Dear Charter, trading a bad ZIP code error for a stack dump isn’t progress

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I’ve been having a go-round with Charter support for several months. They have an iOS app that offers channel information and a bunch of other stuff. Each time I enter the ZIP code of my home, however, I’m not that it’s not a valid address. (We’ve had Charter service and Greater Media before than for 20 years.)

iOS error

Through Twitter, I learned that there is a problem with the iOS app and that the Android one works OK.

So, I installed the Android version on my phone. I was able to enter my ZIP code and get my channel listings. That it needed to fetch the channel listings anew each time I changed from portrait to landscape mode, requiring about seven seconds on each turn, was bearable.

Then I checked out the other features of the app, such as the listing of products and services.

I then checked out their newsletter:

And, if I wanted to find a nearby service location, such as in Worcester, well, …

Categories AI

Computing with light

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Decades ago, Grace Hopper, aka Queen of Software, championed light as a communication medium that could be used to build fast, secure computers. The boffins have pushed through another limit, this time silicon photonics. 

Here’s David Letterman’s interview of Admiral Hopper shortly after she retired from the Navy and joined DEC. “How do you get a pair of pantyhose that fit?” wonders one of the greatest minds of our time. (via Scripting News).
Categories AI

iOS ease-of-use? Ha!

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For inexplicable (or, at least, unexplained) reasons, Apple doesn’t allow browser extensions on iOS (iPad and iPhone). Browser extensions are small apps that allow you to things such as save a link to a service such as Pocket.
Pocket, formerly Read It Later, allows you to save links for later reading. It also provides a cleaner version of the web page so that you can read it without ads and other cruft that accompanies most web content. I’ve been using Pocket/Read It Later for years and recommend it to anyone who uses the web a lot.
Installing the extension on all browsers on Windows and OSX is easy and fast. You get an icon on the browser toolbar.

On Windows, Mac, and Android, you can then save a link from your browser to Pocket. Clicking the icon saves the link to Pocket.
On Safari on iOS, however, here’s what you have to do to set up a bookmarklet so that you can save to Pocket. (For the record, Chrome on iOS doesn’t support extensions, either.)

How to Save to Pocket on iPad

For people new to or not adept with computing devices in general, this is onerous. For the record, Pocket isn’t the only one afflicted by this Apple limitation. Other apps such as Instapaper and Evernote have to provide the same gnarly work-arounds.

You can save links to a Reading List that is synchronized with Safari elsewhere, such as on your Mac. You cannot, however, get at your Reading List from other browsers, via iCloud, or on an Android device.
In a word, pfft.

419 Recursion

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My Gmail spam filter just caught this gem.

Just send us your contact information and our scammers really promise to send you money that you’d lost from those other, less virtuous scammers.

Categories AI

Blitzed by @FeedBlitz

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Some of you may have seen a scary message when you clicked on a link to my blog post this morning. The service that handles distribution of my blog, FeedBlitz, had a bit of a meltdown this morning. They’ve explained the error in an email and on their blog. In part,

This morning, shortly before 8am US Eastern, one of our databases became overloaded and, to use a technical term, crapped out.
Our monitoring apps told us of the situation, we quickly jumped on the apparent problem, and we thought we were done … but there was more to the issue than at first appeared.
One of our downstream web servers that handled tracking became horribly overloaded as a consequence of its being unable to reach that specific database. That in turn caused a failsafe in FeedBlitz to kick in, which had the nasty and unintended consequence of putting up a scary malware message.

There was no risk to your computer or with anything on www.roasterboy.com. I’m sorry for this false alarm. FeedBlitz responded quickly and correctly, getting the servers back online and communicating pretty well.

https://twitter.com/RoasterBoy/status/362905010905956352

They did continue their regular Twitter posts, which did not relate to the crisis at hand and, for while, leading to the impression that it was business as usual. 

BoA getting it wrong in Holden

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So, the Bank of America in Holden recently repainted the entrance to its parking lot. In the process, it got the arrows wrong in all the ways possible.

In this view, we’re facing Main Street.

  1. Left turns form Main Street into the BoA parking lot are prohibited. Nevertheless, there’s an arrow on the parking lot showing how to make that left turn.
  2. Coming out of the parking lot, only right turns are allowed. Therefore, there’s an arrow for a left turn.
  3. Both of those arrows are on the wrong side of the island.