ttj - Tom Jones

Nothing says bad quality like a software system that has to update itself. Firefox has just broken the thing I was trying to do, which was simply download a document from a bank, because instead of doing the thing I want to do, it wants to do the thing it wants to do, which is make a big hoo-ha about having updated itself.  Well done! Sadly for me, firefox didn't bother to save the file it was going to save, because it got all distracted distracting me about its update. And when I clicked on "Restart firefox" it disappeared.  I lost all my logged-in sessions, which was the state of the work I was carrying out. How did we end up in a situation where a multimedia platform is the only way to access online banking, and, even on Linux (in this case Fedora), it randomly fails because it's updating itself.  (i) it shouldn't be updating itself, the user of Fedora should be controlling updates to all applications; and (ii) updating itself shouldn't break the thing the

For all the failures of the web, and the failures of the architects of the web, sometimes it's just the fault of the people using it. The web allows individual items to be addressed. In an email from Tap Air Portugal , the airline where it takes four days of solid administrative activity to purchase a ticket, they announce their web page for finding out travel restrictions about your destination. Since this message is in connection with a specific flight, with Tap Air Portugal knowing the destination (as well as, hopefully, place of departure), how should they do this?  Putting the information in the email itself isn't it, because, as they say themselves, "Each country defines and updates their rules frequently". From the user point of view, it would be nice to have a link to specific information about entering the particular country where the flight arrives, from the place where the flight departed.  This would solve the majority of cases.  It can have a form, so th

 TAP Air Portugal, the airline where a week at a desk battling their web site might get you a ticket, has filthy business class seats, and they argue against cleaning them. This channel, under and to the left of the seat, had a lot of food inside: The TAP Air Potugal employee said yes, they don't clean that part. He said there is no contact between me and the trough of old food, so don't worry about it. When I insisted, he scooped the old food out from the trough, onto the floor around my feet: This stowage compartment just had a few crumbs, and they seemed to agree with cleaning it: The arm had food spillage stains: Wiping with a damp cloth would have cleaned that. Their re-clean failed to get the food stains on the arm, so i asked to borrow the cloth. It took minimal elbow grease to get it off. There were crumbs and other particles on this upholstered element (I can't remember if it was a chair arm or something else): Here's another persepective on spillage dirt on th

Previously, in [0], I sadly noted the need to take action against Interactive Brokers for not honoring a withdrawal request of my funds, due to their wilfull failure to authenticate me. [0] < https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3352794691445397639/9016264402316625710 > I looked at a recent statement and their address is given as: Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Ltd., Level 20 Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate, London EC2N 4AY, UK. Regulated by FCA Despite being resident in Austria, I'm willing to take action against their London presence, which in any case they give as their international subsidiary.  I may also enquire, from the Austrian regulator, whether they are required to have an EU presence to serve EU-resident customers. Checking this on Companies House, there is indeed a company, with number 03958476, called "INTERACTIVE BROKERS (U.K.) LIMITED", with registered office address Level 20 Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate, London, EC2N 4AY.   This is a good start.  This en

I tried to typeset (compile) a simple letter using the "oldletter" LateX package using xelatex on Fedora 32, and got these error messages (and no pdf output): mktexfmt [INFO]: writing formats under /home/home/.texlive2019/texmf-var/web2c mktexfmt [INFO]: --- remaking xelatex with xetex mktexfmt [WARNING]: inifile xelatex.ini for xelatex/xetex not found. mktexfmt [INFO]: Not selected formats: 1 mktexfmt [INFO]: Failed to build: 1 (xetex/xelatex) mktexfmt [INFO]: Total formats: 2 mktexfmt [INFO]: exiting with status 1 I can't find the format file `xelatex.fmt'! I tried various random crap from "answers" sites, and eventually a general "yum update" changed the situation.  Not fixed, but changed.  Now I got: This is XeTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.999992 (TeX Live 2020) (preloaded format=xelatex)  restricted \write18 enabled. entering extended mode (./2021-11-25.ib.complaint.demand.tex LaTeX2e <2020-02-02> patch level 5 L3 programming layer <2

