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#1

marco

A few years later and this is still a problem. The article Unbloating the buffers describes a way of configuring your network to fix this:

“I traded about 10% of bandwidth (263Mbit down/41Mbit up per iperf3) for:”
  • constant average bandwidth on both upload and download
  • no impact of download on upload
  • network load has no visible impact on latency
  • effective traffic prioritisation

The solution isn’t so straightforward, though. You have to have control over your routing endpoint at home in order to set up AQM with a tool like CAKE.

(Attached to Article Beating Bufferbloat)

#1 − Finally deleted my LastPass account

marco

I finally got around to deleting my LastPass account. I switched half a year ago to ProtonPass and never looked back.

“I have, after many years with LastPass, switched to ProtonPass. It’s included with my other Proton tools. The UI is more straightforward and friendlier (even if it’s not yet as good at detecting password changes and account-creation as LastPass). There is also the issue of LastPass having been infiltrated a few times. Thanks for the service over the years.”

#1 − Another one for “Apple Podcasts asks for password”

marco

This is the best answer selected for the question Annoying popup constantly asks for podcast signin. It’s barely English. It kind of has a thread that you can maybe follow, but either (A) the person who wrote it was having a stroke or (B) translated it from English to German to Chinese to Arabic and then back to English or (C) used a goddamned LLM to generate an answer to get cheap “points” on the forum.

“Hey again! I’ve been there.

“Since it happened with iCloud, until you changed your password, and now Podcast, even still after entering your new password, I’d say it’s probably a conflict with your local and iCloud Keychain, (Most likely).

“If you know all of your account passwords, and/or, have them stored in iCloud on another device and/or have a Time Machine backup, I’d say resetting the local keychain will probably fix it,

“So if you do have a copy of your passwords:

“Open Finder, select “Go” on the top menu, hold “Option” on your keyboard, (Only then you will see “Library” under the Go menu.

“Select “Library”, then open the “Keychains” folder.

“Select All by pressing Command A.

“To de activate the current keychain, while saving a local copy, while all is selected, on the top menu select “File” then “New Folder (With Selection)”, press “Enter on the keyboard after entering your Admin password if asked.

“Restart your Mac.

“Note that you will be prompted to re enter all of your account passwords again, (Only one time, that’s it), after that, it should work okay.

“In my experience, if using iCloud Keychain on other devices, the passwords should once again sync, if not for whatever reason, you should only need to enter them once to save and not again.

“Anyhow hope that helps!”

It absolutely does not help. I think you’re suggesting that I erase every single one of my stored passwords and then reboot my computer. Talk about the nuclear option. I weep for the amount of time this kind of stuff is wasting for people.

What did you do last month, Bob?
Oh, I got a lot done. There was this annoying popup that I managed to get rid of.
Anything else, though?
No. That’s it.

#1 − A week after I wrote this article, MS responded :-)

marco

Making it easier to port to .NET Core by Immo Landwerth (MSDN)

“While there is certainly some value in presenting new customers with a cleaner API, it disproportionately penalized our existing loyal customers who have invested over many years in using the APIs and technologies we advertised to them. We want to extend the reach of the .NET platform and gain new customers, but we can’t do so at the expense of existing users.”
(Attached to Article Beware the Hype: .NET Core)

#1 − Adjustments and Enhance “sometimes” don’t work

marco

After publication of the article above, I encountered another issue that I’d seen before, but had assumed was something I was doing wrong. Nope: Photos cannot show previews of adjustments and enhancements in real-time anymore. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. The solution, according to Adjustments not working in Edit mode using Photos is that “[q]uitting and relaunching the application fixes the problem temporarily.” What a lovely workaround. This issue has apparently been in Photos since it launched in April. No fix from Apple in sight.

At least a restart did solve the problem, as advertised. I hope it survives without further restarts for the 60 pictures I want to touch up.

(Attached to Article Apple Photos: a mixed review)

#1

marco (updated by marco)

In defense of the OpenSSL project, the article OpenSSL code beyond repair, claims creator of “LibreSSL” fork by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica) cites its OpenSSL Software Foundation President Steve Marquess “describ[ing] OpenSSL’s struggle to obtain funding and code contributions.”

““I’m looking at you, Fortune 1000 companies,” Marquess wrote. “The ones who include OpenSSL in your firewall/appliance/cloud/financial/security products that you sell for profit, and/or who use it to secure your internal infrastructure and communications. The ones who don’t have to fund an in-house team of programmers to wrangle crypto code, and who then nag us for free consulting services when you can’t figure out how to use it. The ones who have never lifted a finger to contribute to the open source community that gave you this gift. You know who you are.” […] As for Heartbleed, “the mystery is not that a few overworked volunteers missed this bug,” Marquess wrote. “The mystery is why it hasn’t happened more often.”(Emphasis added.)”

The emphasized text is what we should all learn from this experience.

