Tag: The Northern Spy
December 2016 Sierra’s problems continue, as the Spy receives other reports of programs not functioning besides the ones cited here last month. To be fair, the Olive Tree folk managed to get their Bible Study program working on Sierra, reducing the number of fails by one. On the other hand, he now has multiple reports of Sierra installs killing off or corrupting the keychain, and some of SSH, ITunes, and other apps failing, or running very slow. There are also…
The Spy described himself last month as “still breathing”. In view of the worst cold to afflict him in many years, that is not a quality statement, just a bare fact. Good thing he isn’t trying to dictate this column. VCON-41 was this past weekend (why he delayed writing this) and the Spy was scheduled for four panels and a reading. After struggling through Friday afternoon and evening, he awoke Saturday with no voice at all, and had to cancel…
The Spy like everyone else still breathing, is always learning new things–or re-learning old ones–especially so as a new crowd of students (and many more old ones) is about to descend on campus. El Capitan falls into both categories, for it has a few extremely annoying bugs that he has not had to deal with for several OS X iterations. One of the worst is the tendency to forget it has ever heard of Bluetooth. The menu bar icon turns…
June 2016 The Spy spotted an article this month (which he won’t loan credibility by providing a link) suggesting Apple was becoming the next Blackberry, doomed to fail because it is falling behind the times. Perhaps so, but that doom seems a long time off yet. The good news is that WWDC, upcoming in two weeks, is likely to see a plethora of incremental upgrade announcements to please the faithful (though the Spy is giving it a pass again this…
May 2016 The Apple haters and doomsayers will slither from beneath their rocks in force now that Apple has suffered its first quarterly year-over-year decline in revenue in thirteen years. No company can grow its sales indefinitely, so this day had to come. Mind, the company still had revenues of over $50B, so it’s not about to become a corporate food bank client. This does mark a watershed for the iPhone business, however, as it may indicate, if not market…
Sweet Sorrow April 2016 Parting can be tough when you’ve had a faithful machine for so many years. But the old model 180 was getting long in tooth and was no longer reliable. True, some of the problems were mere cosmetic scuffs, but others ranged from annoyances that had to be worked around to serious impairment of functionality. So, when the Spy’s local dealer announced an introductory (and deeply discounted) sale on a brand new (to the frozen north; they’d…
March 2016 This column is being (metaphorically) penned on Leap Day, a day similar to Sadie Hawkins Day (November 13) in which historically the ladies may ask the men without violating polite norms–hardly an issue in our day, though originally somewhat sexist. It’s also spang in the middle of the great American ask/catch–candidates trolling for primary votes, while the rest of the world watches a system seemingly self-destruct in vitriol, venom, slander, and name calling. Ahem. wasn’t democracy supposed…
Why is it that supposedly hard-headed evidence-based fact-found business and IT decision makers seem so driven instead by emotional and personal considerations? Take the stock market, for instance. The one predictable thing about it is that it always overreacts, whether on the up or down side. Never has this been more apparent than lately, where every titbit of “news” sends it on a wild gyration, up several hundred points one day, down likewise the next, with no time or effort…
December 2015 At long last The Spy’s series The Throne is starting to see the light of day. The first book, Culmanic Parts was published in June. Now, the second, Rea’s Blood or Navy Girl is available from publisher Writers Exchange. See the URLs below. The third book Tara’s Mother is in publishers’s editing as we write, and the fourth The Paladin is undergoing second proofing before being made available to the Spy’s volunteer reader/correctors. These books are background…
A Word or Two November 2015 Apple’s sales saga continues to flummox many pundits. They forecast earnings estimates too low or too high, and when they miss, they criticize–not themselves, but Apple–as if it were Cupertino’s fault they aren’t more prescient. The latest take on this is that because Apple’s iPhone sales generate so large a percentage of the total income, and aren’t breaking records by a very wide margin these days, the company is somehow in trouble, and…
