Phone numbers

Posted on 11 August 2010 by meta

I’m in the process of migrating to using a cell phone as my only phone. I’m also cleaning up my address book. Here’s a tip to make life easier for me, and everyone else who might call you.

Whether you’re listing your phone number on Facebook, in e-mail or on your web site, it makes my life a lot easier if I can just copy/paste or tap the number to call it, no matter where I happen to be. If have to edit your number before I can call you, that’s a pain in the ass.

That’s why old fashioned phone numbers like (020) 7890 1234 or (404) 555 1234 are a nuisance on the Internet. You have to know which country the number is in, which country you are in, how to dial from one to the other, and so on. Even just within the USA, you need to know if you’re in the same area code and can dial the last 7 digits or whether you need to add a 1 and then use the entire number.

Fortunately there’s a simple solution, a trivial way of making your phone number callable from any smartphone anywhere in the world, without the user having to do anything special: put it in the international standard format.

If you’re in the USA, that means putting +1 on the front. While you’re at it, you might like to break up the digits with spaces or dashes so that they’re easier to read, just in case someone has to dial them manually.

If you’re in the UK, you remove the 0 from the front of your area code, and stick +44 on the front. For example, (020) 7890 1234 becomes +44 20 7890 1234.

When a mobile phone sees a number in international format, it does all the working out of area codes and prefixes for you. If the call can be made locally, it’s made locally, and you’re charged accordingly. If it’s long distance you get charged long distance. If it’s international–and only if it’s international–the international dialing is handled for you. You can call the number from anywhere in the world and never have to worry about how to do it.

That’s why every single phone number in my address book is in international format. When I go to the UK and stick a local SIM card in my phone, I automatically end up paying local rates for phone calls, without having to change the numbers I dial. Neat, huh? But for some reason, phone companies seem to do a terrible job of explaining this to their customers.

So when I see a phone number on the web, it’s helpful if it’s in international format, because that means I can dial it from anywhere in the world without having to edit it. If I’m browsing on my phone, I can just tap the number.

Note that UK users should not stick brackets around the 0 to make some sort of non-standard mixture of the national and international formats. That makes the entire exercise pointless for two reasons: Firstly, anyone who was going to be confused by +44 20 7890 1234 is going to be every bit as confused by +44 (0)20 7890 1234, if not more so. Secondly, mixing the formats means mobile phone users have to know that they’re supposed either include the 0 but not dial the 44, or include the 44 but remove the zero–and either way, they have to edit the number before they can dial it. So you’ve just made their life that bit more annoying. So either use your local (national) format with brackets, or use international format with a + at the front and no brackets anywhere. Mixing the two isn’t helping anyone.

OK, you say, but what should I do if I have friends or business contacts who are old, still use landline phones, and don’t know how numbers in international format work–but I still want to make life easier for cellphone users?

Simple: list both the international format and the local (national) one. You can even list them on one line. For example:

Tel: (020) 7890 1234 / +44 20 7890 1234

See? Auntie Gertie sees the familiar brackets and area code with a 0 at the front, and can work the rotary dial with her arthritic fingers. The rest of us can tap on the standard number and call. Eventually the old land line area codes die out in the UK and other countries, and we move on.

It’s the 21st Century, computers have lots of memory these days. The extra bytes taken up by listing your phone number in two different formats on a web page aren’t going to be a problem, and as phones with web access become more mainstream, it’s helpful to your friends and/or customers if they can call you straight from the web.

You can probably squeeze an extra 13 characters on a business card too. You might ask why it could matter there. The answer is that when I get your card, I’m going to snap a photo of it with my phone, and the phone will parse it into an electronic business card–assuming you’ve used standard format phone numbers. I’d really rather be able to tap the result to call, and not have to edit the number first.

