Sysadmin Field Notes - Commentary and Links Archives

April 18, 2008

Someone got a hold an old archive of all things Infocom. The post talks about a sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what I find really interesting is the e-mail tone. They read like letters, back and forth across a great divide. Today's version I suspect would look very different.

March 24, 2008

I was all excited to use the google provided project for accessing google stuff via Objective C. Except for this tidbit: The Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library requires Mac OS X 10.4 due to dependencies on NSXMLDocument.

As far as I know, a certain mobile device SDK doesn't support NSXML, just libxml directly. I bet it works on the simulator because the dependencies are there, but I have a feeling that the real device is left out in the cold. Given the heavy use of that API in this code, I wouldn't expect it to be ported to libxml2 anytime soon. Although that would be a useful fork.

March 24, 2008

When the Segway was in it's pre-announcement stage, it had a lot of hype. It was going to change the world.

Someone is driving through my suburban neighborhood on a Segway right now, and they just delivered some flyers to my doorstep.

Segway: Helping more efficient junkmail leaflet delivery since 2008.

Consider the world a changed place.

March 15, 2008

Computers are not perfect. Everyone, even Mac users (arguably the system that spends the most time thinking through ways to make the system run without a lot of administrative overhead), spends some time troubleshooting problems.

John Gruber hits on the relation of this to Apple disallowing background apps on the iPhone.

Imagine a scenario where background apps are allowed on the iPhone this summer. Some typical user buys and installs 10 apps from the App Store. Three of them are background-capable apps, and two of those three are so resource hungry that they have a noticeable drag on battery life. How are typical users ... supposed to know which apps are causing the problem? How are they even going to know which apps do continue to run in the background? They won’t. A likely reaction would simply be to regret ever having junked up their iPhone with any third-party apps at all.

I'd go even further. Us nerds are all debuggers at heart, and I personally still don't want to spend too much time fixing my phone. "Oh sorry Joe, I missed your call 'cause I had to reinstall iPhone OS on my phone." The iPhone's claim to fame is it's usability not it's features. If the administrative overhead of owning one (meaning the average user has to spend any time worrying about which apps hurt performance and which don't) starts to cut into it's usage, the usability advantage evaporates.

People (and by people I mean average users) are willing to accept (or more likely have been conditioned to accept) administrative overhead on their computers. OS reinstalls, re-installing applications, fixing registry settings, calling support, etc.. They are not so tolerant of their phones. Phones out there may have terrible, terrible user interfaces, but no one spends any time worrying about administering them. If Apple wants to make the iPhone as ubiquitous as the iPod (which I believe they do), they'll need to keep that overhead low.

Apple would be lucky if a user that junked up their phone and caused system/performance problems blamed the applications they installed. More likely the thoughts on people (meaning regular, non-nerd people) would be "this thing crashes all the time," or "man battery life sucks." And they either return it, or leave the platform when the phone wears out, thinking to themselves "that's no better than any other phone."

March 7, 2008

John Gruber from Daringfireball asksif members of the developer's program can run other user's apps.

It's a good question, but I think there's an implication in there that's not true right off the bat. I don't think the iPhone will run unsigned apps, period. In the "iPhone OS Programming Guide" it has instructions for obtaining and using a developer certificate, complete with CSR generation and sending that CSR to apple for signing. That gives you a cert that you must build with in Xcode to code-sign your binary.

So it seems like developers should be able exchange source code and test their apps if you build it locally. Can you run other developer's signed apps? Seems like as long as they are signed that should be okay.

But, the kicker on that link is the whole "designate a device for development" and "provisioning profile," which apparently specifies the actions you can perform on that device, "such as whether or not you can make calls." You have to get the profile from Apple, so presumably it's crypto-signed somehow with your cert.

So perhaps the process of designating a device for development then -potentially- (depending on your approval level from Apple) could disable the normal, ATT network access functions (phone and data). That could be a major downer if there's no way to use an app in real world situations without a dedicated developer device.

January 29, 2008

Joel on Software thinks that the CutCat is back.

Not that he says this is a guaranteed failure, but I think the comparison is off. While there is still an adoption problem with getting people to install the software, there's a much bigger value proposition for the customer.

Joel's claim that "Some things are still the same: typing URLs is not hard" is biggest misstep Yes, if you're sitting near your computer, it makes zero sense to pick up your cue cat or phone and scan an interesting ad because it's easier to type the URL. Always.

But have you ever typed a url into 99% of the world's mobile phones? Sort of a time consuming, incredibly painful, makes-me-want-to-slash-my-wrists sort of experience. Being able to just point my phone at an ad (or an article, or lots of other possibilities) and grab the url and visit the page is by itself tremendously more valuable than the cue cat ever was. Especially since Google can give it away for free, and the advertisers themselves don't have to worry about it.

As more mobile apps pop up, that will actually do things like process payments, the potential grows even further. This could become, "scan this bar-code to order tickets for this movie." Or stores could have the barcode on their signs, and you scan it to visit their website. Or info about a construction project. Or a flyer on a signpost for an interesting band could take you to their website, and you could see if there were tickets for tonight's show available. Or buy their CD and have it shipped to you.

Could be very cool, and it's simpler than trying to rig up wireless, or rfid, or bluetooth, or whatever other mobile communication schemes are out there.

