Wandering Thoughts archives

A story of the gradual evolution of network speeds without me noticing

A long time ago I had a 28.8Kbps dialup connection running PPP (it lasted a surprisingly long time). A couple of times I really needed to run a graphical X program from work while I was at home, so I did 'ssh -X work' and then started whatever program it was. And waited. And waited. Starting and using an X program that is moving X protocol traffic over a 28.8K link gives you a lot of time to watch the details of how X applications paint their windows, and it teaches you patience. It's possible, but it's something you only really do in desperation.

(I believe one of the times I did this was when I really needed to dig some detail out of SGI's graphical bug reporting and support tool while I was at home. This was back in the days before all of this was done through the web.)

Eventually I finally stepped up to DSL (around this time), although not particularly fast DSL; I generally got 5000 Kbps down and 800 Kbps up. I experimented with doing X over my DSL link a few times and it certainly worked, but it still wasn't really great. Simple text stuff like xterm (with old school server side XLFD fonts) did okay, but trying to run something graphical like Firefox was still painful and basically pointless. At the time I first got my DSL service I think that 5/.8 rate was pretty close to the best you could get around here, but of course that changed and better and better speeds became possible. Much like I stuck with my dialup, I didn't bother trying to look into upgrading for a very long time. More speed never felt like it would make much of a difference to my Internet experience, so I took the lazy approach.

Recently various things pushed me over the edge and I upgraded my DSL service to what is about 15/7.5 Mbps. I certainly noticed that this made a difference for things like pushing pictures up to my Flickr, but sure, that was kind of expected with about ten times as much upstream bandwidth. Otherwise I didn't feel like it was any particular sea change in my home Internet experience.

Today I updated my VMWare Workstation install and things went rather badly. I'd cleverly started doing all of this relatively late in the day, I wound up going home before VMWare had a chance to reply to the bug report I filed about this. When I got home, I found a reply from VMWare support that, among other things, pointed me to this workaround. I applied the workaround, but how to test it? Well, the obvious answer was to try firing up VMWare Workstation over my DSL link. I didn't expect this to go very well for the obvious reasons; VMWare Workstation definitely is a fairly graphical program, not something simple (in X terms) like xterm.

Much to my surprise, VMWare Workstation started quite snappily. In fact, it started so fast and seemed so responsive that I decided to try a crazy experiment: I actually booted up one of virtual machines. Since this requires rendering the machine's console (more or less embedded video) I expected it to be really slow, but even this went pretty well.

Bit by bit and without me noticing, my home Internet connection had become capable enough to run even reasonably graphically demanding X programs. The possibility of this had never even crossed my mind when I considered a speed upgrade or got my 15/7.5 DSL speed upgrade; I just 'knew' that my DSL link would be too slow to be really viable for X applications. I didn't retest my assumptions when my line speed went up, and if it hadn't been for this incident going exactly like it did I might not have discovered this sea change for years (if ever, since when you know things are slow you generally don't even bother trying them).

There's an obvious general moral here, of course. There are probably other things I'm just assuming are too slow or too infeasible or whatever that are no longer this way. Assumptions may deserve to be questioned and re-tested periodically, especially if they're assumptions that are blocking you from nice things. But I'm not going to be hard on myself here, because assumptions are hard to see. When you just know something, you are naturally a fish in water. And if you question too many assumptions, you can spend all of your time verifying that various sorts of water are still various sorts of wet and never get anything useful done.

(You'll also be frustrating yourself. Spending more than a small bit of your time verifying that water is still wet is not usually all that fun.)

How 'there are no technical solutions to social problems' is wrong

One of the things that you will hear echoing around the Internet is the saying that there are no technical solutions to social problems. This is sometimes called 'Ranum's Law', where it's generally phrased as 'you can't fix people problems with software' (cf). Years ago you probably could have found me nodding along sagely to this and full-heartedly agreeing with it. However, I've changed; these days, I disagree with the spirit of the saying.

It is certainly true you cannot outright solve social problems with technology (well, almost all of the time). Technology is not that magical, and the social is more powerful than the technical barring very unusual situations. And in general social problems are wicked problems, and those are extremely difficult to tackle in general. This is an important thing to realize, because social problems matter and computing has a great tendency to either ignore them outright or assume that our technology will magically solve them for us.

