2021
- The receipt from purchasing the monitor
- A photo of the support case number, my name, and the current date written on a piece of paper and held next to the monitor’s serial number sticker to prove that it really existed
Use local Git repos for personal work
I’ve heard a lot of online arguments about whether you should host your Git-based projects in GitHub or GitLab, but a lot of them miss an obvious option. Is this repo for your own personal work that you don’t intend to share with others? Great! You can host unlimited, free, completely private repositories on your own system. Here’s the complete process:
$ mkdir -p ~/src/myproject
$ cd ~/src/myproject
$ git init --bare
$ cd ~
$ git clone ~/src/myproject
$ cd myproject
There, you’re done. Now you have a 100% fully functional Git repo that doesn’t require a network connection and supports every single Git feature. Pull it, push it, branch it, revert it, whatever: it’s your own repo and you can do whatever you want with it. And you don’t have to sign up for anything, or agree to a Terms of Service, or share your work, or trust a company you don’t know very well.
If you want to move your repo to another server later, you can copy ~/src/myproject to its new home via whatever means you find most convenient, use git remote set-url origin [...] to point your existing work toward the new location, and then go on about your business as usual without changing any of your workflow.
GitHub and GitLab have a lot of nice features that may be totally irrelevant if you’re not collaborating with a team. Never forget that you can host Git projects yourself, easily and for free.
Oh, and if you do find yourself needing to work with a handful of people and don’t need all of the integration features of the commercial options, I highly recommend Gitea. It’s a tiny little service you can host yourself and it takes very few resources. I use it whenever I need my Git repo to be accessible across the Internet.
Dell doesn't honor warranties
In late August 2020, I bought my kid a new Dell SE2419HX monitor for his birthday. School was starting back and his laptop’s built-in screen was turning out to be too small for him to use for remote schooling. (If you’re reading about this in the far future, this was the year of COVID.) It arrived a few days later and we plugged it into his computer, sat it on his desk, and watched him happily use it for the next few months.
In February 2021, the monitor stopped working. Although it would still turn on, it had a little window on the screen saying “No HDMI signal from your device”. I swapped in a few known working HDMI cables and even tried connecting it to another computer. Nothing worked, so it seemed clear that its HDMI port was busted. We gave the kid an older TV to use temporarily while I worked through Dell’s warranty process. This involved a few days of back-and-forth with their support department, and they eventually asked me for two pieces of information:
The next day they replied with a terse email:
We have received an update from our internal team and unfortunately, we are unable to process the request for the Monitor replacement as the account information of the system does not match with your information.
Please contact the store/person where you purchased the system for further assistance. Proof of Possession seems to be Invalid/tampered with/fake.
What? I replied that this must be a mistake and asked them to review the evidence again. I got back a nearly identical copy of the prior email, with an apology “for any inconvenience this may have caused you”. I replied again: yes, but there’s been a mistake on Dell’s end, and please fix this. I got back another nearly-identical with the same apology, plus a cryptic “WE have limited access”.
At this point my confusion was turning to anger. I replied to insist that they fix my broken monitor, problems on their end be damned. The same support supervisor replied:
We apologize but we cannot warranty support this monitor with the available information.
At this point I vented a little on Twitter, and the @DellCares account replied to me to ask me to send them a direct message. I did, explaining the situation. They replied with a copy-and-paste of the last unhelpful email I’d received.
The happy resolution to Dell’s utter failure to honor their warranty is that Amazon made good on it. Even though the purchase was outside their normal return window, because Dell was so horrible, Amazon made an exception and allowed me to return it for a full refund. For that, I greatly thank them.
I have a guarantee of my own: under no circumstances will I allow Dell junk into my home again.
Security training for the masses
My company is going through its annual HIPAA privacy and security refresher training. This is a good thing and I wholeheartedly support it, as it’s always nice to be reminded of some of the details. “Oh, I forgot that we’re allowed to do X! That’s good to know.”
But the most irksome thing in the world is when you know the right answer to a test question but are required to give the wrong one to pass it. For instance, we were asked:
If you then connect with a VPN, will that ensure a file sent via email will be secure all the way through to its destination? Yes / No / Maybe
Test says: maybe! If you change nothing about your setup except adding a VPN into the mix, you may now be able to send email securely.
