I Am Your User

EasyTAG setting Album Artist

2011-09-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Quick post here in case you were looking for the same thing I was. EasyTAG does not let you edit the AlbumArtist of a MP3 file but iTunes and iOS devices use this field when listing out your albums in the Music player. The Ubuntu Forums thread I found on it suggests installing puddletag and I agree:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/puddletag sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install puddletag

Once in puddletag select the tracks and go to Edit > Extended Tags where you'll find albumartist. My recommendation is to simply delete that field (set it to blank) so that Apple shit falls back on the normal artist field and you can see everything you need to in EasyTag.

On a side note, GnomePlayer seems to get confused by the album art configuration saved by EasyTag but my iPod (and iTunes) has no problem with it.

LXDE vs Gnome

2011-04-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

It's incredible how much noticeable difference there is between using LXDE (Lubuntu) and Gnome (Ubuntu) on my Asus EEEPC 901. JDownloader uses Java and takes forever to load, but significantly less time now in Lubuntu than previously in Ubuntu. Perhaps there is more at work here than Window Managers, but I have been impressed at the speed everything is running at on this "low power" machine. It's faster than my Windows workstation which has 4 cores, 3.something ghz, 12gb of RAM, 2tb, etc. Here I'm plunking along on a dual-core Intel Atom running at a measly 1.6ghz (maybe even 800mhz if the System Profiler is to be believed), 1gb of RAM, and a 16gb Mini-PCIE SSD; yet the boot-up time is always under 30 seconds and Chrome loads near instantaneously.

Google Calendar Spam

2011-04-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

Spammers are either getting more desperate or more ingenuitive, possibly both.

Invitation spam, for all services, is starting to become more of a problem. It tends to escape filters since invitations are used as a precursor to trusted communication and yet many services allow almost utterly arbitrary HTML/BBCode/URL's to be entered as part of the message.

Ubuntu Unity: First Impressions

2011-03-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I don't like it, despite really wanting to.

The theory I gather behind Unity, debuting in Ubuntu 10.10 which I finally just installed (and regret), is to have one consistent interface to Ubuntu for portable devices. Netbook Remix on the other hand was targeted specifically to netbooks and that's probably why I liked it on my netbook. See, I don't have Unity running on a touch-enabled tablet and that's who I feel this thing is really tailored for.

Tilting tiles on a slide-bar "dash" occupy a good deal of horizontal real estate. While they may need to be there for a greasy finger to find, they're completely unnecessary and horribly distracting when on a tiny screen that you want to fill with whatever you are doing. Now on my EEE 901, which sports a practical 1024x600, displays a horizontal scrollbar on many webpages. Ugh, who wants that?

And where the icons in Netbook Remix were tray-sized and fit snuggly with everything else in a small space, the dash is large and in charge. It vies for attention, colorful bricks do a dance for you when apparently the application in question is trying to signal. Ugh, leave me alone you little bastards!

Then there's the instability and kookiness. Every time Firefox closes, it brings down Unity with it which causes whatever other app you were running to fill the entire screen and then get smashed down again when Unity rises once again to put baby in the corner. Ugh, stop moving around!

So that brings me to something I really dislike with a lot of modern UI's: swishing and swooshing and things moving around willy nilly. I would really like to use my computer and not try to dance with the interface. Things ought, in my opinion, stay put so I can reliably find them without thinking about it and get my stuff done without clicking somewhere that suddenly becomes a button to close everything down. Does anyone try to work while sitting on top of a running washing machine? No, only lunatics. Why are computers assuming we'd like to play them like video games?

Finally, and this really chapped my pale hide: the old-style "main menu" can be configured but it's all for not. The dash completely ignores it, so I can't figure out how to make an icon for DOSbox running a particular program rather than just launching the generic DOSbox every time. And as for nit-picking: now the close icon (being on the left) is right bloody next to the dash where I'm clicking so I can conveniently accidentally hit it. There were good reasons to have the close on the right, trying to shift everyone's minds the other direction makes me wonder if they're trying to be Apple's next copycat.

I really miss the direction that Netbook Remix was taking. Ubuntu 10.10 and Unity feel shiny, glossy, and bloated. Here comes the saucy-voiced telephone operator who in actuality weighs more than your car and craps bricks.

Oh, and another thing, since I'm ranting. One of the first things I noticed was that GIMP was touted as the graphic editor. Fine, cool, I'm getting used to arcane tools. Then I go to click Install on it, because it isn't by default, and it tells me that it can't because it's using restricted packages. Thankfully they happen to shoot a msgbox at someone who understands it. My dad really digs Ubuntu, but if it popped that to him, what do you think he would do? "Ubuntu can't install the thing it says I should install, I'm confused!"

Seriously guys, leave the jelly beans to Apple zealots and let's get back to the arduous journey of making computers useful not just pretty fashion accessories. 10.04 was close to being recommendable, but I'm not so sure about 10.10 and I fear for the future. Remember what users are trying to do and make all that shit work out of the box. I might re-install at some point just to list out all the wacky things I did to get stuff in working order.

Logitech diNovo Edge on Ubuntu 10.10

2011-03-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

My Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard working wirelessly with BlueTooth in a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) on an Asus EEE 901. Having the same issue? Let's try to resolve it ...
Pairing seems to work fine ...

Start Add New Device wizard under either the Bluetooth system applet or the icon in the upper-right part of the screen; click past the welcome screen.
Turn on the keyboard and press the connect button on the back.
It shows up in the list of devices as Logitech diNovo Edge, click it and then Next.
A six-digit PIN is displayed which I type on the diNovo and press Enter. Sometimes this results in "device setup failed" but more often than not it reports that the keyboard has been successfully paired.
Suddenly afterwards a new dialog appears asking me to enter the PIN shown on the device and here's where I'm stuck.

Device 'Logitech diNovo Edge' wants to pair with this computer / Please enter the PIN mentioned on device

First I tried entering the text on the back beside "P/N", then "M/N", and finally the last one but with no discernible results. I also tried selecting "Input device" from the drop-down during setup which then prevented this dialog but the keyboard still didn't work. I tried rebooting (I'm from the Windows world afterall), turning things on and off, and doing a ritual dance around the room in supplication to the Linux gods.

Note that this prompt for a PIN mentioned on the device can be canceled, but it will re-appear anytime I press a key on the keyboard or use its touchpad. This indicates to me that the pairing has in some way been successful, because at least it's sending some kind of signal to the OS.

I found other pages apparently having the same problem but on Ubuntu 10.04 of which I upgraded from and don't recall having any problems with in this area (or perhaps I applied the same fix and never thought of it again):

Logitech DiNovo Edge bluetooth keyboard not working since an update applied to Lucid Lynx. (March 30th, 2010)
10.04 Lucid Lynx Bluetooth Mouse Connection Issues. (May 2010)
USB logitech bluetooth doesn't work. (Bug 444420, "fixed").

These all basically tell you to edit /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules and find the following text:

# Logitech devices KERNEL=="hiddev*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \ RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

Then you change hiddev* to hidraw* and voila! Only there's a problem: that text doesn't exist in my installation. For me, it looks like the following which is slightly different and the fix, unsurprisingly, does not work:

# Logitech devices KERNEL=="hiddev*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[35e]", \ RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p" KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[4abc]|c71[34bc]", \ RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

Now, I only tried adding that modified code so it's possible that I need to replace one of these -- but note that the product identifiers are slightly different. What's a poor boy to do? Anyone have this solved?

Errors: Never Better

2011-03-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

Error messages never get better, in fact they generally seem to get verbose. At some point the theory moved from the well-known axiom that people don't read them to giant exception blobs that are somehow okay to give back to the user. Case in point, I'm trying to open an Excel document from an intranet location and I've added the SharePoint URL it's coming from (though not the UNC path) to my trusted locations; and yet:

The spew there is rather long and I can't divulge many of its more salient parts, suffice to say it's entirely unhelpful from beginning to end. I may as well have received "Access denied to untrusted document". One more nitpick to note is that this window is floating on its own, not linked to the Excel main window, so it's easy to lose without knowing the ALT+TAB trick. And and it's keeping Internet Explorer locked up waiting for something to be done.

Verizon RAZR V3m versus TracFone LG 420G

2011-03-06T10:21:00.000-08:00

I recently transferred my main mobile number from Verizon Wireless to Google Voice and purchased a TracFone to have everything forwarded to. The total cost of this was $20 for the port, $20 for the phone w/ lifetime double minutes, $40 for 400 minutes (e.g. doubled), and finally $61 for the last month of Verizon service which does not get discounted and officially disconnects when you pay your last bill. I'd like to talk about the pleasing and disappointing aspects of the phone, but let me begin by explaining the services themselves.

Services

People are often surprised at my paying so much a month to Verizon merely for "nationwide" 450 minutes and 500 text messages and I admit no less chagrin. However, be aware I'm no longer on any sort of contract and have refused their offers to renew and commit to some new, temporary deal, however tempting it may be. Also, I asked them for the cheapest plan back in February 2010 and this is what they gave me, but it's entirely possible I was lied to either for the purposes of profit or simply out of customer assistance ignorance ... or even language barrier.

Now TracFone is prepaid and generally cheaper, but only depending on your usage. If you make a lot of phone calls or send a lot of MMS, then it will cost you much more dearly than if you mostly use SMS like myself. The MMS on my plan cost 1.5 minutes (15 cents) and SMS is 0.3 minutes (3 cents). Thus if I sent 500 text messages it would cost me $15 versus the $10 I paid on top of voice to have that amount at Verizon. Remember, though, that was on top of the $50+ I already paid just to have their phone and service. Thus my reasoning is that I'll pay about that much anyway, assuming I don't go over 500 and make many phone calls: a $46 savings per month or $552 per year!

Alright, onto Google Voice. If you haven't tried this then go do it now, because it's free except for international calls and you'll likely be impressed by the feature set. I can use it to make a call to my mom, for example, and talk as long as I want without it costing a dime. Sure it won't work so great over my MiFi, but any consistent DSL/Cable (even the lowest speeds) can handle it fine. And it forwards to my TracFone both voice and SMS (the latter took several days before it started working) while providing me a blocking point for unwanted harassment.

Downside on services? Neither TracFone or Google Voice support "short codes", so I can't use them with Twitter's mobile service since I can't send a message through to 40404. This is certainly an annoyance, but I do begrudge Twitter mostly for this since they don't even support email notifications and their stability leaves much to be desired.

One last upside? No more advertisement texts from Verizon telling me about great upgrade opportunities or even random commercial crap from their "partners". It didn't seem to matter how many times I opted out, I'd still end up getting something from Garlic Jim's ...

Phones

First, you may wonder why I don't have a smart phone; that's a fair question but my answer is always simply that they don't provide me any extra value. What a particular person deems as valuable is a matter of preference and, to me, having a distracting internet-enabled computer always on in my pocket does not fit that bill. It may be convenient but to me it is not valuable and thus not worth the money. I can look up maps on my Kindle, call who I need to, and heck ... you can always ask a street urchin what bus to take.

That being said I would really love a product that combines phone, camera, and music player gracefully. Add the usuals like calendar, contacts, and alarm clock and I'm good to go. There's a limited amount of software I'd actually use consistently and I'd prefer something that does those things well. But anyway, that's neither here nor there for this particular post since I don't have a smart phone and this isn't technically about them. Let's move on ...

The interface on the LG actually feels snappier and less sluggish than the RAZR, everything is more colorful and more animated, less retro spreadsheet and more Saturday morning cartoon. Navigating around is simple enough, although there seem to be more options than necessary and unfortunately there is a "web" button that is way too easy to hit (and it immediately charges you 1.5 minutes if you make that mistake).

Pictures on the RAZR look a magnitude better: clearer, sharper lines, richer colors, etc. I had no idea how much of a difference there would be until I pulled the pictures off the LG and was disappointed to find them to look washed out, blurry, and people's facial features smudged into nothingness; like images scanned from a brochure. I naively though that its 640x480 pics would be comparable to the RAZR's of the same resolution. The RAZR can take higher resolution pics but they just look like the 640x480 blown up to a bigger size and thus, isn't very useful to go bigger.

Next the camera can only be used for stills and not video. This is less of an issue since the RAZR's video is fairly deplorable, but it's at least enough to get the gist of something.

Opening the phone, as strange as it sounds, is not particularly easy on the LG. The RAZR was built such that flipping was quick and easy, but the LG requires me to pry it open by jamming my fingers in the sides. It seems intent upon staying clam-shelled shut.

The alarm and sound recorder features are easier on the LG; I can't even remember where the latter was in the RAZR. However, I found that if I use the LG alarm, afterward pressing "Stop" the power-save is disabled and the screen stays on until it drains the battery dry. Power-cycling it is the only way to get it to go back to normal.

Text input is different on the LG, but much better. I've been having trouble adjusting to using 0 for space instead of #, but otherwise it feels like there's less to press to get stuff entered. I turned off auto-suggest almost immediately because, not being used to it, I couldn't handle all the psuedo-random words undulating at every key press.

Finally, there's the issue of backing data up off the phone. I spent a lot of time and effort to learn how to do this with BitPim for the Verizon RAZR (I say Verizon and not Motorola because they took the phone and hobbled the hardware before releasing it), but I got it down and was able to copy all messages, videos, and pictures over USB. The LG has a mini USB port, but you can only use that to charge because BitPim doesn't recognize the phone. You can use BlueTooth to copy the pictures and sounds on/off quite easily (it was a snap in Ubuntu), but messages cannot be accessed this way.

In conclusion, I like my new "plan" and the phone is comparably functional depending on your usage, but I liked the RAZR better. I may try another TracFone to see if I can get something that takes better pictures, I'm less concerned about being able to backup messages ... gotta let those things go.

Weebly doesn't Wobble

2011-02-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

Of all the free hosting solutions, regardless of WYSIWYG, Weebly has captured my heart. This happened suddenly and without expectation of such; I only first tried it for GW-BASIC last month. It has just the right balance of features and simplicity to make it both fun and effective. So much so that the crazy idea of paying for it keeps popping into my head.

Why why why, would I pay for something? For a while now it has become exhausting keeping track of sites on different platforms and giving them their just due in updates. That is, none of them end up getting updated because just thinking about it is a chore. Oh, I've enjoyed Blogger fine but it has terrible picture/video integration since for the one it uses Picasa and for the other its own home-brewed piece of crap. Straight up HTML is amusing sometimes, but often all I want is a comfortable editing system. You can upload files to Weebly and, although you can't control the URL, they allow you to display the subsequent HTML pages rather than force the client into download-mode as Google Sites does.

Let's talk about the URL's for a moment. I like that they're completely sane and that they end with HTML. Thus giving someone a link, it can be read aloud or written down and difficult to screw up. Whatever you say about such things not mattering to search engines, I can tell you that as someone who's crawled the web using programs that it does at least for the smaller guys. And finally it allows you to export your site "flatly" and port it wherever you wish. You aren't imprisoned by the system and no server-side goo spills over onto the client.

One concern of mine was page-specific customizations, but I've found that you can include JavaScript either in the theme or in a Custom HTML element making the point relatively moot. The consistency of the page HTML makes it reliable when scripting for things like a splash page, and you can either reference jQuery or upload it to your site.

They also allow you to put AdSense on your site and analytics are built-in. This makes it a one-stop shop for managing both the revenue the content can generate as well as how you're making it. Sure the stats might not be involved as full-blown Analytics, but I find report-heavy sites to be utterly tiresome to work with and unable to add any value for all their additional granularity. It's too easy to be led into a false sense of correctness in vision and then be left crushed and confused when it doesn't work. Better, I think, to forge ahead with persistence and make decisive choices rather than being constantly reactive. Send your ship through choppy seas not by bowing to each wave, but by cutting through them.

In short, Weebly is amazing and I am kicking myself that I hadn't found it before -- I would have made more plans on top of it. Of course, I can't do much more with the 2 site limit until I upgrade to pro for 10. I have no desire to exploit registrations with multiple email addresses for a service I respect so much.

YouTube Internal Error

2010-08-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've never seen YouTube's error page before; it gave me a good chuckle ...

