Cyde Weys Musings

Remember a long time ago when the web was free of spam? I’m not talking about email, which has had spam problems for awhile, I’m talking about the web. Nowadays, the web is festering with link-crawling spambots. Anyone with a blog, Twitter account, or heck, even a webpage with a simple submit form with some text fields on it, knows this. There’s not much that can be done about it besides spam-detection heuristic algorithms and CAPTCHAs.

Well, I just recently found some code that I wrote way back in 2002 that displays a blissfully unaware naïvité of what was to come. That code was part of my website Fyre’s Domain, which I have since put an archived copy of online. I had just been learning Perl CGI and I wanted to write a simple guestbook/comments form that readers could use to give me feedback without having to use a mailto: link. This was in the era before blogging software was commonplace — what I was running was a home-brew blog, but before the word “blog” was even invented. I basically copied the format from one of the first chat rooms I ever used, Paddynet, way back in 1995 or so. The “chat room” consisted of an HTML form that would dump unvalidated input (including HTML tags) into a chat buffer displayed on the page that would display the last 30 or so messages.

Paddynet was around long before spambots, but my site was started right when they began appearing in the wild, and the code proceeded to run for another 7 years until I just shut it off.

You can probably guess what happened.

The only reason I even re-discovered this code is because I happened to notice it was getting an unusual number of hits in my web analytics software. And those hits were anything but benign. My poor naïve Perl CGI comments submission form has accumulated 26 MB worth of text over the years, all of it spam. And since I figure it may be interesting to someone to see exactly what seven years of web spam looks like, you can download it for yourself (a text file thankfully compressed down to just 1.8 MB). If anyone finds any interesting trends in popular spam topics over the years in there, do let me know.

So those are the dangers of trusting user input on the web these days. Revel in the blissful simplicity of the following code, which was all it took to implement a comment submission system back in the day. Nowadays you couldn’t get away with anything even close to it. As my data proves, you’ll be eaten alive by spambots.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI qw(:standard);

print header;
print start_html('Leave Comments on Fyre'),
	h1('Leave Comments on Fyre'),
	start_form,
	"<i>Note, all fields are optional, but empty comments will be ignored.</i><br>",
	"Name: ", textfield(-name=>'name',-default=>''),
	"E-mail: ", textfield(-name=>'e-mail',-default=>''),
	"Your Comments: <br>", textarea(-name=>'Comments',-rows=>10,-columns=>50,-default=>''),
	'<br>',
	submit('Submit'), reset,
	end_form,
	p,
	hr;

if (param() && param('name') ne '' && param('Comments') ne '') {
	$date = `date '+%H:%M %m/%d/%Y'`;

	print '<i>Your comment has been posted.</i><hr><br>';
	@foo = "\n\n" . '<br><b>' . param('name') . '</b> ' . "\n" .
	'<u>' . param('e-mail') . '</u> ' . "\n" . '<i>' . $date . '</i>' .
	"\n" . '<table><tr><td width = "100%">' . param('Comments') .
	'</td></tr></table><hr>';
	push @foo, `cat mk.txt`;
	open CFILE, ">mk.txt" or die "Failed to open comments file!";
	print CFILE @foo;
	close CFILE;
}

@foo = `cat mk.txt`; print @foo;

print 'This program is open source, and released under the GPL by Ben McIlwain, 2002.  See
the source <a href = "mk_script.txt">here</a>.';
print end_html;

Today, an anti-semitic terrorist attacked the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C. (I’ve been there, and yes, one visit is enough for a lifetime). Last week, an anti-abortion terrorist assassinated a doctor.

Why is the media so afraid to use the word “terrorist” to accurately describe right-wingers engaged in the act of terrorism? Is it that whites can’t be terrorists? Only Arabs?

Until we call it what it actually is, we can’t address it properly.

And since right-wingers were so keen on using water-boarding against terrorists, do you think they’d mind if we tortured these home-grown right-wing terrorists?

Almost a year ago, I bought a cute little desktop from Dell with the intent of using it as a GNU/Linux desktop alongside my existing Windows desktop. Its name is Vertumnus. But things don’t always turn out as planned. I quickly started using Vertumnus as my exclusive desktop PC, booting the Windows machine only to play games. Eventually I reformatted the Windows computer and the only applications I’ve reinstalled have been games, so it’s pretty much reduced to a gaming appliance at this point, like an XBOX360 but better.

