Browsing Tag

geekery

The Internet

Yahoo broke mailing lists, oops

As many of you know, Dara and I host our own teeny Internet site, including Web and mail support. As part of this, we host several mailing lists, using MailMan as our mailing list system of choice.

This weekend one of our users on the LexFA list (that’s the mailing list for the Lexington Fantasy Association) reported a weird problem to me. He was subscribed to the list with a Yahoo email address, but not receiving email from the list. I logged into the list’s administration website, checked the member settings, and determined that he was indeed correctly subscribed to the list, and not set Nomail or blocked for too many bounces or anything of that nature. As far as the list was concerned, he should have been getting mail and wasn’t.

So, since software testing is in fact what I do for my day job, I immediately went, “Hey, I have a Yahoo account myself. Let’s see if I can reproduce this problem.”

I COULD. I was able to subscribe my Yahoo account to the list. I was able to post to it–which I confirmed by monitoring the list’s archives, where the message showed up. Likewise, Dara confirmed by monitoring our system logs that the message got to our server.

Where it fell over, however, was that message trying to get back to Yahoo so that my Inbox could actually see it.

And further investigation finally got me to this Computerworld article. The tl;dr version of this, in case you aren’t a techie, is that basically Yahoo instituted an anti-spam tactic that sounds good in theory: i.e., it’s trying to prevent spammers from sending mail that pretends to be from legitimate Yahoo users. Yahoo has a setting in place that basically now says “If you get a mail that claims to be from a Yahoo user, and it didn’t actually come from our servers, you should bounce it because it’s probably spam”.

The problem with this, though, is that it breaks mailing list behavior. Because what happens now is this:

  • Yahoo user sends a mail to a mailing list she’s on.
  • The mailing list goes “ah, I have a mail from a subscriber! I shall send it to all the other subscribers!”
  • Then the mail tries to come back to the Yahoo user. Except now Yahoo’s own servers see this mail come in, which is claiming to be from a Yahoo user. (Because it IS, because it’s the user’s own mail to her mailing list that she’s on.) BUT, Yahoo also sees that this mail didn’t come from Yahoo’s servers. (Which it didn’t, at least in our case, because our mailing list is not hosted with Yahoo.)
  • Yahoo’s servers go “MUST BE SPAM” and promptly ditch the mail before the user ever sees it.
  • End result: the user wonders where the hell her mail is, and whether something is broken about the list, or whether she got unsubscribed by mistake. When all this time, nothing is wrong with the list at all.

Yahoo, as per this Help link on yahoo.com and this link on the Yahoomail tumblr, is aware of the problem. However, their suggestion for how mailing lists should handle this is suboptimal–i.e., that we should set our mailing lists to have the list be the sending address. This would result in not being able to see who sends what messages.

So for now Dara and I are moving forward with an attempt to do a distribution upgrade on our mail server, for starters. If this is successful, this should let us upgrade our MailMan system to a version that’ll handle Yahoo’s more stringent settings.

In the meantime, though, if anyone reading this is trying to get mailing list mails at a Yahoo address and you’re having trouble with it, chances are good that this is why. You may need to consider getting your mail at an alternate address.

Apologies to folks directly impacted by this on our mailing lists–hopefully we can get a more recent version of MailMan running, and fix this problem! more as I know it!

ETA Dara and I were up till 1am last night trying to fix this, and now we do at least have a fix in place. We updated our MailMan install to the latest available version, 2.1.18-1, which has settings to talk to what Yahoo did and let mail come on through. However, THAT required Dara to do local tweaking of the source code so that we could actually have emails to the list still have identifiable senders, about which she is displeased. She posts about it here.

August 9, 2014 by
Main

Overall impressions of iOS 7

I had my doubts about iOS 7 when I first started seeing the screenshots for it, but I did go ahead and take the plunge and install it on both of my iThings this past week: my iPhone 5, and my iPad 2. And on the whole, I gotta admit, it grew on me pretty quickly.

Design

First, the things I like.

Once I got used to the new design, I really appreciated that it’s less cluttered. I didn’t like the various screenshots I was seeing of super-bright, super-flat backgrounds with all the candy-colored icons in front of them. But once I set the devices up and chose some of the darker, less gaudy backgrounds, everything looked fine. (Pro tip: the white text labels on the various icons are a lot easier to read if you do in fact choose a darker background.)

I also like how a lot more of the UI is oriented around text now rather than inexplicable buttons. (Although I also am cognizant of the localization challenge, there!)