The text reads:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, show them this information:

5NAZGLnATXbt87a--0-pdjYbQGJRIpkBoWolrqbru694aT-pvbf70z6IPvSW
w08t-CGtF4u4kQ32yHSVjqU0x6MCxW4Qgz4k0Pnoc82SP9d_en7aA_RVMcxD
ISXiUrNgo-kTWBYKnRL-Jg_IOa7vLMqQX7A5nuQkjPMPdSE2r8Pe4e3HjB-H
C8vQ6n8Gq4Yw9ELCntUMOX3D7--djnJxiT-XiycD2FjqygenDZcwKxIn-ggT
WCJAKH5uiwfZZpHvCNnUkW8OlgZeAwjNsjOL1oS72kyzma00LPWVchejvMVQ
MSQjpMXfRAEOubJAPRrwo4Kzil4wsnzKxXV3Za0EGwoOW5CKb2tLN6uxw1xQ
ZEA6Y0zzK8-qeYq2PgLFoTERvj4iu8rKfAm2oZ-hPuh8hm_LbPLaihA5TfRY
5etjjaq87NWD6wMbEDW8_aP-6TJm_s1lfVEVxChSrQw3PJHXMS9wd-2KHgk9
fSdLjJn1FjMa9EYD0i3NTH2kCiYYXbZ-noKRVUUvnVlyWKW1_CWCwSBUcNm5
2bR7RSf1xgFOJXKBac50sAt2Fztga9kZoRJ9ra91rFpwnADVN-m5TcaI2404
b0u7dqGTQE1Rc2ZFTBxCWn3b-rkN7m8R-Qsy7JWVuS8B0fV-Jj7BhVDaeocE
pCUWLWiCq1grIZwMlOmHZgZLLBXk4CFm6en_v3LmNT_2A71EFm1ftsb8EB8r
qvvlq_ZjGEO1iHbIFHIet6VaSgs_9YupevXdngWfdrEYHBertyA0pHFK475a
mxbzRIrCH5spPvx4orr7bGqihN2W2-BbdYomzC1kZv-rn3VR17BixuUvRq5k
10PTrVi0gcl0_TjjLhaB0uTD34OyUv5RRtANoXLAao_IoQQqcnQJe9RUnCsT
coI3shQPI5pIEDMZNTjPD8B75bl1GCVuHp-j24WhbNFeqwrK0dhyEQXO5Seq
TArh3Dt6m-yzhkTPiZ9GTaHbvw18fIonQqDqs8I_BfxvEVR-fB60SBfULH0U
_GkI-6EkHKYLPjLaMYsYVD4HVFtTYGYT2rs-nGU390VURx_eouEkSgLsVL32
95U_gtiavyU5HZLLf8sPH0XEj0QZ0qovoBMLskKQYxebTIn7wnNHOLUvTC9-
GaFMRBnPamkfBSTTfs-l2LFc9VhezjToV8b3wqZ96xeTvnCQAWJUkF79Ql3g
7GpD2ZVunmYiZxrluhR35XHInl0bV1XZNySVm2As2qzCkKXs_nBUXb5sT8Gr
ttEr0-5Smr6wJ9Pc_ZeHpDLzyqLYPxcbQoPnmHyQ5Yq7MmwltCGr2dNCl72r
x5XmGtaOcPgFB5y3IdTPDL_ri8l7869cII_k4ffvdiOSboHMAv2qefWzbB1a
nAEEsC79A4vU4mG6VS-Mqe4B2lwHu59K8yInsy0qDKSHyuMdvSt4-m98s092
3MQjcWzdW24DfvUuCtaS30gZMyFyAWkcaHF8EBplVIhGOvwlUpNMwqqUV7fL
miAmAive6KrWsSyrMdgqPge71DWSbGr3XFw4cU_CVyqPQy3ObKhyKNBQectq
WGMzQ4sDRNNGbC7a6F8iY8HxDVxnTZZ0NMgv9iJdawjqnAFJyvODcmAeTStb
ajtPJmNCpj2BjrvIIdF8msLZ8wtgsZwwjFz1wtQpt878pRwsutdfOT4hvrO-
ZWleVzx7nP8ZEO4NGVhTrZnz7rX0pVtGEi37BZxmIQYwPaiu7kb52zcBb4-R
7GyrKIlloMvY3bEPViZoNpdPioL9MFUgEVnChLGFESn4iPGM5TDOQiaF834z
PwTDon8ki2PvuHgMZ6Cqm1R9Fr5rqbkVNxLRzf_GZOmuCH9_yS2-TUpyDdgd
SCskrIibnV2I8NQZwOzgG-LvBchf5yXs1KWyIj9ZO8C0UND9yebddnL97UF7
6KPxFxUua6lnKpTkbaNZLA==

Reloading the page, of course, worked.

One disappointment I encountered with YouTube recently, though, was in its failing to properly decode an iMemories MP4. The result came out in "slow motion" even though FFMPEG had no trouble with the same file.

ToonTown Email Verification

2010-07-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

I get a fair amount of people using my email address to try and sign up for various things online. It's unlikely they mistype, I think it's more that they want to use something fake but valid. Surprisingly few services actually verify that the user has control of the address, but most of them allow me to reset the password though practically none of them provide a way to delete the account!

Now enter an email message I received from ToonTown which:

Does not indicate who it's to besides referring to me as "Dear Parent".
Welcomes me to the new Child Account I created (popololo0884), again no names.
Provides no way to contact support for this particular issue and in no way mentions that the message might not be for me and what to do in that case.
Links to a "Reset Password" page which requires everything except the email address this junk was sent to.
Ends with nothing but "Do not reply to this address". I absolutely adore it when companies send crap from unmonitored or invalid email addresses; that gives me such confidence in them!

Then again, it's Disney, which I see as a massive, greedy, headless bureaucracy; something this activity fits snugly into. Suggestion for web developers: put the burden of proof on users, not the innocent casualties of their mistakes or malicious promiscuity.

Verizon "High Speed" Internet $20 / mo

2010-04-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

I heard a radio ad a couple weeks ago for "Verizon high-speed internet at only twenty dollars ($19.99 probably) a month with no setup fees and no contracts". It took me a while to get around to their website to research the promo. After all, $20 a month for home broadband with no commitment is a fantastic deal -- if true. Unfortunately it's not only for their lowest speed DSL but also requires their residential home phone service and a one-year contract.

First, the speed thing isn't much of a surprise. Why would you charge a pair o' tens for the lightning fast FiOS (which a friend of mine was actively discouraged from getting, the rep mentioned Verizon is trying to phase it out entirely)? However it is still broadband and rated at 768k down and 256k up. That's plenty fast for normal, non-HD video streaming for Hulu, NetFlix, and of course YouTube.

Secondly, however, they require you already have Verizon's residential home phone service. The keyword here is not wireless. I have Verizon Wireless for my cell phone carrier, but that does not count for this particular deal. In fact, the wireless portion of Verizon appears to be entirely separate from all the "home/business" stuff. I remember back when I had Verizon DSL and that split always caused me a lot of trouble whenever I'd have to call in (since they're separate offices and support centers).

And finally, a year-long contract! Okay, I may have missed the window on the radio promotion for Verizon "high speed" internet, but dang why do all of them have these long contracts? A year may not seem that long, but for apartment dwellers with sub-year length leases, it is long enough. The early cancelation charge is in the area of $250 too, so your cheap DSL is suddenly expensive. Been there, done that, not doing it again.

Messenger: "Add Friend / Contact" Spam

2010-04-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

I've talked to several friends and it turns out I'm not alone in receiving many "add friend" requests to MSN Messenger, Live Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, or whatever it's called these days. I clicked out of all the pop-ups before posting this, otherwise I'd give a sample of the addresses. These are all bots and if you accept them in then you'll immediately get hit with some very suspicious conversations. My dad tried chatting them up one time, realizing they weren't real but curious to see how they'd react. They may have improved, but basically they'd accept anything you type and lead to the same responses and links.

Anyway, what is the solution?

On Microsoft's Live Messenger client you can purportedly block all contact requests. I need to try this, but I'm also fairly certain it is done on your computer when they come in and not on the server. This means that if, like me, you use alternate clients (Empathy on Ubuntu) then you won't get that benefit. There doesn't appear to be a server option to block and even if there were, it'd be sad to resort to that. I like being available for long lost friends to find, or add from FB, or whatever ... and using an all-block filter seems like admitting defeat.

Here's one simple UI suggestion to all the clients: batch this stuff up and list it in one place that isn't a bloody modal dialog. Empathy does a fair job of this, but you still have to open up individual dialogs to kill off the requests one at a time. I can tell at a glance whether or not all the requests are bogus, so "Ignore All" would be great.

Something my dad told me about, adding other people on some sites requires you to input something about them. Even if this were extremely high level, it would significantly raise the bar for bots. Whether that would make them better and more dangerous is debatable, but right now there is absolutely nothing they need to verify before shooting off these requests.

Ubuntu 9.10 on Satellite M15-S405

2009-12-26T21:38:00.000-08:00

I'm having trouble installing (or running off the Live CD) Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on my ol' Toshiba Satellite M15-S405. It's dying with some kind of kernel exception, here's what's on the screen:

[    0.028042] BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at (null)

[    0.028185] IP: [] kmem_cache_create+0x18b/0x2f0

[    0.028288] *pde = 00000000

[    0.028378] Thread overran stack, or stack corrupted

[    0.028430] Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP

[    0.028562] last sysfs file:

[    0.028610] Modules linked in:

[    0.028699]

[    0.028747] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: G        W  (2.6.31-14-generic #48-Ubuntu) Portable PC

[    0.028809] EIP: 0060:[] EFLAGS: 00010206 CPU: 0
[    0.028864] EIP is at kmem_cache_create+0x18b/0x2f0
[    0.028917] EAX: 00000000 EBX: ffffffa8 ECX: 00000000 EDX: 661a7865
[    0.028973] ESI: 00000014 EDI: 00000130 EBP: c0743f78 ESP: c0743f40
[    0.029029] DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 00d8 GS: 00e0 SS: 0068
[    0.029083] Process swapper (pid: 0, ti=c0742000 task=c0748e80 task.ti=c0742000)
[    0.029141] Stack:
[    0.029187] 00000000 0000000f 00000000 205b3f54 00000001 c06d605c fffffff8 00000000
[    0.029533] <0> 00000018 00000000 00000017 00000000 00000000 c0745000 c0743f88 c0346b13
[    0.029961] <0> 00000000 00000000 c0743f94 c03634ac c089bc40 c0743f9c c03650fe c0743fa8
[    0.037164] [] i386_start_kernel+0x7c/0x831ab/0x74-14-generic #48-

This poor thing doesn't seem to have ability to boot off USB, otherwise I'd try 8.10 (no CD-R's on me right now) which is the last one I used on it that I know worked.

Simple Sound Player

2009-12-21T16:55:00.000-08:00

Yeah, right ...

Bluetooth Blues

2009-12-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

I give up. I was trying to get my Logitech diNovo working via Bluetooth on my Lenovo Thinkpad T400 so I could free up one of the three precious USB ports.

Initially everything seemed to work okay. I was able to "pair" it on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10, but the problems came after rebooting. The Windows experience degraded slowly like a rotting corpse. It wasn't working at all after a reboot so I went back into to re-add it. That didn't work at all because the device was already "added". I deleted the original device since I couldn't get it to work and then pairing showed up with a generic "Wireless Keyboard" instead of the previous "Logitech DiNovo Keyboard", so I had a hunch it was only going to get worse. Somewhere in the mix while I was trying to pair, I would hit "Next" after selecting the device and Windows would immediately tell me it couldn't add that device and that it was probably because it was no longer trying to connect (untrue).

This morning I waited for Windows to stop thrashing the hard drive (as it always does on a morning boot) and then tried to use the keyboard - nothing. The Bluetooth icon had disappeared from the task bar so I went into control panel but could only get to the "Add Devices". Funny, all the help told me to go to open such and such bluetooth thing, but all that had disappeared from the control panel! The Bluetooth Support service itself was set to Manual and was stopped, but starting it didn't do anything. Long story short, I think the bluetooth drivers are effed up but Lenovo's frickin' driver site isn't working this morning! AAARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!

Yes, I probably did something wrong in the myriad of things I was supposed to do, but this is exactly my point. The experience for using this just totally blew chunks. I thought that by now this sort of thing would have been worked out.

Troubleshoot Windows Media Player

2009-12-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

What the crap is this? I am using a relatively fresh install of Windows 7 and this stupid thing keeps popping up. I already let it run once and it said it "fixed it", but then kept coming back.

It doesn't even say there's anything wrong here:

Troubleshoot and help prevent computer problems
Windows Media Player Library
Make media files show up in the Windows Media Player library.

Oooohkay, let's see what's under "Advanced":

Troubleshooting with administrator permissions might find more issues.
(shield) Run as administrator
[ ] Apply repairs automatically.

What repairs?! What issues!? Looks like it's time to install WinAmp.

Failed to clean communication environment for local run.

2009-12-04T13:48:00.000-08:00

I just got this error when trying to run tests in Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition. Hitting the "Run tests" button would result in the dreaded "Test run error" message with the little yellow triangle icon. All the tests would simply be skipped, because it couldn't start. And the error provides absolutely no information. In fact, Googling the phrase brings up nothing useful (which is why I put it in the title of my post). I checked Task Manager for weird processes, restarted Visual Studio, closed all processes and restarted, deleted the entire Test Results directory (new Test Results folders were being created with all my assemblies successfully), ran procmon to look for weird behavior, and to no avail. As a last ditch effort I rebooted ... and the error went away.

WTF!?

So, my friend, if you get this error message just save yourself some time and reboot.

Copy MP3's to Verizon V3m for Ringtones

2009-11-19T23:08:00.000-08:00

Custom ring tones are getting a bit old, but I also use my RAZR as an alarm clock and it's nice to have options there. I gave up trying to figure out how to upload the MP3's via USB to my Verizon V3m. Instead, I found this thread which reveals the following method:

Create a MP3 under 325k. Don't use VBR either and I'd suggest keeping the bitrate low (64k?).
Change the file extension from mp3 to mid.
Send an email to your phone number at @vzwpix.com (i.e. 1234567890@vzwpix.com) and attach the file.
Wait for the message to hit your phone.
When you open it, the sound will probably start playing right away (kinda annoying). You can then go to Options when viewing the message and select "Save Sound".

You can give the sound any name, no extension necessary. When you are selecting a ring or alarm sound, it will appear below the built-in ones no matter what you call it.

Also, since you're sending yourself a MMS message, you may be charged 25 cents (or nothing depending on your data plan).

MonoDevelop hates ASCII

2009-11-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

MonoDevelop is a nice-looking IDE for developing .NET in C# code on Linux. Unfortunately, it still won't open a pre-existing CS file I have from an old project without interpreting the character set as ... Asian?

You can see what this file actually looks like on Google Code. It's been about a year since I last tried MonoDevelop, but this is still a problem. Last time I looked for an answer, this time I just shot out a blog entry because I'm lazy. I don't know what it sees in the file that makes it do this, because I was able to open others successfully.

Verizon RAZR V3m + Ubuntu 9.10 + BitPim = Success!

2009-11-19T21:41:00.000-08:00

Long title, but seriously, if you search the posts here you'll know I've been working on this for a while. I happened across the magic Google incantation (ubuntu +"9.10" razr v3m) which led me to the answer on Ubuntu Forums by white.armor. Here's what worked for me:

Get a mini USB cable to attach your phone to the computer but do not plug it in yet. Unplug it if you did plug it in already.
Install BitPim via the Ubuntu Software Center (previously known as Add/Remove Software). It's version 1.0.6 at the time of writing.
Open a terminal and enter: gksudo bitpim
Wait for it to load completely, because it will eventually tell you that it couldn't detect your phone (helpful).
Go to Settings, Browse the Com Port, and select /dev/ttyACMO which should be listed under Available Ports

Voila! Well, sort of. I haven't tried all the functionality yet. All I've ever been able to get to work is downloading files off the raw file system listing. You can get this by:

Check the menu item View > View Filesystem.
Click the Filesystem left panel item.
Pictures are under /motorola/shared/picture and messages are in /brew/mod/syncom2/msging.

