WSJ: “Americas Baby Bust”:

The nation’s falling fertility rate is the root cause of many of our problems. And it’s only getting worse.

…

The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America’s total fertility rate is 1.93, … it hasn’t been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.

…

Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

The article touches on, but does not examine fully, the variation in fertility by economic class (and its implications for taxation, education, health care, and other public services).

The author does note (as we discovered when examining demographics while I was on the State Board of Education), that population growth is being fueled by immigration (and on the state level for our state at the time, migration), not by replacement.

I wonder to what extent this demographic shift in developed countries (which is more pronounced in Europe than the U.S.) is an underlying cause of higher tax rates in European countries.

Via Dave Pell’s Next Draft

General, Economics, U.S. Politics | No Comments »

Consider being a Kickstarter backer for Dungeon Keeper 2, a very enjoyable game from yesteryear.

As with Dungeon Keeper, the player assumes the role of an “evil” fantasy dungeon overseer tasked with protecting his domain from questing do-gooder heroes sent to vanquish him. Looks to be a blast, and the project updates inspire confidence thus far.

Go be a backer!

General | No Comments »

I noticed the current version of SQLite now supports foreign key constraints. (Previous versions would parse the definition, but not enforce the constraint.) I wanted to take advantage of this in a project I’m working on, but it was oddly a bit convoluted to get there. I don’t know why my installed version was more than three years old (pre v3.6.19, which was released Oct of 2009), but it was definitely time for an upgrade.

Simply downloading and replacing the pre-compiled binary didn’t work well; I lost the functionality of the up arrow key (to recall the previous line), and encountered the escape sequence “^]]A” instead.

Some Google searching led me this answer on Stack Overflow, which was only partly helpful. It essentially says the pre-compiled binary isn’t linked to a readline library, so that support isn’t baked in by default. I’d have to compile from source to get that functionality back. (Why it’s not precompiled that way for a default OS X install, I don’t know.)

If you download the “autoconf” source … then you can compile it via the terminal (cd to the directory the tarball extracts to):

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Stack Overflow answer by AmbroseChapel

Mid-way into the ./configure, however, the process died as no C compiler was found by the script. Grr. I recently upgraded my computer, and it seems not all of the *nix pieces in the background transferred over as I had hoped.

Supposedly, the easiest way to get these installed is through the preferences dialog in Xcode. It’s an oddly slow download, and kept failing on me at the end with a “Failed to mount … not recognized error.” Repeated attempts yielded the same result. More searching revealed the problem was seemingly common, and solvable by attempting the download through either Tor or a VPN. So, I spent some time trying to get my school’s VPN software installed. (It took about an hour, due to almost no documentation, old software from my school, and wishing to avoid the Cisco client in favor of the OS X native one.) I still ended up with an error after downloading through the VPN, but the install worked this time.

After that, the SQLite config/make process worked just fine … Except the install didn’t overwrite my previous binary but created a new one in a different PATH location. Simply deleting the old one didn’t work (for reasons I don’t entirely understand); the new one would be found by which, but would not run when the binary was called without the full path. Not wanting to troubleshoot further, I added a soft link to the old path, and the up arrow key now works.

That was a lot of work for a “small” feature.

Computers, Programming | No Comments »

I was going to write a long, tutorial-style post on how I was able to get my university’s VPN working on OS X without having to resort to the Cisco client, which is what they provide. (Doubly frustrating, as the first client offered for download is a PowerPC only version … it’s not clear it doesn’t work on Intel-Macs until after it’s installed and wants to restart the machine. Yes, the is an version that works on Intel-Macs, but it has a different client name and is less prominently displayed.)

Turns out, the native client isn’t necessary, as an excellent (and generic) guide to using the native VPN client already exists, complete with a web-accessible tool for decrypting the “shared secret”. (Decryption took less than two seconds. Another online decryption service is here.)

The profile files are available publicly (complete with the “encoded” yet easily decoded “shared secret”), and can easily be found with a Google search (although I had to use the cached pages, as the university recently changed all of their support links, and the redirects point to a generic page).

It’s a bit strange that the “shared secret” is “guarded” so closely, particularly when the VPN is only usable via the university’s authentication. It seems it would be easier to simply offer instructions on how to use the native client, rather than offering multiple downloads.

The native client is nice. I find it much easier to use, and more consistent with the look and feel of OS X than the Cisco one.

