Jeremy, Author at Jeremys Awesome Blog

What happened to Winston Smith in 1984?

At the end of George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith is sitting in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. Upon hearing of the victory in Africa we are told he enters a dreamlike state. He has finally defeated himself. He loves Big Brother.

That’s it, right? That’s the end of the story. Or is it?

Join me for a moment and think through the last chapters of the book, if you will.

Did Winston Smith die?

There are a number of theories about whether Winston died or not. Some say he was literally shot in the back of the head. Some believe that the person who was Winston Smith ceased to exist, the death being metaphorical.

Either way, the end is ambiguous, correct? Either Winston physically died, or in admitting a love of Big Brother, he metaphorically died.

I don’t believe either is true. Winston Smith is alive at the end of 1984.

Why is Winston Smith alive?

Winston is alive both physically and mentally.

First, his physical death is described from within a dreamlike state. He is blissfully dreaming of going to the Ministry of Truth and confessing everything and incriminating everyone. He describes a long-hoped-for bullet entering his brain. However, this isn’t actually a description of his physical death, just a part of his dream.

Later, we’ll get to why Winston is alive mentally.

What is Winston’s Plan?

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.
Winston Smith (George Orwell’s 1984)

Above we see that Winston Smith perceives that the only way to keep a secret is if one keeps it from oneself. You must always know that it is there but never let it emerge into your consciousness.

After this thought Winston hatches a plan. He believes that one day the Party would decide to shoot him. It was in that instant that Winston would reveal his secret, his hatred of the Party, his hatred of Big Brother.

They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
Winston Smith (George Orwell’s 194)

You can see Winston’s plan. He was going to die hating them. Because, as he says, “To die hating them, that was freedom.”

From that moment forward Winston was resolute. He shut his eyes and committed to this purpose.

Why is Winston Smith mentally alive?

Now we come to the crux of the issue. We know that Winston is not physically dead. But why is it that we know he is mentally alive?

Think of his plan. “To die hating them, that was freedom.”. Now, think of how he was going to accomplish that. He must keep secret his hatred of them and of Big Brother. He must keep this secret from the Party and from himself. And yet, while keeping this secret he must also know that it is there.

How can we know that Winston Smith is mentally alive? It is in the way that he describes the bullet that we know he is mentally alive. Winston is surely successful in convincing himself and the Party of all else. He loves the Party, and in the end he is able to convince himself of the hardest thing, he even loves Big Brother.

Or does he?

He does not. Winston knows of his secret hate of Big Brother, and we know of it too. He has succeeded in keeping this secret from the Party and himself.

However, he betrays his knowledge of this secret in the way he describes the bullet that would spell his doom. He describes the bullet as “long-hoped-for”.

A long-hoped-for bullet.

Why hope for a bullet? Why does Winston Smith describe the bullet this way in the end of the book?

He hopes for a bullet because to him it represents his freedom. The bullet is his plan. He told us this.

Hatred would fill him like an enormous rolling flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the bullet, too late or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it.
Winston Smith (George Orwell’s 1984)

This is why he hopes for the bullet. This is why he describes the bullet as long-hoped-for. His rebellion is not quashed, his mind is not gone. No, he has simply succeeded in his plan. He loves Big Brother, and his hatred is known to but secret from him. The long-hoped-for bullet will be his freedom.

I posted this summary on Stack Exchange:

He doesn’t die physically and he doesn’t die figuratively.

He succeeds in the plan he laid out while in the Ministry of Love. I delve into this more here.

However, for the sake of this answer I will lay out Winston’s plan.

First some information:

Winston perceives the only way to keep a secret is if it is a secret to everyone, including yourself. You must have knowledge of this secret, but it should never enter your consciousness.

Winston concludes that the only way to have freedom was to die hating them (them being the Party and Big Brother).

Winston believes that at some point in the future he will be shot and a bullet will enter the back of his head.

Winston’s Plan

He will keep his hatred of the Party and Big Brother a secret, even to himself.

He will be shot with a bullet in the back of the head.

The instant he is shot, he will let loose his secret hatred of the Party and of Big Brother. In this way he will be free, because “To die hating them, that was freedom.”

Winston knows of this secret, however, and we know to. He betrays his knowledge of this secret in the slightest by describing that bullet, which was to enter the back of his brain, as “long-hoped-for”. After all, why would one hope for a bullet?

He hopes for the bullet, because the bullet is his escape, the bullet is the penultimate step in his plan. The bullet represents his freedom. It is then that he will die with dignity, his rebellion complete, finally unveiling the secret he is keeping from them, and from himself. He hates them and he hates Big Brother.

