Mark Carroll's Journal

Before I graduated, I did a bit of freelance IT consulting. Over thirty years ago now, one of my jobs was to migrate a legal practice from their old Wang business system to a modern PC/Windows-based system. Following the rule that older computer stuff tends to be better, the Wang system was rather nice to use, I got to dig into it in working out what data they had there and how to extract it: I would bring that data home on 5¼" floppies and do some transformation to it before ingesting it into the new system.

The practice's main book-keeper had a computer with a display that was really lovely to read. It was amber, and crisp enough that I surmise it probably used real P3 phosphor, not just some colour setting. Given how much of what I do remains largely text-based, I wonder if I might appreciate there being some system now that I could buy that is basically such a display with some wired way to plug in a keyboard and serial networking so it can run as a text-based terminal client of a modern Linux system, or even just plug it straight in as some monochrome monitor for which we still have some ancient driver code in Linux.

This morning there were police and drumming. Wondering if we were already having some celebration of Glasgow's 850th anniversary, I wandered out into the neighbourhood and found myself witnessing another Orange Order march. They are very pro-Protestant pro-UK and I remain surprised by just how many people around here of all ages feel strongly enough to march with uniforms and bands and suchlike. We appear to have a few lodges around here, I think they report up to a grand Glasgow-wide lodge that reports up to an even grander Scottish one.

R. has provided and instructed me in a little espresso maker. One fills the lower chamber with water that one then heats. The water rises through pipes then a layer of coffee before appearing in the upper chamber. I have no idea what coffee aficionados think of it in comparison with, say, the AeroPress® or Breaking Bad's Gabe's thinking, but I rather like the coffee that this device makes me from the Sang Tao 5 from a local Vietnamese grocery store; next I shall try their number 1.

On a recent visit to Edinburgh, R. and I chose Edinburgh Street Food (ESF) for lunch, on our way to the botanic garden. ESF features diverse vendors around an eating area. Initially, I was unimpressed: very much, oh, they reinvented the food court. Admittedly, I am a fan of food courts: they tend to be cheaper than restaurants and allow people their separate choices. Anyhow, it turned out that one can order online from any combination of the vendors in one transaction, providing one's table number, then the food appears in due course, delivered to the table in somewhat random order. So, much nicer than queueing then waiting at multiple counters. The Polish vendor was decent and, across the vendors I noticed, the prices seemed reasonable. R.'s Peruvian food was adequate but they undercooked the rice.

In experimenting with generative AI, I find Mistral quite nicely conversational, hence in part my recently writing here about the advent of AI companions. In chatting with it about books, it wondered if I'd read Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas and, by coincidence, I happen to have that very book out from the library.

My borrowing the novel at all is another coincidence: I had checked the library's online catalogue and found no available copies. Then, I happened to see it on the shelves of a local branch. Curiosity piqued, I returned to the web interface and discovered awful UX flow: you find the book, click "Book" format, see an entry about the book, click to check branch availability, and see it's not available. You have to notice the "other formats" section, click around in that, and it finds other editions, some of which are available. I've passed the issue on to the library who can do no more than pass it up to their software provider.

In rereading the novel, I find myself at an unusual boundary point. Usually, I retain a fairly good memory of a typical novel for a few years. Once I've waited for long enough, I've mostly forgotten it and can reread it reasonably anew. My memory of Consider Phlebas feels betwixt the two: as I read each scene, I have a fair idea where it'll go but I don't know what the coming scenes hold.

Filing taxes is on paper for me this year. After Mint Mobile ended their previous international roaming, I allowed my US cellphone plan to lapse. Although the IRS typically expects expats to file taxes, its services also generally require them to have a US telephone number. When they can make it easier for expats to actually deal with them then they won't have to process my paper mail any more. As it is, it helps to be able to attach a separate page anyway because Form 1116 Part II doesn't have enough space for reporting monthly salary deposits. If I end up working as a contractor later this year then I may also have to start attaching a form from the UK's Home Office showing that I am not liable for Self Employment tax.

It was rather cloudy here for today's partial solar eclipse but, fortunately, the relevant important moon-finding fellow in the Middle East apparently sighted the crescent in time so the new month starts and we get to celebrate Eid al-Fitr tomorrow, also I don't need to call the school on Monday to explain an absence. As summer time (daylight savings) starts this weekend, we were looking at breaking our fast at 7pm tonight but 8pm tomorrow. Now, tomorrow we get to eat instead.

With secure communication online (TLS, etc.) it is interesting to see how standards develop: older ways are later judged insecure and the community slowly moves onto newer ones. I have wondered if the security services, and others, record some of the more interesting traffic that they can't decrypt yet in the hope that new developments might someday reveal the content of those once-private communications. People move on to different algorithms for actual reasons. Even if past the statute of limitations for prosecution, such records may still yield useful intelligence.

Now, given my job, I think about cryptocurrency more. There are some currencies, popular for payments for illegal services, that are designed to obscure the details of transfers. Even with normal cryptocurrencies, whose transfers are easily observed, there are tumblers which are busy accounts that take in many and various payments, and make payouts differently and rather later, so as to obscure the flows: they make it difficult to match the incoming funds against the outgoing.

I had already been wondering if statistical analysis of activity around tumblers may at least circumstantially reveal repeated flows for habitual users. Now I also wonder if some of the privacy-enhanced cryptocurrencies may be found to be less private than currently assumed, which would be interesting given that the blockchain records all the data publicly and long-term.

In short: as new discoveries uncover historical information, perhaps some people have bad surprises waiting for them.