Dan Jones

Way back in 2013, Google bought Waze, the popular navigation app that is known for allowing users to report speed traps, traffic slowdowns, and accidents. While many expected that Google would soon implement Waze’s features into Google Maps, the search giant largely allowed Waze to continue functioning as-is. But back in June, Google began a small test, asking users about traffic slowdowns or construction zones, somewhat similar to Waze. Now, it’s taking another step.

Android Police is reporting that some Maps users are seeing a new button that allows them to report speed traps or crashes with just two taps. The button is only visible in navigation mode, and again, it’s not showing up for everyone. While this may be in testing, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Google roll it out to the masses. It would certainly prove handy if Maps could notify you before you hit a speed trap or route you around crashes even faster.

Are you seeing this feature when navigating in Maps? Let us know in the comments below!

The Google Pixel 3 is capable of shooting 1080p video in 60 frames per second, but the option just isn’t there in the camera app. You can do 30 FPS or automatic FPS, which isn’t very helpful.

The issue is that, in auto mode, the device will switch between 30 FPS and 60 FPS depending on lighting conditions. So if your video has varying lighting conditions, you could see both framerates in a single video. Not only is this annoying, but it’s also frustrating to edit.

We’re frustrated with the lack of a 60 FPS option, one that’s available on most phones released in the last few years. “Google knows best” isn’t the philosophy we’ve come to expect from Android devices. Many are still complaining about this issue and Google may very well change its stance on letting users select the proper framerate. And since the camera is the main selling point for many, we hope that this feature is added soon.

Remember the Samsung Galaxy Camera? It was an intriguing Android-powered camera, and it made some sense. If you were going to carry a point and shoot, why shouldn’t it be running Android? You can have editing and sharing apps right on the camera!

Chinese company Yongnuo is trying something similar with the temporarily named YN450. This is a camera body with Android on board, but it takes your existing Canon EF lenses for more versatility.

Inside you’ll find a 5-inch 1080p display, an unknown 8-core Qualcomm processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage with an extra 32GB of expandable storage, dual mics, GPS, an 8MP front facing camera, dual LED flash, 3G/4G support, a 4,000 mAh built in battery, and Android 7.1. The sensor is a 16MP Panasonic micro 4/3 sensor with the ability to shoot 4K30 video.

Unfortunately, we don’t know what demographic this is for. The Galaxy Camera was neat because it was for the casual user, but requiring a collection of Canon lenses pushes this more towards the camera enthusiast. Yet camera enthusiasts won’t appreciate the non-replaceable battery, small storage, and lack of physical controls. At the same time tech enthusiasts don’t appreciate the lackluster specs and two year old version of Android that’s unlikely to ever be updated.

It’s hard to know who would buy this, but we can’t judge until the reviews are out. There’s currently no release date or price. We don’t even know if it’ll feature the Google Play Store. What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments!

Percy's employer is an "enterprise vendor". They have a variety of products all within the "enterprise" space. Like most enterprise products, they're sold on the strength of the marketing team's ability to claim with a straight face that they're secure, robust, reliable, and performant.

While the company offered a "cloud" solution for their enterprise suite, the real money was in the on premises version. With on-prem, any updates or upgrades were almost guaranteed to break the entire environment unless the customer shoveled huge piles of cash at the company to get a specialist to come out and do the upgrades.

That was good for the company, but wasn't so great for the specialists. Simple patches could take weeks to perform, not because of any trickiness or difficulty, but because each upgrade step could take days to run.

Percy found out about this when sitting in on a project review meeting.

"For our instant messaging engine," one of his peers, Elizabeth, explained, "just handling the room policy records can take upwards of ten hours at some sites. That's one SQL statement. God forbid the transaction fails for some reason."

"How could it be that bad? How many records is it?" Percy asked.

"Only about 100,000. The problem is the way the data is structured." Elizabeth pulled up the schema.