Definitely liking that I’m finally able to stuff several of the icons for standard iOS apps I never use (e.g., Stocks, FaceTime, Newsstand, and such) into a folder so I can just forget about ’em, and clean up some real estate space on my home screen. Also finally able to put more than twelve icons into one folder. YAY! This is helpful for my folders for games. And I do like the pagination of said folders, though this’ll mean I gotta remember to move the more important icons in a folder forward so I don’t forget about ’em.)

Quebecois Guitarists are an Important UI Element

Quebecois Guitarists are an Important UI Element

The new layout of the lock screen, particularly on a device with a Retina screen like my iPhone 5, is nice–but it meant that the previous pic I was using of myself and Eric Beaudry of De Temps Antan was suddenly unacceptably fuzzy. OH DARN, I said, WHATEVER SHALL I DO IF ONLY I HAD A CACHE OF SUITABLE ALTERNATE HIGH RES PICS oh wait I DO.

And now, the things I don’t like:

Not a fan of the animations of swooping in and out when you unlock the device or when you’re switching back to the home screen. It actually makes me a little motion sick on my phone, though it’s not as bad on the iPad–possibly because there’s more screen to play with, I dunno. After a few days of having the OS on my devices, as I suspected, I am getting accustomed to the motion of app switching. Still though, given my druthers, I’d turn that off.

Also don’t like that the “Reduce motion” setting, buried under Accessibility, does not in fact reduce the animations. There’s no way to turn those off, as near as I can tell. That said, I did in fact turn that setting on because I’m also not a fan of the parallax of the backgrounds. See previous commentary re: don’t really need my phone making me motion sick, mmkay?

ETA: OH YES, I forgot to mention another thing about the parallax–apparently if you have parallax on, it impacts how you can center whatever photos you may be using on your lock screen. I noticed this on my iPad, where I’m using a photo I took of my signed Le Vent du Nord poster as my lock screen photo, and the centering of it went off once iOS 7 was installed. This problem went away once I turned on “Reduce motion”.

You can find this setting under Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion.

Functionality

And now that I’ve talked about what the OS looks like, here’s what I like about what it does.

I’m really digging the new task switcher. It’s a lot more elegant, and it’s super-easy to get rid of a task just by swiping upward on it.

The new “Today” screen is very nice. Its arrangement is intuitive and the info it shows is useful, particularly the new layout of notifications.

I haven’t had a reason to find the new control center useful yet, but I’m suspecting I will. Particularly the next time Dara and I go to Canada, at which point quick access to turning wifi off and on will be nice.

They actually didn’t break my Not Recently Played playlist this time. Well done there, Apple. I’ve complained before about this–though to be fair, when they’ve broken this before, it’s seemed like it’s always been variants of the same bug, i.e., if you try to use a “Limit” criteria on a playlist. My “Not Recently Played” playlist was previously trying to limit to 200 or 300 songs depending on how long I felt like making it. And since I turned off that criterion on the list some time ago, I honestly don’t know if the bug with it is still in there.

So far the things I don’t like are few. I’m vaguely miffed that they moved podcasts out of the Music app and off into their own thing. Presumably to free up real estate for iTunes Radio, about which I give exactly zero damns since I never use Pandora or Spotify–if I like music, I’m just going to buy it, and if I’ve bought it, chances are it’s already on my phone anyway.

And, while they haven’t managed to break my Not Recently Played smart playlist this time around as has happened on previous major revs of the OS, I did notice that there’s a visual bug involving showing the wrong album art for several of my smart playlists in general.

My personal jury is still out on whether they’ve managed to make the Maps app suck less. I did give it a test run to see how well it’d handle live walking directions, on a walk that took me about an hour. I did follow its directions successfully, but I also noticed lag time several times in how fast the phone caught up with my position along the route. More than once it gave me a spoken direction after I’d actually passed the spot in question.

Other Stuff

Plantes contre Zombies

Plantes contre Zombies

And file this under category “never tried this in a prior version of the OS, but discovered it playing around with iOS 7 and thought it was cool”–just to see what would happen, I changed my phone’s language setting to French, and quite liked that you could do that on the fly. But what tickled me even more was seeing that both versions of Plants Vs. Zombies actually dynamically changed over to French, too!

What ultimately sold me on installing the OS on my devices were a couple of in-depth reviews, here and here–but also, just hearing from Dara and Paul that they were having positive reactions to it installing it on their devices at home. If you’re thinking about going for it, do go ahead and read the reviews first, so you can get an informed idea of what you’re signing up for.

