ISP's and Markets

​The idea that an ISP can collect money from a content provider because a consumer requested content is like saying Safeway should be able to charge Kellog's for the Pop-Tarts I want to eat.

Just wait until Disney starts telling Time Warner to pony up for all the Toy Story they've been carrying. The real problem is that consumers have little or no choice of ISP. Each ISP has a practical monopoly in the markets where they operate.

In order for a free market to be a solution to some problem, there has to be a choice. I may choose from a variety of content providers, but I don't get to choose my cable company.

If a consumer doesn't like the way their ISP is regulating content, they should be able to choose a different ISP. But they can't. Maybe it's time we start regulating ISP's like the monopolies they really are.

When resources unavail

Every so often my Linux system starts feeling poorly. Firefox will hang and won't let me close its window. So I ALT-TAB over to my terminal window to kill it.

$ ps -fewww | grep -v grep | grep firefox bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

When this first happened, I figured I would reboot and that, of course, would fix it. But I couldn't even run shutdown! That's when I thought of this extremely inelegant but useful solution:

$ cd /proc $ kill *

And that freed up enough of whatever that I could get on with the reboot and then with my life.

When it happened today, I googled around and saw saw solutions suggesting...

• su root and (WRONG: can't su)
• ps blah blah and (WRONG: can't ps)
• ulimit (hmmm... OK I'll try that.)

This particular solution suggests setting NPROC (max user processes) using ulimit -u like so:

$ ulimit -a ... max user processes              (-u) 2047 ... $ ulimit -u 2100

Upping that value allowed me to kill and restart Firefox without rebooting!!

Thanks, IBM!!

Mac + Virtualbox/Linux ALT=CMD

By default it seems that when you run Linux in Virtualbox on a Mac, ALT will be mapped to the OPTION key and SUPER will be mapped to CMD.

It's much more natural to swap these, i.e. to map ALT to CMD.

And here's how you do it:

Create ~/.Xmodmap containing...

clear mod1
clear mod4

keycode 133 = Alt_L NoSymbol Alt_L
keycode 64 = Super_L NoSymbol Super_L

add mod1 = Alt_L
add mod4 = Super_L

And then

$ xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

Enjoy!

VNC + Mac OS + Option Key = WINNING!!

I love my Macs, but sometimes through no real fault of their own, they can be a bit of a pain in the butt.

Take the Option Key. Very helpful if you're using the Finder.

Ever try using the Option Key when you're connected remotely to your Mac Desktop using VNC? It just doesn't work. VNC settings, nothing.

But I have discovered a solution. Simply turn on Sticky Keys and use the Keyboard Viewer. Now you can use your mouse to press the Option Key - not ideal, but in a pinch, it's better than nothing!

Here are the step-by-step instructions for setting this up:

1. Open up the Preferences

2. Choose Accessibility

3. Turn on Sticky Keys

4. Go back to Preferences and choose Keyboard

5. Turn on "Shoe keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar"

6. Open up the Keyboard Viewer

7. Now whenever you need to hold down the Option Key, tap it in the Keyboard Viewer

8. If you didn't have Sticky Keys turned on, you'd have to keep it held down in the viewer, but you can just tap it the once. Tapping it again puts it into some other state. Tapping it a third time turns it off. So whenever I want Option, I double click it in the viewer. Then I do whatever it was that needed the Option Key in the first place. And then I tap it again to turn it off.

I hope you find this helpful!

#selector vs Selector

TLDR: In Swift 3, use #selector instead of Selector (see here).

The warning (No method declared with Objective-C selector 'swipedLeft:') should be your first clue that there's a problem...



If you use this code in Swift 3, the left-swipe will result in an error like this:

2016-12-24 08:15:12.645 SpriteSimpleGame[65853:2987246] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[SpriteSimpleGame.GameScene swipedLeft:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x7fb99e4101f0'

Worst of all, examples like this are all over the place because leaving out the colon results in a similar error.

Thanks to this answer I learned that what you want instead is this:

let swipeLeft = UISwipeGestureRecognizer(

    target: self,

    action: #selector(swipedLeft(sender:))

)

Thanks, internets!!

VNC black screen of sadness

Did you connect to your VNC server only to be greeted by a black screen of sadness? 

It happened to me not long ago and I don't know what made me try this, but here's what fixed it:

$ vncpasswd

As always, you're welcome.

Old code, new Xcode

When you download some old code from the Interwebs with such like:

[self.window addSubview:self.viewController.view];

and it runs just fine... and later you update Xcode and start getting runtime errors:

Applications are expected to have a root view controller at the end of application launch

Fortunately the fix is easy:

[self.window setRootViewController:self.viewController];

Thanks, Interwebs!!

LED Dice!

They cost me all of my diamonds, but I think it was worth it!

Major accomplishment

I did it!! I beat the Cheshire Cat in Yahtzee Buddies!! 

The dice are cool and all, but pretty hard to read...

I'll stick to my favorite bronze dice.

Beach Ball!!!

I finally got my beach ball dice! Yes, I had to beat 25 different opponents in 24 hours, but it was totally worth it, right? Right? 