On three recent air travel legs, going Germany-England-Portugal-Brazil, there were around three cases of needing mobile internet access at the airport, to fulfil requirements before being allowed to fly. If I had been really thorough at preparing for all government requirements beforehand, perhaps I would not have needed mobile data and device at the airport, but I'm not sure.  The chance of somehow being not allowed to fly, having turned up without mobile data (roaming) and a device, seemed high. To board towards England, I had to do a government form called "Passenger Locator Form".  I hadn't heard of this before I got to MUC, but I was not allowed to board without it.  To get it, I had to order a test for my second day in England, and put the reference number from that into my Passenger Locator Form.  That was another chunk of admin.  You need a payments card to pay for the second-day test.  All the shitfrastructure requires all of the other shitfrastructure; it is

Like most prices, the Bitcoin price is best checked infrequently.  Monthly is probably okay, but daily is too much.  Multiple times daily and you're using time poorly, messing up alignment of natural emotion with portfolio performance due to noise (thanks Taleb for this one), and risk making bad trading decisions.  The exception is when Bitcoin is breaking all-time-highs: on these days you are also allowed to wear a space outfit or maybe just a fake NASA T-shirt. And where to check the price?  These come and go, with the informative ones inevitably being bought up by spammers after getting popular.  Check this spam site out: Conspicuously missing from the above is: the Bitcoin price.  Okay, making the window a little bigger would yield it, but it's already 985 pixels high, contains prices for at least 9 other items, has large ads, makes all my computer's fans start whirring, and so on.  If a Bitcoin price web site can't tell you Bitcoin's price in its first 985 pixe

The background is that I sold a few kilos of gold for CHF, and wanted it in EUR, so I used IB's forex to get it from CHF to EUR at good rates.  Simple right?  Well, it touches on the non-working financial system in several different places, so no, it's certainly not simple, it's an ordeal.  The particular section of the ordeal dealt with here is the seizure of my funds by IB.  The other major part of the ordeal so far is Sparkasse's Kafkaesque handling of giving permission for the EUR to land in their account, which is out of scope here. Like so many things, the problem comes down to authentication.   The general problem is that businesses are generally unable to authenticate their own customers, and this is a competence issue.  This is often accompanied by adhoc and incorrectly-designed processes to sort-of "authenticate" customers, outside what the customer was led to believe constitutes the normal authentication process.   The specific problem is that Inter

If a company is founded, and eight shareholders put in 10k CHF for one share each, then the capitalisation of the company is 80k CHF.  That is the amount of financial capital it starts with, and it can buy real capital (equipment) with this, or whatever it does.  It makes sense to talk about this as that company's capitalisation.  If some kind of market led to these share issuances, then fine, it's a market capitalisation. Suppose later the company's shares are trading at 15k CHF per share on a market.  Has the company's "market capitalisation" now increased, to 120k CHF?  All else staying equal, the company still only has the 80k CHF of capital, so no.  Its market cap is still 80k CHF.  The 120k CHF is something, but it's not the company's capitalisation.  The 120k CHF is the marginal price the shares are trading at, multiplied by the total number of shares.  This is commonly called "market cap" or "market capitalisation", but it s

In the previous installment of failing to buy a flight ticket from TAP Air Portugal, we determined that the proximal cause of flytap.com's most recent failure to create a new account was our use of plus addressing in an email address, which I'd used as part of a workaround because TAP Air Portugal web site wasn't allowing login with the original account, nor for "rescue" of the account. I needed to provision a new special-purpose shitfrastructure email address, so I thought I'd try icreatedthisaddressbecausetapairportugalereretarded@gmail.com, but this was too long, so I tried tapairportugalareretarded@gmail.com, which is equivalent to tap.air.portugal.are.retarded@gmail.com, because of the normalisation google do with dots, which is fine. I kept switching from Portuguese to English, and the google web sites like accounts.google.com kept switching back, but this didn't matter too much.  My browser does send my language with every request, and if a user has

Despite their excellent work rearranging buttons, firefox developers have not deigned to show the user why, from the application's point of view, a download failed.  It just says "Failed" and there is no indication of why.

