Real data proving that UI design for function beats UI design for aesthetics. Well, for web and app designer aesthetics, anyway, which are trend-based and emotional rather than useful.
Luke Wroblewski: Obvious always wins
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Category Archives: code
Accurately named network distortion tool
“Comcast is a tool designed to simulate common network problems like latency, bandwidth restrictions, and dropped/reordered/corrupted packets.”
Office not so 365
Microsoft’s Azure Cloud service failed at almost exactly midnight last night, taking down hundreds of websites who may have thought that hardware redundancy could magically protect them from sysadmin oopses, as well as users of Xbox live and Microsoft’s flagship service Office 365.
Viva Zorggroep, a Dutch healthcare organisation with 4,000 employees, said it had also been affected as a consequence of adopting Microsoft’s online apps.
“At this time, our supporting departments such as finance, HR, education, IT et cetera are working with Office 365,” said Dave Thijssen, an IT manager at the company.
“This morning these servers were unresponsive, which means users were not able to log in to Office 365.
“As a result they had no access to email, calendars, or – most importantly – their documents and Office Online applications.“We also had trouble reporting the outage to our users as most of digital communication – email, Lync, intranet/Sharepoint – was out.
The outage persisted for over five hours for some customers and apparently there are still latency issues at this time. This is of course a violation of the Service Level Agreement… so you can keep a nickel or two of your monthly rent, I bet.
SatNOGS wins Hackaday prize
Coverage here. Very impressive, but personally I was even more impressed by the DIY spectrometer.
Microsoft climbs aboard the WordPress bandwagon
If you were thinking to yourself “what my PHP-based content presentation system really needs is an expensive backend from a company that has historically done incredibly poorly with PHP” then Microsoft has got your number.
Android 5.0 is out
It’s got better support for filesystems and for SD cards, despite Google’s claim that file managers and removable storage are simply too confusing and difficult for their user base. Google’s been flooded with complaints about their rejection of SD cards (and Android tablets like the nVidia Shield that support SD cards are massively outselling Google’s offerings) so perhaps calling their customers clueless wasn’t such a great business move. I haven’t heard anything about the app permissions debacle, so I’m assuming that’s still horribly broken.
Internet soft spots
Want to build a ginormous botnet without doing a lot of work? Compromise one of the Internet’s soft spots.
If you take over bOINGbOING.net, you can use the site to inject malware in 1.3 million visitors. Chump change! How about TheChive.com, or Kottke.org, or whatever? Face it, you’re not going to get more than 15 million suckers. It’s just too much effort for a lazy man; you’d still be doing a lot of hard work to recruit a paltry few million zombies.
So, you take over jquery.com, or typekit.com. Now you’re cooking with gas! It’s become common practice for websites to use remotely sourced scripts – so there are thousands of sites that will blindly push out whatever is in the file jquery.js at jquery.com, and all that site’s visitors will run it just as blindly. So if you take over a popular script or advertisement source, you can leverage that into billions of individual attacks, quite easily.
And that’s my Halloween horror story for this year.
How to hurt yourself with EIGRP
As long as all your routing nodes are Cisco branded, EIGRP (Cisco’s proprietary routing protocol) is very easy to implement. You pretty much just turn it on and it works, like the old Appletalk/phonenet networks in the pre-OSX days.
But if you have a machine that’s all loaded up with static routes, and you accidentally redistribute them back to the machine the routes point to, the network gets pretty loopy. Little network geek joke there.
DIY Ground-based Ion Cannon
Hobbit’s netcat can be used to vomit forth network traffic as fast as your machine can generate it. We don’t need no steenkin’ LOIC!
Anyway, I needed to test a WAN pipe to see if Comcast was delivering the bandwidth we’re paying for – we’re supposed to have a 200 Mbps link to Boston.
[root@monster ~]# yes | nc -4 -u -v -v -n remotehost.boston.com 9
The yes command just screams “yes!” incessantly, like a teenage boy’s dream girlfriend. We pipe the output to netcat, and force it to use UDP and IPv4 to send all the yes traffic to a host in Boston. UDP port 9 is the “discard” service, of course, so the machine at the other end just throws the traffic away. We already constantly monitor all the routing nodes in the path so we can see and graph what happens to the packets in real time.
Turns out the host can generate 80Mbps, sustainable indefinitely. That goes into the 200Mbps Comcast pipe… and only 4Mbps comes out the other end! Thanks, netcat! Time to call Comcast!
