Slashdot Bingo

How to play: Whenever someone invokes one of these topics in the comments on Slashdot, place a token on the corresponding square! Stack two tokens if the subject of the reference has nothing at all to do with the subject of the article. Five in a row and you win!

Remember to shout "Bingo!"

Why Isn't There a 'Presentation Mode?'

After so many years of Power Point presentations and public screens controlled by computers, it is a mystery to me why there still is no such thing as a "presentation mode." You ought to be able to tell the operating system, "No matter what happens, don't bother me. Don't display any message boxes, don't put anything on top of the current application, and don't steal the foreground focus."

It's a big problem when a Windows machine is embedded in an outdoor video display. It's set up to give the impression that it works seamlessly, like a TV. Then a software glitch happens and Windows shows its ugly face. Like this:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Calculatorating-in-Las-Vegas.aspx

You would think that if the operating system cannot be counted on to not interrupt you, presentation software might at least try to give the illusion that the only thing going on is the content of the presentation. Bah! Some of the worst offenders are applications interrupting themselves with update requests. I can't count how many times I've seen a professor try to begin a slide presentation from a PDF file when his slides are covered up with this obscenity:


How come Adobe can't figure out how worthless this dialog is? The person who programmed it seems to think that the user is going to say, "Oh, a dialog box. I love dialog boxes. Let's see what this one says..." And then they think the user is going to carefully read it and consider all the choices.

F**k no, man! Here's what really happens:

User: "OMG! WTF! Did I break something? Where'd this error message come from? Where's my presentation? Update who, what? No! Cancel! Go away!"

Anytime a program shows a dialog message, I think, "ah, this application was programmed by idiots." They're idiots because they don't understand two essential facts:

1. Users do not read message boxes. Ever. Seriously. I'm a computer geek, and I don't read the damn things.

2. The mere fact you're popping up a dialog box carries an unintentional message by itself. Whether you mean to or not, you will lead the user to believe he did something wrong. That message carries the same weight no matter how friendly you make the words inside the box. See rule #1.

Before I go too far on this tangent, my point is that most interruptions are unnecessary. (Adobe, if you need the updates, get them automatically, and if you don't need them, don't ask!) Of the questions that are necessary to ask, well then you're just screwed, because nobody will read it.

So why isn't there a Presentation mode? There are times when an interruption is not just annoying, it's completely unacceptable. How about no interruptions whenever an application is running full screen mode? Or give us a key combination, or a taskbar shortcut, to turn off interruptions? Why not?

I Don't Do House Calls

I wish I could help, but I have to tell you up front that it's unlikely I'll have the time, sorry. With the utmost respect and kindness, I must demur that if I did have some free time, I wouldn't spend it on a service call.

I apologize for this drawn-out "no", but you have opened up a subject which has a long and ghastly history for me. I used to help friends & family with their computers at home, and after much work and frustration I decided it is not something I'm willing to do anymore. I'm sure you would be willing to pay a reasonable amount, but the trouble is the reasonable amount to charge for such a service doesn't come close to the time and stress involved.

I gently suggest that if you knew what you were asking for, you would not ask: the job is akin to separating all the white and black granules out of a pepper shaker into equal piles with tweezers and a magnifying glass. It will require the utmost concentration, but teach me nothing.

I understand the plight you are in, because computers rarely work right, and it is difficult to find someone willing and able to look at them for you. I feel the utmost sympathy for you and the millions of other people like you who have trouble with them; clearly things need to improve. If I am ever in a position to effect a change, I promise I will do what I can to fix those design flaws that cause you so much grief, and try to bridge the disconnect between computers and ordinary people.

But just because I've worked hard to become proficient with computers, doesn't mean I have to feel obligated to do additional work just because I have the ability. I may have the ability, but if I answered every request like this that I get - and I can't walk down the street without being hounded by requests for computer help - then I would never do anything else.

I'll tell you what I am willing to do for you. Send me an email, and describe your problem. If it is something I can advise you on, I will give you all the advice I can - for free - when I have time. Just don't ask for house calls.

Pro Tip: Setting Your Clock

User interfaces of clock radios are so bad, I'll do anything to avoid interacting with them.

Here's one way to avoid having to figure out how to set your clock: if you ever have to unplug your clock to move it, wait until midnight. That way when the clock flashes "12:00 a.m." after you plug it back in, it will already be the right time!

Now I just have to wait until 7 o'clock tomorrow morning to set the alarm...