The only problem is that when I originally bought Vertumnus, I didn’t have all of this in mind, and so I bought it rather under spec. I would’ve been better off just buying a better computer from the get-go. As a result, I’ve had to do quite a few upgrades over the past year to get it to meet my needs. From the very beginning I added more RAM and another hard drive. Then it joined a Stand Alone Complex. Then I added another hard drive. From the outside it still looked the same, but a lot of the interior was upgraded. Now even that is no longer true.

Yesterday, I spent two hours (and another $160) redoing the computer even further. The case was too cramped and was preventing further upgrades. So I moved the computer into a new case, the Enermax Chakra. It’s appreciably bigger than the previous Dell case. It’s also a lot more flexible on the inside in terms of which parts will fit into it. Why the Chakra? I only had two criteria, but the Chakra was pretty much the only case that met both of them: 1) It had to have a 250mm fan, but 2) No LEDs. Both criteria come from my computer living in my bedroom: it has to be silent (hence a big, slow-spinning fan) and it has to be dark, so that I can sleep!

Since the case didn’t come with any fans besides the huge 250mm one, I purchased two of the quietest 120mm fans in existence, the Scythe Gentle Typhoon. Again, my criteria were the same: Quiet and no LEDs. The Gentle Typhoons best met those. I also had to get a new power supply, because the 250 Watt one from Dell isn’t able to accommodate the video card I was about to put in. So I went with the Corsair 550W PSU. It was the power supply that best met my criteria: High efficiency (85%!), quiet (a big 120mm fan), and no LEDs. And it’s more than enough to power the video card that I put in, a hand-me-down GeForce 8800 GTS. Yes, that’s right, I finally got tired of the inferior performance of the Intel integrated graphics card. Now I can actually play modern 3D games in GNU/Linux.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, while transitioning all of the parts from one case to another, the CPU fan developed a faulty bearing which makes it obnoxiously loud. So the first thing I hear upon starting up my supposed-to-be-silent computer is a loud whirring fan noise. Rather than giving up my dreams of a silent computer, I ordered a replacement CPU fan/heatsink, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. Why that one? I already have one in my Windows computer and it cools really well. Plus it’s quiet. It hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s going into Vertumnus as soon as it does.

The new GeForce 8800 GTS is so large that it covers up one of the SATA ports on the Dell motherboard (and another one is rendered inaccessible to all but right-angle SATA connectors). Since I have three SATA hard drives and one SATA DVD-R drive, that’s a problem. The DVD drive is currently unplugged, but I’ll swap it out for an IDE DVD-R drive from my Windows desktop soon — thankfully, the video card doesn’t block the IDE port.

Once all of this is done, the only original parts that will remain in Vertumnus from the original purchase will be the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 processor, 2 1 GB sticks of DDR2 RAM, the motherboard, and one 500 GB hard drive. And that’s after less than one year. Clearly, I tried saving too much money by buying a system far below my ultimate desired specifications, then wasted a bit more than those savings on upgrades. And I can’t even say the upgrades are done. At some point I’m going to need another hard drive, but since I’m all out of SATA ports, I’ll either have to get an add-in card or replace the motherboard. The original RAM that Dell shipped was pretty slow, and can easily (and cheaply) be replaced with something better. And the processor is looking slightly anemic. A nice quad-core processor would be fun to play around with …

Long story short, in another year, it’s quite possible that the only component remaining from my original purchase will be the 500 GB hard drive and a SATA cable or two. I guess I learned my lesson. Don’t try to save too much money on a computer if, at heart, you’re really just a techie who demands performance.

Those of you following me on Twitter may have noticed that all of my tweets come from Identica. I started off with Twitter but I quickly switched over to Identica as soon as I learned about it. Identica, if you haven’t heard of it before, uses the same micro-blogging concept as Twitter (and in fact is compatible with it), but has several improvements. I recommend Identica, and if you aren’t using it yet, check out these reasons as to why you should.

