WaterPik?

Waterpik is now a mandatory thing once a day in my oral hygiene, following a long brushing and flossing.

My old Waterpik Ultra (WP-100W) became unusable due to sticking wand button.  They do that after a couple of years IMO from the typical level of minerals in my tap water.  I could eliminate the problem…using RO water I have now?  I might try that with the new one.

But before going out to Tarshay  (my standard place) to get a new one, I tried to re-use the old one I gave to a friend (she gave it back and said she wanted battery powered model…which I later got for her) that was just one model down from the top, the WP-60W.  (That may generally be one to avoid it would seem now.)  And the wand button was almost impossible to press.  I can't say the device was in new condition (it looked new) but still badly designed.  Did they try to use it?  One often asks that question in using software…it generally seems less a problem with uncomputerized hardware.

It was impossible for me to use.  The water level control was on the wand, it was hard to get a good grip without nudging it slightly, and slightly meant the difference between water pick and water torch.  It seemed dangerous anyway.  I barely made it through one session and decided to add it to my power washing kit.

Along with RO water, with the WP-100, which I can safely adjust on the base, I should remember to wear safety glasses, just in case, when using a Waterpik.  I also try to maintain perfect control of the the wand and point away from me at the first opportunity.  I was using level 4 on the old one (seemed less than level 3 on the WP-60) and even that seems pretty intense.

ActiveSnot

It was a great day.  I finally, just before midnight, figured out how to get PPM to install Perl/Tk, and finally the old client application was running.  I was praising ActiveState for having made this so easy.  ActiveState is the answer, I was going to tell my client.  When I got home, I installed Active Perl and all the other modules on my personal Mac, and showed the client application ran under a newer version of Mac OS X also.  What had originally taken all day I was now able to do in 15 minutes.  This was wonderful!

Next morning, I found an unpleasant email in my inbox from ActiveState:

A Moderator has reviewed your recent submission to ActiveState Community   Site. 
The content was deemed inappropriate. The submission has been deleted from   the pre-publication queue, and your account has been blocked from further   posting.

I had posted two questions to the Forum the night before in my attempt to get Perl/Tk loaded into Active Perl.  It turned out that my problem was quite simple, and I was meaning to post it to the forum the next day.  But as it was happening, my best guess was that ActiveState did not allow the PPM to install Perl/Tk.  The only Tk which seemed to be available was Tkx.  That was little help to me in getting an old application using Perl/Tk--a very popular package--to work.  So I posted the question like this, to a 3 message threat comparing Tke and Perl/Tk, which was the most recent thread I could find even mentioning Perl/Tk.  I can't remember the original posting (and will correct the below if I can get at it somehow, but it was just letters I typed on a hypertext page and I don't think I have any copy--another thing worth complaining about as it happens so often that long messages typed into webpages get lost into the great bitbucket in the sky).

     The approach taken by Tke seems to be what Perl/Tk should have been from the beginning…just a thin layer on top of Tk.  But Perl/Tk has been around a long time and is popular.  [A previous poster said Tkx was more actively supported now.]  Actually the latest version of Perl/Tk is from January 2015 and the latest Tkx is from 2010.
     How can I get the ActiveState ppm to even install Perl/Tk?  It only seems to allow me to install Tkx.  Is this a partisan thing?  I need Perl/Tk specifically to run an old client application.

Well, this thread was kind of old, perhaps 2008.  But as I said, this was (or seemed to be) the most recent thread even mentioning Tk.

Maybe I erred in posting to such an old thread.  But my idea is that likely simply using the word "partisan" or suggesting that the selection of packages for ppm might be biased in some way…that was just too much.  "Flaming!"  (Yes this is flaming, I admit in retrospect.  But I think it is very very gentle, and was intended to be quickly retracted and replaced with praise if things went well.)

Perhaps, and possibly quite likely, it was entirely a mechanical thing, though nowhere do I see that "partisan" is a bannable word.  Mentioning Perl/Tk at all ???