Don’t do this if you aren’t ready to deal with the repercussions of completely smashing your network. Saturating interfaces, routers and pipes will severely impact normal business routines, and should be saved as a last resort.
0+12=13 in DBMspeak
In the field of Computer Science, there are many sub-disciplines, and there are varying shades of technical opinion. One of the shadiest of these is that of the database managers. An outspoken group on many subjects, always willing to force academic ideals of data integrity on hapless junior programmers, critical of any engine that caters primarily to real-world use cases, and always willing to compromise any such principles in any situation that affects them personally. Phil Ochs fans are laughing, everyone else is confused.
To illustrate: Everybody knows C programmers can’t count to ten on their fingers, because they start at zero. But if you ask a C programmer to provide ten items, he will – they’ll just be numbered from zero to nine, that’s all. A Visual Basic or FORTRAN programmer will give you the same absolute number of items, although they’ll be numbered from one to ten. Two boxes twice is always four boxes, in the world of workers getting things done, no matter the language nor what the labels on the boxes say.
Perhaps only in the field of database management would a list of “Ted Codd’s 12 Rules” include 13 items numbered zero through twelve. I suspect that in any other field, this would be considered a typographical error and quickly corrected in the proofreading stage.
Putting it on a computer doesn’t make it new.
This Ars Technica article is notable not only because it explains the Alice decision, but because it leads with a picture of a Wang System 2200 terminal. I taught myself BASIC on one of these around 1977 or so (before the Black Ships came and the secret of hose gartering that doesn’t ravel was lost).
Phone Scammer Slammer
“Man Ass”
Unix-derived operating systems have a tradition of making commands short and easily typed regardless of social conventions.
So, in order to consult the manual page for the Autonomous System Scanner, you would type “man ass” at the command line. People involved with AS work would not find this remarkably odd or offensive – we’ve already got jobs to do, that don’t involve complaining about other people’s sense of propriety.
However, if one creates a site that automatically generates HTML-formatted web pages from the man pages of the Ubuntu V13.04 linux distribution, popularly called Raring Ringtail, one ends up hosting a page describing “raring man ass”.
The Internet being what it is, such a page may have unexpected effects on your google analytics results…
Birthday Paradox
Wikipedia’s entry is unwieldy and Wolfram’s is written in the obtuse language of professional mathematicians. HowStuffWorks cuts through the clutter.
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Automotive Grade Linux might save your life
A standard Linux-based software platform for the connected car would be huge, and at this point could even be a life-saving development.
Automotive Grade Linux is a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car. The community’s first open source software release is now available for download, bringing the industry one step closer to realizing the benefits of open automotive innovation.
Read the press release or visit the AGL Wiki to learn more and download the code.
Recent Windows-based dashboards (for example the Nissan Leaf) are an abomination only slightly less dangerous than even-more-hideous automaker proprietary dashboards (for example the Toyota Prius Plug-in). With all the data that exists about the dangers of distracted driving, and state legislatures passing draconian laws against texting behind the wheel, why is it legal for auto vendors to create these potentially lethal user interfaces? How can a pure touch-screen interface, that must be visually examined to be used, possibly be less dangerous than texting while driving? I can drop or ignore a smartphone, or just turn the bloody thing off, but I am forced to interact with my dashboard!
A step in the right direction is to open up the dashboard software ecosystem, so sane designs have an opportunity to compete for driver approval. After all, you can’t expect the same people who designed backwards fake stickshifts (as commonly found in Nissans and Toyotas) to create a good user interface; these people have already demonstrated that they aren’t capable of understanding the task, much less reaching the goal. But a robust community of Open Source hackers would allow the computerized automotive dashboard to progress in the same way that automobile clubs, hot rod enthusiasts, and similar communities have driven innovation historically in the rest of the car industry – by finding more alternatives, and demonstrating them in action.
For every good design there will probably need to be a lot of bad ones. Let’s stop limiting ourselves to the bad (are you listening, Ford?) and start working on a dashboard that’s less likely to kill people.
Fix uart boot errors on M1000e blade chassis
Somebody else figured it out in 2009, and I’m late to the party.
Basically, if you are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or one of it’s clone siblings) on a Dell M600 blade, you’ll need to modify the default BIOS settings in a non-intuitive way or you’ll get an error on every boot-up.