As an enterprise product, the messaging system prizes configurability and customizability over utility, performance, and common sense. It's not designed to solve a problem, but instead to allow customers to solve problems they didn't know they even had, mostly by inventing them. As a messaging/chat system, they had a concept of "rooms", and the "rooms" could have every aspect about them customized. From how usernames display in the chat, to whether files can be sent, to even whether or not copy-paste is permitted. Of course, the same interface which configured those cosmetic flags also configured role-based permissions, transport layer settings, and whether the messages were compressed before sending to the server.

And with each version of the product, the specific set of fields could change.

Those of you who work in RDBMSes are likely imagining a vast field of relations bound together by foreign keys and indexed to optimize likely query paths. Those of you who are more on the NoSQL side of things are likely imagining a sparse JSON/BSON document, possibly a heavily denormalized representation of the dataset.

Those of you who know enterprise products, or who have read this site before, know what it actually was: gigantic XML documents stored as CLOBs in the database. To add insult to injury, they used SQL Server on the backend, which has had a native XML type with optimized query operations since the mid-2000s.

Percy pulled up the schema on his own machine to explore it. At the center of the schema was a ChatRoomPolicy table. This table had three fields- a PolicyId and the RoomPolicy, which was the main gigantic XML document. In addition to that XML pile, you also had a Visibility column, which contained an XML document which contained ChatRoomVisibility elements- essentially little things, like whether attempting to send a message included a "Cancel" button, or if users could see a "Mute" button to silence the notifications.

Then, of course, you had the ChatRoom table, which had a foreign key reference to the policy which controlled the chat room.

"So, yeah, when we do an upgrade which alters the schema of the RoomPolicy documents," Elizabeth explained, "we have to read every row, parse the XML in our upgrade script, generate the new XML, and then store it. That's if the XML changes- sometimes an upgrade only renames one key, and not every document contains that key."

Percy had seen some pretty horrible things in his section of the product, but nothing quite like this. "Well, at least you can just map the XML document to a class, and mostly automate the changes, right?"

Elizabeth laughed at him. "If we did that, then our customers couldn't make up their own XML keys, and then add their own procedures in our proprietary scripting language which reads them, and then I wouldn't constantly get tickets because some PM at a three-branch bank in East Pilsbury decided they wanted a new field in their chatroom and it happens to collide with one of the fields we already use."

More specifically, the XML didn't have an associated schema. The upgrade script had to be able to handle any arbitrary XML document, identify the parts that the script cared about, if they existed, modify them, if necessary, hopefully without breaking anything the customer had customized, and then actually do the update.

The resulting upgrades could, on a good day, get about 3 records processed every second. With some organizations, the pile of policies applied to chat rooms could extend into the hundreds of thousands (as "private chats" also counted as chat rooms and had policy documents attached). Thus, ten hours just to upgrade a single module of a single service in their enterprise software portfolio. And that's just the upgrade task.

"Wow, I can't imagine how long testing must take," Percy said.

Elizabeth laughed, again. "That's up to the client to schedule. They usually don't."

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Abusive ad experiences are an unpleasant side effect of the digital advertising wave. Examples of these can include users clicking on a “Watch Video” button and instead triggering an unwanted download, or users tapping an ad closure button which triggers multiple unwanted popup ads. These types of abusive ads are a real hassle, and ad-dependent companies like Google are doing what they can to fight back against them.

The Google Chrome team previously put measures in place to prevent abusive ad experiences. Unfortunately, they found that more than half of current abusive ad experiences aren’t blocked by these protections. As such, Chrome 71 will implement a new measure that will remove all ads from sites with persistent abusive ad experiences.

Google says that there are only a small number of these sites in existence. Before ads are removed, site owners will be notified in Google Search Console if there are abusive ad experiences on their site. If there are, site owners will have 30 days to fix the issue before all ads are removed.

Of course, Chrome users can opt not to use these defense measures if, for some reason, they’d like to experience these abusive ads.

