Pretty dumb that you can't do this on a smartphone

I would think, as a newbie owner of a smartphone, that it would be straightforward to assign one ringtone to everyone on my Contacts list, and a different one to every other incoming call.

Apparently, though, this is not possible. You can assign a ringtone to one person on your Contact list, and then to another, and then to another ... but that seems tedious. Granted, it's likely that I'd only need to do this for a small fraction of my Contacts list, for all practical purposes, but still, how is this not something that a smartphone can do, right out of the box? I mean, when I get an incoming call from a friend, it takes no discernable time for the phone to display that person's name and avatar, as obtained by a look-up from the Contacts list, so why can't this info be used to play a different sound file, as well?

And given that an incoming call from someone not on my Contacts list is at least 99% likely to be a scam, why wouldn't phone programmers jump all over this opportunity to make our devices safer, and then indulge in a big splash of self-congratulations? Not to be all cynical or anything.

If I'm wrong about this, please do not hesitate to correct me.

Geezer Alert! (Memories on a Tuesday afternoon)

I don't remember my first experience of programming computers. Close to the beginning, though, for sure, was a course I took in my junior year of high school (c. 1976), where we learned how to write BASIC programs that ran on a DEC PDP-8, I think it was. There was one terminal, which displayed both what you were typing and your program's output on yellow paper, a giant roll of which lived in a cardboard box, below the terminal.

I do vividly remember the first time I made money programming. It was right around that time, probably a school break six months later, when I was asked by my friend's father to put together something that would display bar charts and stuff like that. In this case, I was using his Apple computer (model number long since vanished from memory), which hooked into the TV and used a cassette tape recorder to store programs. He paid me $10 for four hours' work, which was a considerable bump from what I had ever made before that; e.g., about a $1/hr for a paper route, babysitting, and lawn-mowing, maybe $1.50/hr for caddying.

The money was nice, but it wasn't the most important thing. Computers were just ... pretty cool, and the thought that it was not inconceivable that I could someday get paid for playing with them? Well, as I said, still a vivid memory.

Fast forward to the time that they became magical.

After having been excused from further attendance after my sophomore year in college ("Mr. Blutarsky: 0.0"), I still hung around with my erstwhile classmates over the next few years. Mostly in bars, admittedly. But for some reason, one night, I went with one of them to a class, which was an introduction to Lotus 1-2-3. Looking at the Wikipedia article, I now realize that this must have been very near the initial release, well before it became the proverbial killer app. Anyway ...

omg

To be able to put a number in one cell, and then a formula in another cell that referred to the contents of the first cell, and displayed the result in place, and then instantaneously updated when you changed the first cell? That was when I got hooked.

I said magical, but it was something else, too. It felt like I was privy to a sorcerer's secrets. I could make something happen that looked magical, but it was, behind the curtain, absolutely, 100%, purely logical.

What brought about these memories?

A fascinating article by Amy Peniston, posted just a week ago, in which she describes her observation of ...

... a radical shift in data analysis methodologies. Excel-based models, which had seemed top-of-the-line suddenly were too slow and too rigid; Integration with 3rd party data sources, which was once a luxury, became the norm; And analysts began to utilize scripts to accomplish many labor-intensive tasks typically performed by hand or in spreadsheets.

Enabling this change is a suite of accessible Python-powered tools.

I apologize if that punchline didn't knock you off your couch, or home barstool, or ergonomically correct desk chair, or what have you. So let me tell you that there's more! She observed these changes while working in ... wait for it ... the reinsurance industry.

Wait, what? Still not sold?

Ah, well. Such is the lot of the nerd. But thanks for reading all the way through.

(h/t: PyCoder's Weekly)

It's hard to imagine a four-word phrase that would perk me up more than this*

xkcd filter on matplotlib

This isn't the first time the streams have crossed between two of my favorite areas of interest, btw.**

I came across that delightful phrase in section eight of a wonderful article, "Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures." You should read this, for sure, if you ever have to make charts | graphs | plots. You should read it if you ever have to critically view this kind of work by others. You should read it if you're at all interested in clearer communication. You should read it. You should also check out some of the many fine links in the article, including (and how's this for a great name?) Kaiser Fung's Junk Charts.

I came across the link to the article in the Preface to a book I've just started reading. The author, Nicolas P. Rougier, has very generously made this book, Python & OpenGL for Scientific Visualization, freely available online.