IRQ handler type mismatch for IRQ 12
Call Trace:
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I knew this was a serial port issue from the second and fifth lines of the trace, but I couldn’t figure out why it was involving IRQ 12, which is normally used for SCSI cards or PS/2 mice.
bochs is still the box
I’m surprised and pleased to learn that bochs still exists and is still being actively developed and improved. Lots of people said it would die once hardware-accelerated virtualization became commonplace, since pure software emulation of a PC is so much slower than using a hypervisor. But not only is bochs still popular, it’s got competition!
STOP USING ACTIVE X.
One of the horrors remaining from the browser wars of the late 90s is Microsoft’s “ActiveX” technology. ActiveX, not DirectX, although maybe the latter needs to die too.
ActiveX in browsers is based on the idea that your computer should be able to download and execute completely random binary images from the Internet without your permission. What a great basic architecture, huh? It was created because Microsoft’s implementations of COM and OLE technologies were so unnecessarily complex and fundamentally user-hostile that nobody sane wanted to use them. Microsoft needed an alternative, one that could be integrated with the web, since they wanted to crush Netscape and take over the Internet. Browser technology was critically important to them and ActiveX was a way to prevent the creation of a level browser playing field based on shared standards.
To give a more generous interpretation of the same events, Microsoft was faced with a desire to provide a richer web experience to their customers and an inability to deliver their vision using existing web standards. ActiveX was an early attempt to work around the inadequacy of HTML, and while it had many issues (security being a big one, and lack of support for non-Intel platforms another) Microsoft has worked continuously and diligently to remediate those issues and support current and former users of their products.
Personally I’m completely happy with either of those interpretations of the events surrounding the birth of ActiveX. Who cares? Those bodies are all buried now… or at least they should be.. NO WAIT. ActiveX is still stinking up the room!
If you use ActiveX in your websites, or allow your browser to execute ActiveX controls, you are part of the problem. Please, I’m begging you, for the love of God, stop it! Just let this hideous thing die, will you?
There’s nothing that ActiveX provides that can’t be provided using current web standards and technologies. You don’t have to keep hurting yourself, and your readership. Just stop already.
Whenever you purchase any software with a web server in it, or sign up for any service that has a web interface, you need to routinely insist that the product you are buying must be useable with any browser, not merely Microsoft Internet Explorer with ActiveX enabled running on 32-bit Microsoft Windows on a x86 chipset. Make the seller put that in writing, so you don’t get stuck supporting ActiveX against your own will. It’s a shame you have to do this – you don’t have to specify in writing that there will be no incontinent rabid monkeys in the back seat when you purchase a car – but it’s necessary. ActiveX must be destroyed.
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Setting default gateway on Cisco 2960 switches
Since The Dawn Of Time ™ it’s been possible for a networked device to have a default route. Way back then, before our beards turned thick and grey, all routers were called “gateways” so the default route was called a default gateway in those ancient times.
The purpose of the default route is to provide a last ditch option when the device does not know what to do. Basically, whenever a networked device doesn’t know where to send some data, it can do the equivalent of a hail mary pass, and just chuck it blindly at a mysterious place where hopefully there will be a router or modem of some sort which is part of the global Internet. This is actually how the vast majority of Internet traffic is handled, believe it or not; PCs, Macs and webservers typically don’t know anything about how to reach other things on the Internet. The router that sits at the end of their default route handles it for them.
The Cisco 2960 is a commodity network switch that has recently been given some routing capabilities by a software update. They are quite commonplace; there’s a couple stacks of them around my job site, hanging off the larger Nexus fabrics.
The 2960 has brought some fresh confusion to the terminology, because for reasons unknown Cisco has provided these three commands:
ip default-gateway (when IP routing is disabled)
ip default-network (when IP routing is enabled)
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 (when load balancing across multiple routes is enabled)
To an experienced networking professional, those are all the same thing. If I say “hey, Melvin, set route zero mask zero on your box to point to the core12 router” it means the same as if I say “Melvin, you dolt, your default gateway needs to be core12” or even “the default net should be core12, Melvin!” So this is a remarkably non-intuitive set of configuration options here.
“So what” you say, with a Cisco router you just use the tab-completion and question-mark help features of the command line to learn what to do, right? Who needs documentation, Cisco rocks. Er, except in the current version of the software there’s no help text at all for ip default-gateway, and you can’t use ip default-network until routing is enabled, and it’ll accept ip routes to 0.0.0.0 without using them as a default. So, not so much. Thankfully Keith Barker has a more helpful post than mine, if you haven’t already figured out what you need from this one.