But here's the thing. There's a bug - at least on iOS - where the progress of your wins against different opponents isn't getting updated. So if you want to earn the beach ball dice, KEEP A LIST OF THE PLAYERS YOU BEAT (and when) and then paste that information into a help request so customer service can give you credit for your achievement, as they did do for me. Thanks, Yahtzee! 

Now here's my whole lineup of dice. I do expect this will be my final update, since the remaining locked dice involve tournaments and dice masters that are impossible to beat without spending moneys on bonus rolls. C'est la vie! 

Yahtzee!!

My dice. Don't judge me. :-)

Swift selector argument - yes you can!

Selectors are an Objective C thing, but sometimes you have to use them in Swift.

For example, if you are calling performSelectorOnMainThread to work around the problem between GCD and UIWebView that causes hangs in stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString (see here) you don't have a choice.

But how to pass an argument? I defined my selector function to take AnyObject? just as I assumed I should since withObject:AnyObject?

So tl;dr - here's what I was doing wrong. The colon at the end of the selector DOES MATTER. Well duh, of course it does, because it indicates there's an argument. Here's an example of everything working correctly...

  private func caller() {
    let arg = 42
    performSelectorOnMainThread("myfunc:", withObject: arg, waitUntilDone: false)
  }

  func myfunc(arg: AnyObject?) {
    guard let n = arg as? Int else {
      print("how did we get in this cornfield?")
      return
    }
    print("and here we are with our arg n: \(n)")
  }

...and the proof of the pudding - my, how tasty!

and here we are with our arg n: 42

I hope this saves somebody else a few hours of struggle!

What To Wear

Because I never ever remember...

°F	Just Right	Too Much	Not Enough
56	warm wicking T tech long sleeve T shorts	didn't need the hat or gloves or extra LST	n/a

Handy howmany commandy

Here's a handy little bit of... well it isn't really SQL, is it? Shell scripting and SQL*Plus, more like.

tcsh & csh

alias howmany "echo 'select count(*) from table;' | sqlplus -s 'xxxxxx/xxxxxx@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=xxxxxx)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVER=DEDICATED)(SERVICE_NAME=xxxxxx)))'"

sh & bash

alias howmany="echo 'select count(*) from table;' | sqlplus -s 'xxxxxx/xxxxxx@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=xxxxxx)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVER=DEDICATED)(SERVICE_NAME=xxxxxx)))'"

(for ksh use either) - and then...

$ howmany

Enjoy!

p.s. I'd love to add a pipe to

sed -e '/^$/ d; s/^\s-*//g'

but the dollar sign screws things up, at least in tcsh. Oh well!

Fergie playing Yahtzee!

Hard-to-read Podcasts

If you use the iOS Podcasts app, you've probably had occasion to swear at the producers of a podcast for their graphics and how they translate into dark text on a dark background. It's even worse in low light.

Well swear no more! At least not about this. It turns out there's a setting for that! Unfortunately, because this is iOS, you have to open the Settings app. Go there and choose Podcasts. And there aren't that many settings, so find this one, Custom Colors, and turn it off

And enjoy more podcasts!

Don't take checks from strangers

I don't tend to be alarmist, but this article has an important warning... when you deposit a check, everything you write on it can go back to whoever issued it - your account number, social security number... huge identity theft problem. 

http://www.westernjournalism.com/alert-people-are-getting-checks-in-the-mail-from-walmart-when-they-deposit-them/

Emacs cleanup

Because I'm always needing this between tasks...
 
;; kill buffers visiting /scratch or /tmp files
(defun cleanup ()
  (interactive)
  (let* (
         (n)
         (list)
         (file)
         )
    (setq list (buffer-list))
    (setq n 0)
    (save-excursion
      (dolist (elt list)
        (setq file (buffer-file-name (get-buffer elt)))
        (if (and
             file
             (or
              (string-match "^/scratch/" file)
              (string-match "^/tmp/" file)
              )
             )
            (progn
              (if (kill-buffer elt)
                  (setq n (+ n 1))
                )
              )
          )
        )
      (message "Delete %d buffer%s." n (if (= n 1) "" "s"))
      )
    )
  )

I Repeat...

I'm always forgetting how to repeat a command. Here's how in tcsh:

$ repeat 9999 sh -c 'now=`date +%s` ; date > /tmp/tmp ; then=`date +%s` ; diff=`expr ${then} - ${now}` ; echo xxxxx ${diff} xxxxx ; if [ ${diff} -gt 0 ] ; then date ; fi ; sleep 15'

(The inner command is /bin/sh, of course)

Hot and Sour Matzo Ball Soup

Ingredients:

• Swanson Chinese hot and sour broth 
• more broth (h&s or vegetable, optional)
• a can or two of mushrooms
• a scallion or two, chopped like you do
• matzo balls, prepared as directed on the back of a can of Manischewitz matzo meal

Note: you can use one or two boxes/cans of broth, depending on your desired broth/ball ratio. The amount of scallions & mushrooms would then tend to follow the broth.

Instructions:

1. Mix up the matzo ball ingredients and put them in the refrigerator.
2. Cut up the scallion(s) and put them, along with the mushrooms, into the broth.
3. Bring the broth and vegetables to a boil.
4. Add the matzo balls to the boily broth.
5. Lower the heat and simmer per the Manischewitz directions, about 30 minutes or so.