Terminally Incoherent

The other day I got the following email. Curiously, Gmail did not flag it as spam which it probably should. Before you read it though, I strongly advise against actually going to the terminally-incoherent.cn website. It is seriously NSFW. And when I say NSFW I mean serious pr0n with explicit auto-play flash movie clips playing all over the place. Do not open that website at work.

Dear Sirs,

We have terminally-incoherent.cn and found that the domain is pretty useful for you to explore China market. We can really consider selling it out by escrow.com secure transaction if you are interested in it. Please reply to us and discuss the domain tranfer matters. China is the bigger market in the world ！Dot.cn domains is a symbol of enterprises in China！10,000,000 .cn domains are been registered！Wish you happy every day, and welcome to our China to travelling. At last,Sorry for the disturb if any.

Best Regards.

Wong

Usefulname Technologies

Out of curiosity I decided whether or not that URL is actually used for anything. I was half expecting one of those generic parked domain pages full of advertising banners and or/links. There was also a chance the site could have been spreading mallware but since I was sitting at a Ubuntu machine this did not concern me that much. I really did not expect a hard core pr0n site to be there.

They are not really using the domain to identify the website though. It seems to be a simple domain redirect and the links on the website lead to another address. There are probably dozens of other dresses that redirect to the same place this way. They buy them in bulk, then send funny extortion letters in fractured English. I’m pretty sure that the price they would want for the domain would be much higher than what you usually pay for a .cn domain.

I also love the “company name” on the email. I wonder if they actually chose that name or if someone simply forgot to fill out one of the fields in their bulk mailer software and the emails are going out with the default company name placeholder. Sort of funny either way.

Someone asked me what am I going to do about this. I don’t think I need to do anything. If I was selling something or ran a respectable company, and I needed to watch for the corporate image I might have been concerned that my .cn address redirects to hard core pr0n. But since I use the Terminally Incoherent domain to host a private blog I don’t think this affects me in any way. It’s just sort of funny and I guess flattering in a way. It is still sort of bizarre that someone would want to cash in by using my long, hard to pronounce, and easy to forget domain name.

I really don’t know what I was thinking when I started this blog. I picked two long, easily misspelled words and to make matters worse put a hyphen in between them to make it even harder to recall pretty much guaranteeing that this website will never by passed around by word of mouth.

“So, what was that website you told me about?”
“It’s terminally-incoherent.com… With a hyphen in the middle.”
“Oh… You know, just email me the link then…”

Yeah, kids - that’s me. I think I committed every single cardinal sin of naming your domain when registering it. Hard to pronounce, hard to spell, over 20 characters long, has a hyphen in it, not very catchy and etc… I’ve been thinking about shortening it somehow for a while now but I can’t figure out how. I’d love to just use ti.com but the fuckers at Texas Instruments got that one first. Oh well…

My lovely university never ceases to amaze me. Every semester without fail, they do something so monumentally stupid that I can’t help but go:

This has been going on since my freshman year. So 4 years of college, 2.5 years of grad school, and it will now be close to 2 consecutive years of being an adjunct. And every semester they surprise me with a brand new level of organizational stupidity. It’s always a different branch, different school, or office that does this. But it’s always entertaining. This semester the WTF moment was delivered by the Office of Academic Advising. Before I show you their email, let me give you some background.

Academic Advising likes to track the progress of students on academic probation. In the past, half way through the semester they used to send all faculty little envelopes with paper forms to be filled out. You got a separate envelope for each course your were teaching, and inside you had a short questionnaire regarding the progress of the 2-3 students in that class who were on probation. Since I’m using a general requirement course that must be taken, I always had at least 3 of these forms to fill out for each class. They were really short, 1 page things that asked about student’s grades, whether or not they turn in their work on time, whether or not they attend the class regularly and etc… It usually took me few minutes to fill them out, put them in an inter-office envelope and drop them in the Computer Science Department’s outbox.