(Attached to Article OpenBSD takes on OpenSSL)

#1 − Ports

Marc

Number of ports: Don’t forget the port-replicators aka Docking-Station. Depending on the notebook model you are using you can get a docking-station for that. Depending on that docking-station you are using you get more ports then on the notebook itself. As you docking-station normally is there where your big screens are, they are connected to docking-station. So ports of the docking-station count too.

VGA: I use it often when on customer site and get “a screen” (if I am lucky a 24", sometimes smaller). Most of the time the customer IT have only VGA-cables or maaaaaybe a DVI (which I can’t plug into my Lenovo notebook) at hand. No display-port-* cables. So I still need a VGA port these days ;-(

(Attached to Article Windows developer machines)

#1 − MB?

Marc

MacBook Air: I think you Meran GB instead MB.

(Attached to Article Refurbished Mac prices)

#1

Marc

Nice article, dude. Interesting what Google tries to achieve with this all? Reducing browsers? Hmm… don’t think so as you already wrote they all (except one but this one is not of question) are acceptable in compatibility. Maybe a kind of “cover my ass” because they don’t test with Opera? But blocking then is really hard. Hmm….

(Attached to Article Google hates the Opera browser)

#1 − Nice one!

Marc

#1 − Nice one, Java

Marc
(Attached to Article Java Memory Usage on the Mac)

#1 − *haben will*

Marc

aber dazu bräuchte ich erst mal einen mac :-/

(Attached to Article Sneak Peek at OS X Lion)

#2

marco

Thanks for the response! I didn’t notice it until now because I had comment notifications shut off.

“What I don’t see is your gripe about merging from the command line. Aren’t you merging on your dev-box? Don’t you have visual tools for the actual file-merges there? You can even use p4merge. (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MergeProgram)”

On my dev box I now use Murky, which is great! I tried MacHG as well, which is even sexier-looking, but doesn’t show diffs automatically. The P4Merge integration was working on my old Mac, but I haven’t gotten around to setting it up again because I haven’t had to merge locally yet.

The problem was really on my Debian machine, on which I have only headless SSH access.

“Sadly, TortoiseHg is not yet available for OS X. I use it on Ubuntu and simply love the way it lets me work from the command line and seamlessly switch into GUI mode as needed.”

+1 for TortoiseHG on Windows as well. As I said, though, there are all of a sudden two very strong contenders on OS X, so that’s a relief.

(Attached to Article Mercurial: Why So Unhelpful?)

#1 − A few suggestions

parren

a) Use the shelve or the attic extension to temporarily undo local changes to a repo. These basically keep shelved changes stowed away in a patch file so you can reapply them later. AFAIK attic actually uses Hg’s merge-forward logic to reapply to the original ancestor of the shelf, then merges forward to where you really want them applied now. This is more resilient than trying to apply patches with fuzz. I do this too, with two small shell scripts, which I’ll gladly send you if you want them. If you want to get super-sophisticated, check out mq with guarded patches. But before you do any of this, check out suggestion c).

b) Read `man hgignore`. But beware that a file, once in the current manifest, is tracked by hg regardless of what .hgignore says. This is actually a feature.

c) Consider moving non-default configuration to a secondary, untracked file, which earthli should look for but silently skip if missing. This will much better guard you from accidentally committing temporary config changes.

d) Consider using an update hook to automatically update to tip on your servers when something gets pushed (no ssh’ing anymore).

e) Look into the graphlog extension. Shows some ASCII art.

Points taken:

* Since there is `hg merge -f` to force a merge over uncommitted changes, then why is there no way to commit just the effects of the merge? Might be a little tricky, though, as Hg conceptually does whole-tree merges, not single-file ones.

* Why does `hg status` not show resolve status? (I guess it’s because of backwards compat for scripts. Hg should have a dedicated parseable format that is _not_ the default UI output from the start…) Try `hg resolve -l` instead.

And I wonder why you even got a modified robots.txt with uncommitted changes in the working copy. `hg merge` should not have touched robots.txt in this case.

What I don’t see is your gripe about merging from the command line. Aren’t you merging on your dev-box? Don’t you have visual tools for the actual file-merges there? You can even use p4merge. (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MergeProgram)

Sadly, TortoiseHg is not yet available for OS X. I use it on Ubuntu and simply love the way it lets me work from the command line and seamlessly switch into GUI mode as needed.

Cheers,
-peo

(Attached to Article Mercurial: Why So Unhelpful?)

#1 − Where can I get?

Marc

*habenwill*

#1 − Ryan Block of Engadget Joins the Fray

marco

The appropriately titled, Waaaaaah! by Macalope, takes a columnist at Engadget to town for making a hypothesis, assuming it to be true without a shred of proof, then whining about conclusions drawn from it. When Block asks, “So why not make 99-cent 128-bit AAC tracks DRM free as well?”, the Macalope responds:

“Why not give Ryan Block a pony?! Because he’d only bitch that he wanted a bigger, shinier pony.”
(Attached to Article Free Software/Open Source)

#3

Marc
“I still can’t use the default Windows XP blue theme for very long”

me too but the silver skin with minimal window caption height works quite well for me. ;)

(Attached to Article Spolsky’s Choices)

#2 − No Longer Old-School here …

marco (updated by marco)
“…a lot of IT staff I know by default switches back to this old interface.”