You can right-click the folders to download them into ZIP files which is useful for archiving.

Hope this helps other weary souls still using this aged hardware!

VS2008 Disappearing Menus

2009-11-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

I have to write about this, because it's a feature of Visual Studio that has been bugging me forever. I'm currently working in Visual 2008 and this problem is still here. In my most recent example, I was looking for the XML menu which has an option to look at all the known schemas and add new ones. I couldn't remember what the menu name was called, so I was digging through all the others. Whatever time I wasted, I wasted it. See, I had selected a type in the XML Schema Explorer and thus the XML menu disappeared. Once I moved the caret back into the text editor, it suddenly re-appeared. That is just so bloody annoying. I would much rather have all the menus shown all the time and not move around or blink out of existence.

I don't know about you, but once my mind has memorized a spot then it's easy to get back there. If such a target is moving it becomes more difficult to reacquire it (more so if it vanishes entirely).

Windows Notepad Still Sucks

2009-11-18T16:43:00.000-08:00

Windows 7 comes with a badass new version of Paint, but sadly Notepad.exe still gets no love. Specifically, it still cannot handle Unix line endings which is what all RFC's use. Witness:

What I did was widen it nearly as much as possible across two monitors and even then I had to scroll nearly 3 full times to be able to see the entire line. The 'C' at the end of the longest visual line is character 1024. Har har.

Lovely! How hard is it to add this?

P.S. - Picasa can't handle an image this wide, so click here for the raw version.

Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop

2009-11-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

I'm installing this on my ThinkPad T400 and I've already run into several problems. Rather than go into details, let me just note that ...

The initial reboot after installation completed ejected the CD but then "locked" at a blank screen. I waited 10 minutes before power cycling.
I have a second monitor plugged in and all I wanted was to turn off mirroring and get them both at their native resolutions. It gave me some notice about "virtual resolution" or something and that it could do such and such for me. I really didn't understand WTF it meant so I said "OK" and then it said I had to log out. After system updates finished installing I tried to log out and it took me to a user-list screen but completely locked up. I tried to switch to a different console (CTRL+F6) to no avail, but was able to do CTRL+ALT+DEL for "soft restart". When the desktop came back, the resolutions were correct, but the background image was askew and my mouse cursor was trapped inside it (I couldn't get to the task bars at the bottom of the screen where I had moved them). I tried ALT+F2 to run a program but had no idea what I'd launch so I just pressed the power button and no menu came up so I pressed it again and suddenly the machine rebooted (!?). After this reboot I got to the desktop, with screens back to being mirrored, went and changed the settings again and it worked without a hitch. What the crap was all that mess about!?
During system updates I was asked what I wanted to do about Grub and got the choice of keeping the version I had, using the package maintainers version, or doing a diff. I did a diff, didn't see anything particularly interesting, and then chose the package maintainer's version. I don't know why this was even presented to me, I can't imagine how my dad would react to such a message. He'd probably think a virus was trying to install itself.
Last time in 9.04 I tried the restricted ATI FGLRX drivers but they blew chunks and I just didn't try to play any games or heavy multimedia because of it (went back to the dependable, but slow, open source drivers). This time I wanted to see if they'd gotten better and Activate certainly has -- the download progress bar actually moves! Unfortunately, after rolling past the download portion, this weird error came up saying SystemError: installArchives() failed. Turns out it doesn't play well with Synaptic Package Manager running also. :P

Alright, well I'm going to keep at this and see if I can get back to a usable Ubunut desktop. Wish me luck!

Pandora Algorithm Raving

2009-11-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

I'm a paying Pandora customer, the $30'ish a year is worth it to avoid the advertising annoyances and short, unattended play-time of the free version. However, I am really tired of their "algorithm" trying to insert trance music into my "Mystical Ambience" (yes, it's misspelled -- whoops) station. It includes Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze, Steve Roach, and other stuff like that. Today after the desktop app lost connection again (that happens frequently behind the firewall here, but only Pandora seems adversely effected -- too brittle?), it happily started my station back up with, what else, TRANCE NATION 2!

WTF! How many times do I have to thumb down trance before it stops putting these tracks in here? I have another station for those!

Back to Windows

2009-11-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

For my own projects, primary development is now done on Ubuntu using either my ThinkPad running the Desktop edition or my EEE 901 using the Netbook Remix version (both still 9.04). I'm now doing a short consultant programming stint at a Microsoft centric organization at which I used to work full-time and did another 9 month contract at early this year. Right now, on Monday, I'm only starting the second week and already I've experienced amusing aspects of the Windows world.

Today: my manager had pre-installed a fresh copy of Vista and apparently used the MSDN DVD and/or key. The result is an instance of Vista which refuses to activate successfully over the internet. At the same time it wants to install SP2 even though it's working fine but not activated. And finally, Windows Defender is complaining it hasn't had a full run in 3+ days. Not having to deal with licenses and keys is just about the best property of using Ubuntu/Linux. With no qualms about paying for software, I still find it irritating that pirating takes approximately the same amount of effort as legitimate activation; and acquiring through BitTorrent is (for me) vastly easier and faster than juggling physical media.

Last week we had trouble finding our Team Foundation client software since the Visual Studio Team System edition doesn't come with it. Yes, that's right. You can't access TFS through the Team System edition; what is the logic there or is it just some kind of naming conflict? Once installed, joyfully wade through the mire of menus, dialogs, and tree views to find where all the options are. I can't say that a GUI in this case is an improvement over arcane command line options. One requires me to browse like I'm lost in Yahoo! directory and the other to search for something I'm unsure of like when I'm feeling lucky at Google. Luckily a co-worker had the CD contents copied on a share which he gave me. Initially he wanted to send me this location over Messenger, but ...

Messenger's installer is actually for all kinds of bundled "Microsoft Live" services and that behemoth required me to download a huge turd which then failed to finish installing because it was taking too long and I had already started the TFS client install based on the location having been written on a post-it instead! Whew! "Another instance of Windows installer is already running, setup cannot continue" or something like that. Then I flip over to the Visual Studio patching part and its failed because I ran "vs_setup.exe" instead of "setup.exe" (whoops). I had mistakenly thought it was actually going to do something when it was taking so long to start up and copy setup files.

Welcome back to the Jungle! I could go on, but I have some dialogs to click through ...

What is the Precursor to the Internet?

2009-10-31T17:33:00.000-07:00

Talk about a helpful answer:

Windows 7 Upgrade Beta? Nope

2009-10-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

Let me backtrack a bit on what I'm about to say that I understand the perils of running beta, however ...

When last night I tried to upgrade my Windows 7 beta installation with a full version of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate, it came as a rude shock to have Microsoft's as-ever-poor installer refute me. On the surface it doesn't make much monetary sense to provide an easy upgrade path to users of a beta, who are probably more technically proficient than the average customer and unafraid of wiping the slate clean. However, wouldn't it be prudent to cater to the early adopters already proselytizing your latest offering before it is even offered? For myself, I've been recommending the OS to people since I installed the first public beta (back when they had time bombs). Spooky!

So it seems a good a time as any to pick apart the things I don't like, since this is generally a site where I whine about such things. How about starting with the installer which itself starts with a small splash window and one friggin' button. I'll have to upload a screenshot later, since I'm not at home, but honestly I didn't know what would happen when I pushed this mysterious thing. The designers created a huge surprise in an über friendly. Sure it says "Install", but what does that mean? Am I the only one curious as to the effect? Will it start an upgrade, did it already detect it could? Will it give me options after this or just start doing something? I really have no idea because there's nothing on this "dialog" except that one button. It turns out, for those also curious, that this means it'll copy a pile of setup junk files to your computer and then actually give you options -- and then deny you after you've selected upgrade (assuming you're running a beta like me). So what you're doing is installing the installer. Effin' ridiculouso!

I bought the dang thing so I'll end up doing a fresh install, but I'm going to ride this beta for all its worth until then. I wonder if they've fixed Windows Explorer to not crash or rape large files it doesn't understand? Probably not, their file explorer has always sucked (and been kinda awesome at the same time, a paradox possibly parallel to human existence?). For one thing sometimes 7's Explorer will just crash and take your task bar and all open folders with it. Sure your apps are probably okay, but it's disconcerting in its frequency compared to XP or Ubuntu's Nautilus. I have been using 7 for web, games, DVD ripping, and video editing. Given a directory containing a fair sized VOB, Windows Explorer gives the hard drive an ample thrashing while it presumably tries to generate a thumbnail. This wouldn't be so bad if it didn't do this every damn time I open the folder! I've taken to using only the command prompt and typing full paths into the Open dialogs lest I be unable to operate my machine without ending Explorer.exe or "COM Surrogate".

And of course, I've already dispensed a bit of ranting against Snap, so we're through for now ...

Windows 7 Snap Sucks

2009-10-25T00:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently the Windows 7 "Snap feature" is a big deal, because their commercials focus on it. I haven't watched them, even in that CNet article I just linked, but I don't think snapping is quick, or fun, or useful with regards to maximizing windows. By a quick count there are three ways to use your mouse to maximize a window pre-7: click the maximize icon, double-click the title bar, and use the window menu drop-down (left-click window icon or right-click title bar). Now there's a fourth and it has the added benefit of happening precisely when you don't want it to.

Is this something Mac OSX does, or maybe doesn't so Microsoft can tout it as innovation? I don't know, but more often than not it pisses me off. Anytime I'm trying to swiftly position windows above or below each other they now have a tendency to explode selfishly across the entire screen. The problem is compounded by the widescreen display which has less vertical real estate and therefore more chance of this occuring.

Wah, dinosaur whining, right? Well go on and enjoy your fun and quick new way to maximize windows, because I'm going to be grumbling behind you everytime you do it successfully. I do admit, however, the idea of snapping two windows to each other sounds intriguing -- why can I never get that to work right?

Finally, why add this at all? Even assuming that some people find it useful, how many are asking for it? And if they're asking for it, why are people trying to maximize windows in the first place and where are they running into problems with the other three ways (not counting hot keys)? I can think of more difficult problems for useful solutions if those developer folks are having trouble finding things to keep themselves busy.

Snap out.

Fate

2009-10-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

Fate is a generic dungeon-crawler purporting comparison to Diablo. If your desire is a medieval fantasy, point-and-click combat system then this game is for you. I supposed more satisfaction than actually occurred and I'm writing this to explain it. Know that I don't mean to demean the game or its developers, but Fate was built to be free. No qualities warrant a purchase, cheap or otherwise, because it is a stock "RPG" experience. Solid but soul-less.

Frugal people: you can play it for free so go forth and download if that is appeal enough. For a game that costs nothing but a video ad prior to playing it is quality work even if creatively barren. I got confused on the route to getting the game, prepared even to pay some small sum to try it, and nearly wound up buying some kind of wild points or something. Know that these are not necessary, there is a download link, and cheapskates such as myself will root it out.

If you boiled down essences of statistics-based video game systems, RPG's as they are unfortunately labeled, then you will come up with Fate as a result. There are the standard attributes like dexterity and strength which do the most basic things like increase hit percentage and weapon damage. Your skills are a list of all the weapon types, also associated with a number which is unsurprisingly a higher damage bonus. Killing monsters yields experience points. Accruing said XP gains you levels. Experience levels give you two sets of points: some for attributes and some for weapon skills. And there you have it, no surprises.

Pets represent the one semi-unique aspect of Fate. You begin with a dog and can acquire other creatures, I guess (from the picture). I barely made it through clearing the first two dungeon levels and had the pup the whole time. These are computer-controlled allies that you can load with inventory and send back to the starting village (Grove) on their own to vendor things. What would have made this more useful is if they could buy things too. And then the designers needn't have even had a town!

Being that the environments are so vanilla, the town is entirely unnecessary. There are a few more relatively useless character-building thingies like reputation (never figured out what that did), but otherwise Grove is just an area that takes too long to run around and get things done in. You go there just to visit specific people: new weapons, gambler, healer, etc. and not to stretch your legs. There's no auto-run and clicking to move gets old fast. That and you have to keep clicking to attack. Ugh, did I not talk about combat?

You click on an area of ground and your character will move there. You click on an enemy to attack. You click on a friendly thing to talk. Click, click, clickety click. Mind-numbing repetition made worse by the fixed 3D perspective that sometimes hides enemies behind walls or other objects. Just keep clicking until you find a spot the game recognizes, meanwhile your sitting there doing nothing. The mechanics could have easily translated to keyboard alone or a game controller. Then I could sit back and stop adding to my mouse-hand RSI.

The music is just fine, but it never stops playing and since there's only so much, it gets old too. Sound effects are fine, but they're not balanced at all. Every bloody torch makes crackling noises and with a few on screen all biding for your audible attention, well that gets old too. Initial enemies simply run directly at you and are not very interesting to melee with.

I picked up a bow early on and dumped my points into it, from then on it became even more mundane ... standing back and shooting. I found that clicking in the general area with the bow caused me to shoot directly at a foe, whether I could see it or not. That didn't alleviate the need to find pixel-perfect points, however, because loot obscured by bodies is still a problem.

You can't see very far and not just because it's a mostly top-down affair, but because there's some kind of swirling "fog of war". It doesn't annoys rather than adding to the atmosphere. The graphics and models are clean and decent, but uninspiring. There's no mystery, rather "there's a goblin, blob, rat, etc." Why are there urns and crates everywhere with items still in them and why does the place look rather well-kept when it's infested by monsters? What are these things eating, doing, etc.? Whatever, just kill kill kill click click click.

Alright, I'm going to end this here, now that I'm rambling. It is enjoyable for small spurts without any brain matter required, but it is also only viable when it costs nothing.

eHow Sucks

2009-10-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I should have posted this here, but I didn't. Go over to Gibdon.com to see Why eHow Sucks.

Live Ghost Reminder

2009-10-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

I don't remember if I've written about this before. A few years ago I registered Otechski.com and intended to use it as a company name for selling software as well as distributing code on the website. Ah, to be that young and naive again! Anyway, I wanted to try out hosted Hotmail via my domain. It was, and might still be, called "Live Domain Mail". I set it all up, paid the yearly fee to go premium or whatever (have ads removed), and was then off using webmaster@otechski.com.

Another thing I configured was a calendar item reminding me to pay off my VISA balance at the beginning of every month. Now years after the account is gone and the domain is completely expired, I am still getting the reminder emails:

I can't log into the Live account to shut it off, because the account is gone. No password reset can be made since the email address and domain have been obliterated! I recall trying while still remembering the password and no dice. On the bright side I know I'll always have a monthly reminder!

Turbine

2009-09-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

I barely know what Turbine is, only because I'm trying out LOTR online, and now they're already wearing out their web welcome.

Seriously, does this show up for Safari users too? Real nice.

Ubuntu: Sound Pops / Glitches

2009-07-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

Playing music on my EEE 901 in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) was unbearable. Loud pops periodically punctured my poor ears and happened regardless of the applications (Firefox, Rhythmbox, Totem, etc.). I have a solution for you which I have only tested on my Asus EEE 901, but maybe you will find helpful as well!

Go to Preferences and run the Sound applet.
Change all sound playback to use "HDA Intel ALC269 Analog (OSS)"
Under Default Mixer Tracks select "HDA Intel (Alsa mixer)" and then make sure "LineOut" is highlighted.

That's it! I keep the PCM volume at maximum and adjust LineOut instead; it has a noticeably better range. Now I can listen to music even with the processor under load and the worst that happens is a temporary moment of silence.

XHTML: Characters allowed in ID attribute

2009-06-11T16:45:00.001-07:00

Are you wondering what characters (numbers, letters, punctuation) are allowed in XHTML ID attributes? Me too; a few quick and frustratingly fruitless Google searches led me to write this for me and you. Here's the simplified, 7-bit ASCII rules I've come up with:

Start with colon, letter, or underscore
Contain those plus dashes, periods, and numbers.
Regular expression: /^[:_A-Za-z][-.:_A-Za-z0-9]*/

I got this information from the gritty details at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#id. There are more characters allowed beyond the ones I depicted here, but you probably won't use them if you're a cranky English-oriented coder like myself.