What do you think about this protection from Chrome? Is it going too far or is it a necessary measure?

Mike Tyson Ugly Christmas Sweater – Merry Chrithmith from Mike Tyson himthelf. This sweater is sure to be a hit!

The post Merry Chrithmith Mike Tyson Ugly Christmas Sweater appeared first on Shut Up And Take My Money.

Texts From Superheroes

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Ben Yagoda has a Lingua Franca piece on the history of that useful word smarmy; he begins with definition (OED: “Ingratiating, obsequious; smug, unctuous”) and continues with the all-important matter of dating. He and the great Jonathon Green have a back-and-forth about it, with Green finding an antedate from a 1916 edition of the Barrier Miner (New South Wales): “I wonder what his game is […] He doesn’t look the sort she could make a friend of; too smarmy for my taste.” Then Yagoda hits the jackpot:

I kept looking and eventually came upon an even earlier use of modern smarmy. As I said up top, it was a joke. A London journal called The Academy ran “Literary Competitions” in each issue, much as New York magazine and The Washington Post have done in later years. Here are the rules for No. 14 [“the best list of four original words, with definitions attached”]. Using Google Books, I found an article about the results of the competition, including this list of some of the best responses [one of which is “Smarmy: Saying treacly things which do not sound genuine”].

After I sent that out over Twitter, the language maven Ben Zimmer located the original article from the January 14, 1899, issue of The Academy announcing the winner of the competition. It revealed that one B.R.L., of Brighton, had come up with the idea that a word for “saying treacly things which do not sound genuine” should be smarmy.

The Internet is full of articles about notable neologisms, such as witticism, coined by John Dryden, and serendipity, invented by Horace Walpole. But none of them includes smarmy, and the very fact that B.R.L.’s humorous definition in a literary contest should eventually have become widely adopted — even as screel, scrungle, and gluxy disappeared — I find amazing.

So do I; it’s a pity that we don’t know B.R.L.’s full name — he or she deserves credit for their brilliant creation.

Cards Against Humanity Harry Potter Edition – This amazing, original, and creative game comes with 118 cards to play with, as well as a shrink wrap container to store them in.

Give your favorite card game a magical twist by sitting down for a rousing game of Cards Against Wizardry

Can be a standalone game or can be incorporated into a Cards Against Humanity game as an extension pack.

The post Cards Against Humanity Harry Potter Edition appeared first on Shut Up And Take My Money.

Here’s a philosophical question. Let’s say you’re searching an array. Is it clearer to use a for loop and break when you find the element, or is it better to use a while loop and break if you hit the end of the array?

Most of us would likely use the for loop, but it wouldn’t be wrong to use the while- maybe just unexpected.

But what if you had forgotten that while loops even exist? An anonymous submitter found this, and distilled its essence for us:

for (int i = 0; i < int.MaxValue, i++)
{
    // body of the loop, does not depend on i
    if ( /* some condition, does not depend on i */)
        break;
}

At first glance, this seems almost like one of those “search the array” loops, where you break upon finding the element. But that’s not what this is. This iterates up to int.MaxValue times, and no internal iteration ever cares about what i holds.

This is almost a while loop. It won’t run forever, but it’ll run for a real long time before giving up. Our submitter noticed because of a large pile of “unused variable” warnings- pretty much every place where you should use a while loop, this developer used the for/break construct.

The upshot, I suppose, is that at least it wasn’t a for-case.

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Inspired by the Clinton campaign, my daughter Minna made this campaign poster just before the 2016 Presidential election and taped it to her bedroom door, right next to my desk. I see that poster every day as I work and it reminds me of how fired up she was about a woman becoming President and how she saw herself in that effort. We all know how the election went and what the consequences have been so far, but that poster is still hanging proudly on her bedroom door.