POST Body not Included with JavaScript Fetch

I just ran into a problem and I wanted to document it for myself and for anyone else who might have issues. First I describe the problem, then I give the solution. Scroll down if you’re looking for the solution.

The Problem

After posting with JavaScript fetch I did not see the “body” arguments come through on the server. The method of the fetch was set to POST and the body included was an instance of FormData. According to the documentation on MDN, everything should’ve worked. So why wasn’t it working?

The Basic Client Side Code

const body = new FormData(myForm)
// assume myForm.action = "https://example.com/ajax/post"
const response = await fetch(myForm.action, {
	method: "post",
	body,
})

The Basic Server Side Code

<?php
// file: index.php within the ajax/post directory

// don't bother processing the post if there is none
if(empty($_POST)){
	exit;
}

// ... processing code below

I spent some time debugging and without a doubt, every POST request to the index.php file did not have the $_POST array filled out. The POST array was empty as well as the REQUEST array, even the oft-touted file_get_contents('php://input') came up empty.

The Solution

You aren’t going to like it. I don’t like it. The solution to this problem is so annoying that you’ll just facepalm like Picard.

Add a slash to the end of the url you are posting to.

The problem url is: https://example.com/ajax/post
The working url is: https://example.com/ajax/post/

Currently, when this url is posted to, the server responds with a 301 Redirect before the index.php file is hit. But why? The problem is that you do not have a trailing slash in your url. That’s it. You are posting to an index.php file within a directory, but your url does not have a trailing slash. So your server helpfully redirects you to a url with a trailing slash, and you lose your posted information along the way.

Yep, that’s it. Add a trailing slash and you’ll see your body come through when debugging.

Remove Gaps Between Monitors

Do you hate seeing a sliver of light between your monitors? I sure do. I’ve spent a lot of time getting my monitors lined up just right so that they are flush against eachother with no gaps. However, a slight bump of the desk can throw all that hard work out the window.

So, I figured out another solution. Instead of adjusting the monitors to make sure that they are “perfect” I took some black electrical tape and ran it down the seem behind the two monitors. The black tape matches the black border of my monitors and it blocks any light from coming in!

I highly suggest running black electrical tape down the back seem between your monitors. It really helps!

RocketChat server not running. Cancelling

As you might know, I’ve set up a RocketChat server recently on Digital Ocean. So far it’s been working great. An update every once and a while is all it needs.

However, yesterday, I attempted an update that failed. From then on every attempted update resulted in “RocketChat server not running. Cancelling”. This was very frutrating.

First, a few commands to try that might help:

systemctl restart rocketchat.service – This will start your RocketChat server in case it is stopped.
systemctl status rocketchat.service – Use this command to check the results of the previous command. Typically this will report that the service is “Active” if the previous command was successful.

In my case, the second command resulted in a “failed” state. The command itself gave me some information as to what the failure was, but not a lot of context as to what caused the failure. However, it did show me the process that it attempted to run. It said, ExecStart=/opt/nvm/versions/node/v14.19.3/bin/node /opt/Rocket.Chat/main.js (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE).

Alright! We’re getting somewhere. With that I was able to figure out what command failed and where that command was run. I navigated directly to the /opt/Rocket.Chat directory which was where the failure was occurring. From here I ran node main.js. The results of this command were much more helpful. They told me this, Error: Cannot find module '@meteorjs/reify/lib/runtime'. That looks like an issue with npm dependencies.

So, I poked around the Rocket.Chat directory structure and looked for dependencies for the Rocket.Chat server. I found what I was looking for in the /opt/Rocket.Chat/programs/server directory.

From this directory I ran two commands

npm install
npm ci

Afterwards I attempted to start the RocketChat server again using the systemctl restart rocketchat.service command. I checked it with systemctl status rocketchat.service and found that it was working now! RocketChat was back to running normally. The problem with “RocketChat server not running. Cancelling” was gone!

SmileKeepers Medford Childrens Dentist Office

Yesterday I took my son to SmileKeepers Medford Childrens dentist office.

I had to fight with the dental staff just to be allowed in the room where the work would be done. They suggested I wait in the car. I pushed to the point where I actually met with the dentist before the appointment. The dentist said to me that he’d been doing this for 40 years and he didn’t need my help “back there”. However, I was prepared to leave if my request was not met. So, after much pushing on my part they allowed me back in the room with my son. They said, that if I was going to come back they would just have to do less work on his mouth than they had planned. Note: This has never been a problem with any other dentist. I’ve been in the room with my kids numerous times and my kids draw comfort and courage from knowing that I’m in the room.