Computers | No Comments »

I’ve been excited about the Microsoft Surface. I want to like it, but given my experience with Microsoft products over the past few years, my expectations were low. Ever since Vista, workflows that should be simple have become more complicated, and software more bloated. Simple examples like the restructured control panels, User Account Control, frustrations with “Windows Genuine Advantage” DRM, and the “dumbification” of Media Center (the Xbox version too, which works only when the planets are in perfect alignment). Microsoft has increasingly made it more difficult to enjoy using their products.

In what might be a great example of confirmation bias, I couldn’t bring myself to like Surface.

Prior to the iPad Mini debut, I was chatting with the father of one of my scouts. He mentioned that most people at his work were looking forward to it for one primary reason: being able to run Office apps. I do a great deal of work in Word and Excel, not because they’re my preferred apps, but because they are the common denominator for collaborating with others, and because the most ubiquitous citation manager (EndNote) develops its plugins for Word.

I was at the mall—visiting the Apple Store, as it happens—and saw ads for surface plastered all over the escalators and central landing. “Microsoft Surface: Only available at the Microsoft Store,” the ads loudly proclaimed. A quick search on my phone showed the closest Microsoft Store was about a half-hour away. There wasn’t a Microsoft Store in the mall. Bummer. I wanted to try it out.

As it happens, there were a series of demonstration counters on the ground floor, that I’d somehow missed, directly under some of the huge advertisements for Surface.

Why is it only available at the Microsoft Store? Maybe Microsoft knows it’s not ready, and isn’t ready for the public to acknowledge that. Limited distribution doesn’t make sense unless the intent is to keep it from the public. Owning the hardware chain is a necessary step to producing a top device in the modern market, and providing top-notch support is equally important. Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t have the customer-support infrastructure in place for mass market yet. Maybe limited distribution is an ill-advised attempt to generate foot traffic in seemingly less-popular Microsoft stores. Whatever he reason, it’s an odd decision that will, in the long run, delay mass acceptance, which will, in turn, delay third-party developer adoption, neither of which are good outcomes for Microsoft.

With a four-year old in tow (she was very patient with me), I test drove the Surface. Not all of the controls were naturally intuitive, but some of the basic ones were sufficient: swiping from the edge, and the windows key got me out of most applications, but it was never clear when I was quitting, and when I was switching. It suspect there will be memory-related frustrations for typical users hat don’ actively manage the number of running processes. There were too many widgets and “gee-whiz” add-ons for me to like it. I don’t care about (most) stocks, and don’t want the distraction of having them pushed to me. The same with weather data (I have a window, and I know what season it is), and news tickers (in addition to being a distraction when I’m working, I don’t particularly trust the curation). I want quick access to the apps I need to complete my tasks. While I suspect a great deal of this is customizable, I believe most people won’t customize, but the default presentation will be an underlying annoyance. While part of the joy of being a geek is endless customization, I never really feel productive doing it.

Apps on the Surface, in general, were slow to load, and made seemingly slower by long animations. Interfaces were radically different, to the point of being confusing. For example, the email page puts the “To” and “Cc” on the left (in landscape), with a great deal of empty (unused?) space below, but the “Subject” field on the right, but not clearly editable. Standard UI affordances that identified editable space weren’t used consistently. In other apps too, the UI seemed learnable, but yet different.

I love the idea of the TouchCover, with its built-in keyboard. In practice, it didn’t respond well to how I type. I’ve read that it takes some getting used to, and I can see why that would be the case. The TypeCover, with its real keys, was much more natural for me. For a tablet to really fill the space between my phone and my laptop, it needs a keyboard, and I think Microsoft has a good innovation here.

In so many ways, Surface violated, or maybe more accurately, makes irrelevant, most previous experience with interfaces. It approaches interface design so differently, that everything is slightly foreign. There are some good ideas, and it’s learnable, but when everything is foreign, it’s by definition not intuitive. To add a Surface to my workflow would take effort before it felt natural, and that’s a barrier Microsoft needs to break to bring Surface mainstream.

It looks nice, but it’s not for me. Yet.

Computers, Usability | No Comments »

After being away from programming for a while, I was working on a throw-away PHP script to email out grade notifications. Half-way through, I remembered the mail() function has never worked properly on my development machine. Sure, I could upload my script to a server, but it was too much hassle. It was only about 40 students, so doing it manually was not too much trouble.