So to summarize:

  • Either use local format for your phone number, or international format. Don’t mix the two.
  • Ideally, use international format on the web, so people can call you without having to mess with editing the number.
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Bring back the Feast of Fools

Posted on 8 August 2010 by meta

…At least, medieval Christianity understood. For most of the year it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God, and sexual decorum—and then, at New Year’s, it unleashed the festum fatuorum, the feast of fools, and for several days the world was upside down. Clergy played dice on the altar, brayed like donkeys instead of saying “Amen,” had drinking competitions in the nave, farted to the Ave Maria, and delivered spoof sermons based on parodies of the Gospels (The Gospel According to the Chicken’s Arse, perhaps, or The Gospel According to Luke’s Toenail). After drinking tankards of ale, they held their holy books upside down, burned excrement instead of incense, and urinated out of bell towers. They tried to marry donkeys, tied giant woolen penises to their vestments, and held boozy orgies on the altar.

But none of this was just a joke. It was sacred, a parodia sacra, designed to make sure that for the rest of the year things would be the right way up. In 1444, the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the feast of fools must remain an indis- pensable part of Christianity,

in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together. . . . This is why we permit folly on certain days: so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.

If we want well-functioning communities, we cannot focus only on social virtues. We must also find a place for antisocial ones. We shouldn’t banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, an occasion on which we’re able to be released from the two great pressures of secular adult life: to be rational and to be faithful.

—Alain De Botton, Harper’s Magazine

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Home improvements part 2: Guttering

Posted on 7 August 2010 by meta

As mentioned in part one, it rains heavily in Austin. I noticed during the first couple of winters that water would pour in sheets off of the front and back roofs, and pound onto the steps up to the decks. It wasn’t long before the paint in the splash zones peeled away. I sanded down, primed, and repainted, and a year later it had been pounded away again.

The problem wasn’t hard to diagnose: the house had no guttering, and the shape of the roof was basically funneling water towards the deck roofs, and hence to the decks themselves–and particularly the steps. So fixing the front deck wasn’t going to be a permanent fix unless I did something about the lack of guttering.

Our house is surrounded by trees, and I’ve seen our neighbor fighting to clean leaves from the guttering attached to the garage. Our house has two stories, and I had no desire to climb 7m ladders on a regular basis, so some sort of leaf-proof guttering was a priority.

The garage gutter had grilles that were supposed to prevent leaves from clogging things up, but squirrels pulled them out in search of acorns. I know for a fact that squirrels wander across our roof, as I hear their footsteps sometimes in the mornings, so that wasn’t going to be a solution.

I eventually settled on LeafGuard gutters. They are made from a continuous piece of extruded recycled aluminium; a truck comes to your house with a big roll of proto-gutter in the back, and it’s cut and shaped to fit your house. The only joins are at the roof corners. The gutters are extra wide, to carry a higher volume of water, and nothing obstructs the trough, so any debris that does get in can be washed out. There’s a lifetime warranty: if they somehow clog up, you call and someone comes and fixes them.

Costco sells LeafGuard, and arranged for a salesman to visit. He demonstrated the system and I got to check out how it dealt with large amounts of water from a garden hose. It turned out that as well as the standard colors, they had a red color available via special order, which would almost exactly match the red trim on the house.

That was the good news. The bad news was that even via Costco, custom fitted gutters are expensive.

I didn’t just want gutters, either. Once spring is over, you have to somehow preserve your garden through the long, brutal Texas summer. Even with xeriscaping, last year’s drought was tough on the front yard. I wanted to collect the rainwater so I could use it for watering.

Lowes and Home Depot had rainbarrels–made of plastic. As well as looking ugly, I was confident that they would perish after a few years. There was no indication that they were even recycled plastic. So it was off to the web once more, where I located Austin Green Water. They sold rain harvesting units made from recycled metal barrels, with proper brass fittings, mesh to keep out mosquitos, and a wooden stand. I ordered two units, each with two 200 liter barrels.

The barrels were delivered and in place by the time the gutters were ready to be fitted, so the guys who installed the gutters made sure the downspouts were directed into the barrels.