This semester the Office of Academic Advising decided to modernize the process and have instructors fill out the forms online. That’s a good thing, right? Wrong. Please read the email they sent me:

Dear Colleague,

Each year, The Center for Academic Advising & Adult Learning administers the Student Academic Monitoring Program (STAMP). As part of the STAMP program, academically at-risk students are identified and faculty members are asked to assess the student’s performance in class. Comments submitted by faculty are then used by advisors to determine appropriate intervention strategies and support services for students. In an effort to increase the efficiency of the program, STAMP will be administered entirely online this semester. The list of students in your course(s) who are included in the Student Academic Monitoring Program this semester will be available on NetStorage, the University’s secure drive. To access your list, follow the instructions listed at the bottom of this email.

Once you’ve accessed the list, go to [URL redacted to prevent stupidity] and complete a form for each student on your list. Submission of the form by faculty will automatically generate an email to the student. This email will include ONLY the quantitative information supplied by the faculty (eg. number of absences, approximate grade in the course, assignments submitted on time, etc.). Qualitative information submitted in the Comments section will be viewed only by advisors.

Your honest evaluation of these students at mid-semester plays a key role in our efforts to assist them and to ensure their retention at the University. Please submit the online STAMP forms no later than Monday, November 3rd.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Center for Academic Advising & Adult Learning

Instructions:

1. Go to NetStorage
2. In the username box, enter your NetId (eg. smithj)
3. In the password box, enter your password
4. Click OK
5. Click on DriveF@GROUPS
6. Open the CAAAL folder
7. Open the STAMP folder
8. Open the FACULTY folder 
9. Open the spreadsheet that corresponds to the first letter of your last name
10. Sort the spreadsheet by faculty_name (column A) to find your name. Your students will be listed in column C.

TLDR: we are lazy, and you should do all the work from now on.

So the office of Academic Advising dumped their list of students on probation into bunch of excel worksheets, then put those worksheets on a network share.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it is to weed through these spreadsheets, locate the students who attend out classes, then go and fill out a generic blank online form for each of them:

Can you see the problems with this new scheme? Obviously it’s a pain in the ass to do. I’d much prefer to fill out my paper form and be done with it. But there are more jarring issues here.

For one, any faculty member, adjunct, graduate student teaching a class and God knows who else can go and download all these spreadsheet and get access to a list of students on academic probation and their student ID numbers. Upon merging and sorting all these files you can easily re-create class schedules for all these students. I don’t know about you but to me this is way to much personal information being accessible to way to many people. I’m pretty sure this is a privacy violation, and there is probably a rule against doing precisely this sort of thing somewhere on the books.

Second issue is that, as far as I can tell anyone can go and fill out that blank form. There doesn’t seem to be validation of any type so I could fill out forms for students that are not in my class. In fact, I could fill out this form for students who are not on probation, or who don’t even exist.

Not to mention the fact that different people will put different things into the free-form input boxes labeled “Course Name” and “Course Number”. Why? Well, let me give you an example. One of the courses I teach can be identified as follows:

• CMPT 109-36: Fluency in Technology

There is also a “call number” associated with this course which is a unique numeric identifier students use when registering and then promptly forget. The question is, which part of the above is the course name and which one is the course number? Does the course number only CMPT 109 or do I need to specify the section number CMPT 109-36. Also how do I input this information into the box. I can think of several ways to do it:

• CMPT109-36
• CMPT 109-36
• CMPT-109-36
• CMPT-109 36
• CMPT10936
• CMPT 10936
• CMPT 109 sec. 36

And etc.. I think you can see the pattern here. All of the above are somewhat valid annotations and I have seen people use most of these variations at different occasions. This effectively means that sorting and aggregating on the Course Number column in the database will not produce any useful results. The data that they will get in this form will be absolute shit, and will require to be tabulated by hand just like the paper forms were. All they really doing is eliminating the printing, mailing, hand sorting and scanning/data entry part of the process by offloading all the work onto the instructors. Not cool.

I’m being told that this new method is a slight improvement though. Apparently, in the past these spreadsheets used to be emailed from one department to another without any encryption. So at least this time around they have them locked behind some sort of user authentication screen and you must access them via SSL.