Anyway, I think the moderation, in simply dismissing my message and banning me forever without comment as if I had posted pornography--is cruel and stupid.  It ruined my day, and will forever mean that I will not go out of my way to speak well of ActiveState, to praise them as I had been intending to do.  I will generally speak no ill either, except where on my own website where I can vent and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as is required in any kind of accusation.

I now have, possibly long overdue, just gotten a similar feeling about Candians in general.  Candians are not necessarily the nice people I mainly had in my imagination until today.  Canadians are pursuing tar sands oil, and pressuring the U.S. Government to build a pipeline carrying oil solids dissolved in solvents through a pipeline across the USA, much to the further global disaster of global heating.  Previously Canada successfully sued for billions in losses when California banned a gasoline additive made in Canada (because of it's effects, not because it was made in Canada).  They have had a "conservative" government for some time, one very beholden to oil interests.  Canada is a leading petro state.

ActiveState happens to be in British Columbia.  Actually, British Columbia is banning a tar sands pipeline, interestingly enough, and kudos to them.

I think it's bad to treat anyone as ActiveState forum moderation treated me.  It's bad all around.  It does them no good, me no good.  As far as explaining why, they are apparently legendary for not responding to questions, bug reports, whatever.  No response whatever.  Not even, "sorry, we don't answer questions unless you buy our support service."  I suppose that's correct for the free products.  Free means no support, no reply, nada.  Some claim it works the same even if you have their paid service, but I suspect that some who claim that may not actually know.

They could at least tell me why I'm being banned.  "Political discussions are not allowed."  Well, that wasn't what I meant by partisan, but anyway.  I suppose this is a pipe dream.  Nobody tells you why.  I suppose if you're fine if many people hate you, that's a perfectly acceptable strategy.  Telling you why implicitly allows you to say something like "that isn't what I meant" and so forth.  No reply means you have no recourse…and one might expect that is intended.

That said, ActiveState is providing a useful product to me, something that saved me a great deal of time, and I appreciate that.  So perhaps I should be grateful, and never say an ill word.

No, I'll simply try to be honest as I can in telling the story, that is what this website is about, and not in a way to directly affect my clients work.  I'll try not to let my ego get involved.  If ActiveState has the active solution, I go with that, swallow my pride, I don't have much anyway.  I can well imagine others might not be so sanguine, though, and that is one of many Critical points here.

I'll go to other forums when I need help.  I won't say anything bad about ActiveState, unless in response to a question which permits no other honest answer, like "what is their free support like?"

Meanwhile, the problem I was having, so trivial, and suitable criticism for this column as well.

On all the Mac's I've used, the ppm uses a dark grey to indicate the selected button.  That's confusing because grey also means not-selectable "greyed out".  And further, in the leftmost button, the all important "View All Packages" button, the all critical box in the center is also grey.  It looked to me for the first several hours that there was simply no way to select the "view all packages" button.  The only thing not grey is a tiny arrow in the center which I overlooked.  It seemed like for some reason I was being locked out.  Perhaps you only got to select from the full list of packages if you got the full support.  Especially on my work monitor, which has very unsaturated color.  The only thing which suggests that the View All Packages button has been selected

I also frequently made the mistake of showing the column in reverse alphabetical order, which puts Tkx on top and Tk on the very bottom, after dozens if not hundreds of other Tk* modules.

Another confusing thing, the "Available" button looks like the button for finding out what modules are available for download, but it's actually the the button for those packages Available for Upgrade.

Yes, Yes, I see that already

With iPhone 3, whenever I opened the phone enough to see the message counts for my calls and messages, it would clear the notification automatically so the alerts wouldn't keep appearing.  I already knew who was calling from the alerts.

With Android, I have to open the calls or messages apps specifically to clear the alerts.  I find this annoying.  That notification light can be blinking all night long until I have the energy to open up the apps rather than just checking the phone.

It's like somebody actually tried it first, before releasing the software.  I consider that that the first step toward decent design, but often and strangely a step that never seems to have been taken.