Some final notes ...

Brackets, braces, and parenthesis are not allowed.
No explicit maximum length.

Ubuntu: Convert OGG to MP3

2009-06-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

Nothing against OGG (or MP4 for that matter), but my MuVo v100 cannot play them. I found a copy of the music from the Gothic games in this format and wanted to take it with me. Drop into the terminal and use the following command to batch convert and entire directory of OGG files into MP3.

$ for name in *.ogg; do ffmpeg -i "$name" "$name.mp3"; done;

If you don't get any output, then your copy of FFmpeg probably doesn't have MP3 support. Enter the following command to get an unstripped version:

$ sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-52

UPDATE 2011-05-15:I recently used this to convert a bunch of FLAC files into MP3's and preserve the metadata in ID3 ...

$ for name in *.flac; do ffmpeg -ab 192k -i "$name" -map_meta_data 0:0,s0 "$(basename "$name" .flac).mp3"; done;

V3m with BitPim on Windows 7

2009-06-02T21:28:00.000-07:00

Yet again my Verizon RAZR pisses me off! Anyway, if you're on Windows 7 and want to use your shitty Verizon V3m (check under the battery to see your model) in BitPim, follow these steps:

Download http://rsddownload.motorola.com/download/Motorola_Software_Update.exe.
Right-click that file and open its Properties.
On the Compatibility tab, select to run it in compatibility mode for Vista SP2.
Run it then launch BitPim and manually select V3m and your COM port in the settings.

My problem was trying to use the driver tool from HackTheRazr which gives you something that works initially and then messes up until you unplug/re-plug the phone.

Sneaky Apple Safari Update

2009-05-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

I had the Safari 4 beta on my machine and this morning met with an "update" window plus an unwanted extra.

Suffice to say, I've been happy enough to Chrome that my reaction to this was to uninstall the beta. I wonder how many people got this dialog and simply clicked Install.

Jaunty ThinkPad

2009-05-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

Oye, Ubuntu Linux problems up the yin yang just within the past day. I'm exhausted trying to figure this stuff out, so I'll just list what's going on.

Restoring windows after minimizing them takes 2-3 seconds and causes CPU to max out, sound stutter, etc. Turns out it may be due to ATI's proprietary driver. I still don't know the relationship between X, Xorg, FGLRX, Gnome, etc.; so I don't fully understand half of the things people are saying out there to troubleshoot this. However, here is a recent forum thread related to the problem.

Gnome's interface completely locked up on me, conspicuously right after inserting disc 1 of Thief 1 Gold. I had Firefox up, but after minimizing that I could no longer do anything except move the mouse cursor around. I know enough to switch to a text terminal, but that's about it. I played around with Xorg, but couldn't figure out how to simply restart the dang thing. I ended up issuing sudo reboot, at least I didn't have to ...

... kill the bloody power after a kernel crash (caps-lock indicator flashing), as is what happened after trying to launch Thief 1 via WINE. Urgh, I give up! It looked like it might work, got to the menu and everything, but after the training level finished loading it hard-crashed and dumped a bunch of crap that I don't understand.

Wireless networking has caused me a lot of grief lately. At the company where I'm contracting they have hidden WiFi which the built-in networking applet simply could not handle. I found Wicd to be a useful network manager, but with problematic with unsecured wireless networks such as "Tully's 4Free WiFi". Therefore, I can either have wireless working in coffee shops or at my cubicle, but not both ... uh, nice? Here's a forum thread which seems related, but I couldn't get their suggested fixes to work for me.

Speaking more about internet access ... there is a physical "antenna switch" on my ThinkPad. The default Ubuntu network applet would correctly detect if I had it off during a boot and then switched it on, Wicd does not. I have no clue as to how to restart the kernel driver (if that's the issue), so the only workaround for me has been to reboot my machine.

This is a fresh installation of Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) from yesterday, and these are reasons why I can't recommend the operating system to non-nerds. All this said, I like a lot of Linux, but it's certainly not easy or effortless.

Classic Ubuntu Desktop Reboot

2009-04-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure what to call this, but here's the deal. I shut down my EEE 901 after switching to classic desktop using the little desktop-switcher utility (since moto4lin doesn't work in the netbook-remix GUI). About thirty minutes ago I finished getting ready for bed and curled up with this tiny laptop and waited like an idiot while only the desktop (and nothing else) loaded after booting up. Now, there's nothing in the Ubuntu help files for restoring the ... whatever you call it, thing to launch everything with task bar and such. So I floundered and finally got out of bed to go find my trusty USB key to boot a virgin 9.04 and figure it out. I had hoped there would simply be a rescue/repair option, but there wasn't. At least there wasn't one for this situation. I can't find the forum entry that helped me, and the "Live CD" doesn't keep any state, but basically just drop to a terminal (CTRL+ALT+F2 or F3 or whatever one is free) and run the following:

sudo rm -r /home/user/.gconf
sudo rm -r /home/user/.gconfd
sudo rm -r /home/user/.config

This will force Gnome to use defaults, so you might lose some superfluous desktop settings, and allow you to get back to good. Hope this helps save some of ya'all the frustration I went through. I know that I won't be shutting down from classic desktop mode again anytime soon!

Ubuntu and Verizon RAZR V3c

2009-04-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

PROBLEM SOLVING: Rather than merely bitch, because I'm currently undergoing a personal experiment to avoid complaining, I'm posing this as a problem to be solved. I've spent more time on it already than I care to admit, so I won't. Let's get started.

BACKSTORY: I bought a Verizon RAZR with a 2 year contract back in September 2007, thinking that such a popular phone would have widespread support for at least accessing its files. It turned out to be a V3c which Verizon had Motorola lock down to prevent users from using its capabilities for free. Had I known in advance, I would have probably avoided this carrier altogether out of principle. Through much struggle I finagled BitPim into giving me read/delete access to its filesystem under Windows XP. Recently I've been using Ubuntu and now with 9.04 Netbook Remix on my EEE 901 I've come to a point where BitPim is no longer working for me. I unlocked the phone to allow for other features to work, but even still my ThinkPad running the desktop version of Ubuntu can't seem to access the files. Seem editors work fine, but CDMA and P2K stuff fails. BlueTooth transfers, at least on Ubuntu, report a strange "obex" error saying the device is not capable of receiving/browsing files. Last night I tried Moto4Lin for the first time without any luck, so now I guess my next step is reading more of their wiki.

GOAL: On one hand I'd like to trash the phone and give Verizon the finger, but more practically my contract is up in September so if I can figure this out then I'll help others like me and give me some time to choose a new phone. I should note that I no longer have an XP machine, just Vista Business on my T400 (alternate boot), and I'll consider using that only as a last result. Ideally I'll be able to, at a minimum, read the files off the phone from within Ubuntu (and thus my EEE 901).

I'll update this post with more information as I have it. If you're reading this and it's been dead for a while then I have probably given up. Please email me or add a comment if you have suggestions.

Mark Venture's page indicated that the battery will tell you the actual model of your phone, here is what's written on mine:

SNN5794A             M7X719CHRCGM.JF
CELL ORIGIN JAPAN FINISHED IN CHINA
    MANUFACTURED BY MOTOROLA
       20070626    JFA2204
 MODEL:MOTV3CBATS A -| -| DC070626

And underneath ...

Model:V3m     Date Code: 2907
SW: NEWC_01.09.02

MOTOROLA
FC ID: IHDT56FT1 EE3      TTY
IC: 1090-FT1
Made in China

SJUG2147DK  G1  2973G1B2  ORVS

DEC: 05014907990 Model: V3m H/W 0

HEX:32E37A56  HNJ  0G17  G#7NKWJ

It appears I have a V3m, this whole time I thought I had the V3c. Knowing that, check out this inspiring gem from Mark's page:

Using Bluetooth OBEX File Transfers to copy files to/from the phone... No version of Verizon's V3M firmware supports this.

BitPim has support for V3m since August, but I can only get it to work in Windows. The log shows this (it may be of interest to note that my ThinkPad displays 4 /dev/ttyACM* from 0 to 4):

12:30:53.341 USB Comm Watch started 12:31:00.685 /dev/ttyACM0: Opening port /dev/ttyACM0, 115200 baud, timeout 3.000000, hardwareflow 0, softwareflow 0 12:31:00.701 /dev/ttyACM0: Open of comm port suceeded 12:31:00.702 Moto-V3m: Listing subdirs in dir: '' 12:31:00.702 Moto-V3m: X recurse=0 12:31:00.702 Failed to read filesystem 12:31:00.711 Moto-V3m: Listing files in dir: '' 12:31:00.711 Failed to read filesystem 12:31:10.877 Moto-V3m: Listing subdirs in dir: '' 12:31:10.877 Moto-V3m: X recurse=0 12:31:10.878 Failed to read filesystem 12:31:20.003 Moto-V3m: Getting Phone Info 12:31:20.004 Moto-V3m: Switching to modem 12:31:20.005 /dev/ttyACM0: Writing Data - 8 bytes 00000000 41 54 45 30 56 31 0d 0a ATE0V1.. 12:31:20.016 /dev/ttyACM0: Reading remaining data Data - 13 bytes 00000000 41 54 45 30 56 31 0d 0d 0a 4f 4b 0d 0a ATE0V1...OK.. 12:31:20.016 Moto-V3m: trying to switch from BREW mode 12:31:20.016 Moto-V3m: Switching from BREW to modem 12:31:26.086 Error: Device needs attention - Moto-V3m on /dev/ttyACM0 Moto-V3m on /dev/ttyACM0: The phone is not responding while transitioning mode from none to modem.

That's what happened when trying to view the FileSystem and then I clicked Phone Information.

Amazon MP3 on Ubuntu

2009-04-19T21:35:00.000-07:00

I had no idea what to expect when I tried to buy an MP3 album from Amazon while booted into Ubuntu. Shockingly pleasant it turned out: a mere button click to download their software as a package and another to install!

Ubuntu and WiFi

2009-04-17T10:10:00.001-07:00

Wireless works great on the broadcasting networks I've used Ubuntu with, but less so with hidden ones. One of the issues is how it encrypts the network key thereby making it difficult to determine if you made some mistake in entering it after having done so. The "show password" option becomes useless too since it appears to just be hexified encrypted data or a hash of some kind.

Currently I'm attempting to get my fully-updated Ubuntu 8.10 installation on an EEE 901 PC connecting to a hidden (not broadcasting the SSID) WiFi network using WPA-PSK for network authentication, TKIP for data encryption, and a text key ... at least that is how it's displayed and configured in Windows XP.

Part of the issue I'm having is confusion over the difference in configuration, is WPA Personal "WPA-PSK"? Does it automatically know to use TKIP or is that a setting elsewhere which I've unknowingly glossed over. I just did a reboot to see if that would fix my issue, but please post comments to help myself and/or other visitors if you have solutions.

Man, this is giving me a headache. I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix on my EEE 901 and couldn't get this wireless network to work (kept asking for the passphrase which I dutifully kept entering in to no avail). Then I hit cancel and suddenly it connected! Later I rebooted and got into that same painful loop. I wish I could see the raw information of what the router is saying, even better would be seeing what the router is seeing. I sorta think it has something to do with it passing the wrong password (the hash/encrypted crap perhaps) and then the router locking it out. Or perhaps it is not able to decrypt to the network secret because I'm entering that in when I should be entering the keyring password, etc. Very frustrating to say the least, Windows does this way better.

Here is a bug that describes my situation:

Bug #263963 in network-manager (Ubuntu): NetworkManager/wicd fail to authenticate to WPA Enterprise networks

EEE PC 901 Netbook

2009-04-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

These are just first impressions, written on the netbook itself in FireFox. The form factor is something to get used to, but it is also its greatest strength. They've managed to pack so much useful hardware into such a tiny chassis that you'd be hard-pressed to find someone grumpy enough to hate it. This is something I'll be tossing in my backpack to keep the Kindle company when I'm wandering around.

Typing is difficult. I just installed a patch which disables the touch pad while using the keyboard, but that's only part of the problem. I really need to train myself to accept the size and location of the keys. I've done it for other keyboard layouts and I think I can do it for this one. A big part of it is simply taking a leap of faith in that my fingers will hit the right keys. Still, it doesn't help when my palm glances the touch pad sending my cursor off willy nilly.

The software is ... interesting. Asus has partitioned the drive in such a way to keep the system separate from your user crap. This gives you about 14gb of user space with 4gb going to the system and you can chalk up the other 2gb (supposedly 20 total) to swap, overhead, and the fact that drive manufacturers have a different concept of kb/mb/gb than programmers. There's a serious issue in their logic, since the system part fills up completely after installing all the updates it downloads automatically. Seriously, I got to a point earlier in the day where I f'ed up the system and had to do a restore while trying to free up space.

More software problems revolve around the lackluster media performance. I'm sure the Atom processor and integrated graphics are well equipped to deal with a MP3 or YouTube video, but something gets lost along the way and both end up choppy at best. I tried loading some music into the Music Manager and then play it while browsing the web ... completely unacceptable. Every link I clicked or page that decided to load a Flash applet would cause the music to stop and stutter. I don't know why it allows me to launch multiple programs when it can only handle one at a time.

As if performance weren't enough of an issue, they bundled add-ons with FireFox to slow it down even more. These extensions and the theme given take up space in the small system partition I mentioned and aren't compatible with FireFox 3 anyway. So you have precious bytes being occupied by completely useless crap. I understand it's to allow for a very easy "factory refresh", but I'd like some ability to clean up the cruft when it's taking up important space.

Webcam really shines, handling weird lighting well even on a value-priced machine such as this. My ThinkPad T400's integrated webcam isn't nearly as good, strangely. Screen resolution is 1024x600 which is quite adequate for surfing.

Keys feel right, but the touchpad buttons are extremely stiff.

Chinese/English input causes issues, but I figured out how to uninstall that thankfully. Sorry, can't remember the command-line.

Their Update and Add/Remove application is rubbish compared to Debian/Ubuntu's. I'm already missing that nifty catalog where you can not only add, but find and most importantly remove. That's right, their Add/Remove thingy doesn't allow you to remove stuff you installed!

Overall I'm still excited to play with it, but the software has really begun to gnaw on me. I'm going to look into how well Ubuntu runs on these things, I'm not sure how much more I can take.

Vista Hard Drive Thrashing

2009-04-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

Why ... why is my HD access LED lit up like a decorative bulb for Christmas? Always this happens when I boot up to the desktop, before I even start anything. It happens regardless of whether I'm on battery or not. Right now I can almost hear the power draining from the massive 9-cell on the back.

I really need to get a SSD it seems.

Kindle 2 Wishlist

2009-03-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

These are in no particular order ...

GPS: The original Kindle had a faux-GPS system allowing you to triangulate your current position and find it in Google Maps simply by pressing ALT+M. That keyboard short-cut no longer works and I've yet to find anyone who's figured out what to do in version two. Additionally, I've read rumors about this model containing a true GPS chip, which makes hopefully of a firmware update to unlock more potential.

MP3 Store: While being Amazon's product and having an experimental MP3 player, there is no way I've found to buy music from their MP3 store using the device alone. It seems like a logical, instant-profit feature to add which would be useful when I'm out and about and suddenly think of a song I want. Since all the files can be accessed via USB, you can copy them off to your computer from there too.

Faster Typing: Characters show up slowly and individually as you press keys, bottlenecked by the refresh rate on the display. However, and I wrote them with this suggestion, a simple fix would be to stop wait for typing to finish if the input buffer length reaches a certain threshold. Thus when typing a long comment (or email), it would simply appear when you're finished. Also, further improvements in the electronic-ink technology will make this problem disappear over time.

Ubuntu: XViD Pain

2009-03-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Overnight I downloaded an AVI using XViD for video and MP3 for audio hoping to watch it my favorite coffee shop this morning where there is no WiFi. A simple pleasure not to be. Firstly, both codecs are restricted and this being a fresh installation on a shiny new old-man-laptop (ThinkPad T400), they could not be played. Instead I read a fantastic post on the state of SSD's found via Hacker News and then trekked over to Tully's for free wireless internet access.