I sat in the corner of the room, as I normally do at the dentist, and the staff worked with my boy. My boy was great, he let the assistants work on his mouth, easily took the laughing gas, and was following directions well. Then the dentist came in and began to work. It wasn’t long before my son was silently writhing in pain, trying to tough it out. My son then began to tell the dentist that what he was doing hurt. The dentist would stop working on my sons mouth and ask “does it hurt?”, my son would answer “Yes”, then dentist would say, “I’m not doing anything right now, so it can’t be hurting” and then would continue working. My son was telling the dentist continually that it was hurting. However, the dentist was not listening to my boys concerns when my son said he was hurting. Instead the dentist was arguing with my son about whether he hurt or not. He was demeaning and was not treating my son with respect, he wasn’t treating my boy the way I would expect a person to be treated. He exasperated my son. There was nothing I could do, I wasn’t just going to leave the office with my boy bleeding from his mouth and try to rush him to another dentist. I also wasn’t going to risk telling this man who’d been doing this for 40 years how to do his job. Who knows if he’s the kind of person to take “revenge”. I had to let the man finish what he was doing as quickly as possible.

Now, anyone who knows him knows my son is tough. When my son says something hurts, he is telling the truth and I believe him. That said, I have never seen any one of my six kids like I saw my boy yesterday. I listened as my son yelled “No, no, no!” and the dentist ignored him to continue “working”. I sat there in silent rage as my boy screamed and writhed in pain, and instead of validating my sons concerns, the dentist argued with him and tried to prove him wrong.

What’s more is that when the appointment was over the dentist turned to me and said “this is why we don’t allow parents back in the room” as if it was my fault.

Now, I’ve taken the day to let my feelings subside and to think about this logically…

I am livid. There is a word that describes what happened to my son yesterday, abuse. I don’t even want to think of the additional “work” they would have done had I elected to wait in the car as they’d suggested. Anyone who knows us knows that we will push our kids through their tears when necessary. This was not one of those times.

Dr. Zirkle from SmileKeepers Children in Medford Oregon is the dentists name. He is not a safe dentist. I strongly recommend keeping your distance from him. We’ve pulled all 5 of our kids who are patients out of that office and we won’t be using another “SmileKeepers” or affiliated brand of Interdent dentist office (Gentle Dental) ever again. The fact that Dr. Zirkle is allowed to continue to represent Interdent is indicative of the bad decisions Interdent makes. A representative like Dr. Zirkle reflects very poorly on the Interdent company as a whole.

Other Parents Experiences

Other reviews are just as horrific. Apparently this has been happening for YEARS.

Outside link:
https://www.doctor-oogle.com/108058-redding-pediatric-dentist-dr-ronald-zirkle#read_review

Getting Started with Rocket Chat Using Digital Ocean Backing

Note – RocketChat is making moves to severely limit their PAAS offering. They have baked in a bunch of limitations in the codebase and now claim that if you self-host you are using their “free version” ?

RocketChat (https://rocket.chat) is a chatting tool similar to MatterMost and Slack. It offers a self-managed community edition as well as some paid plans and is in active development. I’m just learning how to use it, so I’m planning on documenting my journey here.

I installed and set up RocketChat installed in a matter of minutes. The QuickStart guide, though short, includes most of what you need to get up and running.

To get started with your RocketChat instance on DigitalOcean you need to:

Create a DigitalOcean account
Install RocketChat
Create an A Record that points to your Digital Ocean Droplet. *
Setup your Let’s Encrypt certificate.
rocketchatctl configure --lets-encrypt --root-url=YOUR_DOMAIN --letsencrypt-email=YOUR_EMAIL
Update your RocketChat installation. Run the following commands from your droplet command line interface.
1. Run sudo rocketchatctl upgrade-rocketchatctl
2. Run sudo rocketchatctl update

* I use Cloudflare to host my DNS. In this case I had to disable the proxying on the A Record in order to allow RocketChat to work correctly.

Now visit your site (you should not run into any problems) and create your administration account.

One Note

From time to time the Rocket Chat server responds with “Bad Gateway”. I’m not sure exactly why. However, a DigitalOcean droplet can be restarted by using the reboot command from the command line interface.

Future Logging

The other day I was thinking about how, in the future, “street-view-esque” spherical cameras will be used to capture events. These events can then be played back via VR, and eventually encoded directly to the brain via a project like Neuralink. Add in “kinect-esque” sensors that can map a 3 dimensional environment, and you could reconstruct an event in a virtual 3 dimensional space. I wouldn’t be surprised if future “videos” went that way, especially given FB’s push towards VR (think Meta).

But today I was thinking about being able to predict the future. Imo, the best way to accurately predict the future is to receive messages from the future. Receiving messages from the future sounds a bit weird, until I realized that’s literally what we work on every day. We design interfaces that receive future interactions. Code written to record transactions from today will record transactions from tomorrow. Webhooks are written specifically to receive receive future events. All of the code we write is intended to receive messages from the future. Think of the simple logging methods we use log('location', 'message'), even those are intended to log messages from the future.