I say: The correct answer is “of course not”. Our company uses a “split tunnel” VPN so that only connections to certain services go over the VPN but the rest of our traffic goes over the open Internet? Do we need to route someone’s after-hours Netflix viewing through an encrypted connection? No thank you. But even without that, once you send an email to your own server, you have no control over what happens next. Does the recipient’s server support TLS connections? Are emails stored on that server encrypted at rest? Does their email app require TLS? Who knows! You sure won’t. So no, a VPN absolutely does not guarantee an email will be secure all the way through to its destination.
If you encrypt the file you are emailing, will that ensure a file sent via email will be secure all the way through to its destination?
Test says: yes! If you encrypt an email to an employee at another company, it’s guaranteed to be secure.
I say: Maybe, sure. I’d even go so far as saying it probably will. However, for all I know the recipient’s company uses some key escrow thing that lets them decrypt and analyze all inbound mail, and Joe from IT occasionally sells the interesting ones to North Korea.
Thing is, our particular training program is for the most part pretty decent, as far as such things go. Again, I’m glad we’re doing it. I just wish their post-training exams were a little more carefully worded.
Google v. Oracle, by analogy
Suppose Joe opens a restaurant. He hires a waiter who is really great at following directions, but speaks no English. Over time, Joe comes up with a way of working with this waiter that’s very precise and detailed. You can ask the waiter for things like “order burger plus cheese plus ketchup no tomato no onion” or “bring check” or “bring water”. However, you have to say things exactly the right way each time. You can’t just say “order cheeseburger” instead of “order burger plus cheese”, or “bring me some water” instead of “bring water”. If you do, the waiter will only say “I don’t understand” and wait for you to say it the right way.
All of this is explained on the menu, and the waiter is otherwise good enough at his job that people are willing to learn the Joe’s Cafe way of ordering their food and asking for the check afterward.
A while later, Gina decides to open a different restaurant across town from Joe’s place. Her food is nothing like Joe’s, she uses different suppliers, her kitchen has a brand new setup she invented herself, and she uses little robot dogs instead of waiters. However, she does a little market research and finds out that a lot of people in her city are use to ordering food the Joe way. To make it easier for her customers, she programs her robot dogs to respond to requests the same way that Joe’s waiter would. Then they’ll be able to order food and enjoy her restaurant without having to learn a whole new system!
Now, at Joe’s, if you say “order burger plus cheese”, the waiter writes this down, carries the order to the kitchen, and hands it to the cook. The cook follows the instructions, hands the food to the waiter, and the waiter takes it back to the table. Gina’s restaurant doesn’t have burgers, but if you tell her robot dog to “order steak plus potato”, it transmits the order via radio to the kitchen where a 3D printer makes it and then sends it to your table via a flying drone.
In other words, you place your order at Gina’s restaurant the same way you would at Joe’s, but almost everything else about the process is completely different because Gina came up with her system from scratch. As it turns out, a few orders do happen to work the same because there are only so many ways to react to “bring water”. That’s natural, though. Gina didn’t copy Joe’s “leave the table, fill a pitcher with water, bring it back to the table, and fill the empty glasses” process; that’s just the way you do it.
This is same as the relationship between Oracle and Google. Oracle bought a company who made a programming language called Java that became popular. When Google was making their Android phones, they wanted to make it easy for developers to write apps and games for it. Since so many people were already familiar with Java, they decided to let developers use it. However, they made their own Java from scratch that looks like Oracle’s Java from a programmer’s point of view but is completely different behind the scenes. As with Joe and Gina, the way you place your order is the same, but that’s where the similarity ends.
Oracle is suing Google because they say it’s unfair that Google allowed their developers to write programs in something that looks like Java, except without it actually being Java, and that Google should pay them for the privilege.
If it’s not reasonable that Gina should have to pay Joe just because her robot dog knows how to respond to “order steak plus potato”, then it’s not reasonable that Google should have to pay Oracle since they didn’t use any of Oracle’s underlying work.
Google is asking the US Supreme Court to declare that they didn’t copy Oracle’s programming code when they created their own work-alike system. For the sake of the US software industry, I hope Google wins.
As a personal note, I don’t like eating at either Joe’s or Gina’s restaurant. The food’s awful in both places. I still don’t think that Gina (or Google) owe Joe (or Oracle) anything.