So: two new decks, two new sets of leaf-proof squirrel-proof gutters, two sets of rainbarrels, special industrial rubber sealant, many man-days of work, and finally all was well once again. Nature obliged with two last storms to test everything out before summer proper, so we should now have enough rainwater to keep our plants happy until fall.

Now all I need to do is recover from the credit card bill.

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Home improvements part 1: New deck

Posted on 7 August 2010 by meta

It occurred to me that I haven’t written about the epic home improvement odyssey we’ve been on for the last few months.

The story really started in the fall of 2005, a few months after we bought the house.

When it rains in Austin, it really rains. You can hear what a typical storm sounds like by downloading a recording I made. (It’s binaural, so listen with headphones for full effect.)

In the aftermath of our first couple of storms since moving in, I noticed that water had pooled up on the lower front deck of the house. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but when it was still there the next day, I realized that the builders hadn’t left any gaps for drainage between the planks of the deck.

Months passed, occasional downpours struck, and I started to notice the paint peeling. Closer inspection revealed that the exposed wood was soaking up the moisture. This was not good.

We were still paying off the cost of the refrigerator and various other expenses, so I looked around for a quick temporary fix. I found a company that made a waterproof industrial PVC covering, and called some guys who lived near Dallas who would install it. They did a pretty thorough job, carefully sealing the gaps at the bottom of the pillars with industrial strength caulk. I thought the immediate problem was solved.

It wasn’t.

The next problem I noticed was some discoloration at the base of the vertical supporting pillars at the front of the house. Prodding at it revealed soft, pulpy, rotting wood. I got a contractor to patch it up.

By this spring, things had gradually progressed to a point where further patching wouldn’t be sufficient. Fairly large patches had rotten away at the base of two of the pillars, revealing that the pillars were hollow untreated wood. They shouldn’t have been used as load-bearing pillars at all, they were just decorative for use indoors. An indentation of the PVC and caulk around the third pillar revealed that it was sinking into the deck.

It was time to call in a professional. A realtor friend had recommended someone to take care of some random yard work, and he knew a guy who specialized in decks. I interviewed him, talked to him about the job, took a look at some pictures of his past projects, and decided he was someone I could work with.

The first stage was exploration. What exactly was underneath the PVC, and how bad was the damage by now?

To cut a long story short, the builders had constructed the deck using untreated interior tongue-and-groove planking, laid on top of untreated plywood. The plywood in turn rested on the main joists of the deck, one of which was upside-down, which was why the water was pooling. (Deck joists usually have a slight camber.)

Around and beneath the deck was a concrete wall, which they hadn’t put any ventilation grilles in. The walled off sub-deck area was then separated from the rest of the house foundations by a solid wall of cement blocks, with two small holes in.

So even once the water stopped leaking directly through the deck, moisture would get in via small cracks at the edges of the deck and via the front steps, and would collect in the unventilated area. The plywood was partially rotted, the planking was rotting, the pillars were rotting, water was getting in via the rotting hollow pillars and causing more rot, and the middle pillar didn’t have anything under the deck to support it. Oh, and the steps weren’t to building code–too steep. Basically, everything including the railings needed to be torn off, right down to the main joists, and the whole thing rebuilt–including redoing the steps from scratch, adding ventilation grilles to the walls, and putting a support in for the center pillar.

That was just the downstairs front deck.

The upstairs was the same basic construction–untreated interior planks on untreated plywood, hollow decorative pillars just about supporting the weight of the roof. The builders had actually bothered with some plastic sheeting to stop water from dripping through to the deck below–but the plastic stopped about 10cm short of the edge of the deck. So again, it was all pretty much a write-off.

Fixing all this was clearly way beyond anything I could have attempted myself. On both levels, the roof had to be jacked up and temporary supporting beams put in while the rotten pillars were removed.

So several months and thousands of dollars later, we basically have a whole new front deck. Some of the handrails were salvaged and reused, but that’s about it. No corners were cut, because the last thing I want to do is ever have another problem with this.