This idea doesn't deserve to be lumped in the with CueCat.

January 11, 2008

This ad (via engadget) is totally disturbing, and a terrible advertisement.

But I love it.

January 9, 2008

My 100% purely speculative guesses:

• 16mb iPhone for $399, current 8mb version gets closed out at $299.
  
• Movie rentals via iTunes (this is a gimme)
  
• To go along with iTunes rentals, apple TV 2.0 which will let you rent from the console
  
• iTunes rentals will let you queue up like netflix and they'll download, but when you watch them the first time it will activate the 24hr viewing period.
  
• More details on iPhone software SDK/third party development
  
• Some mac that doesn't fit in exactly into a product silo right now. Maybe a sub-sub notebook, or a tablet (like a big iPhone)....just a wild guess. The above doesn't feel like enough for the time they've had, the iPods were all revved recently, MacPros clearly aren't going anywhere new since they've been bumped, iMacs are too new. Might just be a new MacBookPro lineup though. who knows, part of the fun.
  

January 5, 2008

BBC has the best description so far of why the subprime market implosion runs so deep.

Banks had got round regulators' rules by selling off their risky loans, but because so many of the securitised loans were bought by other banks, the losses were still inside the banking system.

January 2, 2008

There are new restrictions against carrying spare rechargeable batteries on airplanes.

That page is ridiculously complex, and worse, seems to conflict with this one about batteries from the TSA (no mention of lithium quantity restrictions at all). The rules on the second page make sense, but are not complete apparently.

The TSA's page says:

Under the new DOT rule, lithium batteries are allowed in checked baggage under one of the following conditions:

* The batteries must be in their original containers.
* The battery terminals must not exposed (for example placing tape over the ends of the batteries).
* The batteries are installed in a device.
* The batteries are enclosed by themselves in a plastic bag.

Which, according to the safe travel page, is completely not true. It says: You may not pack a spare lithium battery in your checked baggage. Spare, or loose as the TSA page says? Grrrr....

If we can't figure it out, you can bet the TSA person at the gate is unlikely to have a chance.

December 23, 2007

I'm mystified as to how anyone is able to use them to do anything. A few months ago, they closed my account because of inactivity. Actually, they didn't close it, they just deactivated it. They would let me open a new account with my info until I went through a painful 4-5 step process to close my old account. My favorite step of which was "We're sorry to see you go, what is your reason for quitting?".

So I did that and create a new account. But now I can't use my credit cart because "that number is already assigned to another paypal account." Right, the one you forced me to close.

Sigh.

December 5, 2007

Call Me Fishmeal.: On saying goodbye.

October 26, 2007

Gmail has added IMAP support! Finally! This is great because their POP support was wacky anyway, didn't work well at all with the quirks of the iPhone, and was almost impossible to get working right in any way with my phone, the web interface, and Mail.app (which I've been told is fun).

One small snag, here it is like 4 days after the announcement, and my gmail account still doesn't have it. My wife's does; and she doesn't care at all.

Man I hate waiting.

October 9, 2007

Blu-Ray DRM Rendering Some Discs Unplayable

This is exactly why I'm not playing ball with this DRM'ed crap (hdmi, hd-DVD, bluray, whatever). It may not make a difference in the end, but I can sure vote with my dollars.

October 8, 2007

That the primary iPhone development mechanism will remain web based is something I've been saying for a while now. I feel very strongly that future software updates will include incremental improvements to the capabilities of WebKit as an SDK. It makes tons and tons of sense, and fits with the facts that we already have. First let's look at the reasons why Apple wouldn't want to open up the platform.

Engineering flexibility. The iPhone is a pretty damn amazing piece of hardware, with a lot of stuff crammed in there. They can do what they want to the internals (such as switch to intel), with very little notice or warning, something they can't do with a thousand 3rd parties to bring along with them. Apple gets to set the pace for iPhone hardware innovation, because they are the only developers impacted by those changes.

Security. The iPhone is clearly not designed with a native sandbox in mind. Everything runs as root, and the hardware doesn't do a ton of policing. While Apple's stance on 3rd party apps is neutral, their opinion on unsupported programs that hack the firmware in ways they never could have anticipated: they are against it.

Since everything runs as root, it seems very hard to have 3rd party apps while ensuring that the firmware stays unmolested, at least as currently designed. Bricking phones, altered or not, is bad press and a pain for Apple to deal with, so they don't want people messing in there. There's also the issue of a revenue stream from ATT, although I think that's not the end of the world. It seems more likely that unlock paranoia comes from a contract with ATT that demands Apple do what they can to prevent it (ala iTunes and DRM provisions with the labels).

Those are the two big reasons I can think of why Apple would not want to open the phone. Really it can be summed up in saying that there's no way that Apple is going to freely offer native development to everyone; there has to be some sort of limited, sandboxed environment if there is to be free and open development. Otherwise the risks of broken phones, bad user experiences, and threats to their partnership agreement are too great. So what sort of sandbox could they have used?

