Solipsism Gradient

As I’ve said yesterday:

My software development activities are (now, officially and indefinitely) on hiatus.

The dictionary says:
hiatus | h???d?s | noun (plural hiatuses) [usually in singular] a pause or gap in a sequence, series, or process…

Let me tell you about the “why” first. Thanks to all of you who immediately asked if I’m OK, by the way.

Short answer: yes, I’m OK, though not as OK as in the past — but then, that’s to be expected, with all these anniversaries streaking by. Not helped at all by miscellaneous stresses originating in Real Life™. But: see below. ?

Longer answer: in the past several years, my eyes have been getting progressively worse, to the point that reading on paper now works only with excellent illumination. OK, paper is not something I have to do on a daily basis nowadays, but reading on a screen also no longer works at the — admittedly, very small — font sizes I was used to. Jacking up the font size worked up to a point but my coding habits call for a huge amount of text visible at the same time. Stopping work altogether to wait for an improvement has, retrospectively, killed all my momentum. (I’m still waiting for that improvement, unfortunately.) Also: see below…

Medical answer: during a trip to Bhutan (highly recommended!) in 2014 I suffered a posterior vitreous detachment in my right eye; no doubt due to day-long van trips over their highways-in-progress. A couple of months later, a beginning retinal detachment was fixed by laser surgery, and everything seemed OK for a time. However, visual contrast worsened until, in 2016, I had to have cataract surgery on both eyes; this was when I stopped working altogether, waiting for my eyeglass prescriptions to stabilise. While that took longer than expected, I also found that there seemed to be no combination of monitor brightness/contrast that made working longer periods tolerable. To make things worse, the vitreous detachment seems to have left a scar on the right retina, causing a macular pucker; surgery on that (a vitrectomy, yikes!) is now scheduled to happen before the end of this year. My eye surgeon assures me that should take care of everything… digits crossed!

Needless to say, all this has been somewhat disheartening, and — as far as coding and blogging are concerned — I seem to have joined the Procrastination Monks for a few more years.

In the meantime, other things have happened, some quite positive! Stand by for more news…

Today I have removed my remaining apps from the Mac App Store and posted official “Legacy” status notices on the product pages. My software development activities are (now, officially and indefinitely) on hiatus.

I know this notice has been long overdue, as I’ve been unable to update anything for more than 2 years. My apologies; I’ll try to post more about this here in the following weeks.

You may have noticed the small lock icon next to the URL on this site? Well, this means that it’s now (almost) fully buzzword-compliant, completely served over the secure https protocol via a brand-new digital certificate! TL;DR: it’s more secure for both you and me; at least, it’s much better than it was before. But nobody’s perfect.

I know; some pages (perhaps, even, this blog post you’re reading) still haven’t adapted to our new secure overlords and may not show the lock icon, or even be completely broken — I’m working on that. In a week or two all should be fine. I’m using the invaluable https://www.whynopadlock.com/ checker for this, and already managed to get an A rating from the equally invaluable https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ page. Credit to my hosting provider, DreamHost, for making this migration both possible and almost painless.

In other news, we’re just back from Yet Another Trip — this time to Patagonia and Antarctica. I’ve had plenty of time to work offline, meaning that things which are sometimes fascinating but often boring got done without excuses; I had to push off procrastination for weeks! In another week or two — or a month or two, if Zeno’s Paradox kicks in — a new RB Utility should be available. The app itself is 95% done, but as I plan to release it on both the Mac App Store and from this site, and it’s a paid app, all the tedious back-end stuff had to be learned and developed. Watch this space for news.

Update: I did some more tinkering with the security headers and I now also get a B rating from Yet Another Invaluable site: https://securityheaders.io/. (The A rating seems quite tricky, but I’m looking at the requirements.)

Update#2: more tinkering, and https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ now says “A+”! Yay.

Good news: we’re back. Here’s my updated world map:

Bad news: my plans to work underway were largely derailed, and I had to wait an additional couple of weeks for my new iMac to arrive. Still, everything is finally installed and working now, and an update to RB App Checker Lite should be out in a day or two.

The recent update to WordPress 4.0 seemed to have gone smoothly — perhaps too smoothly.

Turns out it has some fancy new redirection facilities that interfered with some of the pages outside this blog — specifically, some of the product pages, but only if the final /index.html was missing — it then would search the blog for the oldest post mentioning the product. Go figure.

Anyway, I managed to mostly fix it; the sole remaining exception seems to be the Klicko page. Please use this link to get there, in the unlikely case you’re still using that.

Another recent addition is the Crayon plugin to properly format source code on these pages. I’ve checked it out and it seems to have a bazillion options. I’ll have to play around with it and find the one that breaks the fewest older pages — this may take a week or so.

Speaking of a week or so, we’re currently on the road for yet another long trip; this time to Germany, Northern India and Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, Italy, Greece and Montenegro. I’ll probably have Internet for another 8 or 9 days, but by then whatever’s not fixed will have to wait for our return around the end of October.

Meanwhile, a small update(1.1.1) to RB App Checker Lite is waiting for review in the Mac App Store. I’ll post the direct download version ASAP; the only change is a fix for a crash that a couple of users complained about. Meanwhile, RB App Quarantine is about to be updated with helpful suggestions from users; I’ll try to do that while underway.

You should not have noticed anything, but this domain (and several domains I’m hosting for others) is now running on a new server under a new hosting plan.

I’m still with DreamHost, but now on a Virtual Private Server – and they’re certified “green”, an obscure jargon word apparently meaning “carbon-neutral”. There’s a smaller green graphic in the footer on every page now – click either there, or on the round graphic to the right to check. By clicking on that (and on other similar links throughout this site) you will see details; also, should you be wanting to host your own site with them, I will get a modest commission if you sign up through such a link.

Together with that change I’ve done some  optimizing, rechecking, and updating of the infrastructure. We now have a newer PHP, new caching software, optimized server resource allocation, and so forth. What is not new, and becoming creaky, are the Support Forums; almost all recent visitors seem to be spambots, and the underlying software is proving hard to maintain. Very few of you seem to go there; or perhaps there aren’t any bugs left in my software…? 🙂 Anyway, expect the forums to vanish sometime early next year, and they’ll probably be folded into this blog in some fashion.

Should you notice something amiss while browsing around on this site, please drop me a line!

Wow, today is the 10th anniversary of this blog; at least that’s the oldest post still preserved in my database. Most of the pieces were already in place in early 2002, but it took me some time to get everything running. At the time, I based the blog on phpbb, but a few years ago I migrated to WordPress; only the support forums, which get very little use these days, still use phpbb. Here’s a screenshot of the early days:

The cringe-inducing title was patterned after several similar ones I saw at the time; later on, no doubt under the influence of Iain M. Banks, I changed to the current “Solipsism Gradient”, which I still think quite descriptive. I’m still working up the nerve to ask him to use the name in an upcoming book, though… 🙂

But earlier versions were still more cringe-inducing, look at this one, from mid-2000:

At least I can safely say there’s no <blink> tag, and the animated GIF for the visitor counter was actually well-received; can’t really use it again as there are too few digits to be future-proof, but here’s what it looked like:

Well, life goes on. In a few days we’ll take a month off, flying in to Denver and driving around the parks between Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, Salt Lake City and Bryce Canyon. If all goes well, I’ll be able to work and post from underway. To coin a phrase, “we have cool things in the pipeline”… 🙂

While I’m busy finding the very last bug in the forthcoming Quay for Lion update…

…here’s a new vocabulary test. Here’s my result: