I am sure much has been written about the fact that we all have a dozen IM clients installed on our phones, and every one of our contacts uses a different one. I’ve mostly not bothered to trim that down, installed all of them, and had an account with each, whether it’s Hangouts, Twitter, Facebook, Threema, SMS or IRC. But this last week makes me think that we need to get out of this situation.
I have been in hospitals for the past 6 days. That’s a time when people want to get in touch, get updates on my status, but also a time of bad Internet access. The first hospital had barely any patient WiFi to speak of, and this second one has an unsecured AP. I have an Android phone and no computer. The phone’s storage is nearly full, and I’m going to have to cut down on the number of installed apps, but can’t really kill any one of these messengers yet, except for Skype, because it really doesn’t work well on mobile devices. SMS is overall the most reliable form of communication, because it is the most democratic and widely distributed, and will always stick around as long as we have phones. I also need to keep it for my sister, who still doesn’t have a smart phone, and hardly checks messages on her laptop more than once a week. Facebook chat is the one where all of my friends are, but it lacks encryption. Almost all messengers fail on the encryption, so it’s nice that I can at least use these VPN functions in Orbot to route all of the internet traffic on my phone through Tor! Threema has end-to-end encryption, but literally no adoption. The latest offering in this space is Signal, which bills itself as an SMS client, and sends SMS when necessary, but encrypts messages over the Internet if both parties have it installed, and keeps everything inside a single app. A desktop client is in beta, too, which makes this more attractive than Threema. Given a choice, I would prefer that all of my friends ditch the text messaging clients on their phones for Signal, and ubiquitous encryption just happens eventually, but inertia is a terribly difficult thing to overcome.

Eressea has a pretty simple memory usage pattern. It allocates a bunch of memory during startup, when it loads the current game data file and creates all the regions, factions, units, etc. and the new orders, then stays pretty much flat while it executes the turn, only allocating more memory for messages and auxiliary structures. Then, after the report is written, it exits and the death of the process cleans everything up nicely.

There shouldn’t be a lot of memory leaks in a situation like that, but the code is written with the intention of being able to load and unload data files from the console, for operations like building statistics over time, repairing one file based on data in another, etc. A recent example was “link every familiar in turn X to the same mage they were familiars of in turn X-1″. So while programmatic cleanup is usually not required, it is in a situation like this (after analyzing turn X-1, we should free it before reading turn X to apply the fix).

Another reason for working cleanup code is testing. Unit tests work best when running from clean state, so anything that gets created in one test should be destroyed at the end of it, so it won’t interfere with the next test. My favorite tool for finding leaks like this is valgrind, and recently it was reporting almost 1,000 leaks when run on the full unit test suite. I started a new feature branch to eliminate them, and after a couple of evenings of hard work, I have pared them down to one final leak in the parser that is really hard to track, and a bunch of static variables that are the bane of this code base. As can be expected when doing work like this, I found a number of small errors that were more than just leaks, and added a lot more test coverage, so this should cause overall code stability to go up. The work ended up in one giant pull request, and will be part of the 3.7 version of the code.

Seit einer Weile schon habe ich das Problem, dass auf spiegel.de Teile der Artikel fehlen. Gelegentlich sehe ich nur die Einleitung eines Artikels, und alle interaktiven Inhalte, ob Infografiken oder Sporttabellen, sind kaputt.

Zuerst habe ich natürlich den Adblocker als Schuldigen vermutet. Ein schneller Blick auf die Seiten im Inkognito-Modus von Chrome, wo alle Extensions deaktiviert sind, zeigt den vollständigen Artikel. Also nach und nach alle Erweiterungen abgeschaltet, bis der Artikel lesbar war, und siehe da: Es war HTTPS Everywhere.

Nun will ich auf keinen Fall die Erweiterung abschalten müssen, also habe ich mir die Liste der Regeln vorgenommen, und auch hier eine nach der anderen deaktiviert. Schuldig waren am Ende zwei Regelsätze (siehe Bild). Ich werde die mal komplett abschalten, statt herauszufinden, wie man die Regeln ändert, und hoffe, dass das kein zu großer Hammer ist. Am schönsten wäre natürlich, wenn man bei SPON in der Technik ohne diese Mengen an IFRAME Elementen in den Artikeln auskommen würde, aber das ist wohl zu viel verlangt?

Korrektes Webdesign ist schwer.

Earlier this year, my trusty and much beloved Nexus 5 broke, and I suddenly found myself in the market for a new phone. I knew I did not want a Samsung, for reasons that are mostly related to the additional malware installed on them, and I could not get a new Nexus through the office’s vendor. A friend seemed happy with her Z1, and the Z3 was getting good reviews, so I decided to put my dislike of all things Sony aside, and got an Xperia.

I must say, I don’t regret this. The Z3 runs Lollipop, and has some Sony bundleware on it to push their media empire, but it is mostly unobtrusive and feels almost like a stock Google phone.

My worries about the quality of Sony hardware were also unfounded. It seems that the Ericsson engineering is showing in this device, with a great touch screen and far superior battery life than my Nexus had. I get almost 5 days of standby or two says of active use from a charge. That is after disabling mobile data, since I am on WiFi at least 80% of any given day anyhow, so YMMV on this, but I sure like not having battery anxiety towards the end of every day like I did with virtually all previous Android phones that I have owned.

I have recently discovered Pocket Reader, and I am getting a lot of value from it. I noticed that I tend to have a lot of open tabs, both on my phone and in Chrome, that are “I will read this later”, and now I just store that into Pocket for later reading. It makes those pages available offline on my phone, so I can catch up on my reading on the bus or plane when I don’t have a network, which is great. Also, when I read something good, it’s always there in the archived posts for me to find later. So this app has conveniences that RSS readers don’t, and in fact supplements feedly for me, especially for wordy posts. Whenever I think “this is interesting, but too long for my bathroom break”, I just shove it into Pocket for later.

What offline reading does not deal well with is video content. So all the lazy-ass web journalisms that talk into their webcam instea of writing, you suck! The same goes for websites that break every article into several “pages” as if there was a limit to how long an HTML document can be, just to get more ad impressions. Stop doing that, or at least add a “full article” view.