Java? Memory, space, and CPU constraints seem too high. Maybe the iPhone has an on board chip that helps this, but that doesn't alleviate all the software engineering required to produce the software that would integrate with the chip, and then more importantly, all the compatibility code to try and map the iPhone's user paradigm to Java apps. It would be a big effort, and the resulting apps would likely not be compatible with other Java phones. That would probably cause licensing trouble. I don't think we'll Java on the iPhone any time soon.

Custom? Could Apple build their own safe sandbox to play in? Not easily. We'd definitely be waiting for launch if this was the case. Most importantly, why build for scratch what you already have....

Which brings me around to the idea of a WebKit/Safari/Web 2.0/Javascript sandbox. It can run user code, it can display content, it can access the internet, and it can play rich media. Sounds like they are 75% of the way there already. Think Apple's not serious about Ajax as a development environment? Notice their website loses progressively more flash everyday. Check out the .Mac web gallery, that's a lot of javascript, and almost no flash.

I don't think it's just lip service when Apple says they want to advance the state of pure web/javascript/quicktime to something close to that provided by flash or a full-blown environment. I think this dovetails nicely with a broader response to things like Adobe Integrated Runtime and Silverlight. If the web goes that way, Apple loses a lot of control, and I don't see an answer from them in the works, aside from just keeping web pages web pages. If they can use the iPhone to expand the spread of that idea, I think they consider that a win.

Now, clearly they are missing some pieces. Local storage, javascript API's for more interesting phone features, etc.. But it's alot easier to expose them via javascript API's than it is write a sandbox on your own. If could write my own javascript apps, easily sync them, have some local file storage, and have them work without internet access, I think that is enough of an SDK to do some really cool stuff with.

As for native apps, I don't think they'll never happen. I just think they will be very locked down, akin to the iPod model where only a select few development companies are allowed into the party, mostly for things like games where you need the full hardware of the device (I think with it's sensors, graphics and sound capability , and interface that it could get some of the most interesting games we've seen in a while).

If the missing pieces to create a total development story are filled in, and some developers are granted full access, I think you'll see 75%-80% of the benefit of a native, supported SDK, with only a small fraction of the risk exposure that would come with it. That certainly makes sense as the way to start for Apple. If it doesn't work out as they have planned, they can always take it on later and add an SDK.

(Not that I wouldn't love a native SDK, just think the reality is that we won't be seeing one for a long time, if ever).

September 16, 2007

So teen drivers will be banned from using mobile phones in California.

Personally, I think it would save a ton more lives if there was a rule prohibiting more than two under-18 year olds from being in a car alone without a 25 year old present. You can still go on dates, you can still carpool a bit....but I certainly remember all the stupid things we did in cars. Most of them were in bigger groups, when everyone's having a good time, there's peer pressure to show off, and general teenage stupidity....:-)

I wonder if statistically speaking most accidents in the 16-18 crowd happen with more than two people in the car.

September 11, 2007

This post, Blackfriars' Marketing: Why a million iPhones in 74 days is better than you think, has a lot of good reasons why the iPhone will likely meet it's goals.

If you need more reasons, how about it's very likely that within the next year (probably right before Christmas, about a year from now), the iPhone will get revved with a lot of things holding people back (3g, possibly a developer SDK or least several officially supported partner developers, etc...). Those would still count as iPhones in Jobs' mind I suspect. They are going to add -more- value to the phone over time, which will help sales.

And second, the iPhone I suspect has a network effect being discounted. For one, people think it's cool. The phone sells itself to a large degree. More people out there with them, means more selling opportunities. I haven't met anyone who after playing with it wasn't at least interested enough to consider it.

And second, this thing is going to change people's idea of the mobile web. More iPhone compatible mobile sites will spring up, making it progressively more useful. Clearly Apple is hoping that effect will be powerful enough to cause people to go away from things like Flash for primary content and go to web standards/ajax.

So quite simply, all other bits of the sales curve aside, the phone will get cheaper and better over the year, and that will help sales I suspect.

September 8, 2007

Do I feel like a sucker? No. I thought it was worth $599 (still think it is), so I paid $599. Is it a large, unexpected price drop? Yes.

The $100 is gravy, I didn't need it, I was happy before. I bought a phone, and liked it.

I could do without everyone who sees it asking "Do you feel like a sucker?" I'm actually happy, as the lower price point means way larger adoption now, which means the crappy, limited, mobile web (via crappy fat clients for specific devices and terrible WAP/Whatever pages) is that much more likely to dry up and blow away before I have to deal with it.

Apple's competitors, all those ones discounting the iPhone because, "yah, it's neat, but who's gonna buy a $600 phone." Those are the real suckers.

September 8, 2007

...all the short-song-snippits off of Apollo 18 as iPhone ringtones.

June 22, 2007

I can't imagine how scrutinized this new official video from apple will be over the next few days.

June 22, 2007

I just got an email from Alaska airlines about their changing frequent flier policies. It contains this gem:

Also effective August 1, the First Class Mileage Plan Redemptive Upgrade rules will be changing. Redemptive Upgrade awards booked after this date will be available on H-class fares and above for 15,000 miles each way. Tickets booked in classes of service below H will no longer be eligible for redemptive upgrades.

What in the hell does that mean? What is service class H? Is it really that hard to describe it without jargon? Or, how about at least a link to a description of what that might mean.

Clearly, writing good, clear, usable copy is a lot like writing good, clear, usable code. It must be a rare skill, since so much of it out there is so bad.

