Monday, May 15, 2017

Robodialer Defense

Sure, you could hide your phone number from view, and refuse all calls except those from numbers on your carefully crafted whitelist. That's one way to keep robo dialers from interrupting your life and work.

But why should you skulk in the shadows, eyes cast downward in defense against callers who might simply be an annoying disruption to your "flow" but who are very likely the shock troops for disreputable or dishonest businesses?

You can read at Gizmodo, or at CBS News about measures you can take. But what irritates me about many of the suggestions is that they constitute an inconvenience for me, or for my callers. I am not satisfied with letting the polluters extort time and effort from me or from my people. (You may have guessed that from my attitudes in my earlier article, Passwords Must Die.)

So let's talk about something you can do that doesn't take much effort (beyond initial setup) and that might provide considerable entertainment. In fact, this might be the most fun you can have with your telephone receiver down.

Reduce to Dashboard

When developers use DataWeave, they often come to rely on the reduce() function to fill in any gaps left by the standard Core library. Altho...