There are several practical reasons you should use Identica:

• All of your data is exportable on Identica, including your entire corpus of tweets. Twitter does not provide this functionality. Should you want to migrate away from Twitter down the road (for any variety of as-of-yet-unforseen reasons), you are unable to do so, but you are able to migrate away from Identica at any point easily. And since Identica uses the Free Software Laconica software, you can even install Laconica on your own web host and import all of your data there, where you can have complete control over it.
• Identica has a powerful groups feature that allows people to collectively subscribe and see all tweets sent to a group (this is what the exclamation syntax you may have seen in tweets is about). Groups are a powerful way to build communities and have multi-party discussions, but Twitter does not have them.
• You don’t have to quit Twitter. My Identica account is linked to my Twitter account, so every message that I send to Identica automatically appears on Twitter. Posting to Identica+Twitter takes the same amount of effort as posting to Twitter alone, except it is seen by more people.
• Identica lets you see things from other people’s perspective. I’ll use me as an example. You can see my entire tweet stream, which includes messages from all users and groups I’m following. This should give you a great idea of the kinds of things I’m interested in. And you can see all of the replies to me, which makes it a lot easier to track and understand conversations. Note that all of this is public information and is accessible on Twitter through trickier ways (in the first case, looking at the list of a person’s followers and combining all their tweets in chronological order; in the second case, by searching for “@username” on the search subdomain), so you aren’t giving up any of your privacy. Identica simply makes these features a lot easier to use.
• Some people you may end up finding and wanting to talk with don’t use Twitter at all; they’re only on Identica. Get on Identica and link it to Twitter and you can talk to everyone on both services. Just use Twitter, however, and you’re left out in the cold with regards to anyone who only uses Identica.

And there is one important ethical reason you should use Identica:

• Identica is Free (as in freedom, not merely cost). Because it follows the Free software ethos, it respects your rights and maximizes your freedom to control your data as you see fit, including the ability to move all of your data elsewhere if necessary. Twitter does not respect these freedoms.

A couple years ago, when I was more active on Wikipedia than I am now, I was trying to prove a point by compiling a list of all of the risque images on Wikipedia (link obviously NSFW). I don’t quite remember what that point is anymore, but the list remains. It has even survived a deletion attempt or two. I stopped maintaining it a long time ago, but for whatever reason, others picked it up and continued adding more pictures in my stead. I haven’t thought of it in awhile.

So imagine my surprise when I learn that that silly page has made Australia’s secret national Internet censorship blacklist. I don’t understand the justification here — all of these images are hosted on Wikimedia servers, after all — but I have to laugh when I imagine some Australian apparatchik opening a report on this page, viewing it, making the determination that it’s not safe for Australian eyes, and adding it to the list without further thought, mate.

Australians, please take back control of your country.

In my recent fiddling around with Twitter I came across the Twitter API, which is surprisingly feature-complete. Since programming is one of my hobbies (as well as my occupation), I inevitably started fooling around with it and have already come up with something useful. I’m posting it here, so if you need to do the same thing that I am, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

One common thing that people do on Twitter is they follow everyone that follows them. This is good for social networking (or just bald self-promotion), as inbound links to your Twitter page show in the followers list of everyone that you’re following. You’d think Twitter itself would have a way to do this, but alas, it does not. So what I wanted to do is use a program to automatically follow everyone following me instead of having to manually follow each person.

Other sites that interface with Twitter will do it for you (such as TweetLater), but I’m not interested in signing up for another service, and I’m especially not interested in giving out my Twitter login credentials to anyone else. So I needed software that ran locally. A Google search turned up an auto-follow script written in Perl, but the download link requires registration with yet another site. I didn’t want to do that so I decided to program it for myself, which ended up being surprisingly simple.

My Auto-Follow script is written in Python. I decided to use Python because of the excellent Python Twitter library. It provides an all-Python interface to the Twitter API. You’ll need to download and install Python-Twitter (and its dependency, python-simplejson, if you don’t have it already; sudo apt-get install python-simplejson does the trick on Ubuntu GNU/Linux). Just follow the instructions on the Python-Twitter page; it’s really simple.

