of failed attempts, I was able to get it going on my MacBook Pro. It’s exciting!

But what does it really do? Well, it doesn’t actually solve any of my problems. I don’t have any secrets that need protecting in that degree. The evil guys who can get at my data are governments, and the data they can get at are things that they could get anyway, whether I use Tor or not. Still, I like that Tails exists. I like that there’s an operating system that I can run on a Mac or a PC, whatever’s to hand. It’s an operating system and application suite assembled for paranoid/secure operations. I like that if I ever should need such a system, I’ve got it handy.

If you want to try it out yourself, here’s some advice that isn’t on the Tails website: have a recordable DVD handy. The thing that you download from the Tails website is a disk image and you need to burn that onto the recordable DVD. There are instructions on how to install that image directly onto a USB drive, but they didn’t work for me. The way I got it to work was to burn the image onto a DVD, boot from the DVD, then use the Tails installer that’s part of the system tools to install Tails onto a USB drive. Note that although the image is about 1 gigabyte, the installer won’t work unless the USB drive you’re installing onto is at least 16 gigabytes.

Morning News

This morning’s news brief was just full of delightful bits. My head is whirling.

We have the story about the Russian government performing cyberespionage. This will probably surprise someone; not anyone who has been checking their spam folder over the past 20 years, but yeah, the Russians have lots of programmers who write malware.

And then there’s the bit where someone pointed out that we’re not really ready for humans to go live on Mars: Study: Mars One human colony plan ‘unsafe’ and ‘unsustainable’. My reaction of, “Well, duh, I said that when I first heard about the plan,” is tempered by my respect for the scientific process. One might intuit a great many things, but until one tests the hypothesis and collects data and analyzes the data, it’s just supposition. So, cool to see that someone has done the work.

The best bit, though, is the one where the end caps on those guard rails that are part of every freeway everywhere in the U.S. don’t so much collapse and divert cars, as they’re supposed to, but impale them. Good for Virginia, I say, for getting on the job and removing those things.

Restricted Knowledge

I’m not really sure how to tell this story. I’ll start with the event that got me writing this post, but there’s a lot of backstory that explains why I even started writing, and then there are my observations of my changed thoughts and feelings about the phenomenon. It’s untidy in my mind; it doesn’t make a clean narrative.

Today’s observation: for the second time in as many days I saw a phrase on Facebook: “Ladies (and non-binary folks)”. It struck me that “non-binary” somehow has a meaning of which I’m unaware, and context suggests that whatever it means, I don’t belong in whatever category of humans it describes.

Backstory: when I was in my early twenties, I had this idea that all knowledge and all fields of endeavor should be open to all humans. I was offended by the idea of “women’s work” and “men’s knowledge,” considering such categories as oppressive as “whites only” facilities. I briefly dated a woman who, among other things, was big into herbal medicine. She had some herbal abortifacient that she was preparing for someone and I asked her about it and she told me it was none of my business, that it was women’s knowledge, and there was no good reason that I should know it. At the time, I was outraged.

More backstory: I’m a white man. I grew up in a secure economic environment. I had no trouble getting an education, nor really any long-term trouble getting a job. So, I’m a member of the privileged class, and I always have been. I have this ideal of equality that means I encounter people telling their own stories about coming from a place of less privilege and I am sympathetic, but I know that I don’t have equivalent experience and that I can’t really say anything useful about their stories.

And now, my evolved position: there are some discussions in which it is not helpful for me to contribute. While I still feel like it’s wrong to categorically exclude all men, all women, all people of <fill in the color> from any profession or access to a particular book, I also feel like it’s best to consider first whether agitating for access is even something I want. Do I have anything useful to say on the topic of black women’s experience in academia? Not really. Nor do I feel like I have any enlightenment to offer in many other situations. There are terms that I encounter that are utterly mysterious to me — “intersectional feminism”, “non-binary people” — and now instead of feeling offended at being cut off from the conversation, I feel relieved. These terms are code and they are reliable markers of stories and discussions to which I have nothing useful to contribute. Check it out! There’s a conversation where I don’t have to worry about untangling what’s going on and then trying to come up with something insightful to say! It’s not about me. That, right there, is a gift.

Retro Bubble, Order’s Up!

I just read this article that says that Angela Merkel wants Europe to have its own network. Now, maybe I’m not understanding the story, and maybe the reporter didn’t understand what the chancellor said, and maybe the chancellor doesn’t understand how the Internet works. But it seems to me that if a laptop in Berlin connects to a German ISP and sends an email to a French ISP and that email goes from the French SMTP server down a link to a laptop in Paris, there shouldn’t be any trans-Atlantic hops to that trip.

I totally understand how everyone in the world who isn’t an employee of the United States security apparatus is cheesed off and paranoid about the NSA’s compulsive spying on every bit that crosses a U.S. territorial border. Yep, that’s uncool. And, sure, if that laptop in Berlin is sending email via Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo! mail) or is conducting commerce with Amazon or FedEx, then eventually those bits will cross into the U.S. and become part of a hard drive that U.S. spooks are peering at. I guess that’s the scenario that Ms. Merkel is trying to avoid.

So, rather than go to the trouble of building a whole new Internet that doesn’t have the United States on it, which would require either severing all contact with the U.S. or running a huge (metric) fuckload of fresh cable, how about the E.U. just do the time warp and have their own version of the dot com bubble? Pretend it’s 1996 all over Europe and instead of using Google and Amazon, maybe they can develop their own ecommerce industry. I know that a few places are trying.

Continue reading “Retro Bubble, Order’s Up!”