June 15, 2007

I can't link directly to the comment, but go to Michael Tsai's blog about "A Very Sweet Solution" and scroll down a little less than halfway (or text search for "Marcos"):

One other alternative to location. Accelerometer. It'd have to be very precise. =)

Of all the features rumored/missing from the iPhone, somehow I -don't- think it will be getting an inertial navigation system anytime soon. :-)

March 27, 2007

Best Buy buys speakeasy?

The last decent, old-school ISP that I know of, purchased by a giant big-box retailer with terrible customer service?

This is a pretty big blow for me. My phone service goes through speakeasy, my DSL that I depend on to work from home goes through Speakeasy. Speakeasy has (as far as I know, please email me if you have alternate providers that are decent) the only network friendly policies that I've seen in an ISP (wireless? no problem. multiple computers/ip's? no problem. Guarantees not to block firewall ports...they don't reserve the right to read your mail and cancel you for what you say, and the service is rock solid).

I can't imagine that this will mean good things for the reliability, quality, and especially customer service of Speakeasy. I'd love to find differently, but Speakeasy has the best customer service of any company that I deal with today, bar none. I can't say that I've had too many terrible customer service experiences with Best Buy, but I don't do much more than browse there, given the horror stories I've heard from others.

December 8, 2006

So between holidays, a trip to Oregon, my first paid photography gig (which was actually several days of shooting), and an insane work schedule I've just been too busy to post. I'll get back to a regular schedule soon "ish."

Of course, that doesn't mean jerk-off blog spammers (whose spam, remember is pointless since it's all moderated and never shows up) haven't continued to flood the comments. In fact, at one point they actually crashed our server (should it have crashed? No, but it's a pretty old box, and stressing it out isn't nice).

So I'm disabling comments. I'm sick of spending my resources on low-grade knuckle draggers. Maybe I'll look into one of the methods for disabling comments after a week or so and see if that helps, but until then I'm just turning them off.

If you've got a burning desire to comment, just email me and I'll respond here somehow....

November 15, 2006

So I think after upgrading to MT-3.5 I've gone from bad to worse. Granted, since everything is moderated, NO spam gets through. That's an improvement. But I have hundreds of spams a day now that end up in the junk folder.

We just had so many that they used up all the memory on my box and crashed it. Granted, the box shouldn't crash, but still.

So to all you spammers who crashed my box, piss off. I guess I have to do some basic captcha or specific field, although I don't know if that will cut the resources enough to really fix anything. What a pisser. Maybe I'll just pull comments altogether?

November 8, 2006

From a Fox News exit poll article: FOXNews.com

"Republicans were favored by terrorism voters"

September 29, 2006

Talk about cut off from reality:

Walden repeatedly asked Dunn how she thought HP was getting the phone records. "My understanding was these records were publicly available," she said, later adding, "I understood that you could call up and get phone records" because she thought it was a common investigative technique.

I believe it though. Large company CXOs and board members are treated like royalty. Wherever they go, Potemkin villages spring up around them, directed by studious aides ensuring they don't get any messy reality on their shoes as they walk through. They live in a different America, so of course they don't realize that phone records aren't public.

That's probably the least shocking thing in a long, long list of things that they don't realize.

September 29, 2006

I've used and enjoyed bloglines for a long time now. I discovered it and started using it when I was on linux, started reading feeds, and couldn't find a fat client RSS reader that was very good. Combine that with the benefit of having access to my feeds everywhere and it was a slam dunk. When I switched to Mac, I just kept using bloglines, even though I knew there were some decent feed readers for OS X.

I had always assumed I'd stop using them one day because since I can't figure out how on earth they make money, they'd go out of business eventually (or get peppered with flashing ads). Turns out that it's an Ajax-y update to the left tree on their site that's going to drive me away.

Now it updates the tree in-place instead of reloading the whole left frame. In Safari at least, whatever code is driving that locks up safari for the duration of the update. The dreaded "spinning beachball" pops up and everything is totally unresponsive until they are done. Then it decides to give my cursor back, but I've still got a few seconds until I can do anything.

So now I can't leave it open, which is sort of inconvenient for...you know...reading it. Plus the hover underline is gone from the left tree too. Combined with the lockups, and a new-found ajaxy lag in updating the DOM when you click on a blog in the left side, it feels terribly unresponsive.

I'm sure it probably works fine in Firefox and it's really just triggering some Safari or WebKit defect, but since I don't use Firefox for my day to day browsing to that's little consolation.

If there's not a rollback (or an option for the old interface), I'll have to find myself a new RSS reader. Too bad, I like bloglines, they've always been very responsive to suggestions, so here's to hoping this has some impact. It may just be that Safari's market share is too small to worry about for them, which is fine, I'm not mad, just sad.

What's a good client-side RSS reader? Any suggestions?

Update: Bloglines contacted me (see the comments) almost right as well; they continue to be extraordinarily responsive. No resolution yet, but I did notice that underlines are back, and that the problem is much less pronounced when my number of unread feeds that show up is small. Not sure where the tipping point is, but I'll wait and see if it gets better. In the meantime I'll just have to remember to close my my feeds window when I'm done reading.

