No Account Bypass

Nearly every online store wants you to create an online account, so they can have an excuse to email you endless advertising, on top of all the other entities emailing you endless advertising.

I'm inconsistent about creating such accounts.  If I really like the merchant, I might (and then immediately set my account for no extraneous emails).  But I already have so many accounts with so many different passwords, it's become a mind boggling morass.

Today I tried to make a small but necessary purchase at HomeDepot.com.  While in the past I recall being offered to skip the account business and just make a one-time purchase, this time it did not present me that option.  I was only allowed to sign in, or not make the purchase.

I tried for several minutes to log in.  Then, giving up, I asked to get an email to reset my password.

Several minutes later, no email from Home Depot appeared.  I checked my spam folder (and I really, really need to write another critical essay about spam filtering--the whole "spam" business is social destruction through which I often lose contact with friends because of stupid or perhaps deliberately-social-destroying spam filtering).

I tried once again to make the purchase without signing into my account.  Strangely that page seemed to appear, then immediately disappeared, replaced by the one which gives no other option than to log into your account.

The purchase would not have been made today, except that I finally remembered my old password.

Many minutes later, I have received neither my password reset nor my purchase confirmation from Home Depot, and I keep checking my spam folder too.

Shutdown with Impunity

One thing I miss most from Unix systems, in "personal" systems like Mac and PC, are the old hard shutdowns.

When you did shutdown, you could choose to give "other users" a minute or two to shut down, or just  shutdown right now.  On my own systems I just did "now."  Even on systems I managed, as I had already shepherded all users off by that point.

And the systems would come down right now in a second or two, even with cached file systems (though, theoretically those could cause some delay, but usually caches were generally empty by this point).

But now we have microprocessors which are 1000 times more powerful than the original Unix minicomputers, and they struggle for minutes to shut down, frequently giving up because this or that process declined to accept the shutdown order.

Typically, such an application might have modified project work that the user hasn't written out yet.

In nearly all such cases, if I hadn't actually written something out, when I give a shutdown order, I didn't intend to.

I would be fine with going back to hard shutdowns.  But if not, could it be some sort of preferences option?  Or maybe a different kind of shutdown, slow vs fast, for example.

Or maybe somehow get all the things that want this or that state saved, to present all their demands more quickly, or even  in some kind of integrated way, rather than having to wait for minutes for each different program to responde...why are they so slow in doing that?

iPhone 8 Plus temporarily bricked by IOS 13.6 update

I had my phone plugged into Mac to transfer some photos.  iTunes advised me of an update.  This was the second time.  I'd been pretty much lulled into accepting iPhone updates.

Now my phone won't connect to the Sprint cellular network.  Apparently it can do wifi but not cellular.  It just says Searching.

I found an Apple forum page on this which was useless, people complaining about the same kind of problem going back to 2011.  But then I found several very similar help pages, which gave a list of things to try, starting from a restart.

So far I've tried a normal restart, and then a hard restart--didn't seem any different, except one time it sort of froze with the Apple logo appearing for 15 minutes, then I did the hard restart to get try again, which went better the next time.  And then various resets, which didn't seem to do anything, didn't have to re-enter my wifi password even.

I came to the update carrier settings.  It's weird how you get to this, under your name.  But the carrier settings showed the correct version, but didn't alternate to other settings when you clicked on it (as it does when the phone is working correctly).

There were many little issues I needed to face upon doing a "Restore," which is what is recommended after you are unsuccessful trying to "Update Carrier Settings."

After running the Restore for awhile, it put up a little window (which might be easy to ignore) saying the Restore could not be done until I went into the phone settings, into the Cloud settings (which are under your name itself...so central is the cloud supposed to be to your existence) and turned off the Find My iPhone feature.  Somehow, the restore couldn't proceed without that being turned off, and it couldn't turn that off by itself, and if you failed to handle that message, as I apparently did the first time around (because I was busy with my photos and blogging) you would be stuck without your carrier settings getting updated completely.  I sort of know that now as fairly soon after I had handled turning off the "Find My Iphone" (which took some time, as I'll describe below) during the restore, THEN it immediately proceeded to update carrier settings, boom, and there seemed to be no issue with them after that.

Well, that created another issue, because in order to change any of the Cloud settings, including the Find My iPhone feature, you need to enter the password for your Apple ID.  The particular Apple ID that you had previously used when you purchased this phone (or one of it's predecessors).  That ran square into the fact that the Apple ID that the phone demanded that I log in for, is an old email address I haven't used in 10 years and am now totally unable to access, and there is no way to change it to anything else, until you first log in so you can change it to something else.

Fortunately, I ultimately managed to guess my old password.  I'm not sure what I would have done otherwise.  I spent an hour unsuccessfully trying to get it to use my other AppleID first, but it wouldn't do that until I logged in first so I delete the old ones and sign out of the old AppleID account.

This time I have made sure to turn everything associated with the cloud "off."  Now it appears it won't even let me log into the cloud.  After I refused to allow the cloud to use my location information, it simply hung trying to log into the cloud.  But after I was able to dump that window, everything seemed normal, so I'm not sure if I'll have to face all the music all over again on the next upgrade.

This time, at least, I've written down the passwords for both my old and new AppleID's, so if this issue comes up again I'll be better prepared.

Morals:

1) Make a paper list of all your passwords and copy it frequently
2) Allow for days of debugging time after every iOS update.  Don't do so before vacations or important meetings.
3) Allow the update process, even if running on a computer, to proceed in full view, not to be covered by other windows or distractions.  Do not be in a great hurry to get your phone again, and be prepared to work through every set of update issues thoroughly as they come up.

Design issue:
If an update isn't 100% complete and approved, a reboot should bring back the old version rather than loading a corrupted state.  (It's been the other way so many times, it's hard to even think in such radical terms.  But this is clearly the way things ought to be.)  This ought to be a central consideration in design for frequently auto-updated devices.

Knowing the need to turn Find My iPhone off, the queries involving that should have been at the very beginning of the update process, rather than awaiting downloading and other steps where it might be overlooked.

More generally, questions and issues for a batch process should be present as close to the beginning of that process as possible, following by a predictable reliable conclusion.

Replacing Racially Loaded Terms

I was here 22 years ago.  My office had discussion about replacing the "master/slave" terminology for our compute farm.  The Boss didn't see any problem with the words, saying they had long technical history.

I felt that "slave" was not an accurate description of what our compute servers were actually doing.  But I had trouble making any other word stick.  For quite awhile, hand waving replaced the words rather than better words.  Then we were back to Master/Slave because everyone knew what it meant.

But I'm glad to see Twitter Engineers fixing this, and they have some good word choices.

• Whitelist becomes allowlist.
• Blacklist becomes denylist.
• Master/slave becomes leader/follower, primary/replica or primary/standby.
• Grandfathered becomes legacy status.
• Gendered pronouns (for example "guys") become folks, people, you all, y'all.
• Gendered pronouns (for example "he" or "his") become they or their.
• Man hours becomes person hours or engineer hours.
• Sanity check becomes quick check, confidence check or coherence check.
• Dummy value becomes placeholder value or sample value.