by Rick Sutcliffe Back Up To The Old Tricks October 2015 Much has happened worth commenting upon in the months that this space has been devoted to explicating some of the features of Modula-2 R10 that make it safe, reliable, and extensible as a problem solving tool. For one thing, a few errors were noted in the June article. R10 uses NOT, but ~ is not a synonym, [DESCENDING] was removed for FOR loops and replaced by FOR selector–, and…
by Rick Sutcliffe Technology News and Views Since 1983 Modula-2 R10 Templates September 2015 Modula-2 R10 has been the Spy’s meat and potatoes in this space for a few months now. It is the fully modern dialect of Niklaus Wirth’s Modula-2 that he and Telecom engineer Benjamin Kowarsch have developed to address serious software engineering issues of safety, security, reliability, and extensibility. This month we consider the use of Generic templates to reach toward the software engineering grail of reusable…
Technology News and Views Since 1983 Modula-2 R10 Blueprints August 2015 In these last three months the Spy has introduced the fully modern dialect of an existing notation he and Telecom engineer Benjamin Kowarsch have developed to address serious software engineering issues of safety, security, reliability, and extensibility. This month he shows how to leverage Blueprints to enforce the rigour involved in planning code before executing it. Modula-2 R10 allows the programmer to develop Abstract Data Type (ADT) libraries that…
May 2015 Why is it that so many software projects fail? Here in the frozen north, we routinely see one government and enterprise IT project after another delivered late, and not working, to the opprobrium of all the putative users. Government catastrophes run into the tens of millions. Notable failures in the United States include the IRS ($8B), FAA ($2.5B), FBI ($500M), McDonalds ($170M) and Denver airport ($560M) projects, to select a very few. And yet, though there is no…
The Spy has it on good authority that iTim is about to iCook up a major purchase–one that will rock merely the high-tech sector, but the entire business world. What follows is a partial transcript of a larger interview, with the Spy’s sometime erstwhile assistant, coder extraordinaire, workhorse novel character, and chief head banger Nellie Hacker, speaking with a source she declines to name. The Spy has omitted some of her comments as unnecessarily…provocative, and some of the subject’s answers…
Cash away the old year passes as Cupertino has to be a happy place given the wild success of the iPhone 6. Only now are wait times reverting to normal after the most successful product launch in tech history. Apple is once again in ascendancy, Samsung and other rivals descending. The question is, what does iTim do to keep the momentum going, or will 2015 be a relative disappointment by comparison? Try iPhone 6s and 7, refreshes of Apple TV…
With the release of OSX 10.10.1 the Spy decided to take another try with Yosemite and installed it on one machnine. Seeing none of the problems he experienced with the beta at WWDC, he eventually installed on three machines–a late 2007 MacBook Pro seventeen inch (emergency unit), a 2013 Retina MacBook (main one at work), and a Westmere tower MacPro (home). So far all has gone well, though there has been no opportunity to test the fusion space where Mac OX…
by Rick SutcliffeNovember 2014 The new iPhone six plusis just about everything Apple has touted–sufficient screen real estate, speed, snazzy design, plus runnable iOS enhancements to last for…well, the next year or two for some folk, though the Spy will make his serve far longer. Delivery took over a month from the order date, and except for a last minute glitch where the truck returned it to the depot (quitting time apparently arrived before the UPS driver did) was near…
by Rick Sutcliffe October 2014 iOS8 was introduced at WWDC with much hoopla but actually arrived with some problems, and has needed two updates since, the current one being 8.0.2. Also many users find it is too large to install without deleting a great deal of material from their iPuds. Hint: Use iTunes for the update. Given the usual spit and polish Apple puts into new releases, this whole episode seems odd, even a little Microsoftish–as if something has slipped there….
iSchool, or the Pitter Patter of little feats September is supposed to be back to school, but here in British Columbia of the frozen north, the public school teachers union and the Provincial government are so far away from each other in their contract positions that the mediator they consulted walked away from the dispute because his involvement had no prospect of success. It doesn’t help that after a previous government gave the union a sweetheart deal on class size…
