MAPtool, Badblocks, IoT, Politics, Thunderbird, IMAP, Firefox, Mobile Software Engineering

Post date: Jul 29, 2018 6:31:56 AM

• Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAPtool) is so full of bleep that phew. It's perfect example of totally over engineered, complex piece of bleep software which just seriously annoys users. It's perfect example how software should not be planned and implemented. - That's pretty much it. - Windows System Information is much more usable tool, but that toolkit is just horrible. If you run it as Administrator, why it asks for credentials. Why it doesn't use default user, why it doesn't allow .\username as username etc. Why it requires Active Directory (AD) / Domain, even if features wouldn't be in use at all. I would personally prefer light standalone program which can be run with elevated administrator privileges without any configuration or installation, just to run the binary and extract required system information in dozens of seconds. That would be something I could use, actually like and wouldn't deeply annoy me.
• Run again badblocks on all drives and checked SMART data. Only one drive is in slightly bad shape, but that's being only for temporary data which isn't unique or easily reproducible / available.
• Watched yet another documentary about IoT dangers by BBC. It was a very good documentary. Everything is now hackable, and unexpected things can happen. Because people aren't accustomed to all the trouble malware, hacking, viruses and worms can cause in the Internet of Things (IoT) world. Did you know that your children's toys, your kitchen kettle and home thermostat are all very hackable now or in near future. As well as your AC / HVAC units etc.
• Politics, security, costs, work, efficiency, productivity, balance. Well, it's hard to get that right. Just as the NHS documentary showed. It's easy to laugh that they got hacked. But maybe the laughers don't know what kind of ridiculous resources NHS IT staff got for the task? That's one of the factors where the reality and fantasy collide. It's also easy to wonder why buildings collapse in earthquake zones. Sure it would be possible to bulldoze the buildings and replace those with state of art earthquake proof buildings. Personally I'm waiting for the California's big one. USA is rich country, and all required technology is available. It should be just as safe as in Japans new sky scrapers, right? Sad to say, but let's just watch the body count when the quake actually hits.
• Also watched yet another documentary about current information availability (information overload) and the brain overload it causes. Including: Cognitive load, multi tasking, task switching cost, stress, weakened concentration.
• Does anyone know why the Thunderbird + IMAP sometimes ends up in that kind of loop, where messages are duplicated over and over again? I've heard similar report from one other user. But I'm just wondering if this is more wide spread? I guess it has something to do with the combination. Large amount of messages, really slow and crappy Outlook servers. With this combination, it's possible that the process gets timeout, hangs out, or hits some kind of rate limit. And then is automatically retried, from beginning. And therefore doesn't get ever completed. - This is totally and absolutely just a guess, but it might still make some sense.
• Firefox 54 is using multi-process & many-threads approach. Just as I do. And many others. Of course number of threads could be reduced if the program code is written perfectly using async code alone. This also leads to the expected downside which is potentially huge additional memory consumption. Haven't measured it yet.
• Still wondering how badly mobile phone display brightness control (Android / Samsung) and modifiers are engineered. If the sensor range is from 0 - 10. Why they first read the sensor range And the fit it into range like 3 - 7. Then the user modifier can modify that with range: -3 or +3. I would very much like a solution where the user modifier would be applied to the sensor reading and then used. Currently configuration limits either dimness or brightness. I don't want that. I just want to set the screen bit dimmer or brighter than the sensor reading. But that seems to be once again way too complex for engineers. I do assume that the sensor range is actually larger than the screen brightness range. And therefor just adding the modifier to the sensor reading would be perfect. It would be also the simplest thing to do. Maybe I should make a slide show presentation about this. But I'm pretty sure nobody cares. We're just so used to living with bad engineering.