Also, two other things I’ll mention that you’ll want to keep an eye out for. One is that there’s a potential vulnerability with the aforementioned lock screen, described here. I was able to reproduce the behavior it describes, though it does require you to be very quick to make it happen. On the other hand, I also noticed that I could not actually get to any applications in my task switcher which were not themselves accessible by the control panel. For example, I couldn’t get to either my Facebook app OR Echofon (the app I use for Twitter). So be on the lookout for this, be cognizant of what apps you’re running, and if you’re feeling paranoid about this particular thing, you might consider disabling the control panel.

The second thing I’ll mention is that if you’re concerned about privacy settings, go read this article about the various things you’ll want to make sure are OFF. In particular, eh, no, Apple, you really don’t need to know what places I commonly go to in my life.

TL;DR version

On the whole, I’m considering this a win, and certainly a less painful transition than going from iOS 5 to iOS 6 was. On the other hand, I’ve also got a reasonably new phone, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to install this on an older one. My iPad 2 does appear to be handling it well, though.

Drop me your thoughts in the comments on how the upgrade’s working for you!

September 23, 2013 by
Other People's Books

On nerds and geeks in romance and other genres

The fine ladies of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Dear Author, who’ve been doing a joint podcast for a while, just released an episode about nerd-based romances. As I am a) a nerd/geek and b) a reader of romance, you may expect that WHY YES, I did in fact find this episode highly relevant to my interests!

One big thing that leapt out at me though was Sarah and Jane, the podcast hosts, getting into a debate about what actually constitutes a nerd or a geek. I just had a little chat with them on Twitter on that very topic, and what I had to say started off like this:

Anna Geeks Out On Nerd Vs. Geek

Anna Geeks Out On Nerd Vs. Geek

‘Cause yeah, this is pretty much where I am on what a nerd or a geek is. I generally consider myself both. As someone with a B.A. in Computer Science (and yes, my college gave me a B.A., not a B.S., they handed out B.A.’s in everything) and whose day job career all her life has been in computers, I’m legitimately a computer nerd. But I’m also a computer geek, since I have that component of strong enthusiasm about computers. A lot of the time, I slant more towards geek than nerd here.

Likewise, I’m a bit of a language nerd, as y’all might guess what with me doing the Trilingual Hobbit Re-read. Languages are also one of the big reasons I love Tolkien so much, what with all of the work he did building the languages of Middle-Earth. And I’m absolutely a Tolkien nerd. Yes, I’m the one who actually rather likes digging into the minutiae of The Silmarillion. 😉

But I’m also a geek about all sorts of things. Doctor Who. Battlestar Galactica. Firefly and Buffy. SF/F culture in general. But also trad music and Great Big Sea and all my Quebec groups. In all these cases it’s more of a case of passion and enthusiasm for me than of intellectual understanding, but because I also have nerd tendencies, that’ll often drive my explorations of any of these things. This’ll be why Quebec music is making me learn French–because I want that better understanding of music I’m passionate about.

Sarah and Jane have a couple of other discussion points that I feel are worth addressing, too. There’s the idea that nerds and geeks are socially awkward, which Sarah was saying she usually expects when she’s reading stories involving these types of characters. As I pointed out in my tweets, I feel this is stereotypical. A lot of us are socially awkward, but not all of us. And there’s also this idea that the social awkwardness of nerds is the extreme “loser living in their mother’s basement” sort of awkwardness, whereas in my experience, there are absolutely different levels of social comfort. Some nerds and geeks do have that extreme awkwardness. A lot more of us are still kind of awkward in social situations with non-nerds and non-geeks, but honestly, this is often more about ‘what the hell do I say to these people?’ than anything else.

I mean, think about it–if you take a nerd and put her in a room full of people who don’t share her interests (e.g., sports fans), it’s asking a lot to expect that person to be sparkling and vivacious to the others. The reverse also applies. Take a woman who’s passionate about, say, fashion, and put her in a room full of people geeking out about Doctor Who–should you expect that person to be a hundred percent comfortable in that scenario?

The ability to be vivacious to a room full of people who don’t necessarily share your interests is hard for anybody, not just nerds and geeks. It’s popular to expect it of nerds and geeks, sure. We do have a long history of our interests being sneered at and looked down upon specifically because they didn’t match up with mainstream interests.

But this is actually changing. To be a geek is becoming cooler. ‘Nerd’ still carries a pejorative weight in some circles–hell, I’ve seen people in my own profession snarkily call each other nerds–but that’s fading, too. Nerds and geeks are starting to show up in mainstream TV, albeit still often with a weight of stereotype (but then, hello, Hollywood, they never met a stereotype they didn’t like).