The deck surface is now thick treated wood planks, held down with galvanized deck screws. There are gaps between the planks for drainage, and three vents allow any moisture beneath the deck to evaporate away. The pillars are 15cm solid pressure-treated pine. They’re separated from the decks by surprisingly expensive galvanized metal spacers, which prevent water from pooling up and soaking into them at the base.

Upstairs required some inventive thinking. Normally you’d put what amounts to a miniature metal roof inside the floor of the upper deck, draining out of the front. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough vertical space for that.

I checked reviews of various wood sealants designed for decks. I quickly came to the conclusion that while some of them claimed to have an 8 year warranty, none of them would actually last that long. Consumer Reports concluded that all the transparent or translucent sealants were basically worthless unless you were prepared to re-seal every few years.

I did more online searching, and found a company called Ames Research. They sell various rubber compounds which can be used for waterproofing, and are applied in liquid form. Their Super Elasto-Barrier dries to a pretty much untearable sheet of gray rubber, around 2mm thick. It’s usually used for waterproofing flat roofs. I figured if it was up to that task, it would probably cope with any rain that blew onto the deck and dripped through the gaps between the planks. As an added bonus, it’s water-based, so we didn’t have to worry about lots of noxious volatile chemicals harming the parakeets.

So, the treated plywood was coated with rubber; then some spacer joists were fixed to it; then the whole lot was given several more coats of rubber. The result is a flat, ribbed, rubber-sealed surface that slopes gently towards gaps at the front of the house, and drains away any water that falls through the upper deck.

I had also checked Consumer Reports and a few other sites to find out what would be appropriate for paint. Valspar and Behr got good reviews from CR after the equivalent of 9 years of exposure. There seemed to be a lot of people online with assorted grievances about Home Depot and Behr, so we went with Valspar and bought it from Lowe’s.

I’m completely happy with the end result. It looks much nicer than PVC, restores the original look of the house, and the steps are more comfortable to climb now.

The story isn’t over yet, though. Stay tuned for part two.

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Android is #1

Posted on 4 August 2010 by meta

NPD reports that Android is now the #1 platform for smartphones in the US. 33% Android, 28% BlackBerry, 22% iPhone. And that’s including iPhone 4 pre-orders.

Meanwhile, Nielsen confirms that Android has beaten iPhone,  though they have Android still lagging slightly behind BlackBerry:

Canalys have a slightly different spin on the same result, citing Android’s 886% YTY growth rate.

Fanboys on MacWorld (who should just give in and rename themselves iPhoneWorld) have been desperately saying that the iPhone 4 is going to turn things around any moment now. However, as noted, NPD’s figures include the iPhone 4 pre-orders, and the popular HTC EVO and T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide didn’t start selling until right at the end of the surveyed period, just like the iPhone 4.

Also interesting is that while existing iPhone users’ professed loyalty remains formidable, Android users are almost as enthusiastic about their chosen platform. The big losers are RIM.

On which note, BlackBerry OS 6 has been launched. It looks as though they’ve finally provided a proper set of widgets for developers and a proper web browser. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s a case of too little, too late. If they had delivered OS 6 a year ago (and made their SDK multiplatform), I might still be using a BlackBerry–but now? Too late, I switched. The new OS will slow their decline, but they’re still playing catch-up to their competitors. I hope they’ll be able to continue keeping iOS in third place, but I’m not optimistic about their chances.

[By the way, don't bother logging in to comment that the numbers are flawed because Android is sold on lots of phones but there are only three models of iPhone, or that iPad and iPod sales aren't included. This is a comparison of smartphone platforms, because platforms are what developers are interested in. If the fragmentation argument was valid, nobody would develop for Windows and Mac OS X would be #1, because the most popular model of Mac outsells any single one of the millions of models of Windows PC out there.]

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A lie from Apple

Posted on 27 July 2010 by meta

Apple writes:

The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer.

That’s a pretty blatant lie.

