James's Weblog

After four years, I’ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650. I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing.

The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons? That’s the result of 3½ years of sharing a pocket with my keys. That weird cloud in the center of the screen? It’s dust that seeped in and collected there. That hole in the back cover? I drilled that so that I could easily access the reset button with the stylus. (I admit that it might have contributed to the dust problem.)

I actually could have tried transferring my number to my dad’s old Treo 650, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. No more reception was the push I needed to buy the new Palm Pre. (Sorry, iPhone, but I’m a (wanna-be) keyboard snob.) This also marks the end of nine years of using Palm OS.

The Palm Pre is nice. There are a few significant things and a lot of little things that I miss from the Treo 650, but having a modern web browser makes up for all the deficiencies. When I think about it, I realize that I was pretty satisfied with everything about the Treo except for its anemic and ancient browser.

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Cygwin, a port of various Unix utilities to provide a Unix-like environment on Windows, has been around for a long while. It’s well-known; sites such as Lifehacker gives tips about using it. My tip is: avoid Cygwin unless absolutely necessary.

Cygwin-based tools depend on cygwin1.dll, and cygwin1.dll is obnoxious because:

• It’s DLL-hell squared. You can’t simultaneously use different Cygwin-based tools that depend on different versions of the cygwin1.dll. Normally Windows programs can avoid DLL-hell by storing dependent DLLs in the programs’ own directories, but cygwin1.dll goes out of its way to search for other instances of itself.
• To avoid that problem, the Cygwin authors discourage developers from bundling cygwin1.dll with their applications and instead want developers to include the Cygwin installer, which automatically fetches the current version from the Internet. Unfortunately, the Cygwin installer is horrible. The UI is non-standard and is completely bewildering. There is no uninstaller. Making end-users download and run the monolithic Cygwin installer just to get a small command-line tool also violates the Unix philosophy of having small tools for specific tasks.
• The approach of bundling the Cygwin installer is fundamentally flawed anyway. Even if each application includes the installer, there’s no guarantee that the current version of cygwin1.dll is compatible with all of them. Installing one application could break existing ones. Did I mention it being DLL-hell squared?

So what are people to do?

• If you want common Unix command-line utilities, check UnxUtils first, which is a collection of ones that have been ported to run natively on Windows.
• If you want to compile a program written for Linux, try using the MinGW compiler first. For command-line programs, there’s a good chance that MinGW can compile it, and the generated binary won’t have any cygwin dependencies. (Yes, Cygwin’s version of gcc has an option to not require cygwin1.dll, but it basically puts it into a MinGW mode anyway.)
• If you need a full Linux environment, install Linux in a virtual machine (shameless plug) or use andLinux. (andLinux doesn’t support 64-bit versions of Windows yet, however.)
• If you want an X Server, try Xming.

I should note that Cygwin is still a necessary evil for stable versions of bash and sshd. I don’t know of any good alternative implementations of those.

Downloadable games for the Wii are purchased through credit (“Wii Points”). Wii Points are purchased in the form of gift cards from retailers or are purchased directly through the Wii. The gift cards have a redemption code that must be entered on the Wii. Typing this in without a keyboard seems somewhat laborious. Purchasing points directly through the Wii requires entering a credit card number and some billing information. Typing this in is even more laborious. The gift cards therefore are a bit easier, but they lack instant gratification and seem physically wasteful.

I don’t understand why customers can’t make an account on Nintendo’s website, link their Wii with their web account, and then purchase Wii Points directly through the web. (Potential problems where people mistype their Wii ID number can be prevented by a simple two-step confirmation system.) You’d think Nintendo would want it to be even easier to separate customers from their money.

(Oh, I know I’m being a nitpicky pedant, but when buying points directly on the Wii, the confirmation screen confused me a bit. What am I answering “yes” or “no” to?)

After submitting a credit card purchase at Newegg, I was greeted with a “Verified by Visa” webpage:

This page is idiotic.

• I was directed to this page without any warning.
• The page uses the domain verifiedbyvisa.com, not visa.com. A tip to financial institutions trying to thwart phishing scams: pick one domain name and stick with it. People are going to be directed to this page automatically, so the address does not need to be memorable or even human-readable. Using other domain names is confusing and looks suspicious, and if users become accustomed to it, it opens the door for phishers to use their own, look-alike domains (such as, say, verifiedbyvisacard.com, which is available as I write this).
• For goodness’ sake, register your security certificate properly and completely. “Run by (unknown)” is not reassuring, nor is being verified by “Thawte Consulting”. (I’m sure Thawte Consulting is a big name in the security certificate space, but are they as recognizable as VeriSign? Besides, VeriSign acquired them 10 years ago. Again, pick one name and stick with it.)
• The page provides me with none of my basic, personal information so that I can have some assurance of whom I’m dealing with. Verification is a two-way street. Continuing to ignore this makes phishing easier.
• The page outright lies to me. The button says, “Sign up to complete purchase”, but Newegg already emailed me my purchase confirmation. I shouldn’t have to say this, but lying does not build up trust. Duh.

