Category: Technology (Page 1 of 4)

Today my son came to me to tell me the vacuum cleaner stopped working. Uff, another thing broken! I’ll take a look – or rather I’ll take it apart. Haha. That’s an engineering joke.

Anyway, it turns out that the switch has a wire that came loose. It’s interesting, because due to the nature of the design, by putting the power switch at the end of the suction hose, they have created a problem whereby tension on the hose puts tension on the wires. They’ve included snap slots to secure the wires, but the wires worked themselves loose and separated at the connector.

Normally a vacuum has the power switch near the motor. You have to bend down to turn it on. Isn’t it SOOOO much easier to bend down, pick up the suction hose, and then turn it on? Sarcasm.

Anyway, checking out how they designed the pathways and connectors for the wires, I was struck that none of heat shrink fittings were actually on top of the connections nor do they seem to be shrunk. Hmmm, what happens if I slide the tubing down and properly secure it?

It turns out that with the heat shrink fittings in place, there is not enough slack in the wires to press them into their snap slots. The tubing blocks them, not to mention with the fitting in place, the snap slots won’t accept the wire.

Where am I going with this?

I’m imagining the factory worker assembling the vacuum hose. They are frustrated by the fact that the wires aren’t of proper length and that the snap slots aren’t big enough to accommodate the wire with shrink tube. You could make a modification in the factory, but that’s above their authorization level. You could make a suggestion to the engineering staff to alter the design, but they are in another country. And besides, you’re doing it as requested. Just do it like it’s drawn.

Here are the specifications. We don’t pay you to think.

The bright engineer(s) who put this all together, drew it out, who selected the materials and everything, missed something, but they can’t see it in assembly because it’s in another country. If the company valued quality, they would visit the manufacturing plant and solicit advice from the workers and plant managers about problems they have had.

But they didn’t. The worker isn’t paid to care and probably doesn’t work for the company contracting them to assemble these plastic things in the first place. The engineer is smart and experienced, but doesn’t have enough professional humility to accept there might be other sources of knowledge other than their fabulous engineering experience/degree.

In the end, you get a vacuum that works okay, but after some normal use has a tendency to break.

Lessons learned?

Design and engineering should have a closer relationship with manufacturing. Is it possible when your manufacturing plant is oh so far away? I’m not saying every company that produces a widget needs to own their own manufacturing plant, but they need to make in-person visits more often. Walk the floor.

Caveat: This is all contingent upon the premise that each entity actually wants to make a quality product. The manufacturing plant wants to do good work, and the design firm wants to put out a quality product. I know it’s possible there’s some short term thinking involved whereby you build for planned breakage/obsolescence.

When Facebook/Twitter/Google+ et al, showed up they published open interchange formats. Facebook’s messenger chat was XMPP, which meant you could use your own IM client to communicate with your contacts.

A company or individual could publish directly to their Facebook page from their website. Then, little by little they closed off all that 3rd party functionality. You now could only publish from their platform. Your own website could no longer be the hub of your communications. You can pull data from social media sites, but you can’t push. These social media sites wanted you engaged on their platform only. And why wouldn’t they. They can’t monetize you if you’re not there, can they?

Now, Mastodon (and others) come along with #ActivityPub. Public utilities, FEMA, weather service, local services etc, could publish to a regional mastodon instance, funded perhaps by the local municipality or province. This interchange format isn’t beholden to one company, and your channel of communications could be funded with public money and be maintained as part of jurisdiction’s emergency response.

I hated that Twitter was the default for important public services.

It’s ready right now. All that is required is some forward thinking agency to set up their own instance.

But it gets even better. There’s even an #ActivityPub plugin for #Wordpress? https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

WordPress runs 44% of the web. Every single one of those websites could publish on the #Fediverse right now.

What does it mean? It means your website right now could publish to the public Fediverse and be found and followed by any user on any instance in the world without having to repost your information to a private company’s website.

This brings a few benefits. A decentralized platform is infinitely more resilient to censorship and bad behavior by a private corporation. You cannot be monetized of manipulated by corporations and their algorithm.

Are Google/Facebook/Twitter good stewards of privacy? Do they protect the identities of dissidents when their governments come for them? Do they protect you?

I’m telling you, Elon’s meltdown may be the best thing for re-exposing people to what an open internet looks like. Let’s not screw this up again, okay?

It’s like Richard Stallman is reading my blog! 🙂 Haha, is joke.

Finally, don’t forget the software in your own computer. If it is the non-free software of Apple, Google or Microsoft, it spies on you regularly. That’s because it is controlled by a company that won’t hesitate to spy on you. Companies tend to lose their scruples when that is profitable. By contrast, free (libre) software is controlled by its users. That user community keeps the software honest.

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This is pretty much why I use only software libre. I can’t write it all myself, but I have more trust in groups that don’t hold profit as a motive when I entrust to them my data. These non-profit companies develop software that allows me to see and manipulate the source code. I can do anything I want with it, except close it up.

Just wanted to jot down another frustrating example of how closed source software serves the creator company before it serves the user and why particular choices are made at the point of development.