10/23 Update: So I'm not sure if it's my imagination, but it seemed like the pause got a little less annoying on it's own. Since Safari seemed to have slowed a bit anyway, following some interweb advice I cleared my cache and removed all the auto-form-fill cache entries. Now things are much faster, and I think I'm back to usable.

September 12, 2006

Eric Sink wrote today on advocating the use of code coverage.

I'm definitely a strong advocate of automated testing and code coverage measurement, but I've always been in the "mandating 100% coverage is pathological and pedantic."

I still think it is, but at least Eric presents some good arguments as to why it can be useful.

My main argument against it is that this is just one sort of code coverage metric. Tools like Jester produce a different coverage metric. You can probably dream up others. "Lines visited" is a very one dimensional metric. I think I'd rather have 75% coverage, but have the hairiest, ugliest lines of code tested in several scenarios. This sort of metric doesn't give you credit for that.

Code coverage under unit tests is interesting, but only to a point. It's also very interesting to add code coverage to the application while you run automated functional or integration tests against it.

In short there are all kinds of interesting tests and metrics available to look at, and I'd rather look at those with the time it takes to get the app from 75% to 100% coverage.

September 9, 2006

Very cool, google has launched a news archive search.

It has a great scope of resources that it searches. This could be a major step in using the web for research; I've always complained that the hardest thing to to do is find information from the past that no one would have really through important enough enough to deliberately archive.

Of course, it sorta sucks, but I'm sure it will improve. I searched for "atomic bomb". The "timeline" option was just sorta sad, only managing to highlight one event at 1945 (Hiroshima of course), and then nothing until the 80's. I did find this interesting article in the Time archives speculating on the V3 rock and Nazi atomic bomb progress.

I think this has great potential.

September 3, 2006

MySpace is launching a music store.

Will it follow the same "drive the user insane" methodology that the current site provides? Probably.

My question?

Will it succeed in spite of providing the worst user experience possible, just like myspace.com has?

August 7, 2006

From: Apple - Mac OS X Leopard Sneak Peek - Xcode 3.0

"Many such Xray instruments leverage the open source DTrace, now built into Mac OS X Leopard."

Wow, I'm surprised that's not keynote-slide eligible. Maybe I'm just a sysadmin wonk at hand, but this makes me very very happy. Now I'll really get to play with DTrace at home at least, and be even more pissed that in my work life I have only terrible, terrible tools with which to work to fix problems (minus those from Sysinternals).

Update:

Another bit from the same page, Objective C 2.0:

"So compelling, Apple wrote Xcode 3.0 itself in it. Enjoy modern garbage collection, syntax enhancements, runtime performance improvements, and 64-bit support. At your own pace, since it’s backwards compatible with existing Objective-C source. Write applications more quickly with fewer bugs using Objective-C in Xcode 3.0."

Garbage collection...dying what that looks like.

July 29, 2006

From craigblog; New copyright act unfair to artists?

The key is that it's unfair to small artists. No doubt large companies will make sure that all of their material is suitably registered or consolidated such that they can argue that any reasonably diligent search would have unearthed the creator.

Whereas I bet smaller scale artists would be much more subject to a "hey, I searched the internet and didn't find them" definition of reasonably diligent, and consequently stand to be hurt more.

big surprise I guess.

July 26, 2006

Here are the most interesting boring photos on flickr.

Maybe I should write a little api script to show the most boring photo of those tagged interesting?

July 4, 2006

See how fast you can type!

Oddly addictive...I did 5-6 runs, all fell between 100-117 wpm, with 4-6 mistakes.

The only drag is that if you hit enter or space at the end, you clear your score and have to do it again. It would be nice if instead of a popup, the score was written into the page itself.

June 30, 2006

First must come acceptance.

Here are some great mistakes in technical leadership.

This may be common sense to a lot of people, but I've bet everyone in any sort of leadership position (whether reflected in title or not) has done something on that list.

I've found it's very easy to say, "well, just this one time I'm going to do this..." where "this" is take a juicy technical problem for yourself, or come down on someone for breaking the build etc...it's a very slippery slope from "I'm just going to do this once" to adapting into your leadership style, especially if you're new to the leadership game. All sort of internal justifications are created that really aren't very good reasons.

I'm working very hard to break some of these mistakes, which quickly became habits for me. Not only do I have to break them as habits myself, but I have to change the perception of these as my shortcomings. That's even harder.

Make like easy on yourself, don't pick up bad habits from the beginning. There can always be a "good" reason not to delegate or trust your team, but in the long run those reasons don't typically hold water.

Me, I'm primarily guilty of 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, and 17.

Those are my things to work on, and some of them I hadn't realized until reading through the entire list and thinking about it.

June 21, 2006

Luckily, the PowerMac is not an arcade game, and therefore doesn't require quarters. This subtly was apparently lost on Hudson and Carson, as they attempted to feed money into my computer.

So far so good with the repaired system, but they are not allowed to touch a computer for a while.

At least it wasn't a banana.

June 15, 2006

Sigh. The easily google-able WinFX moniker has been replaced by the totally useless .NET Framework name.

It seems like I have to try 10 different searches before I finally get all the results I want, since .NET is so generic. COM, .NET...maybe they should just call their next component framework "a".