This is where it gets bad ...

First, I booted into Ubuntu rather than Vista because it takes less time and my hard drive stops thrashing after a few seconds versus a few minutes (at which point it falls back to a dull thrumming). Unfortunately while the desktop arrived as promised, the network connection did not. I watched the cute little pair of dots court each other endlessly with one a succulent green and the other flashing like a busted traffic light, both caught in a swirl of endless progress metering. Then it would stop, they'd both go gray, and start again, the mating ritual of dots that never ends. I had seen this before and I knew what to do ... reboot!

Once in Vista I ... wait a sec, hard drive is still grinding. I ... stilllll going. I, oh for frick's sake what the crap are you hammering on about? Okay, anyway, as I was saying. At least it immediately jumped onto the WiFi I'd accessed before and a quick trip through sluggish ol' IE7 gave me unwanted work email and the confidence of connecting once again in Linux. Thus I rebooted.

This time I had no issues and quickly selected the restricted GStreamer packages suggested by Totem Movie Player. After that I had a lot of time to wait since their servers are extremely slow. Seriously, can I pay someone a fee for faster updates? I'd totally be willing to do that.

After installation finished the video proceeded to play immediately, though by that time it was in the background whilst I browsed with FireFox. Switching over to it, I found it to be flickering as if every other frame it redrew the stuff behind the video window and then a new video frame. Completely devastated I contemplated diving back into Windows and downloading VLC, but decided instead to stick it out and look for help on the forums.

In addition to the following suggestion I also changed the sound output to ALSA.

SOLUTION 1
1. Hit Alt+F2
2. Type: gstreamer-properties
3. Click the 'Video' tab
4. Set the output to "X Window System (No Xv)"

Immediately I noticed a difference. The video became watchable though with noticeable tearing and periodic choppiness and the sound was massively out of sync. I don't know if streams are muxed in AVI files, but it seems (my hypothesis at least) to be an issue with it containing independent streams that the software is free to screw up whereas MPG multiplexes the video and audio together which has the nice side-effect of audio generally staying in sync if it was encoded correctly. Anyway, I closed and re-opened Totem and that fixed that.

Tearing is something I know I could fix by turning on a vertical refresh sync if I find it. The choppiness, however, appears to be indicative of a larger issue with performance in general. My notebook machine has a fair dual-core processor and plenty of RAM yet the system monitor showed usage at 50% on both cores while playing. That makes me think that the underlying software is not designed to take advantage of multiple threads/cores/processors considering the usage of both cores added together would be 100%. I didn't dare watch the video in full-screen, fearing it would throw the sounds off again. Also, the sound itself sounded too bassy, and I couldn't find any options (in a very brief search) to remix the audio dynamically to raise the treble.

All in all, the experience was less than ideal, I'm just happy I was able to watch the whole thing. These problems feel like they should have been solved, or they are and we just don't see them. Also, I wish more people seeded content as H.264 wrapped in MP4 (because I'm that lazy). In fact if networks want me buying digital copies, that would help sway me.

Ubuntu: Map Network Drive

2009-03-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

Unix systems have no concept of drives like DOS/Windows; instead everything is mounted to folder paths with certain base folders having special meanings. Accessing a network share in Windows is fairly straight-forward, then there's the ability to map it to a drive, and saving files to it from any application using the standard dialogs is a snap. Ubuntu, unfortunately, things are not so simple ...

You can certainly access a share, but as far as I can tell you can't just open a UNC (\\server\share) path; when in Windows I just hit START+RUN and then type the path. Without having to provide your machine credentials again, you can access a share via Places > Connect to Server.... It seems to create some kind of folder linkage but if you look at the path in Nautilus, it's a crazy Samba (SMB) location using some kind of hash code ... an impossible thing to type in anywhere.

Being in a GUI we shouldn't have to type in that weird location though, right? Well attempting to save a link/picture in FireFox brings up the standard save-file dialog and none of the network shares show up there. So it's tremendously inconvenient to save off stuff to my NAS!

Even in Windows we get tired of typing UNC paths and some programs simply won't operate correctly without a drive-based path. So what you'll do is "map a network drive" which links a particular share to a drive letter in Windows. Unix and Linux have all kinds of capabilities to map various devices and protocols to file system folders, so I thought this would be a snap. Oh no, not so. Firstly there doesn't seem to be any GUI-based tool built into Ubuntu for this and the command-line instructions I've found all require you to use sudo or run as root!

W ... T ... F ...

I don't want to mount it permanently, just temporarily and for my current user. Apparently it is done through the kernel which is why it requires root privileges. Crappy

Ubuntu: Eject Kindle

2009-03-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

When plugging your Kindle into your computer via USB, it shows up as a drive and shuts down the device's operating system. The screen will tell you to "eject" the Kindle from your computer in order to use it and charge the battery through the USB cable. Thus it can either act as an external drive or be usable/charging, but not both. In Windows there is the simple tray option which allows you to "Safely Remove Hardware", satisfying the "ejection".

On Ubuntu it's not so simple. Clicking the little eject-looking icon in Nautilus (file browser) just dismounts the drive mapping, it doesn't actually eject the hardware (e.g. switch it to powered-only). To do this you'll have to drop down to the terminal and run the eject command:

sudo eject Kindle

If you've renamed it then the last argument may be something different. In order to find exactly where your device is mapped to run sudo fdisk -l, output is something like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcccdcccd

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          26      204800    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              26        4182    33385472    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3            4183       11522    58958550    5  Extended
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4           11523       12161     5125680   12  Compaq diagnostics
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5            4183        8031    30905280   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           11218       11522     2449881   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7            8031       11217    25598128+   b  W95 FAT32

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 1598 MB, 1598119936 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 48770 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       48770     1560632    b  W95 FAT32

The Kindle's file system is FAT32 and I can tell from this that it is on /dev/sdb1 meaning I can also pass that to eject:

sudo eject /dev/sdb1

Hope this helps!

Convert LIT to PRC for Kindle

2009-03-02T20:35:00.001-08:00

Amazon's electronic-ink reader is catching fire, har har, but a lot of ebooks out there still using other formats like LIT by Microsoft. For example, I have a bunch of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books on my shelf but I can't seem to find Kindle-friendly digital copies. Here's a free way method to get to reading some LIT files on the Kindle after converting them.

Download ConvertLIT and extract its ZIP contents into the same directory as your LIT file(s). Thus you should end up with clit.exe (yes, ha ha, funny), LitConverter.exe, and some other files.
Next you'll need to explode the LIT file, e.g. extract its contents. It's basically a container, like a ZIP archive, which contains multiple files within it. I like to use the command-line to do this so here's those instructions:
1. Open a command prompt.
2. Change to the directory with the LIT file.
3. Enter: clit.exe filename.lit exploded/
You'll end up with a directory (named exploded if you followed the instructions above) full of HTML, images, and importantly an OPF file (an Open eBook Package File).
Install Mobipocket Creator, a utility for creating PRC files.

Double-click the OPF file in the exploded directory (or whatever name you chose); this will launch Mobipocket Creator. Chances are everything is in basically the right order so at this point all you need to do is click Build and you're done!
Lastly, plug your Kindle into your computer and copy the PRC (it will have the same base name as the OPF) you created into its documents directory.

Hopefully the number of steps will go down as better utilities come out!

Naughty Nautilus

2009-03-02T14:21:00.001-08:00

Nautilus is to Ubuntu what Explorer is to Windows: the main interface to your files locally and over the network. Unfortunately, Nautilus has some deep-seated issues centering around its FTP support which are bugging the crap out of me. When I open my FTP bookmark, it takes a bit before it shows up. No biggie. Then if I type in a path in press enter, it crashes (depending on the path). If I navigate to the folder I want, drag some files over there, and then tell it to skip ones that exist: it crashes (most of the time). Sometimes it just crashes when I'm doing things so simple that I don't remember the repro-procedure. It's ridiculous! When it does this, it just disappears without a trace and I'm left wondering what it accomplished before its magician's trick.

Doing a Google search for "nautilus crash" versus "explorer crash" yields 486,000 results versus 473,000. How disappointing!

To be fair, Windows Explorer does a horrific job with FTP (and ftp.exe doesn't even support passive mode), but I expected more from Linux.

Your B Log Slap Source

2009-02-26T12:27:00.001-08:00

When parking pages try to be clever ...

Ubuntu: "start" a Folder

2009-02-24T11:25:00.000-08:00

Within the Windows command console (cmd) you can open the directory you're in using start.exe plus the path or . for the current directory. Under stock Ubuntu, which runs Gnome, the equivalent command is nautilus. The start command in *nix is for their job system.

Satellite Pro M15-S405 BSOD

2009-01-24T12:12:00.001-08:00

I can't get XP Home installed on this ol' Toshiba Satellite Pro M15-S405, because of a near infinite amount of blue screens of death. A fresh install from a SP2 CD works fine, but the moment I try to put ANY drivers on it, that's when it seems to freak out. Anyway, I'm going to try and figure this out as best I can before (probably) giving up. Here's what the first blue screen shows when I tried to put the wifi driver on it (Intel(R) PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 WiFi Driver with Cisco/WPA Support for Win2K (v1.6.0.46; 11-11-2003; 1M)):

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps: Check to make sure any new hardware or software is properly installed. If this is a new installation, ask your hardware or software manufacturer for any Windows Updates you might need. If problems continue, disable or remove any newly installed hardware or software. Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use Safe Mode to remove or disable components, restart your computer, press F8 to select Advanced Startup Options, and then select Safe Mode. Technical information: *** STOP: 0x000000D1 (0xF79675D4, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0xF64A6069) *** w70n51.sys - Address F64A6069 base at F648A000, DateStamp 3f8511f7 Beginning dump of physical memory Physical memory dump complete. Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further assistance.

Ha! Can you imagine me trying to pursue Toshiba and Intel for fixes to a decade-old operating system on a half-decade-old laptop? Anyway, if the wireless card drivers are at fault, it may make it difficult for me to actually install anything else (like SP3).

Turns out it is specifically that wireless driver and a lot of others have had the same problem. What you need to do is uninstall that driver, disable the device if possible, and install Intel's latest one. That appears to have fixed the issue for this ol' lappy!

Blogger kills Internet Explorer 8.0.7000 (BETA)

2009-01-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

Alright, it's beta. Fine. I'm still a bit torked that I lost a paragraph of a new blog entry I had started about how Windows 7 "seemed alright to me". Here's how to crash IE 8 in build 7000 of Windows 7 (e.g. BETA).

Highlight any text.
Click the "insert link" icon in Blogger.

Voila! Happens to me every time. All settings are still at whatever their defaults were from installation.

World of Goo (Wii Version)

2009-01-19T13:08:00.001-08:00

I've been unable to really enjoy World of Goo, despite the initial attraction, due to the pointer vanishing unexpectedly on my Wii. Once the cursor disappears the only recourse is a restart. It has happened randomly and this last time it occurred while I had friends over and it didn't do much towards convincing them the game is cool. I have no inclination to try it anymore when any progress I make might disappear with the Wii Remote pointer at any time.

Ubuntu: World of Warcraft

2009-01-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

It is possible to get World of Warcraft running on Ubuntu 8.10, but you may experience some strange issues as I am right now. This post will serve as my research and knowledge base on the subject.

Install method:

Install Wine from "Applications > Add/Remove ...".
Copy an existing installation directory from C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\ on my Windows partition to C:\WoW on Wine's C drive.
Deleted the Cache folder.
Opened C:\WoW\WTF\Config.wtf with gedit, "Applications > Accessories > Text Editor", and added the following lines:
SET gxApi "opengl" SET ffxDeath "0" SET ffxGlow "0" SET M2UseShaders "0"

Issues:

Text disappears after a few seconds of play. No text shows up anywhere: menu's, chat, icon overlays (e.g. the number of items in a stack), etc. I'm using the open source driver, not the proprietary one because the latter would prevent my system from successfully returning from suspend, which might be an issue. One person found that this was caused by the mini-map loading which meshes with when the text disappears. As soon as I see the mini-map load, it turns white and that's when the text goes away. His solution of just closing the mini-map using the default UI doesn't work for me, but someone else has made an extension which prevents it from loading that I'll try.
Icons corrupt or missing. All the little inventory and spell icons are messed up in some way, with the severity variable. It looks like someone has drawn yellow lines over everything in my backpack. No idea how to fix this yet.
Textures missing/invisible. I can see through parts of my character which makes me think that the textures aren't loading and thus you can see through whatever they're supposed to be applied to. This doesn't bother me so much.
Polygon stretching and anomalies. It looks like points of the model are being pulled by some divine force causing some interesting 3D artifacts. Minor issue, not concerned about fixing.

References:

Ubuntu Community Documentation for WorldofWarcraft
No text in WoW from Ubuntu Forms; thread started July 13th, 2008.

Ubuntu: Windows Fonts

2009-01-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

I wrote a document in OpenOffice and saved it as a Word 97 "DOC" file. While typing it out, I found a lot of fonts missing that I've become accustomed to, specifically Courier New which I tend to favor for monospacing due to its perceived ubiquity. Unfortunately the closest I found was "Courier 10 Pitch" which did not load correctly in Word 2007. Not only did it turn into some nasty variable-width font, but all the slashes (back and forward) became some other character. After a short bit of digging, I found out how to get the Windows fonts you're used to on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

I wonder if this fixes the small-font rendering problem I had on some websites?

Ubuntu: Music Player

2009-01-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, but the Music Player bundled with Ubuntu (Rhythmbox) gives a terrible first impression. Inevitably you try to play a file for which the audio codec is not installed (MP3 or WMA) and are met with a friendly "(null)" message.

The bundled Movie Player (Totem), on the other hand, will not only tell you that the codec is not installed but it will go get it for you! Of course now it keeps loading up my songs into the playlist in reverse order and I can't figure out how to sort them properly. When I search the help, it literally comes up with no results.

Ubuntu: Change "Date Modified"

2009-01-02T17:53:00.000-08:00

The picture and video files I get off my RAZR V3c using BitPim have their "Date Modified" value set to zero which results in many applications screwing up. On Windows I wrote a little .NET utility to fix this based on the file name. Now on Ubuntu I'm looking to do the same thing with a shell script, or possibly with Mono. Once I'm finished I'll post the results here, but if anyone else has found something to do this (and you happen to be here), please leave a comment.

Visual Studio User Files

2009-01-02T11:20:00.001-08:00

It's great Visual Studio no longer keeps debug settings as part of the main solution or project file, but it's annoying that they're completely local and can't be checked in. Rather than just having a "user" extension, why not put the user name in there as well? That way people can keep their settings checked in, useful if they're switching between computers, and perhaps other data could be stored there as well.

Picasa on Ubuntu

2008-12-30T09:53:00.001-08:00

On Windows I just use the Picasa ActiveX control for uploading whole folders of photos, which is one of the few reasons I ever launch Internet Explorer anymore. In Ubuntu there is no such luck so I decided to install the Picasa desktop application. It works just fine, but by golly why do they have to try so hard to make it look like Windows? And not even Windows XP, but old-school Windows 2000/95/etc. And it seems to use its own internal font rendering for the UI which is blurry and looks really odd compared to the stark menu fonts.

All in all it is perfectly usable but ugly as sin, which strikes me as odd for a simple photo organization application. I wonder if they used some canned conversion program to make it run in Linux.

Ubuntu: WINDOWS Key

2008-12-30T09:41:00.001-08:00

The Windows Key in Windows is used as both a modifier and a key code depending on whether you tap it or hold it and press another key. This is lost in Ubuntu which only sees it as a key code and thus can only be bound once and I use it for two things:

WINDOWS+R to launch the Run dialog.
WINDOWS to launch the Start Menu.

Ubuntu calls this key the "Super" key and after setting it to launch the Applications menu, trying to set it to open the run dialogue resulted in an error.

Now I'm stuck trying to memorize ALT+F2 for launching the Run dialog in Ubuntu.

P.S. - I find it strange this key would be called SUPER (WINDOWS == SUPER?)