(* Resists temptation to start typing You shoulds ... again *).

Admittedly, this is not gonna be primo beach reading for some of you. But all of the above is so in my wheelhouse that I just had to pass it along.

This concludes your my early Sunday*** morning geekout.

(h/t: PyCoder's Weekly for 2019-10-29)

---

* That you would be willing to say in polite company, I mean.

** You do know about import antigravity, right?

*** My weekend, these days, is Tuesday, Wednesday, and I work nights. The carpenters remodeling the apartment next door evidently do not share my schedule.

Twenty years ago (musings at a stoplight or two)

While running some errands a short while ago, I got to thinking about the Internet, back in the day.

Three things came to mind:

There was no Google. Searching basically sucked. I still want to punch you if you say "Ask Jeeves."

Netscape Navigator was the hot new thing. When my coworker and best friend, ddw, took the initiative to download the latest release and install it for use on our office LAN, he reported it as "this behemoth." He was not being hyperbolic. The file size was just over 3 MB. We had a T1 line at work, which almost certainly cost the company many hundreds of dollars per month. If memory serves, the download speeds were about the same as the cheapest DSL plans available now six years ago, which go went for about 1/1000th the price. (Is DSL even still a thing?)

I bought a new car in 1999. I got a car loan by clicking on a sidebar ad while checking my Yahoo email. I gave this company that I had never heard of my social security number. Everything worked fine. I'm not sure what's more scary these days: online ads or using Yahoo email.

Win some, lose some.

Packrat excavations

I'm now deep in the bowels of my layers of old boxes -- pruning, in preparation from moving from a place with practically infinite storage space to a place where I assume there will be none -- and among the gobs of stuff I've found are about thirteen DSL modems. Or forty-seven. I've lost count.

I'm responsibly bringing them to the town's e-waste disposal center, so don't worry about that. But, sheesh, I am starting to wonder how many phone companies have me on some obsolete shitlist for never returning their once-precious gear.

(And fantasizing about how annoying it would be to them, were I actually now to return these things, as once COMMANDED, in the accompanying paperwork, received lo those many years ago.)

Family portrait

[ + ]

Right before a trip to the town's e-waste center.

If you're running Windows, you should uninstall Quicktime now

Apple is no longer updating Quicktime for Windows, and at least two security vulnerabilities are known to exist in the latest version. These will not be fixed.

Removing Quicktime is straightforward.

This does not apply to Quicktime on the Mac.

If you still have .MOV files on your system, you can view them using other programs. I've been using Irfanview for years, and I'm perfectly happy with it. Apparently, Windows Media Player will play .MOV files, too.

[Added] Unknown points out, in Comments, that VLC is also quite capable.

How to get rid of the unwanted Avast ad in your outgoing email

A recent upgrade to Avast's antivirus software (to version 11.1.2245) evidently included a highly undesirable feature: automatic injection of an advertisement for Avast as my email signature. The ad became visible to me only after I clicked the Send button. Below is a screenshot (with some personal details obscured) and the steps I took to shut this off.

MORE »

And speaking of civil engineering ...

... Jon Timmer offers some interesting details in answering the question I know you've wondered about as often as I have: "How DO they sort all those recyclable materials, anyway?"

Deep thought

We've come up with mailman letter carrier, waitress server, fireman firefighter, policeman police officer, stewardess flight attendant, manned crewed missions, and many other perfectly tolerable gender-neutral terms, but I still haven't heard a good replacement for manhole.

Nor has Google, either, apparently. See page 11 of a checklist that may appeal to your inner civil engineer.

(h/t: Jon Brodkin)

You submit one cheek swab and this is the kind of email you get

A message from haplogroup Administrator, Mike Walsh:

People in any R1b subclade from R-M269 on down should consider going to 111 Y STRs or 67 at a minimum.

And oh yeah, there's a "Buy Now" button.

Funny and cool

From today's Versioning email newsletter:

Finally, here’s an amazing image showing the world from space, partially occluded by the moon. Or, to put it in language millenials would understand: “the moon photobombed our big space selfie” [nasa].