Imagine the fun of searching for that:

a string class
a "string class"
+a "string class"
+"a string class"
+a microsoft framework "string class"
+damnit "what a stupid name"

Remember, please pick distinctive product names so we can actually find them on the internet...thanks.

June 15, 2006

Sigh. The easily google-able WinFX moniker has been replaced by the totally useless .NET Framework name.

It seems like I have to try 10 different searches before I finally get all the results I want, since .NET is so generic. COM, .NET...maybe they should just call their next component framework "a".

Imagine the fun of searching for that:

a string class
a "string class"
+a "string class"
+"a string class"
+a microsoft framework "string class"
+damnit "what a stupid name"

Remember, please pick distinctive product names so we can actually find them on the internet...thanks.

June 13, 2006

I can die happy now, Rock-Paper-Scissors (which I just taught Hudson, who plays the cutest version) used as legal conflict resolution.

Although according to World RPS (who offered their consulting services post-ruling), the lawyers worked it out before it came to the match.

June 2, 2006

For the second time I was directly delayed by some sort of tragic train accident. Didn't get home until 2am. Trains are dangerous business, check out the number of news stores regarding Amtrak and death.

Playing on train tracks in an 80mph speed zone is a recipe for death. There are also a lot of "suicides by train". That's just plain mean; if you're going to kill yourself, don't be a coward and ruin someone else's life.

Anyway, while the life expectancy of people walking on train tracks is generally very short, and there are occasional accidents, overall it's still a ton safer I'm sure than driving. 3-4 deaths per week by train probably doesn't even register as a blip compared to car accident deaths.

June 1, 2006

Fact: Unless you live in the south-central USA (see map, right), where Loxosceles reclusa actually lives, human bite cases are reported from your area because of the incompetence of those reporting them, not because of actual spiders biting people.

No software development analogies here, just sharing from a very cool spider site.

Why was I looking at spider sites? Found a few to take some pictures of this week, and got sucked in.

May 19, 2006

Wil Shipley is getting screwed by E-trade. I'd like to think that this sort of think couldn't happen at my financial institution, but that would probably be naive. :-)

However:

Let me say that again. ANYONE can call the bank and say, "Hi, I'd like to make an ACH transfer from this account to this other account at a different financial institution of ill-repute, and I swear I'm really Wil Shipley," and they'll do it. Just like that. There's no password, no signature, no record.

This part doesn't sound right to me. We have do a lot of work to verify that an external account is actually owned by the person on the other end. We're online only in my world, so maybe the rigor is higher, but we use small deposits first which form a 4 digit code essentially that the person must then provide to prove they own the account (reasoning that if they can see the statement of the external account, that's close enough to ownership). So just snarfing a check + the SSN wouldn't be enough.

It's all about being able to show the company did due diligence. If they are just taking people's word for it on account ownership and transferring money, they are likely going to be open to some severe liability.

May 15, 2006

Here's what iTunes music store suggests for me in their "Just for you" section on their front page (based on what you've bought; I fear it would be even more twisted if it could see my library:

1. Since U Been Gone - Kelly Clarkson
2. Pon de Replay - Rihanna
3. Don't Phunk With MY Hearth - Black Eyed Peas
4. Lady - Lenny Kravitz
5. As Good As I Once Was - Toby Keith
6. Midnight Rider - Willie Nelson
7. A Change is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke
8. Fly to the Angels - Slaughter
9. Iron Man - Ozzy Osbourne & Therapy?
10. Think of Me - Andrew Lloyd Webber

    Probably the only time you'll see Iron Man and "think of me" next to each other on a playlist.

    Posted by rmeyer at 12:58 AM

May 15, 2006

In my iTunes library, somehow Metallica's Master of Puppets ended up with the cover art from They Might Be Giants' Flood.

You are free to chuckle internally at the thought of either band covering the other's album.

For particular amusement think of Particle Man as sung by Metallica. Or "Minimum wage." Hah.

"Sanatarium" would be a good one for TMBG.

Update: Fixed html.

Update: If my phone could play ringtones, my new ringtone would be Call connected by the NSA.

March 28, 2006

Drunkenblog has a posting about an apple defect that kills several mac apps including safari. (Don't click on that link if you're on the Mac and not using firefox).

The comments are typical blogosphere stuff. "You bastard, you crashed my browser, I lost my tabs."

Deep breath. It's a defect. Now it's easy to open a report with Apple. Your tabs are safely in your history.

Even if you disagree with the method, is it really worth getting that angry about?

March 26, 2006

Check out the entire sum of Boston Acoustic's multi-media tech tips section.

That's seriously good advice. I'd expect content..uh...a bit more specific to the problem at hand though. Anyway, very zen of them. Remember that tip when working just about any problem (especially including organizational ones!).

In case their site changes, here's the relevant portion:

March 25, 2006

Raymond Chen blogged about solving the real problem, something I believe strongly in and in the process linked to a story from the Word team about a customer with a problem. Something about how Word views styles, but it doesn't matter for my purposes. What struck me (emphasis mine):

... but it told me nothing about his problem that he was trying to solve. Well, it turns out that he had to review documents to see if they adhered to corporate style guidelines. In order to do this, he needed to be able to see both the style that's applied to a paragraph and any direct formatting that's been applied in addition to the style.