UPDATE (2009-01-02): Discovered I also rely heavily on WINDOWS+L to lock my workstation which is now CTRL+ALT+L.

Ubuntu: Fonts

2008-12-30T09:28:00.001-08:00

This is the first post on what might probably become an ongoing series. In a nutshell I put Ubuntu on my main computer/laptop (my precious ThinkPad T60p) and being a noob there are a great many things still confusing to me.

My biggest prior complaint from my last attempt involved font rendering. Besides a generally amateurish feel, the spacing between letters of smaller fonts got screwy. Unfortunately that particular issue is still a problem, especially considering how many web pages still insist on using sizes of ten point or less (bleck). However, for most of the rest of the operating system you can turn on Subpixel Smoothing under the Fonts tab in System > Preferences > Appearance. I can't tell you how much of a difference this made, especially on my older Toshiba M15 which runs at a resolution of 1024x768. Now I have to admit that text typically looks better than Windows XP!

Still, I don't know if the spacing between letters is a problem related to FireFox, the FOSS font types, or the underlying rendering system. Unfortunately or fortunately I can't find the pages which really show-cased this irritant, so it'll have to wait for an update.

WTF is Windows DOING

2008-12-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

It's a testament to the stability of Windows XP and the lack of crapware that came with my IBM ThinkPad that I have never re-installed the operating system on it; and I purchased it mid-summer in 2006. Seriously, wow, think on that for a moment. All my other computers I've installed XP multiple times, it's a difficult-to-break habit and an easy fix to the myriad of problems which can occur. However, now I am considering a full wipe of my T60p, because there's a lot of processes doing stuff and half the time I don't know what they are or doing.

Since I recently got a virus for doing nothing out of the ordinary, I'm a bit paranoid that perhaps my laptop is also infected. This has driven me to re-install AVG and I'm currently running a full system scan (which won't find anything cleverly hidden, since I'm not in Safe Mode).

Both of these processes seem to go nuts on files when my laptop comes back from Standby:

wuauclt.exe (Windows Update) accessing C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb
svchost.exe (some service) accessing C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\OBJECTS.DATA and C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\INDEX.BTR

I'm posting this before doing any kind of investigative work and I turned off Automatic Updates for the time being to see if that helps.

Apple makes Microsoft Retarded

2008-10-30T18:44:00.001-07:00

The error:

---------------------------
Service Pack 3 Setup Error
---------------------------
There is not enough disk space on C:\WINDOWS\$NtServicePackUninstall$ to install Service Pack 3. Setup requires a minimum of 4 additional megabytes of free space or if you also want to archive the files for uninstallation, Setup requires 4 additional megabytes of free space. Free additional space on your hard disk and then try again.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

The reason:

Error message when you try to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 on some Intel processor-based Apple computers: "Out of Disk Space

This problem occurs because a critical registry key (BootDir) is missing. This registry key is not created when Windows XP SP2 is installed by using Boot Camp on the Apple computers that are listed in the “Symptoms” section.

Nice, really f'ing nice. So now I have to figure out how to get back into OS X to install a new version of Bootcamp? Super lame. Until then the SP3 install just retardedly reports insufficient space.

Word Up, OpenOffice Down

2008-09-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

Coming from a WordPerfect background, Microsoft Word never did much for me. I missed being able to view the tags (and this was before the web really took off) and blow away the little things which screwed up your document. However, Word wasn't bad and eventually everyone was using it because of that and its dominance. Now the office software market is bulging with free solutions, but after spending the last two days constructing a résumé I wish I had just installed my old copy of Office XP.

Google Docs is great for hacking out documents and spreadsheets, but have you ever tried exporting from it? Boy howdy, it don't work too well. You can get it looking just peachy in their web-based editor and then it will crap out a Word DOC which looks like a bomb exploded, pushing everything up and down and all around.

Oh well. After getting the content the way I wanted it, I installed OpenOffice. What a horrifying user experience. I should spend some time enumerating all the problems I encountered and how little the help system actually provided any assistance, but I'm just too exhausted from it. The biggest suck about OpenOffice is picture management. I simply wanted a picture in the background behind all the text. While I got that working, afterwards I couldn't point to anything except the damn picture with the mouse. I finally just pushed the picture up into a corner so I could get to most things. What a crock. Then their exporter for Word Doc's created one where the picture had none of the attributes I applied (brightness/contrast) and for some reason the last line of my resume got pushed to a second page. What the friggin' crap?

Finally, I will say their PDF export worked rather well and I ended up with something that looks about right. I'm gonna go to Staples and see how well it prints. Then when I get home, I'm going to dig up Office XP and install it straight-away.

P.S. - No I didn't try AbiWord because of past problems with it.

P versus CENTER amongst DIV

2008-09-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

Since when did the <CENTER> tag become taboo? The problem with using it or <P> is that starting one cancels out the other, and I don't mean pushing/popping the stack. I mean when you open one, the CSS styling from the other is completely thrown out, and afterward it is not restored. They are mutually exclusive and cannot be nested in one another. In a twisted way it makes sense, but in a sensible way it's completely twisted. The prolific <DIV> can contain one of its own or <P> or <CENTER>, and it doesn't get messed up at all when one of those tags end within it. The CSS stack is simply popped and things go on as normal.

Is this intentional? It's annoying how much HTML is being pushed behind generic tags which can only be disambiguated by class or id attributes. The code becomes more and more difficult to read and manage without more sophisticated editors and all those close/cancel tags blend together. How often have you seen something like "</div> </div> </div> </div> </div>" these days?

S3 Virtual Hosting: Fail

2008-09-01T12:18:00.000-07:00

I'm very satisfied with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) after having relied on it for over a year for personal documents using JungleDisk. So much so that I mentally made the decision to migrate my Neil Stuff website to it, utilizing its Virtual Hosting feature. Basically you name a bucket the exact same as the host (e.g. "www.neilstuff.com"), set the host record in DNS as a CNAME pointed to s3.amazon.com, and voila! Any requests will then be translated as GET's against objects in that bucket.

Unfortunately, it's not all roses ... there's no concept of a default document, also known as a root key. You know the names: index.html, default.html, etc. So if you point your domain to S3 as explained above, requests to http://www.neilstuff.com/ will be translated to a S3 LIST command on the bucket, returning XML or an error if access is denied. Yikes; not exactly user friendly.

Le sigh ...

First WordPress and now this. I don't expect things to be perfect, but what's with all the show-stoppers?

WordPress Still Lacking

2008-08-28T20:51:00.001-07:00

While playing around around with WordPress today, I decided it was not only time to give it a real try, but that it might actually be paying $10 for the domain mapping. However after a few hours of sincerely making a go of porting one of my sites, I am backing out and here to tell you why.

First, a disclaimer: WordPress might work fine for you and your website(s). It tends to look great and their hosting capabilities are many servers strong. If you're already using it, and like it, then why are you hear reading about my rant? Go away and enjoy what you enjoy. Now for the rest of you on the fence, possibly in a similar position, let me list out the things that drove me away.

1. No ads, no AdSense, and even no affiliate links.

Here's the straw that broke the camel's back. I was pressing forward despite other problems being encountered, but this is what stopped me. I am not out to soil the interweb with crappy pages, and not allowing ads or AdSense mildly appealed to my sensibility, but automatically removing simple affiliate links while rendering with no error message in the editor is just ... ugh ... just annoying.

I didn't see affiliate links or advertising mentioned in their Terms of Service, but they have a separate page detailing what sites are acceptable, but it seems a pretty large gray area.

2. Poor URL Customization

A www prefix on the domain is automatically removed. That's fine if you started out that way, but otherwise all of your links are going to be broken or they'll have to redirect. Additionally post slugs are assumed to be path components and work with or without a trailing slash, however it also means you can't have a page URL which ends with ".html". Again this is fine if you're just beginning a site, but what about trying to migrate existing pages and keeping the dang URL's the same? Finally on the same topic, you can't change the slug format of posts or category pages, so I'm really curious as to how their Blogger import works. I'm guessing that all the links break ... again. All of this functionality is merely masked, because I know it's in the code you can install on your own servers.

3. 3gb of Photo/PDF only Space

I don't know why they push the three gigabytes of storage when it only allows for pictures and PDF's. When you click to "Add Sound", it asks for a URL or you can upload a picture. When you click to "Add Movie", it asks for a URL or you can upload a picture. Hello, are these buttons mislabeled? It completely confused me the first time, I kept thinking I had clicked "Add Picture". The uploader also makes all names lower-case which is another migration irritant.

4. No Domain Transfers

Thankfully I didn't transfer in, but I did look for the functionality and came up empty. It makes me wonder if you can transfer out either, or if your domain is simply stuck.

5. IE Compatibility

Not to be elitist but Internet Explorer is not my primary web browser; it is however for a great many people. I had this same issue with some Blogger templates, whereby list bullets would not show up. This is definitely a low-end item, but still an irritant (pages don't look the same between browsers).

YouTube: Video No Longer Available

2008-08-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Today my girlfriend asked if I had removed my Birthday Bowling video from YouTube because the page said it was unavailable.

"We're sorry, this video is no longer available."
Of course I hadn't removed it, there were no emails or YouTube messages for me about having it removed for any reason (copyright, terms violation, etc.), and the "Edit Videos" page still reported its status as "Live!".

After fumbling through their clumsy help pages, vainly trying to find an official admittance of the problem and possibly a cure, I came upon the forum thread Not able to play a video? What's your error message?. Of course I couldn't log in for some weird reason to do with having both a Google account and YouTube account, but neither being one in the same, but I did read the tales of many users with my same issue and found a solution (the easiest being to add &fmt=18 to the URL).

Apparently YouTube's somewhat new "View in Hi-Quality" option is at the root of this evil. If you view the hi-quality version of a video with this problem, it will probably work (again, try adding &fmt=18 to the URL), because the default/dial-up-friendly standard quality copy is what has crapped out. One other solution is to upload your files using settings which will prevent them from being additionally available in high quality; e.g. low resolution, not MPEG-4, etc.

However, if you encounter this message for all videos on YouTube, it means you're trying to view them from an IP block which has been ... uh, blocked. In this case you'll need to use a proxy.

Canon (CanoScan) LiDE 60 - WIA Driver Problems

2008-07-04T14:44:00.001-07:00

I finally got my three year old (or more) scanner to work with the WIA drivers. Perhaps you've also had problems, so I'm writing this post to help people with the same issue as me. Basically the only way I could get this CanoScan LiDE 60 scanner to work was through the TWAIN drivers and usually consented to suffer through using the annoying and bloated CanoScan "Toolbox" software you can get from Canon. Since I did all this on my desktop which I recently decommissioned in favor of focusing my computer time on my laptop, I had the chance to set everything up all over again. What fun!

Unfortunately, at first, the WIA driver didn't work - again. It appears I already had the TWAIN version installed and checking out the readme.txt led me to the root of the problem (user error):

The Canon Scanner WIA Driver and ScanGear CS (TWAIN driver) cannot be present (installed) on the same system for the same scanner at the same time.

Of course uninstalling drivers on Windows doesn't really do anything, so after running their own driver removal software I was able to start fresh with the WIA version and get it working flawlessly!

Emailing Executables

2008-05-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

One casualty in the ongoing fight against spam is attaching any sort of executable to a message. Rather than scanning to see if a virus is contained within, many providers take a more aggressive approach and simply prevent you from sending any program file. This always irritated the crap out of me when I used in Microsoft Outlook in a corporate programming environment where you always needed a quick way to send someone something. We got around it by instant messaging and network shares, but it was still annoying.

The way I've always preferred to get around the issue is by zipping the file(s) into an archive and sending that. Imagine my surprised chagrin today when this failed me in Gmail!

Error: anim.zip contains an executable file. For security reasons, Gmail does not allow you to send this type of file.
I guess we're back to the alternate method of changing the extension? Or perhaps zip it and then change the extension in case it looks for signs of COFF.

Run.com - Invalid Host

2008-05-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for this to go away so I could create a custom route, but since it hasn't I'm going to shame them forever!

Yaaarrrrgggg!

Compatible with iPhone

2008-05-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

Packaging has gone below the curve of the average consumer to complete dumb shits; check out the helpful notes on these headphones (which yes, I did end up buying for $9.50 at Target).

Not only are these Sony stereo headphones "ideal for music listening", but they're also "compatible with iPhone"! Who knew!? I mean, they're only using the standard stereo jack you see everywhere. If you actually needed to see that sticker before buying a pair of headphones for your precious Apple device, I think you might also consider checking into a retirement home early.

SPAN versus B

2008-05-03T11:35:00.001-07:00

One reason I rarely use the RTE in Blogger is how it represents the standard textual styling techniques bold, italics, and even underline. Rather than using the tiny and specific tags built for the express purpose of whatever effect is being sought, it creates <span>'s!

Consider these two blocks of rich text:

Hello world.

Hello world.

Now look at the HTML behind each:

<span style="font-weight: bold;">Hello</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">world</span> <b>Hello</b> <i>world</i>.

Instances like these make me think such "pure" CSS has taken things too far. Nearly everything is being relegated to the style attribute or placed within a class even when all you want is a simple bold or italic effect.

Old man Neil complains again! Sorry, I just had to voice something about this, it's been bugging me for a while. I do realize this is probably the easier route when programming a rich text editor, since you can combine effects simply by adding to an attribute rather than adding new elements. I'm not too fond of the excuse though either.

Also when writing this I discovered I couldn't put the greater-than (>), less-than (<) signs in the title because Blogger doesn't escape them properly. Instead of seeing "<span> versus <i>, <b>" I see " versus ,". Also note these are still not automatically escaped properly in the RTE Compose tab either; a bug I noted years ago.

Microsoft Script Debugger Locks Up

2008-04-26T15:35:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Script Debugger, a lightweight tool from years past when NT4 was "mainstream", is no longer working correctly for me. Everything is fine up until the point I do anything with the Command Window. I can even fire it up without attaching to a process, type "hello" in there, press enter, and BAM it freezes up...

This little debugger has been a simple friend for many years and having this problem on top of it being deprecated by Microsoft is quite sad. My alternative, Visual Studio Express, is a huge sprawling mess of software that went crappy in 2008 when it was actually quite lightweight itself in the 2005 version. I even have Visual Studio 2008 Web Express (that's a mouthful!) installed and it won't debug any scripts that aren't web pages.

Gawd frickin' dammit. It's time for my old pal the trace() statement.

Internet Explorer: Operation Aborted

2008-04-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

Just today Internet Explorer began giving me this weird error off and on when I would try and check my Gmail:

Windows Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://mail.google.com/mail/.
Operation aborted

Now it has been a while since this laptop was rebooted, but seriously what the heck is going on here? I just don't think IE likes me anymore, because it knows I've been cavorting with FireFox.

Other oddness has been happening when viewing the root page of a local Drupal instance running off of OwebPHP, it seems to think the site isn't returning anything, but it is! Using WinHttp in a little craplet or, again, viewing with FireFox works fine. Very strange and annoying.

iPass has iProblems with T-Mobile

2008-04-04T15:45:00.000-07:00

Selecting "Help Topics" under "Help" on the iPass application actually crashes it. Oh wait, there it goes ...

iPassConnect

Please contact your helpdesk.

[OK]

Very helpful indeed!

Similarly the "Technical Support" option looks like so:

Technical Support

For technical support,
please contact your helpdesk.

[OK]

No help files at all? That doesn't help me when I provide my own "help desk", or am I supposed to contact Lenovo about a third-party program they obviously won't support? What a crock of crap.

I simply want to know why I can't get it to work at any T-Mobile Hotspot I've been to. What I get is:

Disconnected

Failed to associated with tmobile

Associating to tmobile
Connecting to iPass-enabled Access Point
Retrying connection attempt (2/2)
Associating to tmobile
Connecting to iPass-enabled Access Point
Failed to associate with tmobile
Disconnected (-105)

Quite helpful, huh? Almost self-explanatory! Is there a deal that fell through somewhere, is T-Mobile being a dick, or is iPass the jackass? Who knows? I can't get online from here, so obviously I can't check to see what the -105 [presumably error code] means.