Now, create a new Python script named auto_follow.py and copy the following code into it:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#(c) 2009 Ben McIlwain, released under the terms of the GNU GPL v3.
import twitter
from sets import Set

username = 'your_username'
password = 'your_password'
api = twitter.Api(username=username, password=password)

following = api.GetFriends()
friendNames = Set()
for friend in following:
    friendNames.add(friend.screen_name)

followers = api.GetFollowers()
for follower in followers:
    if (not follower.screen_name in friendNames):
        api.CreateFriendship(follower.screen_name)

Yes, it really is that simple. I’d comment it, but what’s the point? I can summarize its operation in one sentence: It gets all of your friends and all of your followers, and then finds every follower that isn’t a friend and makes them a friend. Just make sure to edit the script to give it your actual username and password so that it can sign in.

Run the script and you will now be following all of your followers. Pretty simple, right? But you probably don’t want to have to keep running this program manually. Also, I’ve heard rumors that the Twitter API limits you to following 70 users per hour (as an anti-spam measure, I’m guessing), so if you have more than 70 followers you’re not following, you won’t be able to do it all at once. Luckily, there’s a solution for both problems: add the script as an hourly cronjob. This will keep who you follow synced with your followers over time, and if you have a large deficit in who you follow at the start (lucky bastard), it’ll slowly chip away at it each hour until they do get in sync. In Ubuntu GNU/Linux, adding the following line to a text file in /etc/cron.d/ (as root) should do it:

0 * * * * username python /path/to/auto_follow.py >/dev/null 2>&1

This will run the auto_follow script at the top of each hour. You’ll need to set the username to the user account you want the job to run under — your own user account is fine — and set the path to wherever you saved the auto_follow script. Depending on your GNU/Linux distribution and which cron scheduler you have installed, you may not need the username field, and this line might go in a different file (such as /etc/crontab). Refer to your distro’s documentation for more information.

So that’s it. That’s all it takes to automatically auto-follow everyone who’s following you — a dozen or so lines of Python, one crontab entry, and one excellent library and API. Enjoy.

I’m doing some research on Unicode and compression algorithms right now for a side-project I’m working on, and I came across a highly ranked Google search result for a UTF-8 munging code snippet that is so idiotic I couldn’t let it pass without comment. If this post helps even one person who would’ve otherwise followed the linked advice, it is worth it.

First, some background. UTF-8 is a character encoding format that can pretty much handle any character under the Sun, from the English alphabet to Japanese kanji to obscure extinct languages. It even includes thousands of esoteric symbols used in smaller fields of study that you’ve probably never even heard of before. But the nice thing about UTF-8 is that it is variable-length. Standard ASCII characters (including everything on a standard English keyboard) only take one byte to represent. All of the common characters from other widely used languages typically take just two bytes to encode. It’s only the really obscure characters that require more than two bytes.

So now you see why the linked “solution” is so stupid. This guy says he is “designing a little client/server binary message format” and wants “a simple and quick way to encode strings”. Well, duh — use UTF-8, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It’s simple, quick, and already implemented in any programming language you can think of, so it requires no additional coding. There are all sorts of dumb ways to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel in sotware engineering, but trying to come up with your own character encoding is particularly idiotic. It’s really tricky to get right because there are so many corner cases you’ll never even know existed until they cause your application to break. The Unicode Consortium exists for a reason — what they do is hard.

This guy even confesses that his expected input will probably not contain Unicode characters that are longer than 2 bytes. So there is no justification at all for what he does next — he creates a mangled version of UTF-8 that turns all Unicode characters 3 bytes and longer into question marks, instead of just leaving them as is. So instead of allowing a rare character to take an additional byte or two, it gets mangled. And to accomplish this, he has to create his own custom encoding solution that is an intentionally broken version of UTF-8. That’s the worst part — he’s wasting time creating completely unnecessary code, that will need to be maintained, that will need to be debugged — and for what?

Of course, none of the people responding to his thread point out that what he is trying to do is stupid. They just smile and hand him some rope.

I’m up in Parsippany, New Jersey at the moment on business travel. That in itself wouldn’t be anything special, except that the eastern seaboard was just rocked by a huge snowstorm. I had to leave a day early to ensure that I made it here for an important meeting Monday morning, only for that meeting to be canceled while I was en route and incommunicado. To add insult to injury, none of the client employees I work with even showed up for work today, and my car died at the hotel this morning so I walked to the client site in the falling snow. And just for some added excitement, I had to run to escape the torrent from an oncoming snowplow at one point.