This customer's real problem was not that they need some way of viewing styles in Word, this person's problem is that their job is to review word documents to see if the adhered to corporate style.

March 20, 2006

Insider says Apple not interested in the enterprise market.

Would you be? Yes, there's lots of money there, but there are lots of compromises. Enterprise software/hardware means never being able to say no. When a $100 million customer calls up and says "hey, can we have that in blue" and you're a public company with shareholders, you damn well better say "we can have it to you by Tuesday."

Enterprise products aren't chosen by the people who use them, they are chosen by committee based on a host of factors, almost none of which are the quality or suitability of the product. So having a better product only helps you to a degree.

Enterprise development (software for sure and hardware likely) on a large scale with a company to support means you don't get to develop fun, innovative products that delight the users, which is what Apple's mission seems to be. They revel in having products with a strong vision and purpose, just the way the consumer market likes and the enterprise market hates.

March 19, 2006

I thought it would be a cool idea for my dad and I to take Hudson to the Capitol Airshow.

I had no idea that these things were attended by tens of thousands of people, it's been a very long time since I had been to one. So we spent nearly 2 hours in traffic trying to get in. We did finally get in and have a good time, so all's well that ends well.

Another note to airshow organizers, the best place to tell people that the best travel arrangements are to take the light rail to a nearby stop where they'll have special, police-escorted bus service all day long is not on the caltrans traffic radio that you can't tune in until you're already stuck in traffic.

You should probably also consider mentioning something about the traffic in the frequently asked questions on your website. Oh, and a rough schedule would be nice. Mostly though, I'd just really talk up the transportation issue, and mention that the air show will be turning all neighboring freeways and streets into parking lots with all the traffic.

The website is a classic example of terrible, terrible web design, but at the time I thought it was because it was the way it displayed the information it did have, not realizing it was terrible because of the info they left out. It's so terrible that "due to overwhelming traffic" they replaced their home page with a link to the identical page on two different servers. Funny, I would have just removed the pointless animations, and huge graphics that don't render right anyway...

Hudson really liked walking through the C5. The cool thing about the C5 is that it's really wide, and when they open both ends for the public to walk through, it's the only plane with no line to see the inside of. He also liked "all the planes doing the fancy tricks."

February 19, 2006

On the day of the super bowl a few weeks ago, our Tivo missed Grey's Anatomy. Yes, everyone else in the world knew that it was on following the superbowl, but you know, we fast forward though ads so we didn't. Our Tivo missed it because the program guide was wrong. Had the 2-3 hours after the game marked as TBD, and Anatomy on at the normal 10:00pm time-slot.

So I decided to email around until I found the culprit, and get them to apologize. Or find out for me if it was going to be replayed and get the time.

Checking our ABC affiliate's (KXTV News 10) website, they had the right schedule there. Maybe they didn't get it to the right places in time. The only programming related email they had on the site was for the program director, Erin Tognetti. I didn't necessarily want to go that high with my little complaint, but she must be used to it if her email is right on the site like that. I got a quick, real reply saying that they had sent the program guide to the right places weeks ago, ABC would not be replaying it as of yet, but if I wanted them to the best bet was to contact them and ask for it.

So I went to their website and did just that. Never got a response, but the site said that there might not be one, so that was okay with me.

Then I emailed directTV, which was hilarious. Again, just wasting time, basically looking for a "sorry, thing X happened, won't happen again." Here was my message:

Just wanted to register my annoyance that the local listings this week for the ABC affiliate in my area (KTXV Channel 10) had Grey's Anatomy on at 10:00pm, when it was never scheduled to air at that time. It was always scheduled to air after the superbowl, and according to the channel program director the listings were updated 4 weeks ago.

And their response:

Dear Mr. Meyer,

Thanks for writing. I'm sorry to hear about the programming schedule of KTXV Channel 10. Our goal is to provide a wide variety of channels and programming content. Unfortunately, we can't predict or control when the programming selection of a particular channel chooses to air. While we continually work with our programming partners to improve your television entertainment experience, it helps us all if you also forward your feedback to ABC's local affiliate KTXV.

We understand that not everyone will like every program aired on DIRECTV, and we take customer feedback very seriously. However, our ongoing research tells us that most customers agree with us, and like being able to choose from so many options.

Thanks again for your interest in DIRECTV and stay tuned to DIRECTV.com for the latest news and information about our services.

Huh? That's totally nonsensical. It sounds like they just ran my mail through a Markov text generator. No apology, explanation, or anything. More then that, they toss all the blame onto the local station or ABC which seemingly did nothing wrong. They even go so far as to direct me to those outlets, sending a potentially disgruntled customer to the wrong place (who's going to be even more disgruntled if they get back to DirecTV).

Speak with a human voice to your customers, and they won't hate you as much, even if you screw up once in a while. Speak to them like their idiots, and every fault will be magnified to a major issue. I'm just a dumb code monkey and I've picked that much up by reading a blog here and there.

To make the difference even more pronounced, Erin emailed me back a day or two later, to let me know that ABC did decide to re-air it and gave me the time. Very, very nice, and above and beyond what I'd expected. Thank you Erin and Channel 10.