Selecting about on the help information on this client doesn't give me much hope:

iPassConnect
Version 3.5.0 [Build 153 July 26, 06]

Profile 33265 Phonebook 22395

Copyright © 1996-2006

Powered by Meetinghouse

cdma2000® is a registered certification mark of the Telecommunications Industry Association. Used under license.

So this software is almost 2 years old, are the deals that old too?

I'm assuming iPassConnect has some issue with my laptop's wireless, though it frustrates me to think this when I got it through options in Lenovo's ThinkVantage software, specifically the Access Connections software. Anyway, I tried at a few more Starbucks with no luck and in order to possibly trouble-shoot the issue I'd like to lay down some log files I cleared and then copied from C:\Program Files\iPass\iPassConnect\log (download ipass-tmobile-logs.zip which contains all this stuff):

connection.log

CreateThisProcess() Failed with error=The system cannot find the file specified.

CreateProcessAsUser() Failed with error=The system cannot find the file specified.

CreateProcessAsUser() Failed with error=The system cannot find the file specified.

*******************
iPassConnect 3.50 [Build 153]
WINXP 5.1.2600 Service Pack 25.1.2600 [Service Pack 2]

Engine.log

[04/05/2008 10:19:47.109] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:19:47.109] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::SetAuthenticationMode: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:19:47.187] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:19:56.031] ERROR GUI CiPassDirectory::Get8021XPOPByMediaTypeAndPopType:Query:
[04/05/2008 10:20:04.156] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:20:04.156] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::SetAuthenticationMode: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:20:04.203] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:20:21.343] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:20:21.343] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::SetAuthenticationMode: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:20:21.609] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:20:23.187] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::UnRegisterNotificationHandler:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:20:23.421] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::RestoreWzc, failed to find adapter name
[04/05/2008 10:20:23.421] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::RestoreWzc, failed to find adapter name
[04/05/2008 10:20:23.437] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::RestoreWzc, failed to find adapter name
[04/05/2008 10:21:58.500] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::RestoreWzc, failed to find adapter name
[04/05/2008 10:21:58.562] ERROR GUI CiPassDirectory::Get8021XPOPByMediaTypeAndPopType:Query:
[04/05/2008 10:21:59.234] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:21:59.234] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::CheckAssociation PortHandleByname failed
[04/05/2008 10:22:00.812] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::RegisterNotificationHandler:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:22:00.843] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::RestoreWzc, failed to find adapter name
[04/05/2008 10:22:06.640] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:22:07.187] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:22:24.015] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:22:30.187] ERROR GUI CiPassDirectory::Get8021XPOPByMediaTypeAndPopType:Query:
[04/05/2008 10:22:41.109] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:22:45.750] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:22:58.140] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:23:05.968] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:05.968] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::Disassociate: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:06.187] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:06.187] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::Associate: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:06.187] ERROR ENG CiPassSmartConnect::SetWIFINetwork Exiting - failed to associate to tmobile
[04/05/2008 10:23:06.187] ERROR ENG CiPassAuthentication::SetWIFINetwork: Exiting - IPASS_STATE_INFO, IPASS_INFO_NETWORK_ASSOCIATION_FAILURE errCode:137 SQMErr:-105
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.187] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.187] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::GetSsid: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.187] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.187] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::GetSignalStrength: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.187] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.187] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::GetAPMacAddress PortHandleByname failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.203] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:08.218] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::Disassociate: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:13.281] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:13.281] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::Associate: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:13.281] ERROR ENG CiPassSmartConnect::SetWIFINetwork Exiting - failed to associate to tmobile
[04/05/2008 10:23:13.281] ERROR ENG CiPassAuthentication::SetWIFINetwork: Exiting - IPASS_STATE_INFO, IPASS_INFO_NETWORK_ASSOCIATION_FAILURE errCode:137 SQMErr:-105
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.281] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.281] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::GetSsid: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.281] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.281] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::GetSignalStrength: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.281] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.281] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::GetAPMacAddress PortHandleByname failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.656] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::PortHandleByName, failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:15.656] ERROR ENG CiPassAdapter::Disassociate: ObtainPortHandle failed
[04/05/2008 10:23:18.265] ERROR ENG CiPassWiFiSniffer::GetWiFiScanList - GetInterfaceFromGlobal failed, hResult=-2147024809
[04/05/2008 10:23:18.281] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:23:18.296] ERROR ENG CiPassWiFiSniffer::GetWiFiScanList - GetInterfaceFromGlobal failed, hResult=-2147024809
[04/05/2008 10:23:18.328] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:23:18.390] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::Execute:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:23:22.609] ERROR ENG CiPassMediaServiceFactory::UnRegisterNotificationHandler:Exited. couldn't find service manager for 253952
[04/05/2008 10:23:22.750] ERROR ENG CMdcUtil::RestoreWzc, failed to find adapter name

iPass_GUI.log

[04/05/2008 10:23:18.093] ERROR GUI CConnectStatus::CloseDialog() Could not UnRegister ConnectionStatusHandler.

My system is an IBM ThinkPad T60p with Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection for wireless, Intel(R) PRO/1000 PL Network Connection for LAN, and a Sierra Wireless 1xEV-DO Network Adapter for WAN.

Also please note that I can use the wireless at Starbucks (T-Mobile Hotspots) just fine if I go through their direct service and buy a pass.

DreamHost Bandwidth Speed

2008-03-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

DreamHost appears to favor short bursts of downloads or uploads as opposed to streaming much larger files. This disappoints when they give you so much bandwidth and storage space only to throttle it down to a trickle past ten or so megabytes. Maybe it's just my ISP/connection doing this, but I don't notice it as much with S3.

Windows Live Outage

2008-02-26T10:53:00.000-08:00

For once I actually tried to login to Hotmail this morning, which is something I haven't done in ages. Of course it didn't work, because there's some sort of Hotmail Outage. I'm a little annoyed that everyone is saying HOTMAIL IS DOWN, when it really appears to be any system which requires a Windows Live login. Such as Messenger:

This is an oh-so-helpful message box with a delicious HRESULT printed for end users:

We were unable to sign you into Windows Live Messenger at this time. Please try again later.

To let us try and troubleshoot this problem, click the Troubleshoot button.

Error code: 80048820
Extended error code: 80048439

Intrigued by the possibility of the software figuring out its problems for itself, let's click that ol' button and see what happens ...

This dialog is confusing, because although it puts a green checkmark by everything (I assume that means "good"), it also puts a little Repair button on there. So ... what am I repairing exactly? It doesn't even try to explain itself at this point, there is simply a couple of labels and buttons and a list of things that apparently work just fine. Is it just me, or does this basically leave you at a dead end?

In case you're wondering what happens when you do click Repair? It does nothing. Yup, I can click it all day and nothing happens. Why is it even there!? Oh wait ... it just changed and the Repair button is still there!

If this is hard to read, it says:

Windows Live Messenger's Connection Troubleshooter was unable to identify and repair the connection problem. However, here are some other resources that might help you.
(Error code: 80048820)

Look up the error code at Windows Live Messenger help site

Run the Windows Connection Wizard

Install and run the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool

Visit the Windows Live Messenger Team blog website

Visit the Windows Live Messenger support blog website

Visit the Windows Live Messenger newsgroup

Contact Customer Support

A bit much options maybe for the average impatient user. At any rate I know why Messenger is screwed simply because of the news on Google, no thanks to this application. I wonder why it just didn't report something about the login service being down or returning an error, what's with the crusty error codes?

Void Returners

2008-02-09T10:23:00.000-08:00

Sometimes documentation is confusing, but other times it makes me wonder if I'm smoking crack ...

Am I missing something? Maybe it's just me, but according to this the connect() method has a void return type and yet there is a note saying it can output false.

I tested it out and SharedObject::connect() actually does have a bool return type; this was just a doc goof.

Email J's no Dings

2008-02-07T15:12:00.001-08:00

Do you see a lot of isolated J's in your messages from friends and family? I'm going to take a wild guess and say you're either using FireFox (webmail)or Thunderbird. You see, those applications refuse to support the Dings series of fonts: WingDings and WebDings. I'm sure their reasoning behind it (use Unicode symbol characters rather than platform-specific fonts that re-use alphanumeric character codes) it's perfectly reasonable, but all the same it's irritating as hell because Microsoft is not budging!

Oh yes, and speaking of the Redmond giant, this wouldn't be an issue if their Word-based rich text editing in Outlook didn't automatically translate text smileys into Ding characters!

This is one of those tiny frustrations that has been an issue for a long time and doesn't look like it will be solved anytime soon. Until that far far away day in the future, we can continue to look forward to seeing sentences that read like this:

That was awesome! J

Thanks guys, way to go!

Messenger: Appear Online Dammit!

2008-02-07T10:38:00.000-08:00

When a contact on Messenger decides to change their status from Appear Offline to Online, every one on their list sees them suddenly "pop on". These pop-ups also occur when a person actually comes online, or rather returns after their wireless connection totally flakes out. Maybe it's just my crazy laptop computer, but Microsoft seems to have made a change that automatically sets your status to Appear Offline if you regain a connection after having it dropped on you.

Thus now when I go to Tully's and login, e.g. check the TOS checkbox and click a button, Messenger logs me in but sets me to offline. It's a small irritation, but an irritation none the less. Is there a setting somewhere I can tweak to fix this? Anyone else having the same issue?

Diskeeper Spam

2008-02-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

Last year I wrote about Diskeeper's spam and here I am again complaining about it. Check out my inbox for an address I rarely used except to register a copy of Diskeeper that I bought.

I totally understand that there was probably some checkbox I left checked or forgot to check, but come on ... an email almost every week? That's ridiculous! Every subject is different while the body and main message remains the same: "buy Diskeeper <year> because it performs <X> and <Y> miracles!".

I never plan on buying Diskeeper again, and I'm going to recommend that to anyone else looking for a defragmentation program. If this is how they treat their customers, like fruit trees waiting to be harvested every god damn year for some inane upgrade, then I don't want to know how they treat their code.

For You I'll Make An Exception!

2008-01-26T10:52:00.001-08:00

There's nothing like staring down a mysterious exception which only contains enough information to tell you what could not be done, not why it couldn't be done ...

2008-01-26 10:48:57,468 [1] FATAL FluorineFx.FluorineGateway - Failed to start Message Broker
System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Data.OleDb.OleDbException: Could not delete from specified tables.
at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand.ExecuteCommandTextForSingleResult(tagDBPARAMS dbParams, Object& executeResult)
at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand.ExecuteCommandText(Object& executeResult)
at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand.ExecuteCommand(CommandBehavior behavior, Object& executeResult)
at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand.ExecuteReaderInternal(CommandBehavior behavior, String method)
at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand.ExecuteNonQuery()
at WebMessenger.UserSessionDAO.DeleteAll() in C:\Stuff\Oxampleski\FluorineFx\ServiceLibrary\WebMessenger\UserSessionDAO.cs:line 136
at WebMessenger.UserSessionAssembler..ctor() in C:\Stuff\Oxampleski\FluorineFx\ServiceLibrary\WebMessenger\UserSessionAssembler.cs:line 18
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at System.RuntimeTypeHandle.CreateInstance(RuntimeType type, Boolean publicOnly, Boolean noCheck, Boolean& canBeCached, RuntimeMethodHandle& ctor, Boolean& bNeedSecurityCheck)
at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceSlow(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean fillCache)
at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks, Boolean fillCache)
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic)
at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes)
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes)
at FluorineFx.Messaging.DotNetFactoryInstance.CreateInstance()
at FluorineFx.Messaging.DotNetFactoryInstance.get_ApplicationInstance()
at FluorineFx.Messaging.DotNetFactory.Lookup(FactoryInstance factoryInstance)
at FluorineFx.Messaging.FactoryInstance.Lookup()
at FluorineFx.Messaging.Destination.Init(AdapterSettings adapterSettings)
at FluorineFx.Messaging.Services.ServiceBase.CreateDestination(DestinationSettings destinationSettings)
at FluorineFx.Messaging.Services.ServiceBase..ctor(MessageBroker messageBroker, ServiceSettings serviceSettings)
at FluorineFx.Data.DataService..ctor(MessageBroker messageBroker, ServiceSettings serviceSettings)
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeConstructor(Object[] args, SignatureStruct& signature, IntPtr declaringType)
at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeConstructor(Object[] args, SignatureStruct signature, RuntimeTypeHandle declaringType)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeConstructorInfo.Invoke(BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes)
at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes)
at FluorineFx.ObjectFactory.CreateInstance(Type type, Object[] args)
at FluorineFx.Messaging.MessageServer.Init(String configPath, Boolean serviceBrowserAvailable)
at FluorineFx.FluorineGateway.Init(HttpApplication application)

In this case the code was simply trying to use OleDb on an Access file (messenger.mdb). The Jet SQL involved was merely "DELETE FROM [session]" and I still have no idea why it is failing. When I run the same code in a different project, it works. Nothing like tiny frustrations to make this a chore to learn.

FLAC you MSCOMCTL.OCX!

2008-01-19T23:30:00.000-08:00

Seen this?

Component 'MSCOMCTL.OCX' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid

Currently it's the FLAC frontend giving me this, uh, flack. You can tell that project is made, maintained, and distributed people who try to avoid "M$ Windows" whenever possible, because their helpful suggestions to download and install some form of VB Run-Time and/or Common Controls is, uh, not helping!

Apparently the Visual Basic run-time was dropped from Windows XP in SP2 and has been conspicuously absent ever since. I'm sure it was security related and Microsoft will do what it takes to save face on this front, they've been beaten up pretty bad. Whatever the true reason, my system is without MSCOMCTL.OCX, and FLAC refuses to run without it.

Honestly, shouldn't they have simply made a nice Windows Media Codec? Lossless indeed, I think I've lost some sanity.

Thumbs.db Must Die

2008-01-18T14:51:00.001-08:00

It's great Windows allows you to view a folder as a bunch of thumbnail images rather than just filenames, but is Thumbs.db the best they could come up with? Storing it along with the files themselves sounds nice in theory, but it's a constant tiny annoyance in practice. The Hidden/System attributes applied to it cause constant warnings for stupidly simple operations: "Are you sure you want to move the system file Thumbs.db?", "Are you sure you want to delete the system file Thumbs.db?", "Thumbs.db could not be deleted, because it is in use", etc. etc.

God dammit, it's a cache file and nothing more. Why the hell is it in the same folder with Hidden/System attributes? Can't it be in, oh I dunno, my temp folder!?

/end rant... whew, I feel better

Windows Live Hotmail - Blocking Legitimate Mail

2008-01-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

Okay, enough is enough. There were some email threads I shared with friends that contained some harsh language extracted from articles, not of our own devising, that Hotmail blocked. However, there are only two possibilities as to why the latest message in this conversation has been stopped by Microsoft's email servers:

Yes, it's either "jackass" or "M$ Window" and the latter I used jokingly. As a person who has recommended people use Hotmail in the past, I'm now officially retracting that statement. This isn't the first problem I've seen with their system blocking normal email and I doubt it'll be the last.

Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 DY-002 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. The likely cause is a compromised or virus infected server/personal computer. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support

It's morbidly amusing they hide behind the guise of security when there's absolutely nothing wrong with the email (I checked the raw MIME data to be sure).

Amazon Super Savings

2008-01-09T10:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think Amazon takes this saving money thing a little too seriously, or maybe not seriously enough.

Is a savings of one cent really compelling, are people that hard up for a deal that simply the presence of one is enough?

Oh There It Is!

2008-01-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

Here's a short thread on the Fluorine mailing list that I found amusing.

On 04/01/2008, Ken wrote:

For service logging, I am trying to capture the client's IP Address. Does anyone know if fluorine provides a method for accessing this? Is this possible?

On 06/01/2008, Stepan replied:

hi,

client IP address you will get from System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress property.

Even being a gigantic string, drilling down through the .NET hierachy abyss, they couldn't seem to fit "IP" anywhere in there. Wouldn't that have made it easier to search for?

Of course none of this would matter if the masters of Fluorine saw fit to create an indexable web forum as opposed to the opaque mailing list that's currently in place.