And we’re showing up in books, too. Like romances, which is what the podcast episode was all about. One of Sarah and Jane’s listeners wrote in to ask what nerd romances they’d recommend, and of those, I can note that yeah, I’ve actually read the first four of Vicki Lewis Thompson’s series. I very much liked the first one, due to her nicely skewering a lot of nerd stereotypes (e.g., lack of fashion sense). The subsequent ones didn’t grab me as much since they struck me as way less about actual nerdery and more about superficial adherence to nerd tropes (e.g., a heroine who wears glasses and dresses frumpily as a shorthand for being smart, rather than showing her, y’know, actually being smart).

One Con Glory by Sarah Kuhn is another nerd romance I liked–lots of con culture described there.

I’ve also talked about Tribute by Nora Roberts before, which while not a nerd romance per se did have a hero in it who was an absolute geek–a graphic novelist who was into Battlestar Galactica (both versions!), and who legitimately thought along the lines of “what KIND of Kryptonite?” when the heroine lamented that love was her Kryptonite. Because yeah, I’d totally expect a geek to understand that much about Superman lore.

I still find that SF/F books are way more likely to have nerds and geeks showing up in them, ’cause, yeah, well, that’s where a lot of us are in our primary reading tastes. But as I’ve pointed out in a previous post, a lot of those tales are still going to have love stories front and center. In romance, I expect nerd-friendly characters to actually be showing up more in stories that aren’t ostensibly about nerd/geek culture–which is why I tend to slurp historicals with bluestocking heroines RIGHT UP. I really rather liked Nina Rowan’s A Study in Seduction for having a mathematician heroine, and y’know what scene in it stands out the most for me? The one where the hero drives himself a little crazy trying to solve a math problem that’s quite hard for him, specifically to express to the heroine that yes, he appreciates her and her interests. And I totally loved how he showed up disheveled and a little frantic to present her with the answer.

Zoe Archer’s Stranger, Book 4 of her Blades of the Rose series, is another excellent example. I loved her hero Catullus Graves, for being a man of intellect and whose scientific creations are integral all throughout the series. And I loved that while he had some traits that fall into nerd stereotypes (i.e., he had issues talking to women), he had other things to balance that out (i.e., the man could rock the hell out of a waistcoat).

Because ultimately, what a nerd character should be about for me is that character using their brains effectively as part of the plot. If it’s in a contemporary setting, bonus points if actual nerd/geek culture is shown–and shown effectively–but I don’t actually require that. It’s all about the brains for me. If you’re going to claim your character is a scientist, show me some science. If she’s a computer geek, I want to see her hands on a keyboard–I don’t want to see men in the plot solving her computer problems for her.

So talk to me, people! Sound off about your favorite nerd/geek characters, and what books they show up in!

June 19, 2013 by
About Me, Carina Press, Valor of the Healer

Blogging at Here Be Magic today!

Hey folks! Surfacing from Norwescon long enough to report that my very first contribution to the Here Be Magic blog has gone up today! I’m being relaxed and groovy, and talking a bit about Valor of the Healer as well as Faerie Blood, and mentioning a few of the ways I’m shooting for equality and balance in my work. It’s no accident that both of my heroines of record, to date, are elves who are not white.

And being, well, ME, I also mention a few of the ways I love to geek out!

Come on over and say hi! I AM at Norwescon so I’m only able to pay erratic attention to the comments right now, but I’ll be trying to answer any comments as the weekend progresses and I have time in between convention programming. 🙂

Many thanks to my fellow Here Be Magic authors for spreading the word!

March 29, 2013 by
Books

The only acceptable use for DRM

I’d been aware for some time that a lot of libraries had embraced the ability to check out ebooks, but not until this weekend did I get around to actually trying it. I was quite pleased to discover that both of our local libraries, the Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, provide the ability to do electronic checkouts.

Since KCLS is the one I have a card with, I gave that a shot over the weekend and succeeded in checking out both Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Justin Cronin’s The Passage. I selected both of these novels because they were specifically available in Adobe Digital Editions ePUB format, and therefore were friendly to my nook.

The process of getting the books onto my nook was less friendly than it should have been, and pretty much went like this:

  1. Check out the book from the library web site and download a small file.
  2. Open up Adobe Digital Editions and then actually launch that small file so ADE could see it. If I tried to doubleclick the file without launching ADE first, then I got an error message that claimed ADE wanted an update it didn’t actually need. The file then opened up the actual ebook so ADE could see it, complete with the timestamp for how many days I was allowed to keep it.
  3. Close ADE and then plug my nook into my Mac via USB, then re-launch ADE so it can see the nook. (This is because I’ve had trouble getting ADE to recognize the nook’s been plugged in if I launch it first. In retrospect I could have saved this step by just plugging in the nook first thing and then launching ADE and keeping it open, but I didn’t think of that at the time.)
  4. Copy the book onto my nook.
  5. Profit Reading!