The drive up here was no picnic either. About an hour in it started raining, then quickly turned to snow. Thankfully none of it started sticking to the road until I arrived at the hotel four hours and many wrong turns later (not the best time to try a new route). I saw a surprising number of other vehicles driving in the snowstorm without lights on, including one semi-trailer which kept on disappearing and re-emerging from the mist of snow in a terrifying fashion. Even my high beams didn’t provide nearly enough illumination to see the road ahead of me. This was made worse by the constant glow of headlights shining over the jersey barrier from vehicles in the opposite direction, like some dividing line across the horizon, which lit up the entire sky from about six feet above the road on up. The road was thus made darker and less see-able by contrast.

The only thing that hasn’t sucked about this trip so far is ham radio. Sunday night is an excellent time to work the ham bands, which is what I spent my whole commute doing. Repeater contacts have become passé for me these days because they are so easy; at any random point along the I-95 corridor, you can hear at least a couple simultaneous conversations on various nearby repeaters. As such, I focus mostly on making simplex (direct) contacts, which at least provides somewhat of a challenge, especially while operating mobile. I was mostly using the national calling frequency on 2 meters, which is 146.520 MHz, though I did talk to one man on another simplex frequency while idly scanning the band.

I made more simplex contacts during this trip than I ever have before. At one point I was talking with two to three people simultaneously, a feat I’ve never experienced outside of pre-arranged simplex nets while operating stationary. I had some pretty long conversations with stationary operators, as well as some shorter conversations with other mobile operators (as mobiles tend to be a lot more limited in terms of antenna size, elevation, and to a lesser extent, transmitting power).

But the neatest point in the trip was when I briefly became the best ham radio station in the whole area.

I had been talking with a stationary operator for around fifteen minutes. The signal went from bad to good to bad as I-95 took me closer and then farther from his position. His signal was never stronger than S-5 (S-meters give a measure of signal strength from 1 to 9, on a logarithmic scale). About ten minutes after we said our good-byes and he faded into the radio-frequency mist, I arrived at the foot of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

All of a sudden, the stationary operator I had been talking to earlier came in again. And his signal strength just kept getting better and better. We excitedly traded signal reports in a rapid-fire series of transmissions, remarking on how much the signal quality of the other was improving by the second. My S-meter kept on climbing until it pegged at S-9, still 50 feet shy from the apex of the bridge. The other operator’s signal was full-quieting, meaning that his signal was so strong that not only could I hear him perfectly, even the lulls between the words of his transmission were perfectly silent (because his carrier was so strong that it overwhelmed the ambient radio-frequency noise).

Then as I reached the apex of the bridge, some 200 feet in elevation above the ground and quite the enviable radio location, something really cool happened.

I was able to make contact with my previous contact, much further distant than even the current contact that had just gotten back in range. And in between the gaps in our conversation, I heard a multitude of other voices rising above the static, a chorus of conversations on the calling frequency many miles distant in all directions on the compass rose. So many things were being said at once that I couldn’t make sense of any individual transmission. I could only hear it all as a collective murmur. All of these people out there, each holding separate conversations — and unlike any of them, I could hear it all at once.

As I crested the apex of the bridge, the signal strength from my primary contact rapidly faded back down the S-meter, and with one last hurried transmission, we said good-bye. Then he, along with everyone else, was lost to the static, and I was alone again.

Frank quickened his stride and took a leaping jump onto the waist-high brick wall separating the sidewalk from the field. Kathy rolled her eyes at him. None of the other students busily hurrying to or from their classes registered a response at all.

“You know, this isn’t the playground at kindergarten,” Kathy teased Frank.

“Yeah, I know,” Frank responded. “If it was, I wouldn’t have made that jump.” He cracked what he hoped was his most winning smile. Arms spread wide, he balanced carefully as he continued walking along the brick wall. Kathy walked along beside him.

Kathy turned away and grunted, trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile. On the other side of the wall, a large group of students – too many on the field at once for a real match – was kicking a soccer ball around on the patchy field. They didn’t look especially coordinated, nor was there even a clear delineation between teams, but at least they looked to be having fun.

The two walked awkwardly in silence for awhile, avoiding each other’s gaze, until Frank grew bored of the novelty of walking along the wall and jumped back onto the sidewalk, nearly tripping in the process. He hoped Kathy hadn’t seen that, but of course, she had.