Lately though, “Vote for Minna” has taken on a new meaning for me. No longer a simple campaign command, I now think of it as a guiding principle for my political activity. Self-interest in America is at record levels and I’m opting out. When I head to the polls on Tuesday, I’ll be voting with the best interests of my daughter and all of the other young people of America and the world in mind. They’re gonna need a stronger, safer, and better America and we can help. Vote for Emma. Vote for Kelsey & Miko & Isaac & Vic. Vote for Kira. Vote for Dae’Anna. Vote for Muzoon. Vote for Garrett & Gavin. Vote for Hauwa & Ruth & Kauna & Saratu. Vote for Anthony. Vote for Minna. Vote.

I imagine most of us know the basic facts about the Hebrew name of God, conventionally rendered YHWH, but Elon Gilad has a useful roundup at Haaretz:

According to the Mishnah (redacted in 200 C.E. but containing ancient traditions going back hundreds of years), the sacred name was only to be pronounced in the Temple in Jerusalem, and only in very specific occasions – by the High Priest on Yom Kippur and when the priests sanctified the crowds with the Priestly Blessing.

When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 C.E. by Rome, to punish the Jews for their latest rebellion, there was no longer any context in which the uttering of God’s name was permissible. Since then, to this day, when the name YHWH arises during prayer or recitation outside the Temple, Jews read it aloud as ‘adonai, meaning “my lord.” Thus the true pronunciation was eventually lost.

Still, linguists and biblical scholars have come up with a likely reconstruction based on ancient transcriptions, information gleaned from theophoric names, comparative material, and Hebrew grammar. The details of these analyses are too technical and frankly boring to even summarize here, but the upshot is that in all likelihood, in biblical times, the name was pronounced yah-weh, with soft a and soft (and slightly elongated) e.

(What on earth are “soft a” and “soft e”?) As for the meaning:

In the case of god, the trilateral root seems to be HWH.

If this is true, and it probably is, the root HWH is likely a variant of the very common Hebrew root HYH. It is very common in Hebrew for W and Y to interchange. HYH simply means “being.”

Also, the format of the name YHWH is similar to that of causative verbs, verbs that indicate the subject is causing a change in the verb’s object, such as English’s spill or hire. So, if we accept the root as HWH or HYH, and assume it has causative structure – taken together, the name seems to mean “bring into being.” Or, “creator.” […]

Meanwhile, as we said, we lost the original pronunciation of God’s name because it is too holy to say aloud. But nowadays, even the euphemism used in its stead, adonai, is considered too holy to be uttered outside of a liturgical setting. So new euphemisms have arisen, the most common being: hakadosh baruch hu (“the holy one blessed be he”) and hashem (“the name”). Whatever that name may be.

Thanks, Kobi!

This article was discussed on Hacker News and discussed on Reddit.

It’s been just over fours years since I started mentoring high school students at work, and I recently began mentoring my fourth such student. That’s enough students for me to start observing patterns. Of course, each arrives with different computer knowledge and experience, but there have been two consistent and alarming gaps. One is a concept and the other is a skill, both of which I expect an advanced high schooler, especially one interested in computers, to have before they arrive. This gap persists despite students taking computer classes at school.

File, Directories, and Paths

The vital gap in concepts is files, directories, or, broadly speaking, paths. Students do initially arrive with a basic notion of files and directories (i.e. “folders”) and maybe some rough idea that there’s a hierarchy to it all. But they’ve never learned the notation: a location to a file specified by a sequence of directory components which may be either relative or absolute. More specifically, they’ve never been exposed to the concepts of . (current directory) nor .. (parent directory).

The first thing I do with my students is walk them though a Linux installation process and then sit them in front of a terminal. Since most non-option arguments are file paths, shell commands are rather limited if you don’t know anything about paths. You can’t navigate between directories or talk about files outside of your home directory. So one of the first things I have to teach is how paths work. We go through exercises constructing and reasoning about paths, and it takes some time and practice for students to really “get” them.

