Chaos Server

In the modern era, the RSVP has become a rare thing. The ettiquette that you need to respond has slipped away. It seems strange--as we’ve moved into an always-connected world where invites flow through the Facebook, the Evite, and other services--that people just don’t reply one way or another. It’s so easy now, you would think the reply rate would go up, eh? My guess is that in the modern era, replying doesn’t usually matter. In the world of more loosely connected friends, larger pools of people on an invite, and fewer “formal events” where you need to make sure there is room at a table and enough food to be served, the need to have your guests RSVP has faded. There are formal events (weddings, for example) where it’s extremely important to know how many people are coming. But the culture of not needing to send an RSVP has become pervasive. Even at weddings, people just don’t reply. Who am I to judge? I’ve always made a point of trying to reply, but often my reply i...

I’m slowly building up a smart wired home, so it’s sad when it’s dumb. Friday morning we got woken up by the house smoke alarm blaring. We have one of those new fancy homes where the smoke detectors are connected through wiring so that when one smoke detector goes off they all go off. Walking into the hallway I hear the Nest Protect jabbering away “Smoke detected in the hallway!” I don’t see any smoke. I waved my hands rapidly under the Protect and nothing happened.  We have high ceilings so I can’t reach it.  I pull out my phone and check and the Nest app trying to silence it while my wife fiddles with the Nest Thermostat on the wall. Finally I go and grab the ladder, climb up, and hit the button on the Nest. “Alarm cannot be silenced.” Well that’s cute, isn’t it? Now what? So I pulled the alarm off the ceiling and disconnected it. GLORIOUS! All the rest of the alarms in the house stop going on. “Smoke detected in the hallway!” Cute Nest Protect, real cute. ...

It just works. - Steve Jobs The problem about things that “just work” is when they don’t. A nifty writing app (Desk) went on sale in the Mac App Store a few weeks ago. I noticed it while I was on Amtrak on the way to work and tried to download it. The download failed, because Amtrak WiFi blocks the App Store. No big deal, right? Just wait until later to download the app. Now became later and I was on my home network and tried again to download the app and got a reply that the download timed out. I could download other apps, just not this one. We had moved past the “it just works” phase of things. I noticed in `Console` that the following request was timing out: 2/13/15 9:53:20.491 AM storeaccountd[351]: ADI: { "Cache-Control" = "max-age=604800"; Connection = "keep-alive"; "Content-Length" = 0; Date = "Wed, 28 Jan 2015 15:26:24 GMT"; Location = "http://10.66.66.66/denied.html"; Server = "squid/2....

There hasn’t been [a smart watch] that changed the way people live their lives. At Apple, that's our objective. We want to change the way you live your life. - Tim Cook Everyone knows I'm going buy the  Watch the moment it comes out. If I don't by the  Watch, I lose my Apple fanboy status and the perks of spending hundreds of dollars a year on crazy stuff. I haven't worn a watch since college when I got my first Palm Pilot. To prepare my soul for the shift and build up my arm muscles to carry the extra weight, I bought a Pebble in November. So how do I feel about the three things the Pebble does? Notifications - every time my phone gets a notification, my Pebble buzzes, shows the notification, and waits for me to dismiss it. If I acknowledge the alert on my watch is removes it from the Notifications view of the phone. The usefulness of the notifications and the buzzing varies a lot depending on context and it would be really nice to filter this magically. For wor...

I always put clothes and family photos under the mattress, in case the house burns down. - Kim Kardashian The death of a corporate-owned Apple website is like a uranium chain reaction: each dead blog spawns about 2.4 new blogs. The problem with the explosion is that I have a glut of Apple-related sites all covering the same stories and filling up my RSS feeds. When an Apple event hits, say the release of Photos Beta, I get a whole lotta coverage of it. I'm intrigued by the cloud portion of the new Photos app and how it might help my parents. It will be a long time before I'm comfortable enough to trust Apple with all my photos. Like most of my friends, I am the family member responsible for the safety of the digital photos in our life. We've traditionally been using Time Machine on a NAS to keep a nice local backup and then once every few weeks we swap an external drive at my parent's house. The main photo library is on Mrs.Chaos' laptop and she only has her lapt...

If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever said it - Tom Lehrer It's 1994 and I carry small spiral notebook in my pocket. When I have a question, I make a note - "what's the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon?" At the end of most days I sit down in front of my desktop computer, work through the list, and try and figure out the answers. Many answers come from Microsoft Encarta. On Saturday mornings I go to the library for the harder-to-answer questions. Sometimes I remember to tell people what I've learned. It's 1997 and I carry a USR Palm Pilot Pro. I make notes about questions to research when I'm back at the computer - "What's Hangul Day?" I can find more answers at home on the Internet, but I still go the library often. These days I email the people I was with when the question was posed - so we're all getting smarter. It's 2001 and I hav...

The grand plan is to update Episode.Next to use Web Workers to do all the background synching with TheTVDB and App Engine. It should solve the responsiveness issues that it has. Before I jumped into it, it seemed like it was time to solve the long running desire to use RequireJS and move all the JS out of the main window context. This took... a while. The big thing I had to wrap my head around was the meaning of this . I had all these event handling methods being used by Episode.Next and was setting them as click handlers - $(…).click(episodeNext.clickHandler) . So when the method clickHandler is called, what is the meaning of this ? All my Java-based experience told me that it should be the EpisodeNext Object that contained the function, but that’s just not the way this language works. EpisodeNext isn’t a Class, it’s just a hash, and so clickHandler isn’t a method on the class, it’s just a variable that points to a function. So what does this mean? It’s the ...