Advice to the (Fellow) Crazy

When you're crazy, you don't have to talk.

Everyone just understands.

Control-Alt-Delete

Control-Alt-Delete is not a mistake.  It is actually the best thing about Microsoft Windows, that it has kept a memorable key combination that works on all keyboards to grab control of the system, and not fallen prey to fads.  But not surprising that Bill Gates himself now thinks otherwise.  He never had much sense in these sorts of details, leaving room for someone else who was only a bit better (but with a different non-user-centric strategy).

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4772680/bill-gates-admits-ctrl-alt-del-was-a-mistake

The most despicable thing about Microsoft/IBM-PC wrt keyboards was not control-alt-delete.

It was that they moved the barely used Caps Lock key to where the Control key had always been before, and should still be.

I have always maintained the conspiracy theory that the IBM PC keyboard layout moved the control key precisely because the control key was so useful in other operating systems (and also, word processing competitors like Corel.)

I have always taken whatever measures are needed to restore the Control key to it's proper place.  For a long time, I simply used a Sun computer keyboard on my Mac.  Nowadays native remapping has been working reliably and in all programs.  It had been a struggle with 3rd party remapping programs not so many years ago.

Of course I would think this, as a confirmed and dedicated Emacs user.  BTW, Vi is another conspiracy that has, unfortunately, all but succeeded.

More Missing Today

It's 10:30 PM, and Weather Underground is showing "Today's" low temperature of 43 degrees F, because that's the temperature forecast for 6am tomorrow morning.  Menawhile "Yesterday's" low is said to be 31.8.  But in the wee hours of "this" morning, which would have been "Today's" low at this time yesterday, it was actually 41 degrees.  Nowhere in the "Today" or "Yesterday" is the temperature it actually reached in the wee hours this morning shown, because it's too late to be "Today" (meaning until tomorrow AM) and too early to be "Yesterday" (because, ok, it isn't really Yesterday yet, but it was Today Yesterday).

VAX/VMS was a wrong turn

VAX/VMS was a big part of my life in the 1980's.  From 2003 to the end of 2008 I had a VT125 terminal on my office desk, and it was connected to a VAX in our machine room, which had many machines, including at least one 8600 if not an 8800 as well.  The room after 2006 was a showpiece, visible through glass windows, with large climate control machines also.

The earlier room was also visible, but before the 8600 the mere 11/780's tied to many VT125's were dog slow, taking up to an hour just to log on.  And that's where I became familiar with one VMS misfeature.  The fact that while processing was being done, characters typed at your terminal were gleefully ignored.  Basically, you'd watch, and if you didn't see your characters appearing after awhile, you'd type your command again.  I recall one co-programmer (who later became a divinity student) intoned:

The VAX, in it's infinite wisdom, sometimes chooses to ignore your command.

Sometimes, just to keep you on your toes, the ignored character was precisely the carriage return (and it was CR, IIRC, not NL as on Unix machines) which caused the command to be executed.  So you couldn't tell if it was just sitting there, after you entered the command, and slowly grinding away, or whether it has summarily chosen to ignore your CR.

Having been thusly trained, when we moved on from 11/780's to 8600's the problem of having the terminal program swapped out while you were typing occurred less, but never totally went away.  I recall forgetting about this feature, until a Unix programmer pointed it out to me again, and before long I was working on a Sun Unix system also and VAX/VMS and it's foibles were gradually forgotten.

DEC really earned their reputation on, at the time, leading machines, like the PDP-10 in 1966, the breakthrough timesharing machine, used by Compuserve, Stanford, MIT, and many others.  This was not a perfect machine either, but in those days DEC was more honest, less driving by intense marketing.  So their solution to imperfection was to provide the source code for the entire OS.  This was a breakthrough for places like MIT, the PDP-10 became the delight of all "hackers" (as leading computer scientist students were often called then, before hacking became synonymous with cracking), since you could hack the very OS the great timesharing system was based on, and do virtually anything to it, though typical modifications were bypassing the serial input stuff, IIRC.  Interesting.  Meanwhile, for IBM machines, you slipped your PL/1 card deck through a slot and some time later it would come back with the first of many error reports.  Big difference.  Interactive multitasking was available early, but only to the college crowd, who later became the buyers of DEC machines like VAX, which simply had to be good, the best thing ever, etc.  Except that it was way oversold, too slow for the timesharing it was sold for, and VMS was terrible.