I was buying some new computers for work recently and I actually almost laughed at the newest OEM bullshit that is being pulled by Microsoft. But let me back up a bit. My workplace is a windows shop. I’d say that 99% of our machines are running some sort of OS made by Microsoft. Most machines run windows XP and we are really not in a hurry to change that dynamic. Especially since every single employee who bought a new computer in the last year gave us a panicked call the next day asking whether or not we will be migrating to Vista any time soon, and then thanked us profusely when we said that it is not something we have even remotely considered at the moment.

To tell you the truth I have yet to meet a single person IRL who thinks upgrading to Vista was a good idea. Most people in fact ask me if it’s possible to downgrade back to XP. Funny thing is that most of the new Vista laptops ship with the funky SATA drives which are not detected by XP’s installation disk. So even if you have a non-OEM Genuine Windows XP™ license and installation disk downgrade requires some tinkering (ie. slip streaming SATA drivers) which is a pain in the ass - especially if you are a luser and you have no clue what the hell you are doing. I can’t help but wonder if the laptop vendors are contractually forced to do this. I wouldn’t be surprised.

But this is not the underhanded Microsoft tactic du jour that I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk about the downgrade fees. If you want to buy a computer with Windows XP these days you need to carefully select your vendor since not all of them are allowed to do this. It’s not that there is no demand for it - as far as I can tell the demand for Windows XP is huge. It’s just Microsoft only licenses XP to few select companies. So for example, if you want to buy your new machine from HP you will need to go with Vista. If you want XP you probably need to go with Dell. Unfortunately, recently Dell stopped selling machines with Windows XP. When you buy a new computer you have to buy a Vista license. There is just no way around it. But because of the huge demand for XP, Dell will “downgrade” the system for you for an additional fee of $99:

Some people say this is a bargain, while I say it is a ripoff. Yes, you theoretically do get a Vista license but it is an OEM bound to that machine. Most people who are still buying XP machines have no intention of upgrading to Vista any time soon. I’d say that 90% of the people who purchased the downgrade will never actually use the Vista license they got as part of this deal. If they wanted Vista, they would buy Vista right now, no?

If I remember correctly, when Dell was still selling XP they were pricing it approximately the same as Vista. This means that practically speaking buying the downgrade means you are paying the same as you would pay for a WinXP computer and a $99 Microsoft Tax.

It is a shady, underhanded tactic and I’m not sure who should I blame here. Is Dell skimming off the top here selling us bullshit downgrades? Is Micrisoft requiring them to do this in order to boost their Vista sales this quarter? Is it both?

All I know is that I don’t like this one bit.

Function keys were designed to be ultimate shortcuts or “hot-keys” on your keyboard. By definition, they were there so you could bind some sort of a function or a command to them for quick access. They are like the speed dial buttons on your phone. And yet, they remain some of the least used keys on your keyboard. Why is that?

Let’s face it, if we made a heat-map of average persons daily keyboard use the function row would probably barely register any strokes. This is sort of the opposite of what these keys were intended for. There are few reasons for it though. They are not standard, and may work differently in different applications. This context dependence is by design - the original idea was to leave them un-bound so that users can assign their own functions to them. Unfortunately some OS’s like windows do not allow users to define global shortcuts like this out of the box. So, application developers started assigning their own functions to them. This naturally turned out to be very confusing so over the years we developed unofficial conventions such as using F1 for help, F3 for search and F5 for refresh. When users can expect a key to work predictably, they start hitting these keys more often.

The de-facto standardization however doesn’t change the fact that these keys are like 100 miles away from the home row. Hitting any of them requires you to lift your hand and and move it about inch or two upwards to reach the key you need. You can’t you just can’t touch type them and this is an issue. This is why functions such as copy, paste or save which would be perfect for F keys are usually bound to easily touch typed key combos such as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S.

I find that I hardly ever use any F keys these days. For example, I like to use multi-button mice which allow me to back-forward and refresh pages with my thumb. This means I hardly ever touch F5. I don’t like full screen (kiosk) mode so I hardly ever touch F11. I do my searching using the ‘/’ key (works with vim and firefox which are the two apps I use the most) or Ctrl+F (most other apps) so I have no practical use for F3.