Heh. I used to be one of those … but I stopped using the Windows Classic look when I found Opus OS 1.5 by Ross 'b0se' Harvey, Opusworks (Deviant Art). I still can’t use the default Windows XP blue theme for very long, but Vista looks pretty nice. I just don’t have the horsepower on my notebook to turn on all the pretty details …

(Attached to Article Spolsky’s Choices)

#1 − True

Marc

Nicely written article. I thought exactly the same. A non-geek will probably never click that arrow button. Even I read the hint / tool tip first before I clicked on that ominous little button. So it really is the hidden-geek-option-button normal users don’t care about.

Actually I am searching a lot for things in Vista but most of the time it helps if you just ask yourself “What would I like to do?”. It seems Microsoft spent a lot of thought simplify the whole system and therefore moved quite a lot of options to new places or combined it with other options and so on.

AND: badly they did not yet remove the “Classic Windows Look and Feel” yet :’( I hoped they will remove this fancy old gray user interface with Vista but it is still there. So also more then 10 years after this operating system we still will see the Win95 interface as a lot of IT staff I know by default switches back to this old interface. Maybe they don’t like to learn new stuff ;-) Think I now have to take cover because of the Win96-geek-readers here :-)))

Over and out,
Marc

(Attached to Article Spolsky’s Choices)

#2 − Just tested it!

marco

I just tried it out and am still very excited about it. Both PowerPoint and Word are worlds better than any previous versions.

“the “bad thing” is that microsoft once more did their own thing for the toolbar-system.”

Kind of … the toolbar is actually a whole area on which any controls can be laid. The “ribbon” really only works for applications with a lot of functionality and a lot of different workflows. It also only works once a lot of time has been put into researching how people want to use the program.

Many other applications—including those condsidering using the “cool new” toolbar from Microsoft—will have far less success than they expect. Even if they manage to replicate the look and feel, they won’t be able to replicate the usability with a simple copycat approach. That said, I do hope they at least make the toolkit available so that applications that do want to make the leap to using a “ribbon” can do so in a standard way.

 

(Attached to Article Office 2007 Innovations)

#1 − Nice features

Marc

i already had a look to this movie some months ago. my first impression was “oh, looks nice but will it be usefull?”. after some thinking about it i would like to get this new version asap. think this ideas will be interesting for other applications as well.

the “bad thing” is that microsoft once more did their own thing for the toolbar-system. now, where they are shiping their current toolbar-system with .net 2.0 they just started to use another system once more so component-writers can do business once copy the microsoft style. the race is started once more :-)

cheers, marc

(Attached to Article Office 2007 Innovations)

#1 − More Opera startup packs

marco

When you start up Opera for the first time ever, it defaults to the Startup home page at Opera. From here, you have a link to Customize, which offers one-click downloads that adjust your browser to have the “IE/Firefox look and feel” or “Safari look and feel”.

They may not be open-source, but they seem to know how to get new users accustomed to their product.

Does Firefox have anything like this?

(Attached to Article Extensions and Plugins)

#1 − Check Out “Chained Melodies” on Salon

marco

Salon.com has Chained Melodies, a four page article discussing copy-protection in the age of the Internet, the SSSCA and has interviews with Lawrence Lessig and Edward Felten.

“As a result, if the content companies continue to have their way, the once-freewheeling Net will be reduced to a glorified form of top-down broadcasting: “a digital multiplex and shopping mall,” in Litman’s words; “cable television on speed,” as Lawrence Lessig phrased it in “The Future of Ideas.””

It even offers a look at how the copy-protection is likely to be enforced:

“…everything will likely be encrypted. “For example, instead of sending analog signals to your speakers, you send an encrypted stream of digital data, and the decryption is done in a sealed module built right into the speaker,” he says. “Video is done the same way: Encryption is done in a sealed module built right into the monitor, so you can’t bypass the encryption by tapping into the monitor cables. Disk drive encryption is built into the drive itself, etc., etc.””

So, let me get this straight. I’m going to spend more on hardware to be smart enough to read digital content so that I can use the content I buy in fewer ways? Sounds wonderful. Regardless of the protection enabled here, it should always be possible to circumvent it. However, with the SSSCA and its precursor, the DMCA:

“… it’s the criminalization of the act of copying, and even worse, of the act of discussing copying, that critics find most alarming. Is it really in the public interest to continually increase the level of corporate ownership of ideas and expression? Who should Congress serve?”
(Attached to Article SSSCA Creeps Onward)