And this takes longer than you might think! Even once the student has learned the basic concepts, it still takes practice to internalize and reason about them. It’s been a consistent enough issue that I really should assemble a booklet to cover it, and perhaps some sort of interactive practice. I could just hand this to the student so they can learn on their own as they do with other materials.

Paths aren’t just imporant for command line use. They come up in every day programming when programs need to access files. In some contexts it even has security implications regardless of the programming language. For example, care must be taken handling and validating paths supplied from an untrusted source. A web application may need to translate a path-like string in a query into a file path, and not understanding how .. works can make this dangerous. Or not understanding how paths need to be normalized before being compared.

I consider paths as falling under file and directory basics, and it’s part of the baseline for a person to be considered computer literate.

Touch Typing

The other major gap is touch typing. None of my students have been touch typists, and it slows them all down far more than they realize. I spend a lot of time next to them at the keyboard as they drive, so I’ve seen the costs myself. In a couple of cases, the students have to finger peck while looking at the keyboard.

An important step in mastering the use of computers is quickly iterating on new ideas and concepts — trying out and playing with things as they are learned. Being a slow typist not only retards this process, the tedium of poor, plodding keyboarding actively discourages experimentation, becoming a barrier. Advanced computer use isn’t much fun if you can’t type well.

To be fair, I’ve only been a proper touch typist for under two years. I wish I had learned it much earlier in life, and I really only have myself to blame that it took so long. Fortunately I had developed my own pseudo touch touching style that required neither finger pecking nor looking at the keyboard. My main issue was accuracy, not that typing was tedious or slow.

The bad news is that, unlike paths, this is completely outside my control. First, one of the major guidelines of the mentoring program is that we’re not supposed to spend a lot of time on basic skills. Learning to touch type takes several weeks of daily effort. That’s just too much time that we don’t have. Second, this won’t work anyway unless the student is motivated to learn it. I have no idea how to provide that sort of motivation. (And if the student is motivated, they’ll do it on their own time anyway.) I think that’s where schools get stuck.

The really bad news is that this problem is going to get worse. The mobile revolution happened, and, for most people, mobile devices are gradually replacing the home computer, even laptops. I already know one student who doesn’t have access to a general purpose computer at home. The big difference between a tablet and a laptop is that a tablet is purely for consumption.

In the future, kids will be less and less exposed to keyboards, and productive computing in general. Keyboards are, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, a vital tool for professionals. I wonder if the future will be a bit like, say, the 1980s again, where only a small fraction of kids will be exposed to a proper computer. Only instead of a PC clone, Commodore, or Apple II, it’s a Raspberry Pi.

Conclusions

I want to make something really clear: I’m not blaming the students for these gaps. It’s not in any way their fault. What they’re taught and exposed to is, at this point in life, largely outside of their control.

I lay most of the blame on the schools. My mentees have all taken high school programming classes of some sort, but these classes somehow manage to skip over the fundamentals. Instead it’s rote learning some particular IDE without real understanding. Finally I can relate to all those mathematicians’ complaining about how math class is taught!

What can be done? If you’re a parent, make sure your kid has access to a general purpose computer, even if it’s only a Raspberry Pi or one of its clones, along with a keyboard and mouse. (Of course, if you’re reading this article you’re not one of the parents that needs this advice.) It’s good exposure all around.

After reflecting on this recently, I think one of the shortcomings of my mentoring is that I don’t spend enough time — generally none at all — at the keyboard driving with my mentee as the passenger, where they can really observe me in action. Usually it’s me approaching them to check on their progress, and the opportunity just isn’t there. Perhaps it would be motivating to see how efficient and fun computing can be at higher levels of proficiency — to show them how touch typing and a powerful text editor can lead to such a dramatic difference in experience. It would be the answer to that question of, “Why should I learn this?”