The FingerWorks iGesture pad was a multi-touch trackpad designed to work with Mac desktop computers (as well as Linux and Windows machines). You can still see some web pages about it at http://www.fingerworks.com/gesture_guide.html

I know this because I have one, purchased before Apple bought FingerWorks.

Since Apple bought the company that made the first multi-touch trackpad for the Mac, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that they know damn well that they’re lying.

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Year of the click beetle

Posted on 14 July 2010 by meta

It seems as though each year, a different kind of Texas wildlife undergoes a population explosion and decides to visit our house.

We had the year of the woods roach. That was pretty unpleasant. The year of the junebugs wasn’t much better, because the dead ones got everywhere and looked disconcertingly like dry-roasted peanuts. There was the year of the snail invasion; that one mostly troubled our neighbors. Much cuter was the year of the eight squirrels, and the year of the geckos was nice too.

This year seems to be the year of the click beetles. Last night one got itself jammed in the laundry basket, and kept me awake clicking against it until I moved the basket out into the hallway.

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RPM fail

Posted on 9 July 2010 by meta

It’s 2010, and RPM still sucks.
Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/share/man/man1/xdelta.1.gz from install of xdelta-1.1.4-1.el5.rf.x86_64 conflicts with file from package xdelta-1.1.3-20.i386
file /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/psvn.el from install of subversion-1.6.12-0.1.el5.rf.x86_64 conflicts with file from package subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1.i386
# rpm -q subversion
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1
# rpm -e subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1
error: "subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1" specifies multiple packages

Apparently i386 and x86_64 versions of packages count as different packages for the purposes of installing and removing, but are listed identically. This means that yum will fail to work out that it needs to uninstall the 32 bit version and the 64 bit version as a unit, before it can install any kind of upgrade.

Posting this because every time I mention how much I hate RHEL and RPM, someone says that there’s nothing wrong with it and it’s perfectly OK these days.

Best of all, searching around shows people hitting this problem in 2005.

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Extracts from “iPhone Four” by George Orwell

Posted on 5 July 2010 by meta

Winston woke up inside 101 Infinite Loop.

“I told you,” said O’Brien, “that if we met again it would be here.”

“Yes,” said Winston.

O’Brien picked up an iPad from the table, and brushed his fingers over the screen. Without any warning except a slight movement of O’Brien’s hand, a wave of pain flooded Winston’s body. He grimaced, and tried to remain silent.

After a few moments O’Brien moved his hand again, and the pain receded almost as quickly as it had come. He turned the iPad screen towards Winston. It showed a set of candy-colored sliders, and a selection of buttons, but Winston was unable to make out the text.

“That was forty,” remarked O’Brien. “It goes up to one hundred. Please remember: if I need to inflict pain on you at any moment and to any degree I choose, there’s an app for that.”

“Yes,” said Winston.

Continue reading →

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iPhone 4, SAR, and antenna contact

Posted on 23 June 2010 by meta

The iPhone 4 uses the metal edge of the phone as its antenna. This means that it’s pretty easy to make contact between the antenna and your hands. As you’ll know if you’ve ever grabbed the antenna of a TV or FM radio, the human body conducts, and can have a pretty big effect on reception.

Users are now reporting that it’s true for the iPhone too. You can lose most of your signal strength by holding the phone the wrong way.

What I haven’t seen anyone discuss yet is the effect on the phone’s Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) caused by the antenna making contact with your hand while the device is transmitting. I know that making contact with a high powered radio mast can cause RF burns, so antenna contact definitely can result in much more energy reaching your body via conduction than you get exposed to by radiation from being next to the antenna. So it seems to me that there will be increased EM exposure from having sweaty fingers in contact with the iPhone antenna most of the time it’s transmitting, and I doubt the standard measurement methods for estimating SAR allow for this factor.

So, does anyone know how SAR levels change if you’re physically in contact with the antenna? Has anyone seen any discussion of this? Apple’s engineers must have thought of this and allowed for it when setting transmission levels, right?

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