I’ve been working on reading the Atwood and it looks just lovely on the nook, just like all the other ebooks I’ve read. And I honestly am fine with the DRM in this case, since if you’re going to do electronic library checkout, there needs to be some way of keeping track of how long the library patron is allowed to keep the content. I have no problems whatsoever with DRM in this case telling me “HEY YOU HAVE 18 DAYS LEFT ON THIS KTHX” and then making the book magically go away if I run out of time.

There are still issues here of device compatibility, though. I cannot check out ebooks to my iPhone just because Adobe Digital Editions does not like the iPhone; as I understand it, it’s a matter of ADE being a Flash app and iOS doesn’t do Flash. Or something to that effect. I can however check out to the computer, and from there, as described above, I can copy down to the nook. So that’s all fine.

Less fine is the question of file format. ADE does PDFs as well as ePUBs, and while the nook in theory talks PDF, in actual practice so far PDFs I’ve looked at on my nook come across sloppily formatted. They’re still readable, but it’s a clumsy reading experience and just not as pleasant as reading an ePUB, or a PDF on a device that’s capable of showing it to me as it was actually formatted. This is the nook’s fault, though, not ADE’s. (I suspect that Kindle owners would have a better time with an ADE PDF but I have no firsthand experience with that.)

Anyway, though, once I got the books checked out, that was awesome and I plan to make use of this ability more in the future. I expect it will help a great deal in whittling down my Enormous Reading List of Enormousness.

As a general FYI to Seattle-area folks, here are the pertinent links if you’d like to try out this shiny ebook checkout thing for yourselves:

You do of course need a library card for either system, but hey, library cards are Awesome Things and should be had regardless. 🙂 Enjoy!

October 18, 2010 by
Movies, Television

Attention, Dork Nation of Seattle!

For those of you who didn’t see me say this on Facebook or Twitter:

There’s a Harry Potter exhibit coming to the Pacific Science Center on October 23rd!

And, AND, the very same weekend, a Battlestar Galactica exhibit arrives at the Sci-Fi Museum! Including full-sized prop ships!

In short: GEEK WEEKEND OF AWESOME. Tix for the Potter exhibit go on sale on the 14th, and I’m keeping an eye out for when the BSG ones are available. Chances of the Murkworks descending en masse upon both of these exhibits at once are very, very high. If you’d like to be in on that geekery, let me know! This is your advance warning!

August 10, 2010 by
Books, Main

WordPress geekery (and also books) for the win

I’ve been playing around with WordPress 3 for the last few days, as y’all might have guessed from a previous post. I am pleased to report that with some help from the folks on the wordpress.org support forums, I’ve successfully set up a mini-network of blogs all based off of annathepiper.org. More importantly, I’ve learned how to redirect domains to them. So once I figure out how to pull all the extra data in plugin tables from angelakorrati.com, I’ll be adding that blog to my network of blogs all running off the same install of WordPress 3. Yay!

If anyone is interested in how I did it, I’ll do a separate post detailing the steps.

Meanwhile, because I wouldn’t be me without periodic updates of Books Recently Purchased, here’s the latest roundup, all electronic:

  • The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog, one of the Amelia Peabodies by Elizabeth Peters, #7 to be precise. Bought because B&N had it at the low price of $1.99, and because I couldn’t resist–this is the one where Emerson gets amnesia. 😉
  • Moving Target, by Elizabeth Lowell. Romantic suspense/mystery. Re-purchase of a book previously owned in print.
  • Darkness and the Devil Behind Me, by Persia Walker. I’d actually previously acquired a free PDF of this, which I still have, but in the interests of Nook compability and because B&N’s selling it for only $1.99, I figured what the hell, I’d go ahead and buy it.
  • Nightkeepers, by Jessica Andersen. Paranormal romance. Another re-purchase of a book previously owned in print, given up in print only for the sake of making more space on my shelves. I’ll be re-buying her Book 3 as well as buying Book 2 for the first time, since Book 2 was the one I’d won as an ARC and I still need to buy a copy of it for real!

And that makes 170. I have a whole LOT of things on the To Buy list for the Nook, although most of them are re-buys of things I’ve traded in print copies of, and quite a few are things I still actually do have print copies of. The latter therefore do not count as part of the To Read list. I just want ’em electronically too.

Meanwhile, still left to do on the great WordPress 3 upgrade: figure out if I can adapt Tarski as a theme to support shiny new WordPress 3 menus. I’d like to have a proper menu bar.

June 22, 2010 by