A few days later, I was reading something online and it clicked: check the php.ini

Sure enough, nothing was specified, so PHP was trying to use the default. Sending mail from the bash command line worked fine:

~> printf "Subject: Test\nHello" 
    | sendmail -f myemail@gmail.com anotheremail@gmail.com

PHP, however, wasn’t working, even though it defaulted to sendmail. A quick which command sorted out why: the default sendmail path in php.ini was different than my actual sendmail path. ‘Twas quickly fixed, and now works like a charm.

There is still an issue with SpamHaus rejecting some emails at recipient’s servers, but stuff is at least getting sent properly now.

General | No Comments »

Seth Clifford writes a frustrating story of his parents’ interaction with Comcast. Though never (yet) to the extreme level Seth describes, this always seems like the end game whenever I need to interact with Comcast or AT&T.

Update: Seth has written an even better follow-up.

H/T Jim Dalrypmple.

General | No Comments »

Note: I wrote this at the end of August, but never posted it. There are some excellent walkthroughs of the levels online.

I finished the “Capture the Flag” hacking event put on by Stripe, an online credit card processor. (It’s not a hugely impressive ranking, but finishing was not a trivial task! About seven thousand people started, I was 549 of 978 finishers.)

It was neat, and I learned a handful of things along the way, most notably a vulnerability in SHA (also, here), and I built a web server in Python. I hadn’t previously done for more than a few lines in Python, so using a new language was a pleasant challenge. (@Stripe: Maybe some Clojure next time? I haven’t used that before either, but I’d like to!) The first levels were pretty easy, and I made it through the first five pretty quickly—it would have been even faster if not for family obligations like dinner and putting the kids in bed. For level 6, the chat rooms really helped out (I started lurking the chat rooms around level 4), and had it not been for the chat rooms pointing to an article on SHA vulnerability and suggesting a look at the level’s log files (which led me to notice another vulnerabilty that had to be leveraged as well), I wouldn’t have made it.

I ended up on the final level before anyone had captured the flag, as one of just over 100 people to get there (at the time). I ended up staying awake all night, somewhat to the detriment of my other projects. By the early morning, around the time there were about 10 people completing the last level, someone was kind enough to connect the dots of what I’d deduced from the code and inferred from the chat room. I knew from the chat room, for example, that I’d need SSH access on a server belonging to the “company”, and had been able to leverage previous hacks to depost my SSH key and gain access, but wasn’t sure yet how to use it.

I finished my code a little while later, and did a first run, and was able to pare down the password space by about 1/3. I was tired though, and not particularly interested in the leaderboard, so I took a long (and much deserved) break. When I came back the next afternoon, there were so many users hammering the server that the port-counting method I used became ineffective. I kept tweaking my code, and eventually switched part of my code to Ruby to make it easier for me to edit/tweak. Ruby’s not my primary langauge either, but I’ve played in it enough—and used Prototype.js, which uses Ruby idioms—that I’m comfortable with basic tasks. Things would have moved faster if the final server had accepted PHP. It was frustrating that it didn’t; the hacked Level 2 didn’t expose the PHP binary to the command line but it executed PHP in the webserver as part of my exploit. (At least, PHP wasn’t in $PATH. As I wrote this, I figured out a way to find the path to the binary, but the servers are now closed so I can’t go back and attempt it.)

Switching to Ruby was, in the long run, I think, a mistake on an over-loaded server. Someone in the chat suggested they were able to significantly improve their success rate by implmeneting a particular piece in C instead of using an interpreted language. I spent some time in XCode and mostly completed the part I needed. At the same time, I was still running my Ruby code in the background, and went through several runs not making any progress because there was so much noise on the server (which was not helped by several users that thought they’d achieve success by port scanning as many servers as they could). I had other things to take care of, and dropped the project for a time, as I wasn’t making any progress.

I tried again the following morning, and there was still a great deal of jitter in the results, and again, I didn’t have time to finish up my C solution. I didn’t touch it at all over the weekend, which turned out to be enough time for the completion list to jump from the dozen or so it had been when I started to more than five hundred. When I checked Monday night, nearly every request was went through fast enough with the Ruby solution that there was no need to switch. (By way of comparision, my first effort was successful in excluding a test only about 2 out of ten tries, while the test run on Monday succeeded more on than 9 out of 10, which made checking the 4,000 tests I needed to run—four sets of 1,000, with each set dependent on the previous one—super easy, and my program runs were completed in a couple of hours of running in the background.)