I have been doing some research and have come across hundreds of PDFs of doctoral dissertations written by smart people about extremely interesting topics, but surprisingly nearly all the papers begin with “Microsoft Word – …” as the prefix to the paper’s title field embedded in the PDFs property data and dutifully indexed by Google as such. In none of the cases is “Microsoft Word” relevant to the topic discussed.

Curious, no?

So let’s ask ourselves why might Microsoft Word appear as a default prefix to the topic title of the work you are producing. Maybe it’s the particular manner of the chain of custody between Word and the PDF renderer (I don’t use Windows, so I have no idea how it works in that world). Maybe it’s Microsoft Word itself. I have no real idea. But the problem exists – your work, your data, your investigation has Microsoft branding barfed all over it.

Why?

Microsoft wants more search engine traction. By making all PDFs produced with Microsoft Word embed the string “Microsoft Word” into your work’s title, they ensure that every search for your work will also yield a boost for them. Microsoft is piggybacking on your hard work.

Microsoft just wants everybody everywhere to know that there is only one way to write an academic paper. Using the same motivation as the search engine, Microsoft hopes that for every paper published or read, people will continue to regard the string “Microsoft Word” as the only manner in which people may produce textual works. It becomes so conditioned into our expectations that when it doesn’t appear we think, something must be wrong.

I mean, it’s no secret that Microsoft, a for profit company, seeks its own ends, that these decisions are made to benefit them and no one else. Why else would they helpfully embed their brand into your document? Does that help you?

There’s a better way, however. Contrast Microsoft’s tack with that of the Document Foundation, whose values favor and empower the user rather than the organization. Among others, here’s a particularly nice gem from their core values: We commit ourselves to allow users of office productivity software to retain the intellectual property in the documents they create, by use of open document formats and open standards.

And we find that when you output a PDF from Libreoffice it doesn’t alter your title. Cool.

Two Congressmen have written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the FTC to investigate certain websites’ use of “supercookies” to track the activities of website visitors after they have left the website and without their knowledge.

Which begs the question, who says you left the website? In today’s interconnected web/Facebook API you essentially never leave Facebook. If a website has Facebook’s API installed, you know, that innocuous little “like” and “share” buttons, you are on Facebook.  Of course Facebook tracks you, you never left their site.

The web, in its most essential form, is just an interconnected series of HTTP calls via GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE. Any webpage can have resources linked to any other site. We have crammed a bunch of functionality into our venerable HTTP specification, but it’s essentially just that simple.

When you visit a website, you are not visiting a destination, you are visiting a virtual representation of resources fetched from all over the world, some of which are Facebook. Since you are using Facebook, they know what pages are using their resources, because the site operators opted in to their API. If you wish to avoid this, you will need to delete your cookies from Facebook and deny them the ability to place them. If you are a site owner and you are worried about your visitors’ privacy, you should remove the Facebook API calls from your site.

A lot of the work I do is bascially phone/email corporate tech support.   I get the IT managers and their assistants calling me for advice and troubleshooting on network, security, email spam, filtering, and on and on.  I’m sort of the go to guy for corporate IT managers in my little circle in Puerto Rico.

Here’s the thing, I used to get annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t get ANYONE to use email.  Email is my trouble ticket system.  It’s allows me to assign a date to the incident, make a to do list, and have a record in case my clients forget that they called me.

Here’s the problem:

Everyone wanted to call.  Everyone wanted to leave voice mail messages that said, “Give me a call.”  There was no mention of the problem, a description anything.  If they did send an email it would say something like, “I have a problem with the server.”    I would sigh, pull out my crystal ball and divine up the problem with a series of repetitive questions…  all of which we’ve been through before.  If there’s a problem with an email, instead of emailing me the bounce, error or whatever, they’d call and say that someone (top secret identity?) was having problems with their mail.  Sending? Receiving?  Was anyone else having this problem?  Was it with only a particular recipient?  Was it a network problem?  Can I see a copy of the email bounce in question?  And on and on.   Wouldn’t it just be easier for them to click forward and send me the email?  They already know what I’m going to ask.

But they didn’t, and for many moons, I felt like an automated question engine running through my script, yes, no, no yes, okay BING here’s your problem.  But recently, perhaps in the past year or two, something has changed, and I suspect it has something to do with social media and SMS.

People have stopped using the phone to make voice calls.  I’ve noticed it in personal relationships.  Talking has become passé.  People are now practiced in asynchronous communications.   We can now dispense with the “Hi, how are you, how’s your family,” salutations and pleasantries that used to bind our social network of personal interaction.  Now it’s all asynchronous and me-centered.  I have information I want to send you, here it is.  Read it when you wish, but I don’t really want to talk to you.  We post on our facebook, twitter, whatever and just throw it out there.  It requires NO interaction.  People will take that and use it for what it’s worth.  We are detached from our communications.  Everything is a discrete packet self-contained and autonomous – automated.

It’s a shame to admit it, but it makes my job easier.  I can knock things out with minimal stupidity.  Simple bug report, simple fix.  It seems social media and SMS has trained my clients to send it and forget it.   I have become an automaton, a problem solving engine dependent on rich precise input.

But is this is healthy for society at large outside of specific business contexts?  What are your thoughts?