The only function key I actually do use is F12 which on my Kubuntu system is bound to the Yakuake pull-down console and I don’t even remember if that was by default, or if I bound it myself.

How do you use function keys? Do you bind them yourself? Let me know which one is your favorite!

If you don’t see your favorite key listed above, choose ‘other’ and let me know what it is in the comments, and how do you use it.

Also, Happy Halloween! Sorry that today’s post is non-spooky but whatever.

I hardly ever use the touchpad on my laptop. At work, my morning routine is plugging in my external monitor, ethernet cable and the USB hub into the back of my machine. Yes, I could get a docking station but why bother? I have a little USB hub on my desk where I connect my mouse, keyboard, the external drive for backups and occasionally a flash drive or two. It is almost like a desktop replacement which it practically is. Dell Latitude 830 is a monster of a laptop. I love this machine but it is big and bulky and definitely designed to be stationary more than portable.

Today I had the crazy idea of walking around with it and using it as a normal person would use a laptop. Bad idea! It is nice to have that big wide screen when you work on this machine but it really was quite unwieldy when I was trying to carry it and a stack of papers around the building. Not to mention that the suspend to disk just does not work on that machine. Not that I’m surprised. I have never owned, nor seen a Linux laptop in which ACPI functions such as suspend or hibernate would work with any degree of reliability. If you have one, congratulations! I envy you. Perhaps Hardy will solve my issues once I finally upgrade to it. But I digress…

I took the laptop with me to the classroom without an external mouse and noticed two things. One, my keyboard was dusty showing how often I actually use this machine as a laptop. Two, my touchpad was sluggish. Quick glance at the KDE System Settings panel assured me that there was no such thing as touchpad settings applet. One was clear - I had to do something. I tried using the rubber nipple (yes this a technical term) located between my G and H keys but that thing is so inaccurate it is not even funny. It is like trying to mouse around with a Joystick - something that I actually did quite a few times back on Amiga when I was to lazy to plug in a mouse in between games. It will get things done, but it is neither pleasurable nor productive.

So I decided to fix this. Quick google told me that all I really needed to do was to add few short lines to xorg.conf. Look for the following section in your file:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Synaptics Touchpad"
    Driver         "synaptics"
    Option         "SendCoreEvents" 	"true"
    Option         "Device" 		"/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Protocol" 		"auto-dev"
    Option         "HorizEdgeScroll" 	"0"
    Option	     "MinSpeed"		"1.0"
    Option	     "MaxSpeed"		"1.8"
    Option	     "AccelFactor"	"0.3"
    Option	     "MaxTapTime"	"0"
EndSection

This is how mine looks right now, which is after applying the changes. You see, I added the MinSpeed, MaxSpeed and AccelFactor options to this section. You might need to play around with the numbers but keep in mind that the higher the MaxSpeed the less control you have over the cursor. At 1.8 my touchpad is a bit jumpy but I can swipe it from corner to corner of my screen without picking up my finger which is what I wanted. I’d say that 1.5 would be a medium speed you’d want to aim for, and 2.0 is way to fast. I haven’t experimented with acceleration much because I got tired of restarting my X.

Here is the thing - why can’t I have an applet with adjustable sliders for all of this in my System Settings area in KDE? It would be much easier and more convenient than editing xorg.conf and restarting X, don’t you think?

In case you noticed the last option MaxTapTime being set to 0, that is me disabling the tap to click functionality. Why? Because it was just to sensitive. I was sitting in the class as my students were taking an exam and readig Terminally Incoherent comments. At one point I was trying to move my muse pointer and I inadvertently clicked on one of the google video ads that sometimes show up above or below the comment box and my laptop went:

“DUM DUM DUM DUM! THE ICREDIBLE HULK! CRAAAAASH! ROOOOAR! COMMING SOON ON DVD! BA DUM DUM DUM! WHOOSH! KABLOOM!”

By that time I of course scrolled up so I didn’t see the video playing. I was just like “WTF??? Who is watching videos during an exam”. Then I realized it was me. Fun times.

So yeah, tap to click is gonzo for now. I don’t really need it and it was more annoying than useful.