A Curiously Chocolate Radio

I've been saving Altoids tins for years. They're full of project possibilities: how much electronics could you cram into one? What neat things will people see when they peek inside?

From the outside this looks like an ordinary Altoids tin. But what's under the cover?

Why, it's a shiny pocket radio!

I got the circuit board out of a cheap FM radio, but I added the batteries and speaker. (The original radio only had head phones.) It turned out to be very difficult to get the antenna to work right. The original radio used the head phones to double as a loop antenna, but the speaker I replaced them with doesn't have long enough wires and wouldn't get any reception with the metal tin surrounding it. I solved it by running one leg of the audio out the back as an antenna wire, and I grounded the other side of the audio to the metal case.

Now the radio gets better reception than it did even before I hacked it!

The chocolate brown theme of the tin reminded me of old wooden cabinet phonographs, so I thought it would be neat to make the radio so that you prop the lid open to use it, as if it were from that era.

The speaker is held to the lid with foam tape, which keeps it from buzzing. The circuit board is held on one side with foam tape and screws on the other side, and the batteries are in a Radio Shack AAA battery holder, also secured with foam tape. I used 190 proof Everclear to pre-clean the inside of the tin, so the foam tape would stick tight.

I'm pleased with how this project turned out. It's one of the few projects I've actually seen through to completion in years - a testament to the wisdom of choosing a simple project. And it's something I will actually use!

What Am I Doing Here?

It's been another crazy semester, and I've no doubt lost my readers (all five of you) by not posting in so long. I've been suffering an existential crisis as to just what my blog is really all about.

I started blogging with the intention of writing about the business of software - and I will do so still from time to time - but it has been so long since my employment has dealt directly with coding that I feel I can no longer speak of it as an expert. When you're away from the front lines of software development, your memory of it becomes stale too quickly.

So I have to ask myself, who am I writing for and what would those people want to read? I will admit that I actually am writing for myself, but I do so with the suspicion that what I want to write, someone else may want to read.

For one thing, I think I will move most of my project pages off Google Pages, and turn them into blog posts from now on. Since Google has decided not to continue working on the Google Pages software, I don't know what will become of my website. Blogspot, on the other hand, has continued to improve, and I've learned how to add images to my posts.

I found that the most anecdotal narrative I've written yet, "Looting CompUSA", is also the one that rates highest on a Google search (indicating popularity). Clearly the personal touch does better than an intellectual essay.

One area that I've long neglected on this blog is my personal life. No more! My fiancee has asked why I don't talk about her on my blog, so let me start the new direction of my blog by announcing that I'm super excited because we just got our honeymoon trip booked!

Wifi Combat

I suspect someone has been jamming my wireless network today.

I noticed that web pages were taking a long time to load, which is strange since my cable internet is normally very fast. Then my laptop's wireless connection to my router
started dropping out within seconds every time it reconnected.

I opened my site monitor and found that new non-broadcasting wireless networks were suddenly popping up on channels 1 and 11, and the strongest one was on the same channel as my router. Though my connection kept dropping out, I managed to connect to the admin page on my router long enough to move it to channel 6. It's not a good idea to use the wireless network to do router configuration, but I wasn't too worried about someone spying on my router password out of my packets because I run WPA-2 encryption.

After I moved to 6, someone opened a new nonbroadcasting network on channel 8! Usually, 1-6-11 are the three channels used. These are chosen because they are as far apart as you can get; the intermediate channels interfere slightly with each other. It is possible that someone might choose 8 knowing that it would interfere with my 6. I thought, "they're trying to squeeze me out."

Haha, they don't know who they're messing with. I went into my router again and this time I sliced my broadcast power down as low as it would go: 3 percent.

You might think, that if you are in a wifi jamming war, you would want to make your signal as strong as possible. That's brute force thinking. The Zen way to beat them is to make it so they don't know your signal is there at all. A signal that is too strong is a common security risk for wifi networks; if you instead use only the minimum signal you can get by with, you reduce the chances of someone eavesdropping on your signal from far away. By setting my broadcast signal so low, hardly any of it spills outside the walls of my house.

Once I had the signal turned down so that my jammer couldn't see my network, I switched channels one last time - from 6 down to 5, so that it would both be farter from 8, and odd instead of even (if that matters -?). Though my 3% signal only gets two bars on my meter, it still runs at the full 54 MBps, and I haven't been knocked offline since.