Update (1 Nov): One of the prizes (the only prize, actually, apart from recognition) was a free T-shirt from Stripe. Mine arrived yesterday. It’s a lightweight, navy shirt, 50/50 cotton from American Apparel, with what seems to be excellent build quality.

General, Programming | No Comments »

I was visiting a marketing software company with a renowned professor when he said something that both startled and intrigued me: “Programmers,” he said, “are arrogant.”

He’s right. We are.

My mind flashed back to earlier this morning when I was reading comments on Hacker News about a supposed fork to a popular programming language. The language author identified several flaws in a popular language, then set about to fix them. It’s arrogant to assume that his new product is better (there was some disagreement on this at HN), or that there would be enough adoption to make the project even partially as viable as its ancestor. Only time will tell whether he was right or not.

It’s arrogant to roll our own code rather than adopt existing libraries, but it happens all of the time.

It’s arrogant to think our code is as useful to others as it is to ourselves.

It’s arrogant to stress over the details of products we release, to insist on refining the corners and polish the surfaces only other coders see.

But without arrogance, nothing new would be built.

Arrogance challenges the status quo. It feeds the courage to try for a better way (even when we fail at it). The arrogance of builders, designers, and innovators gives us new things.

It’s our greatest weakness, and our greatest blessing.

General, Design, Programming | 1 Comment »

Dear Netflix,

It’s not me it’s you.

I cancelled my account just before the 60% price increase kicked in. I took the exit survey because I wanted to let you know why. You didn’t give me that chance.

The closest item to my answer was “I want to cut costs.” While that’s somewhat true, it’s not the whole story.

You offended me with a 60% price hike. I immediately decided to cancel as soon as my current pricing ended.

Splitting the product prices cemented my decision. I purchase products because they provide value to me. If the value doesn’t match the price, I don’t buy. I’m not cutting costs, I no longer see the value of your separated services. It’s not me, it’s you.

First, you’re paying too much for your content; when you pass those costs on to me, I’m not interested. Yes, studios have a great deal of bargaining power in this assymetrical relationship, but not buying at their inflated prices is an option you should consider. It’s not worth what they’re charging. My pricing sensibilities are a product of the 99-cent-ificiation of media. Digital distribution should be cheap. Digital content at your scale should be too.

Second, Neflix offered the unique proposition of both discs by mail and streaming, together in one package. I don’t get that from RedBox. I’ve carried an Amazon Prime membership for years simultaneous to my Netflix subscription, and while Prime videos are a newer offering—and a perk of a service I was already paying for—they don’t offer the same value as your combined package at a low price. But now that I have to evaluate your products separately, I see that I’ll spend less each month getting movies from RedBox, and still get most of the “free” streaming content (excepting Starz, which you’re apparanly having problems with) through Amazon. For new releases, there’s a RedBox a block away a the grocery store. For me, the switiching cost is negligible. Your rivals are increasing, but you just commoditized your product. You’re no longer different.

With a combined plan you had a differentiated offering. Consistent customer service (even if it was sans-human), an iPhone app and quick turn-around times were a great selling point, but they’re not enough on their own. (I’m apparently lucky enough to live close to a Netflix distrubtion center, so I’d get a new disc a mere day-and-a-half after putting my old one in the mail.) I already have access to the same content at a lower price. I was paying you anyway, because the way you did it offered me value. No longer.

I made this decision before you announced you’re splitting into two companies, and I’m glad I did. It validates this break-up.

Please don’t write. I won’t be sitting by the phone waiting for you to call. Getting a lame “apology” via email a week later just confirms you don’t get it. I’m moving on.

Sincerely,

 
 
Tom Q. Customer

P.S.: Did you see the comics by Joy of Tech and Oatmeal? (h/t Gruber) I think they’ve got you down.

P.P.S: Maybe you’ll lose enough subscribers to come to your senses. Maybe not. The only sensible reason I can see for the company split is to sell either the spin-off or the whole company. Is a studio buying you? It would be a great match for them as you’ve got the distribution network and (flagging) subscriber pool in place. The DVD-by-mail business might be a great acquisition for GameFly—but they already charge much more than you do.

P.P.P.S: You have your own hashtag: #DearNetflix

General, Customer Service | 1 Comment »