After several more moments of silence, Frank turned to look at Kathy. “Ready for the exam next Monday?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Kathy said mock-indignantly. “And that was a complete waste,” she continued, gesturing behind her. “How come we’re already learning new material that won’t even be on the exam?”

“He’s trying to teach sadism.” Frank paused for a few instants for effect. “By example.”

Kathy smirked. Then, she quickly side-stepped to the left to avoid an oncoming bicyclist on the sidewalk, bumping into Frank in the process.

“Idiot,” she said angrily, looking over her shoulder at the bicyclist. “The sidewalk is for people.”

A car whizzed by on the road to their right, braking and honking angrily at an absent-minded student who had just started jay-walking across the road.

“So, do you want to study for the exam together?” Frank asked. A slight tremble in his left hand would have betrayed his growing nervousness, had anyone noticed it.

“Oh, come on, you ace all the tests,” Kathy said with a tone of feigned annoyance.

“Well, I could help you.”

“Come on, you have better things to do with your time,” she said, smiling.

“Nope, I really don’t,” he said half-jokingly.

“All right, well I hope you don’t expect you’re getting anything out of this,” she said, her smile widening. Frank felt his heartbeat quickening.

They reached a group of students anxiously waiting on a patchy piece of grass between the sidewalk and street for a break in the steady stream of cars. The real crosswalk was a hundred feet up the road, but it didn’t lead directly to the walkway leading between the Mathematics and Physics buildings back to the dorms.

“So, when do you want to meet up?” Frank asked hopefully. A gap in the cars arrived and the group pushed out into the streeth. Frank stepped off the curb and followed them, Kathy closely behind him.

“How about toni-”

The world turned red in an instant.

Jagged loping arcs of pure white electricity lept between the power lines leading to the Physics building.

The red afterglow faded just as soon as it had come.

Everyone stopped in their tracks. One man fell over himself.

An oncoming car plowed into the students in the road behind Frank at low speed, the panicked driver stomping on the brakes to little effect.

Frank pulled Kathy up onto the opposite sidewalk.

People witnessing the carnage behind them began screaming for help. Others just began screaming.

“What the-” Kathy began saying. A loud boom from elsewhere on campus cut her off. The assembled crowd whipped around and looked in the direction of the presumed explosion, but saw nothing. The screaming ceased as people strained to hear anything further.

More out-of-control cars collided into each other on the roads, followed by bewildered motorists stepping out and staring at their vehicles in exasperation.

“Something happened,” Frank said softly. He was still holding Kathy’s hand, but he was no longer thinking at all about how he could turn a study session into something more. The traffic light up the street was dead.

Frank glanced at his watch. It was blank. “Something big happened.”

Kathy fumbled with her cell phone, but it wouldn’t turn on.

One of the students that had been struck by the car unsteadily got to his feet, clutching his leg. He started yelling at the driver of the car, unaware that larger problems were afoot.

“Nothing works!” Kathy said with increasing exasperation. She threw the cell phone down in disgust. The other students were collecting themselves.

“What happened?” Kathy asked Frank. The silence was deafening, punctuated only by curious and frightened whispers. He didn’t answer her right away. He was staring up in the sky, transfixed. Slowly, Kathy followed his gaze, and was frozen in horror too.

“Remember this moment. The moment that everything changed.”

They stared at the jetliner in the sky several miles out. It continued on its steep downwards trajectory, trailing a contrail of smoke that was too gray to be just water vapor. It developed a list to the left, and then with a chorus of shocked gasps from the attentive crowd, it rolled over entirely, and quickened its meeting with the ground. In the distance, in the direction of the airport, two more jetliners sought a similar fate.

The exam that would now never happen was the last thing on their minds.

Sigh. A lot of other people at work were using Twitter, so now I am too. If I join anything else, I’ll need to think of a good way to organize all of my web presences. I guess this blog can be the mothership, and contain links to everything else.

So far I seem to be using Twitter as a dumping ground for my Google Talk status messages, so they are no longer lost to the mists of the intertubes when I switch to a new one. I don’t ever foresee myself updating it on the go from a mobile phone — I just don’t have that much of a desire to remain connected. Being off the grid can be good sometimes.