January 30, 2006

In the past few days, I have about 20-30 entries in my referrer log that just point to people's resumes, and if I check them out, they have no links to my page and the user-agent is suspect.

So the idea is is, search for "resume", and crawl them all, using the resume URLs of your clients as the user agents so hopefully people with unfiltered referrer logs get links to the desired client resume, thus boosting it's page rank?

As spamming goes, It's pretty low impact since it's just a few hits here and there, but still strikes me as stooping a bit low (I wouldn't want my resume "promoted" like that). Maybe I'll email one of the target resumes and see if it's something they subscribed to, or just some third party with angle I'm not getting. The source IP's all seem to be staffing firms.

January 13, 2006

This is just a throwaway quote from Howstuffworks "How Friday the 13th Works" post, but it's the truth:

"Superstition has a way of creeping up on people when they're in a particularly vulnerable state."

January 6, 2006

10:40 Outside, a guy talking into his phone: "Well Steve Jobs is a fucking Jedi Master of this shit compared to these other clowns."

I love Engadget

December 28, 2005

David at 37Signals has written an article predicting that there will be a grassroots, utopian uprising against bad software and that companies will start rejecting it en-masse. He says "By the end of 2006, it will be written that enterprise means bulky, expensive, dated, and golf."

By my calculations, it's always meant that to everyone I've ever talked to, except those who buy it. There's nothing new there, that enterprise software tries to be all things to all people and consequently sucks at the tiniest little task, but still needs to cost millions to employ the army of sales-folks needed to convince the decision-makers otherwise (Joel on Software has a very effective article on this point.)

To suggest that somehow, across large corporations everywhere, that the people who use the software will provide effective resistance is just wishful thinking. The decisions are made without user input, way, way before the users ever even see the software. At that point, the ability to enact or sometimes even ask for change is long, long gone, because it now means personal risk for the VP that signed the check.

If the project is a horrible disaster and doesn't work at all, then maybe there's a tiny chance that the people above the check-signer might actually notice, and demand some fixes. It's very unlikely that that fix would be to throw away a $15 million investment and instead buy a $15,000 piece of software and some low cost hardware. They'll just demand the vendor fix a few things, kick back some money, or take them to more golf games.

Would I love it if enterprise software went the day of the dodo? You bet. Do I think the dynamics of how IT organizations at big companies are organized would allow that to happen without a major paradigm shift? Highly unlikely.

December 22, 2005

This is like twice now that someone at myspace.com has just hrefed an image from here, sneaking both the image and the bandwidth without so much as a tip of the hat, or leaving a 10-spot on the nightstand.

Apparently, this is a chronic problem.

Some people get -really- angry about this, and I can certainly see that if the bandwidth consumption was large. I can even see it just on principle alone; it's certainly within your rights to get pissed about it. Some have a bunch of funny images that they replace it with.

I don't think it's worth much time, so I just chmod'ed the file 0000 for the moment, and it disappeared from the offending site.

Now, if I were -really- mean, since the person didn't put the image size into the tag, I'd just put a 10,000 x 10,000 all orange/green flashing gif in it's place. That might be kinda funny. Or, maybe just a 10GB file, so everyone's browser never finishes loading the page. That would probably burn me more than anyone though, since browsers are pretty good these days about handling multiple request threads.

Update: Okay, that was excessive. I put in a 3000x3000 purple/green flashing box instead. Really cool effect, but it could probably cause seizures in the susceptible, and causing any serious medical problems would definitely be going too far, even if the risk is low. So I settled on just a big pink box, which will only cause seizures in the fashion conscious.

I'll just leave it removed I guess...but if it remains a problem, they get THE BOX. You can see it here but for god's sake don't link to it.

http://www.evilrob.org/offspring/images/scary.png.1

November 28, 2005

So I've decided at the urging of Jakob Nielsen to redesign this weblog to help people find more about me and find the better postings.

So I've got new categories, a new blog front page, and improved navigation around the rest of the site.

This blog will primarily be focused on software development, with some system administration, general commentary about internet happenings, and an outlet for my personal photography.

I'm not finished yet; just have the homepage done. The redesign will be descending into other pages when I get some time, maybe later this week. You might also see some postings pop up again in the RSS feed as a I fix the titles.

Feel free to send feedback.

September 28, 2005

The tattered coat has a genius redone trailer for the shining.

Imagine someone's reaction if they had never seen the movie before, saw this trailer, then saw the Shining.

I'm picturing my grandmother saying "Oh, doesn't that look like a nice movie..."

July 25, 2005

Visual Studio 2003 Sucks Ass.

QED.

That is all, continue with your day, I feel at least a little better now.

June 30, 2005

What? You mean a chain link fence won't stop a truck moving 60 miles an hour? I'm shocked. Maybe now that this sensational lid has been blown off our totally ineffective airport security system (remember, people will never attack the hard parts of the system, just the weak ones) we can stop taking off our shoes to board planes.

June 20, 2005

Here's an interesting article about becoming an early riser by Steve Pavlina. For me, kids did it. I'm always up before 7am, at the latest. Usually it's more like 5:30-6:00am. Having to commute 2.5 hours to work also started me getting up at 5:30 sharp, but it's really the kids that sealed the deal.

Have kids, be more productive. :-)