I had a parallel experience during the PDP-11 "hacker" era.  I was a enthusiastic PDP-10 user for all of my college years from 73 to 78.  The PDP-10 user of the system for the Claremont Colleges, renowned as one of the last to keep going into the early 2000's.  Though we only had a few dozen terminals on campus, it wasn't THAT hard to get on one, and it was just heaven, being able to solve difficult problems in Basic, or run cool things like Eliza.  In the summer after my freshman year I did a programming job using APL through a Tektronics terminal (which did lots of funny characters) connected through the Dec 10, as we called it.   The Dec 10 was so much more useful and fun than the IBM 360, we actually had in our math building at Pomona College.  The Dec 10 was up campus in the Claremont University Center.  Later I ran my psychology experiments through SPSS on the Dec 10.

But meanwhile, I had also come to know and love the PDP-11 I used for several years in the Psychology department.  Starting in 1976, I programmed in Basic and Macro-11, thanks to a Macro-11 handbook we got.  Using peeks and pokes, and finally Macro-11 programs, I controlled digital audio through a 10 bit multi channel audio interface, and graphical displays on a CRT.

RT-11 was wonderfully crisp, and the system was marvelously simple and open.  For controlling laboratory equipment, nothing could be better.

I sadly missed out on the dawn of Unix, which also happened on PDP-11's, starting in 1970.  Unix had originally been programmed on a PDP-7, something I've never seen, but the first C version was programmed on a PDP-11 in 1970, and PDP-11 became the standard through the key developments of Research System 6 and 7 and BSD.  I only got to use Unix starting in 1989, after gratefully leaving behind VMS.

Last PDP-11 I programmed was an 11/60 running RSX-11m, which was not perfect but helpfully open and fixable.

VAX, sadly, was a step backwards from all these fine machines.  Rather than a leader, it quickly became a laggard in speed.  It was sold to do far more than it could.  A single 11/780 might be a nice personal machine, or maybe two people.  I don't believe DEC was as open with the OS as they previously had been, though the 780 was a departmental machine, maintained by specialists, who at least kept it working.  Unix might have been available, but we were supporting our product under VMS, which was considered something like industry standard, if not high end (Silicon Graphics was the high end).

DEC believed so much in the VAX they cancelled their Jupiter project to create the next generation PDP-10.  This made people using famous systems at Stanford very angry, and may have been the impetus to creating SUN (Stanford University Network) computers.

It was said that the successor to PDP-11/70 was killed because it was faster than the VAX.  The same may have been true for the Jupiter.  The VAX machines were slow and especially unresponsive especially with the 11/780 and 11/730.  The improvement in the 11/785 was minimal.  It took many years before the speed was substantially increased, when the 8600 came out.  Meanwhile DEC had disc clustering, machine clustering (buy more slow machines!), but each machine could simply not work for many users running CAD programs.

I think VAX was a bad turn, not just for DEC.  All systems have become either more closed or more complicated, to the point where systems like the wonderful PDP-11 don't make much sense anymore, but are very much missed.

One of the bigger parts of that mistake was VMS.  DEC ultimately realized the error of their ways and made Ultrix their standard.  As that was happening, I moved on to SUN computers, which had used BSD Unix from the beginning.  Until the late 2000's, SUN occupied a position similar to that which DEC had had, in leading universities.  With Oracle starting to actually charge for academic Solaris licenses, and the decline of the cost competitiveness of Sun desktop hardware, Gnu/Linux is gaining faster than ever to solidify it's position as the leading research OS.  Mac OS X is unix based, and much unix code has made it into Microsoft Windows as well.