Blogs

A few days ago, the news carried a short notice about Richard Matheson's death. I was a bit surprised at first, but then remembered that his novel I Am Legend had recently been remade into a blockbuster movie, so that's why the media know him. Just now I did some research while reading Isaac Asimov's "A Memoir", and so found out that another Science Fiction author, Jack Vance, has passed away a month ago, this time entirely without my noticing. Jack Vance is one of the few SF authors that I absolutely adore, and in the SF field he is rightly famous - but apparently not famous enough in the eyes of the general populace to warrant even the smallest notice in the papers. Just now I feel very sad.

It is now 2½ years since my last post on greylisting, and over 3½ years since I reluctantly started to use this spam prevention technique. I am pleased to report that greylisting remains as successful as it was on day one.

In fact, the situation has even improved since that last post 2½ years ago: The overall spam rate has dropped from 36 to 14 messages per day! It is unclear whether the reason for this is a world-wide decrease in spam mails, or a decrease in "quality" of spam mails, i.e. fewer spam mails make it past the greylisting wall. I don't need to know the exact reason, though, to feel happy about the result: Due to the low overall spam rate, on average only 1.4 messages per day now make it into my inbox. Wow, these days I can even leave my mailbox unattended for a few days without getting flooded - isn't that great?! (compare the current situation to when I only had Spam Assassin and, at the peak, my inbox was inundated by more than 40 new spam messages per day).

For more statistics details, see this wiki page.

Little Go 0.11.1 has made it into the App Store yesterday. I decided to make this bugfix release now, and not wait another month for 0.12.0, so that I could get the fix for a very annoying bug out to "my" users. The full story can be found on the GitHub issue tracker.

A long time ago I decided that I would never ever watch another movie directed by Roland Emmerich. Not every movie on my menu must be super quality, plain good entertainment is usually OK, and sometimes I even enjoy to see trash films. But I always felt insulted by the stuff made by Emmerich because he seems to assume that the viewers of his movies (e.g. me) are dumbasses that are happy to see explosions, and never mind the story. So these days Emmerich movies are a no-go for me.

A few days ago I saw Star Trek Into Darkness. After maybe half the movie had passed, I felt how I got angrier and angrier at all the stupid mistakes in the story, until in the end I had to say: What a dumb movie! Then I happened to see the writing credits, and everything became clear: Damon Lindelof has done it again. As a writer this guy just seems to be abysmal, and now he is getting reeeeally close to the brink of my Emmerich hole...

Little Go 0.11.0 has been published on the App Store on April 23 2013, almost 4 weeks ago. For some reason I completely forgot to write this announcement, and I also forgot to update the master and develop branches on GitHub. I just fixed this a few minutes ago...

For iPhone users this new release finally brings the long-awaited zooming feature, making it much easier to place stones on large boards. iPad users can also zoom, but this is of much less value, except maybe for the iPad Mini. It is now also possible to display move numbers and coordinate labels, things I originally planned to implement much sooner, but somehow there was always stuff to code that seemed to be more important. So in the end I am not sure how important these two features really are, but they are at least a nice graphical addition to the UI.

Something of which I am sure that it is very useful is the new ability to export and import .sgf files to/from other apps such as Mail or DropBox. Working on these features prompted me to propose this draft of a UTI specification for the .sgf file format, but so far the announcement on the sgf-std mailing list has not received any responses. Ah well, it's probably not the most important thing in the world ☺.

The project page for Little Go has moved to https://littlego.herzbube.ch/. The new site is hosted by GitHub Pages, accordingly the site source files can be found in this gh-pages branch. The only resources for the Little Go project that are still on my private server are the third-party software tar balls required to build Little Go.

As of this morning, a new version of Little Go (v0.10.0) is available in the App Store.

A lot of work has gone into this feature release: Almost three months, much more time than I had originally anticipated. The biggest chunk was spent on adding the function for viewing board positions for moves played earlier during the game. The main problem I had here was designing the user interface: On the iPhone I had to add UI elements to an already crowded screen, and on the iPad I gave myself the challenge of revamping the entire "Play" tab.

Another thing that kept me busy were the graphic design changes: Adding artwork for the Go stones, and adding a wooden background to the Go board. With these changes the app suddenly looks much more attractive, which I find very satisfying because usually I am such a nil when it comes to polishing up a purely-functional UI.

No single release in the history of the project has more changes than v0.10.0, both visible to the end user and technically under the hood. On the one hand this is good because it tells me that the code is still malleable, on the other hand I am a bit nervous because many changes usually also means many new bugs. Let's hope that it doesn't get too bad.

This is the workflow Apple envisioned when they introduced the annoying quarantine flag back in the days of Mac OS X 10.4:

1. User A downloads an archive (.dmg, .tar.gz, etc.) from the Internet. The system applies the quarantine flag to the archive file.
2. User A extracts an application from the archive and places it into /Applications. The system infects the app bundle passes the quarantine flag on to the app bundle.
3. User A launches the application. The system warns about the unsafe origin of the app.
4. User A confirms that the app is safe to use. The system clears the quarantine flag. Problem solved.

Unfortunately, my workflow is slightly different: Click the "Read more" link to see what the problem is.

python-aprmd5 0.2.1 has no functional changes, it just includes a patch for a more comfortable build without having to manually edit setup.py. The patch was contributed by Juan A. Diaz - thanks Juan!

I took this opportunity to move the project to GitHub. A small project page stub remains here on herzbube.ch that lets me host the source distribution tar balls for each release. The source distribution tar balls have now also been moved to GitHub.

If you like a bit of computer science entertainment, this StackOverflow question has a humorous treatment of a very real world problem that I am sure has affected all of us, more or less severely.

And here is a demonstration how a light-hearted subject will always be turned into a controversy by people that are just too focused. What a pity.