Gmail search tip -- use the from: and filename: keywords

Just noticed this string that appeared in the Gmail search window after I clicked on one of the thumbnails in the "Recent photos" sidebar while looking at a new message from ... let's say somebody@example.com. It looks like a handy way to find that picture that person sent you that one time.

from:somebody@example.com filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png)

Works whether the pictures are attached or embedded in the body of the message, despite what it says here.

You might want to add gif and other extensions, of course.

Note the parentheses, the colons and the absence of a space after them, and the capital ORs. Not positive, but I think those might all be requirements.

Anyone have Dennis Lehane's email address?

Also, please forge the From: field to read "Jeff Bezos."

[ + ]

(text source: Moonlight Mile)

Help stomp out robocalls [updated]

(Update at bottom of post.)

TC sent along an article about a free service called Nomorobo that claims to block robocalls. He wondered how it worked: "If you're not bundled with everything together, how is your computer going to answer your phone when it rings? There's no connection between the two as far as I can see."

So I looked into it a bit, and I figured I'd post (a mildly edited version of) my reply to him, since it seems like potentially useful information.

MORE »

*snicker*

Dhananjay had posted his problem on StackOverflow and promptly got an answer that wasn’t really solving or explaining the issue, but at least linked to W3Schools to make matters worse ...
    -- Christian Heilmann

Headline of the Day

Today, we are all tackle-box-faces:

Researchers Control Computers Through Body Piercings

Oh, this is such a good read

Frank Chimero has written up and posted a version of a talk he recently gave, called "What Screens Want."

His talk was (ostensibly?) aimed at web developers, but there's no way you need to fit into that slot to follow it, or to love it.

Just for example, how's this for empathy, for every plain ol' computer user out there?

Computers, after all, are just shaky towers of nested abstractions: from the code that tells them what to do, to the interfaces that suggest to the user what’s possible to do with them. Each level of abstraction becomes an opportunity to make work more efficient, communicate more clearly, and assist understanding. Of course, abstractions also become chances to complicate what was clear, slow down what was fast, and fuck up what was perfectly fine.

And this?

So what is the answer? I found this quote by Ted Nelson, the man who invented hypertext. He’s one of the original rebel technologists, so he has a lot of things to say about our current situation. Nelson:

The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world.

Emphasis mine. [...]

Also, to illustrate some of what he's saying, Frank has clips from James Burke's Connections, Eadweard Muybridge's work with horses, and The West Wing. Featuring CJ. I mean, the shared nerd porn interests alone ought to do it, don't you think?

Go, and enjoy.

(h/t: Jenna Wortham, via a Scuttlebot post which was presented as a sidebar on the NYT's Bits blog, which I saw while reading a note about Twitter and Perfect Forward Security, and omg, when the h/t is getting to be longer than the post, it is waaay past time to click the Publish button)

__________

[Added] Of course the first blockquote above reminded me of one of the classics from the mesozoic (when we had just evolved from hamsters running along wires strung between tin cans, and thence onto typewriter keyboards, and were suddenly able to sign up for Automatically Delivered Email Newsletters), Joel Spolsky's post "article," The Law of Leaky Abstractions. Joel does eventually get into specific programming examples, but don't let those throw you, if you're not a programmer. The opening, the general ideas, and most importantly, the view of what today's programmers face when trying to relate to non-programmers are well worth your time, especially if you liked Frank Chimero's piece. Even if the words are more than *gasp* ten years old.

Testy!

From a short interview of Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of the C++ programming language (emph. added):

C++ was and is meant to be a tool for professionals and for people who takes programming seriously. It can and is used by novices, but the too often heard complaint that “C++ isn’t for everybody and not every project is easily done using C++” is based on a seriously miscomprehension. There can be no programming language that is perfect for everybody and for everything. C++ doesn’t try to be everything for everybody, but it is rather good at the tasks for which it was designed – mostly systems programming, software infrastructure, and resource-constrained applications. C++ dominates the fields where its strengths are needed. The fact that you can write a simple web app easier using JavaScript or Ruby does not bother me. Basically, C++ was not primarily designed for tasks of medium complexity, medium performance, and medium reliability, written by programmers of medium skills and experience.

So he says now.

There are many ahems one might link to. Since he is a hero of mine, I'll be kind and leave it at this "How long" question.

(h/t: StatusCode issue 45)

Tempting!

[ + ]

You gotta think about a million people will be registering names of their opponents. It'll be the next dot-com dot-fail boom!