• I have no idea why CableCARD has such weird capitalization.
• It’s surprising how CableCARDs—solid state PCMCIA devices—seemingly can have such a defect rate. Most people I know who’ve tried to set up a CableCARD have had to exchange them at least once. Also, since CableCARDs must be paired with the device they’re connected to, it’s hard for Comcast to test them beforehand, and it’s easy for them to shift blame to the device manufacturer.
• I think it’s funny that the Fremont Comcast office has a wall of televisions in its customer service lobby, but they’re all standard-definition CRTs. There’s not a single high-definition television in sight.
• Comcast’s website is really confusing, and they do an awful job of explaining the differences between different plans.
• The non-local HD channels that Comcast carries seemingly are from Eastern feeds and aren’t time-delayed for Pacific time. What the heck? On one hand, I guess it (sort of) increases the available choices of what to watch when, but on the other, I think it’s confusing. It’s not like this is the Central time zone, which is accustomed to being the Eastern time zone’s gimp.
• It’s annoying that the TiVo HD lists hundreds of channels I don’t actually get; can’t the CableCARD figure that out? Or maybe Comcast intentionally wants to show people all the channels they could be getting if they signed up for a more expensive plan.
• TBS’s stretch-o-vision is lame. I don’t know how people stand it. Their argument about not confusing viewers with pillarboxing would hold more water if every HD channel did the same thing, but luckily most channels aren’t that stupid. So instead people end up with a mixture of pillarboxed 4:3 content on some channels and distorted 4:3 content on others, which is more confusing. If they want to avoid complaints about black bars, they could do what ESPN sometimes does and show big station logos on the sides. I’d even prefer (non-animated) banner ads.

I always used to avoid depositing checks in ATMs. A few years ago, one of my friends got screwed when he deposited a check only to discover later that the bank had no record of it. I preferred handing them over to a teller and getting a receipt.

One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, I realized that I forgot to deposit a rebate check that was going to expire the next day. The bank was already closed by the time I got there that day, and it’s not open on Sundays. With no other alternatives, I deposited the check through the ATM.

It turned out to be way better than dealing with a human teller.

This particular branch had newfangled ATMs that offered envelope-less deposits. I inserted my check, the ATM scanned it, used OCR (or maybe a mechanical Turk) to read the amount, showed me a confirmation screen to double-check the transaction, and printed out a receipt with a copy of the check. This is great:

• No more deposit slips.
• Minimal waiting in line.
• I get a receipt for each check. Since going to the bank was inconvenient (particularly for the above the reasons), it usually wasn’t worth making a trip just to deposit a $5 or $10 check, so I’d wait until I had multiple checks to deposit. Unfortunately I’d get a receipt only for the total deposit amount, which made it difficult later if I needed to determine if I had received and deposited particular rebate checks.

Procrastination pays off once again. Had I been responsible, I’d have deposited my rebate check promptly with a human teller and never would have tried using the ATM to do it.

I really liked The Bourne Identity. I thought The Bourne Supremacy was not as good. I had heard that The Bourne Ultimatum was better and was looking forward to it, but after watching the DVD this past weekend, I think it’s the worst of the bunch. Some spoilers follow.

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I swear, someone on NBC’s Heroes must have the power to make everyone stupid.

(Some spoilers are below.)

The season had some hints of grand designs, but unfortunately the writers’ strike obviously made the later episodes rushed and a bit incohesive and made the finale totally anticlimactic. It was missing much of the excitement from the first season, I guess partly because there weren’t any compelling villains: Adam just didn’t seem very threatening, Sylar was impotent, the Nightmare Man was a big loser, and the Company was in shambles. One would think that Adam would have accumulated at least as much power, knowledge, and influence as Linderman over the years.

I wonder how long they’re going to milk the “I went to the future and saw the apocalypse, now we need to stop it” pattern.

Sometime in the past few months the Fremont BART station started requiring people to pay $1 for parking. While the fee itself isn’t so bad, the system seems pretty ill-conceived.

Rather than using a normal paid parking system with parking meters or with entry or exit fees, riders are required to remember their parking space number and to pay at a machine inside the station. The system is so confusing that there are at least three extra employees to guide people through the process: one person in the lot shouting at people to remember their parking space numbers, another person inside the station directing people to the parking validation machines, and a third person to explain to people how to use the machines. And that’s not including any people needed to enforce the parking dues.

The parking machines also introduce a bottleneck since everyone entering the station must wait to use them. No longer can I have a spare ticket handy in my wallet and dash straight from my car to a departing train.

Admittedly the parking lot at the Fremont BART station wasn’t designed for this sort of thing, but I wouldn’t expect retrofitting it to be too costly since the lot has limited entrances and exits, and areas of the lot are designated for buses and for passenger drop-off and pick-up already.

I received papers from Sony today saying that the USPTO actually approved some ridiculous patent application that my then-coworkers dragged me into filing with them four years ago.

I think it’s just further evidence of how overwhelmed the patent office is, of how ill-equipped they are to evaluate software patents, and of how software patents are usually lame. It’s another example of how large corporations flood the patent office with anything and everything to try to build up their patent portfolios, and not because they think they’re good ideas worth pursuing, but because they want things with which to defend themselves in case someone else sues them for patent infringement. Stupid patent cold wars.

It saddens me to think that my name is associated with that dreck. On the other hand, my name’s all over the dreck that I call my weblog, and as we already know, it’s not an uncommon name anyway.