Geeks have a predilection for what they call "recursive acronyms".  An example is GNU, which stands for "GNU's not Unix".  See how clever that is?   But recursive is a misnomer because recursion has a base case, or it wibbles forever, or is undefined or something.  These acronyms do not have a base case, so any attempt to expand them does not terminate, so they would be better known as degenerate acronyms. TAP stands for TAP Air Portugal.

  Having failed yesterday (and the day before) to get a ticket out of TAP, despite many hours trying, I thought I'd make a fresh start today. I'm going to use a different browser, a different payment card, a different email address.  To the maximum practical extent, each shitfrastructure element used in the purchase will be different. I'll go for business class just so that everything is different. I start by checking my shitfrastructure email inbox, in case anything pertinent happened overnight.  It's always possible they just tried against the card again and it just went through. I have this:   Happily, the first stage went well with chromium, with the dropdown lists containing the right elements.  It's 2021, and a web site not truncating its dropdown lists is a happy moment. The next stage is to change to email, follow some link, and continue the sign-up.  It's at this stage that I get to finally choose a password.  After the usual attempts to follow password

Some outlets in the apartment are white, and some red.  I'd heard Rio used both 127V and 220V.  This is indeed it: I plugged the kettle into the 220V, red, one, because I thought: it's a high-power appliance, so this way, it needs less current, so the kettle's cable will get less hot. I was wrong.  The kettle stopped working a few days later.  The light still came on, but no heating element.  The airbnb host kindly replaced it, and said only plug it in the 127V, white, outlet.  At this point I looked more closely, and the old and new kettle did indeed both specify 127V: Note the power ratings for both kettles are 1200W, which is tiny.  It's amazing anyone ever has cup of tea at that rate. The one that broke was the Unitermi one. How does the dual-voltage thing work?  Does the owner get two bills, one for each voltage?  Are there parallel infrastructures from substation to outlet?  Or is there one transformer per apartment building, or per apartment? Elsewhere, at an ele

Yesterday, I was unable to book a ticket using either firefox or chromium on flytap.com. The way it failed for a password reset on chromium was different from how it failed on firefox.  This morning, the way it's failing on firefox is the same: after entering the email address, it goes into an animation, with more animations happening in the grayed-out background, and never progresses. I checked out as a guest, and used the Austria card, so I could select a cardholder address from the list Afghanistan - Bermuda (it's a bit different this time -- I guess the truncation point depends on the exact size of my browser window). There's realtime SMS reception required for the card payment, and by the time the SMS arrives, the payment page says I'm out of time.  Never mind, there's a button to try again, and now the SMS has arrived.  But the "try again" button just brings up a blank page under a domain I've never heard of: Look at all this shitfrastructure wor

As part of my ongoing ordeal to buy a ticket from TAP, I tried chromium instead of firefox. Though it's unlikely I "forgot" my password, since I carefully record the passwords for all retail sites systematically, and I have the record of recently having done so for flytap.com, it was possible that using the "Recover Password" function would restore access to my account, so I wanted to try it. In firefox, this had previously brought up a new tab saying "javascript;" in the address bar, and nothing else. Now, on chromium, which is basically the same as chrome, I go to the same "Recover Password" function, and enter my email address.  This time, the bug is completely different: the original page and the modal dialog are grayed out, and there is a little animation.  The animation bounces up and down.  It's a really great little animation.  First it's a plane, then it's a suitcase, then it's a globe, then it's a plane again, an