Texts From Superheroes

A smattering of hints is pointing towards a new Google service called Play Pass, which would be a subscription for access to paid apps and games. The news comes from Android Police, where the team has taken note of several pieces of evidence. The first is from XDA developer Quinny899, who found an in-development Play Store feature called Play Pass back in June. The code for this feature indicated that it related to a subscription, but there was little known beyond that.

Added on top of this, however, a new Google Opinion Rewards survey has indicated the potential for Google Play Pass. The question asked, “Imagine your app store has a subscription that offers hundreds of dollars worth of paid apps and games for a monthly fee. How well does Pass describe this service?” This backs up the idea of a Play Pass subscription service, and isn’t the first time that Google has floated concept ideas through its survey system.

What are your thoughts on Play Pass? Would you utilize this service?

I spent a few days in Berlin last week.¹ One of things you notice as a visitor to Berlin is the remembrance of the Holocaust and the horrors of the Nazi regime. There’s the Jewish Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the Topographie Des Terrors, which is an excellent (and free) exhibition detailing how the Nazi terror machine worked.

At the massive train yard at the Deutsches Technikmuseum, they have a dedicated exhibition on how the German rail system was used to transport Jews to concentration camps, including a freight car used in the transports that you could walk into and try to imagine, in some small way, you and your children cheek to jowl with 80 other people, on the way to be murdered. A powerful experience.

Outside a train station, there was a sign listing concentration camps: “places of horror which we must never forget”.

Just as important, the language they used on the displays in these places was clear and direct, at least in the English translations. It was almost never mealy-mouthed language like “this person died at Treblinka”…like they’d succumbed to natural causes or something. Instead it was “this person was murdered at Treblinka”, which is much stronger and explicitly places blame on the Nazis for these deaths.

As the exhibition at the Topographie Des Terrors made clear, the German response to the Holocaust and Nazi regime wasn’t perfect, but in general, it’s very clear that a) this happened here, and b) it was terrible and must never happen again.

On Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, a man radicalized by the President of the United States and right-wing media walked into a synagogue and killed 11 people.

With overt anti-Semitism growing in the US (as well as other things like the current administration’s policies on immigration and jailing of children in concentration camps), it’s instructive to compare the German remembrance of the Holocaust to America’s relative lack of public introspection & remembrance about its dark history.

In particular, as a nation the US has never properly come to terms with the horrors it inflicted on African Americans and Native Americans. We build monuments to Confederate soldiers but very few to the millions enslaved and murdered. Our country committed genocide against native peoples, herded them onto reservations like cattle, and we’re still denying them the right to vote.

These things happened in our history in part because powerful people needed an enemy to rally everyone against. It’s an old but effective tactic: blacks, Indians, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Irish, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese — they are here to take your jobs, steal your money, rape your women! It’s what slaveowners did to make their forced labor camps socially acceptable to polite Southern society, it’s what the Nazis did to make murdering Jews acceptable to the German people, it’s what the US government and settlers did to commit genocide against Native Americans, and it’s what Donald Trump is doing now. The monuments, exhibitions, and museums I saw in Berlin last week formed a powerful rejoinder to this type of fascism. I think the US really needs to grapple with its history in this regard…or it’ll just keep happening again.

Update: An earlier version of this post stated that one of the victims of the Pittsburgh shooting was a Holocaust survivor. She was not. (thx, vanessa)

1. I’ll be posting more about the trip later in the week, I hope.↩

Tags: Berlin   Donald Trump   Germany   Holocaust   museums   politics   racism   slavery   USA

That spookiest of days, Halloween, is nearly upon us, and to celebrate, Google's running sales on all the creepy media you could possibly want. Right now, you can score some solid discounts on seasonally appropriate movies, books, and TV shows on Google Play.

Horror and thriller flicks, from recent hits like IT and Get Out to vintage gems such as Alien and American Psycho, can be had for five to 10 bucks.

[Deal Alert] Google Play has savings on creepy movies, books, and TV in time for Halloween was written by the awesome team at Android Police.