That got me thinking of quantum entanglement, mapping polarization states to binary 1’s and 0’s, quantum routers, and an article I read years ago about delayed-choice entanglement swapping. The idea, in the article, was that a choice made in the present can “affect” measurements made in the past. It occurs to me that this also means, a choice made in the future can “affect” measurements made in the present. Could that same delayed-choice mechanism be used to receive a string of bits from the future?

Assume you define a state-binary mapping that you consistently use. Imagine measuring the polarization state of eight separately entangled photons, mapping those states to binary, you’d have yourself a byte of information from the future. Expand this to a logging method, maybe one that sits on a Starlink satellite, and you can imagine logging a bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte of data that passes through that satellite all of it “from the future”. Assuming you have information from the future, could you then predict the future?

Google Fi Auto Connect Issues

Ok, so I use Google Fi (formerly known as Project Fi) as my phone provider. I have a Pixel 2 and haven’t felt the need to upgrade. Recently I’ve noticed issues with my service. Specifically, my Pixel 2 will connect to an H+ network or an Edge network in an area I know has reliable 4G LTE. So, what gives?

First a quick and dirty explanation of the Google Fi network based on my limited understanding ?. Google Fi utilizes the TMobile (which I believe includes Sprint now) and US Cellular networks as well as WI-Fi to provide cellular service to their customers. Phones on the Google Fi network smartly switch to whatever provider has the best signal. At least that’s the idea.

Knowing that Fi uses multiple cell networks to provide service I wondered what network my phone was using. Using SignalCheck Lite I was able to determine that my phone was connecting to the TMobile network by default. In my area US Cellular beats TMobile coverage hands down. There is no competition. So what is the deal with my phone auto connecting to Edge and H+ networks?

Honestly, I don’t know yet. I strongly suspect a recent update to the Google Fi app or services set my phone to prefer TMobile regardless of network speed. Whether this was an intentional change or a bug in the auto-connect code, I don’t know. I’ve been able to temporarily fix this issue by forcing a connection to US Cellular using Google Fi dialer code: *#*#34872#*#*

Google Fi Dialer Codes

I pulled these codes come from this post on ArkieNet. I’m including them here just in case the post poofs from the internet in the future.

Note this paragraph from the original article:

The following options are only available for “Designed for Fi” phones. They will not work on the iPhone or “Compatible with Fi” phones because they are T-Mobile only. See which class of phone you have here.
ArkieNet

ALPHA CODE	DIALER CODE	DESCRIPTION
FI AUTO	##342886##	Set carrier selection to automatic.
FI NEXT	##346398##	Select Next Carrier
FI SPR	##34777##	Select Sprint for 2 hours
FI TMO	##34866##	Select T-Mobile 2 hours
FI USC	##34872##	Select US Cellular 2 hours
FI SIMON	##3474666##	Select Three (UK only)

ALPHA CODE	DIALER CODE	DESCRIPTION
FIXME	##34963##	Force reactivation
FI INFO	##344636##	Get information about the current network.
INFO	##4636##	Get general phone information.
DEBUG	##33284##	Phone Debug Options
PRL	##775##	Force download of Preferred Roaming List (Sprint)
PRL	*228	Force download of Preferred Roaming List (US Cellular)
FI ROAM	##347626##	Turn on International Roaming
SWITCH SIM	##794824746##	Switch to / from eSim.

Git Commits for the Current Branch

I had need to get a list of a simple list of all commits for the Current branch. This approach was simple enough and gave me what I wanted. I modified it to just use HEAD so that I can easily run it against the current branch.

git shortlog --no-merges --graph --abbrev-commit master..HEAD

This came from Alex who posted it on StackOverflow here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/61284456/296889

Issue with Mouse Auto Scrolling on Windows 10

Problem. I installed Adobe Premiere Pro and then all of a sudden my mouse starting automatically scrolling. This happened only in certain places. Like when opening the run command dialog, or when hovering over the Premiere Pro timeline. It did not happen in the browser unless I hovered over a section that had a custom scroll type listener.

The issue with auto scrolling was very frustrating. I was able to figure it out though. Here are the steps.

Right click on This PC in the file explorer menu. Select Manage.
Find and click the Device Manager
Expand the Mice and other pointing devices option
Right click the HID-compliant mouse entry and select Uninstall device.
Your mouse will stop working…
Unplug your mouse from the back of your computer, wait 10 seconds, plug it back in.
Windows should redetect your mouse and the problem should go away.

Alternatively you could try to “Update driver” instead of Uninstalling the device. I didn’t try, my problem was solved with the steps documented above.