MOV DL Tool

2008-01-03T19:48:00.001-08:00

Somehow the title "MOV DL Tool" evokes the memory of X86 assembler rather than a QuickTime Movie Download Tool (.mov extension). I don't understand how a window title like that is supposed to make users feel comfortable with what's going on.

(note: picture edited for width)
I don't know why that particular thing launched. At first I thought that it was a XUL application, and the browser is using about 5% CPU time, but I also see QuickTimePlayer.exe in Task Manager and I ain't been watchin' no movies just yet.

Sure enough, a quick Google search affirms that this has something to do with QT. Thanks Apple for this weird, barely responsive ... uh... thing. I think I would've preferred a torrent or at least something which can calculate times without resorting to negatives, which would happen if I kept everything minimized and then restored the window.

But now enough bitching, it's time to watch the movie (non-full-screen of course, because you have to pay for that privilege!).

UPDATE: Ha! I caught myself looking like a fool before anyone else could point it out! Oh wait ... yeah, I suck. So it turns out this thing comes with the QuickTime Alternative package of software I was trying out. I was giving this a shot, because the real QuickTime was pissing me off for some reason. However, in this case it was not them so I apologize for jumping to conclusions. Whoops!

Why Software Sucks

2008-01-03T14:21:00.000-08:00

Scott Berkun lays down a massive essay, "Why Software Sucks", on the reasons behind the suckiness and what can be done about it at a high level. As part of this he defines what it means to say “this sucks” ...

Whenever you hear someone say “This sucks” they are doing several things simultaneously: expressing frustration, experiencing shock, using criticism to mask feelings of helplessness in a cruel universe, and, most importantly, communicating the gap between their expectations and reality. It’s rare to hear people complain about things they don’t care about (although I once had dinner with a man capable of complaining about everything that’s ever happened to anyone anywhere). One way to think about how people respond to things is this spectrum:
What is this for?
I have that but haven’t tried it
I’m annoyed by this, but I don’t need it often
This Sucks
This is acceptable
This is cool / I love it
This works so well I don’t even think about it
This is one representation of how people respond to things (there are others). The point of this representation is that “this sucks” is right in the middle. In order for people to say “this sucks” they have to care enough about the thing you’ve made to spend time with it and recognize how bad it is. For things that are equally bad, but are unimportant to someone, you won’t hear the same complaint. We’re frustrated most in life by things that come close to our deepest needs, but don’t deliver. It’s the things that tease us, making us think they’ll satisfy us but then failing, than hurt the most.

So this blog about software sucking should help some developers because they'll see real, honest feedback from users that care. Well, most of the time.

I realize this essay is from 2005, but I was just reminded of it from a link he put in his very recent blog post "Stop saying innovation - here's why".

MSDN Links

2007-12-29T11:29:00.000-08:00

Every few years, nay, months ... anyway, Microsoft likes to break the links on MSDN. Sometimes they redirect to a new location and sometimes they don't. Their own pages reference bad links! Look guys, I know you like people to see the file extension to prove you're eating your own dogfood with regards to every god damn new technology that tickles your balls, but have you ever heard of URL permanence?

My bookmarks are out of date? Well, of course, silly me: I shouldn't be bookmarking MSDN!

eHow Many Messages

2007-12-26T11:23:00.000-08:00

At least the number of requests is correct ...

I was giving the developers a chance to fix this before posting it, but the bug has been there ever since I received that one friend request (which I haven't accepted/rejected) on November 16th.

Motorola RAZR: Download SMS/MMS

2007-12-25T23:09:00.000-08:00

I'm still on the long journey of figuring out my damn phone. I did find BitPim's useful "Phone Info" feature helpful in that I finally found out what model I have:

Model: Motorola CDMA V3c Rev2 Phone
Manufacturer: Motorola CE, Copyright 2000
Phone Number: 206*******
ESN: 853768790
Firmware Version: NEWC_01.09.02

Strangely, I thought I had a V3m and PST's Phone Programmer confirmed this with the following information ...

ESN: 32E37A56
MIN: 206*******
Software Version: NEWC_01.09.02
SU Model: V3m
Technology: CDMA 1X-EVD0
Flex Version: XS4VRZ03V3M1NA0D.0R_PRlkk42717

This makes a bit of a difference when reading tutorials, because a lot of times they tell you to download this or that based on whether you have a V3M or V3C. For me, it seems the V3C stuff works best.

I have no idea what ESN is or why it's reported differently between these programs. Don't you wish these phones could interact like normal USB drives? Yeah, me too.

Now I've temporarily given up on the ringtones and now I'm trying to copy off my old SMS/MMS messages so I can clear up disk space on the phone! And of course one of the first things I found was other people having problems doing just that. Doh!

UPDATE: Ah ha! After some dead end threads from other people searching for the same thing, I found this gem (BTW HowardForums.com is excellent for these kinds of searches).

Basically all of the messaging data (MMS and SMS) is stored under /brew/mod/syncom2/msging/.

I used BitPim to backup the entire directory into a ZIP file (not sure why it doesn't allow you to back it up to files rather than an archive of the files). Now I just have to figure out how to parse these, but so far it looks fairly easy. The messages are preceded by a two-digit ID in hex and if there's an attachment (such as pictures with MMS), it shows up with the same prefix.

UPDATE @ 2007-12-26: The *.ENV files appear to be the main message files. They tell where to find attachments and so forth as well as contain the main text. Also, at first I thought the folder letters were just there to keep the file count per directory down, but they're actually abbreviations:

i: Inbox
o: Outbox (Sent)
d: Drafts (may also contain the last couple pictures you sent)
s: Saved/Searches? Not sure, mine is empty except for mb.idx.
w: Unknown, mine is empty except for mb.idx.

I'm casually working on parsing the ENV (and other) files, so if anyone can point me to the name of the format or a spec of some kind, it would be most appreciated.

The Indexing Service Here Is Great

2007-12-20T12:04:00.000-08:00

Apparently the at sign (@) is used to indicate something special to Window XP's search. I tried looking for all *.sql files containing @@ and received the following helpful message:

I suppose there's no harm in such a strange response, what kind of user would even use the built-in file finder (I ended up using TextPad), much less try to find certain SQL identifiers.

Genuine [DIS]Advantage

2007-12-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

It has to be said again, Genuine Advantage is such bullshit. I'm visiting my mom's house out in the middle of nowhere, her connection speed makes 56k dial-up look blazing fast (on average I'm seeing about 2.5 kbps), and I need to get some anti-virus and anti-spyware software on her computer.

Imagine my surprise when I Google Windows Defender (Microsoft's Anti-Spyware product) and come to find the installer listed as a mere 4.9mb! Now imagine my dismay when I find I have to validate her copy of Windows in order to even begin sucking the bits.

For some reason the ActiveX control never appeared, perhaps because it was downloading and I didn't wait long enough for it to finish, so I selected the "alternate" method which basically means you grab a throw-away program to check your computer and spit out a code ...

This bloody thing is over a quarter the size of Windows Defender and all it does is spit out a small sequence of letters and numbers after, presumably, finding and crawling in every oriface on your installation. What a crock! How is this a better user experience?

I'm kicking myself for not pre-emptively saving the installers to my laptop before coming out here. AVG Free is over 30 megabytes!

UPDATE: The Windows Defender installer validates your copy of XP also! What the heck!

Internet Explorer Trusted Sites - FAIL

2007-12-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

There was some online application, it might have been Google's terrible Page Creator, that required the use of "Scripted Windows" which Internet Explorer shot down without temporary recourse. The solution involved adding the domain to IE's trusted sites list.

Well, I've tried, but this "feature" is just ridiculously annoying. Every time another site attempts to embed stuff from one of these domains, Internet Explorer halts with the following message:

Two options missing of particular import: "never" and "always" ask me again. While it may be a security risk, I honestly couldn't give a shit if this blog wants to put something from blogger.com in an IFRAME.

I am emptying my Trusted Sites list and the next time I get bothered about a scripted window, I'll just view that site in FireFox.

Steam Freak Out

2007-12-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

I've never understood how Valve can turn out beautifully crafted games and yet manage to crap out a piece of stinkware like Steam. It's a testament to how much I enjoy their work that I actually continue to use it! However, we just moved and our new apartment doesn't yet have internet. I'm sure I can play HL2 offline, but my latest beef is that every time I turn on the computer, Steam simply won't leave me alone about the network connection!

I know, I know, and I don't care. I don't even feel like playing a Steam game, so get out of my face and never bug me again ... wherever that option is. Oh wait, there isn't one on this message box!

I don't care about letting it start with Windows (yes, see, I know I can turn that off), but can't it just not complain until it reaches an impasse? Steam isn't alone; a lot of programs seem to have trouble waiting to tell you things, as if all the messages are really important and must be dealt with immediately. I like how ~~MSN~~ Live Messenger handles this: it simply hides in the tray and puts a little "disconnected" overlay on top of its icon.

With so many applications being dependent on the internet, I hope Vista (haven't used it, so I'm only reaching and wishing) has a centralized "network" notification. Rather than every single piece of software trying to detect if I'm not online and freaking out if I'm not, couldn't there be one place to show that? Just a thought ...

Genuine Microsoft Suckware

2007-11-30T10:14:00.000-08:00

I've ranted about WGA before, but it wanted to install itself again (how many times is this? a dozen?) so the annoyance has barfed up again ... and I must blog it!

It is an irritating, multi-dialog process to get this unwanted utility installed and I can't help but thinking Microsoft is joining the ranks of RIAA/MPAA in misunderstanding how to fight piracy and win mind share with us peeps. Perhaps they feel the latter is already lost.

My primary issue with this is getting bothered to update it constantly and that it's a supposedly optional piece of software that will beg to be installed ceaselessly as a Critical Windows Update, and there's no way to "opt out".

It begins! Wait a minute, it's not Patch Tuesday? Weird, okay fine, whaddya got for me?

Ah crap, what the hell? Didn't I already install this thing like a thousand friggin' times?

Size: 1.2 MB

The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be a non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows.

More information for this update can be found at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=39157

Fuck it, let it roll so it can stop bothering me.

I found the license agreement interesting as it mentions the software is optional, but then I fell asleep at my keyboard and didn't finish reading. Maybe you will.

NOTICE: THIS UPDATE FROM MICROSOFT WILL HELP YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE RUNNING A PROPERLY LICENSED, GENUINE COPY OF WINDOWS XP. SOME UPDATES AND OFFERS FROM MICROSOFT REQUIRE A GENUINE COPY OF WINDOWS XP.

INSTALLING THIS UPDATE IS OPTIONAL. THE UPDATE WILL BECOME A PERMANENT PART OF YOUR WINDOWS XP SOFTWARE.

INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR SYSTEM (FOR EXAMPLE, YOUR WINDOWS PRODUCT KEY AND IP ADDRESS) WILL BE SENT TO MICROSOFT. MICROSOFT WILL NOT USE THE INFORMATION TO IDENTIFY OR CONTACT YOU.

BEFORE INSTALLING, PLEASE READ AND ACCEPT THE LICENSE TERMS BELOW.
_______________________________
MICROSOFT SOFTWARE SUPPLEMENTAL LICENSE TERMS

MICROSOFT WINDOWS GENUINE ADVANTAGE NOTIFICATIONS FOR MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP

Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of its affiliates) licenses this supplement to you. The following license terms describe additional use terms for this supplement. These terms and the license terms for the software (Microsoft Windows XP) apply to your use of this supplement. If there is a conflict, these supplemental license terms apply.

BY USING THIS SUPPLEMENT, YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THEM, DO NOT USE THIS SUPPLEMENT.

If you comply with these license terms, you have the rights below.

1. Application of Terms. The terms also apply to any Microsoft updates, supplements, Internet-based services, and support services for the software, unless other terms accompany those items. If so, those terms apply.

2. PURPOSE OF SUPPLEMENT. THIS SUPPLEMENT UPDATES WINDOWS XP AND IS DESIGNED TO NOTIFY YOU IF YOU ARE USING AN IMPROPERLY LICENSED COPY OF WINDOWS XP. TO EFFECTIVELY ENCOURAGE THE USE OF PROPERLY LICENSED SOFTWARE, THIS SUPPLEMENT CANNOT BE UNINSTALLED.

3. Validation. This supplement also includes the Windows Genuine Advantage validation tool. The tool will check whether you have a properly licensed copy of Microsoft Windows XP (“Windows XP”) installed. Installation of the validation tool may be required in order to install certain Microsoft software or to use services such as Windows Update. If you have a properly licensed copy of Windows XP installed, you receive special benefits, which are listed on the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=39157.

4. Notification. If this supplement detects that you do not have a properly licensed copy of Windows XP installed, you will receive a notification and periodic reminders to install a properly licensed copy of Windows XP. This supplement will also notify you if a more recent Windows service pack for the software is available.

5. Internet-Based Services. Microsoft provides Internet-based services with this supplement. It may change or cancel them at any time. This supplement connects to Microsoft or service provider computer systems over the Internet as described below. In some cases, you will not receive a separate notice when it connects. For more information about this feature, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=56310.

6. Computer Information. This supplement uses Internet protocols to send to Microsoft computer information, such as your Windows XP product key, hard drive serial number, PC manufacturer, operating system version, Windows XP product ID, PC BIOS information, user locale setting, language version of Windows XP, validation result and whether the installation of this supplement was successful. Certain information derived from your IP address, which cannot be used to identify you, is retained in association with this computer information.

7. Use of Information. We may use the computer information to improve our software and services, help prevent improperly licensed use of the software, and develop aggregate statistics. We may also share the aggregate data with others, such as hardware and software vendors and volume licensees to help protect their license keys.

8. CONSENT FOR INTERNET-BASED SERVICES. BY USING THIS FEATURE, YOU CONSENT TO THE TRANSMISSION AND USE OF THE ABOVE COMPUTER INFORMATION. MICROSOFT DOES NOT USE THE INFORMATION TO IDENTIFY OR CONTACT YOU.

9. Privacy Notice: For additional Information about the computer information transmitted to Microsoft, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=68985.

10. Support Services for Supplement. Microsoft provides support services for the software as described at www.support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx.

After completing the install there is even more text which I'm sure lots of people read with glee!

Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications
Introduction

Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications is part of Microsoft's effort to reduce software piracy. Installing this software can help confirm that the copy of Windows installed on this PC is genuine and properly licensed.

If your copy of Windows is not genuine, the software will provide periodic reminds to help you take appropriate action and protect yourself from security threats posed by counterfeit software.

What is WGA Notifications?

Obviously they're targeting casual piracy, people who don't even realize what they're doing is wrong. Of course, tacking obstacles in front of such things just makes their laundry list of "things to do so my friend can use this software" slightly longer.

With all the free software that home users get to enjoy, it's no wonder there's an issue with casual piracy. Perhaps the licensing itself is to blame and not the users? Microsoft has already buckled and provided excellent, free development software in the form of Visual Studio Express and SQL Express, why is Windows (Home) the last to receive this treatment?

Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications
Validation Results

Thank you for validating your copy of Windows! Validating allows you to enjoy the full capabilities of Windows and helps you confirm that the software installed on your PC is authentic and properly licensed.

Microsoft is continually improving our anti-piracy technology. Your system may be revalidated periodically in order to take advantage of new information available from Microsoft that can help protect you against new forms of counterfeiting.

[ ] Show me some of the many benefits of using genuine software when I click Finish.

This final dialog mentions that WGA will be visiting me again soon and it's for my own good. It also presents me the opportunity to see the benefits of genuine validated software! Whoopee! How can I resist? Here we go ...

Your current browser cannot run the ActiveX control required by the genuine Windows validation process.

Let's try validating a different way:
Click Validate Now to run the genuine Windows validation application.
When prompted, click Open or Run this program from its current location.
Validate Now

Arr matey, ye donut be taken a liken' to me fox of fire!

So this is a little confusing: I have to validate my copy of Windows to read about the benefits of validating my copy of Windows? With the paranoia I'm encouraging in my family members with regards to anything internet-related, they're going to think this is some sort of spyware.

Oh wait ... it kinda is.