However, the way that this saying is often used is for technologists to wash their hands of the social problems entirely, and this is a complete and utter mistake. It is not true that technical measures are either useless or socially neutral, because the technical is part of the world and so it basically always affects the social. In practice, in reality, technical features often strongly influence social outcomes, and it follows that they can make social problems more or less likely. That social problems matter means that we need to explicitly consider them when building technical things.

(The glaring example of this is all the various forms of spam. Spam is a social problem, but it can be drastically enabled or drastically hindered by all sorts of technical measures and so sensible modern designers aggressively try to design spam out of their technical systems.)

If we ignore the social effects of our technical decisions, we are doing it wrong (and bad things usually ensue). If we try to pretend that our technical decisions do not have social ramifications, we are either in denial or fools. It doesn't matter whether we intended the social ramifications or didn't think about them; in either case, we may rightfully be at least partially blamed for the consequences of our decisions. The world does not care why we did something, all it cares about is what consequences our decisions have. And our decisions very definitely have (social) consequences, even for small and simple decisions like refusing to let people change their login names.

Ranum's Law is not an excuse to live in a rarefied world where all is technical and only technical, because such a rarefied world does not exist. To the extent that we pretend it exists, it is a carefully cultivated illusion. We are certainly not fooling other people with the illusion; we may or may not be fooling ourselves.

(I feel I have some claim to know what the original spirit of the saying was because I happened to be around in the right places at the right time to hear early versions of it. At the time it was fairly strongly a 'there is no point in even trying' remark.)

A brief review of the HP three button USB optical mouse

The short background is that I'm strongly attached to real three button mice (mice where the middle mouse button is not just a scroll wheel), for good reason. This is a slowly increasing problem primarily because my current three button mice are all PS/2 mice and PS/2 ports are probably going to be somewhat hard to find on future motherboards (and PS/2 to USB converters are finicky beasts).

One of the very few three button USB mice you can find is a HP mouse (model DY651A); it's come up in helpful comments here several times (and see also Peter da Silva). Online commentary on it has been mixed with some people not very happy with it. Last November I noticed that we could get one for under $20 (Canadian, delivery included), so I had work buy me one; I figured that even if it didn't work for me, having another mouse around for test machines wouldn't be a bad thing. At this point I've used it at work for a few months and I've formed some opinions.

The mouse's good side is straightforward. It's a real three button USB optical mouse, it works, and it costs under $20 on Amazon. It's not actually made by HP, of course; it turns out to be a lightly rebranded Logitech (xinput reports it as 'Logitech USB Optical Mouse'), which is good because Logitech made a lot of good three button mice back in the days. There are reports that it's not durable over the long term but at under $20 a pop, I suggest not caring if it only lasts a few years. Buy spares in advance if you want to, just in case it goes out of production on you.

(And if you're coming from a PS/2 ball mouse, modern optical mouse tracking is plain nicer and smoother.)

On the bad side there are two issues. The minor one is that my copy seems to have become a little bit hair trigger on the middle mouse button already, in that every so often I'll click once (eg to do a single paste in xterm) and X registers two clicks (so I get things pasted twice in xterm). It's possible that this mouse just needs a lighter touch in general than I'm used to. The larger issue for me is that the shape of the mouse is just not as nice as Logitech's old three button PS/2 mice. It's still a perfectly usable and reasonably pleasant mouse, it just doesn't feel as nice as my old PS/2 mouse (to the extent that I can put my finger on anything specific, I think that the front feels a bit too steep and maybe too short). My overall feeling after using the HP mouse for several months is that it's just okay instead of rather nice the way I'm used to my PS/2 mouse feeling. I could certainly use the HP mouse; it's just that I'd rather use my PS/2 mouse.

(For reasons beyond the scope of this entry I think it's specifically the shape of the HP mouse, not just that it's different from my PS/2 mouse and I haven't acclimatized to the difference.)

The end result is that I've switched back to my PS/2 mouse at work. Reverting from optical tracking to a mouse ball is a bit of a step backwards but having a mouse that feels fully comfortable under my hand is more than worth it. I currently plan to keep on using my PS/2 mouse for as long as I can still connect it to my machine (and since my work machine is unlikely to be upgraded any time soon, that's probably a good long time).

Overall, if you need a three button USB mouse the HP is cheap and perfectly usable, and you may like its feel more than I do. At $20, I think it's worth a try even if it doesn't work out; if nothing else, you'll wind up with an emergency spare three button mouse (or a mouse for secondary machines).

(And unfortunately it's not like we have a lot of choice here. At least the HP gives us three button people an option.)