“nah, it works with IE, it should be fine” Yes, that was said today.

Firefox fixed it for him. He saw this as proof that it qualifies as a valid URL, despite what the actual rules for a URL says (which he didn’t even care existed, and couldn’t be bothered to check what he was arguing against)

Is it any surprise that compatibility just doesn’t happen online? Seriously? When “liberal acceptance” implies “you can be flakey in what you produce”, might as well toss out RFCs, ISOs, and everybody make up your own way… because the really cool things will be worth everyone spending a lot of time to reverse-engineer a 98% effective compatibility, so it’ll work just fine… until it doesn’t.

The Motorola SurfBoard SBG6580 (damn, Moto, ever hear of shorter URLs?) showed up when I was looking for a Wifi-N/DOCSIS/hub that might fit inside my “Smart Panel” in my closet, and covers all the bulletpoints: DOCSIS-3.0, Wifi-N, 4 ports of 1gb goodness.

SBG6580 doesn’t have a simple way to create persistent VPN/PPTP connections (that I can see), and the SNMP only goes to the “head end” (the cable provider, I would assume). Finally, when it goes to sleep to conserve power, it’s not in any way fast about coming back up. I’m not sure whether it has a mdns stack to help printers work (one of those things they can’t really advertise because Joe Public doesn’t get it, and Moto doesn’t get blamed if the printer doesn’t work)

Despite these issues, I’m looking at repeating this exercise in my buddy’s closet to replace Comcast’s DOCSIS box, plus a WRTSL54GS.

Notable mention: the SBG6580 has a plug/wart/plug rather than a wall-wart, so it’s a bit easier to share the power connection inside the panel. I think I can lash down that power brick so that it gets a bit of heat-space around it. I’d feel better punching holes in the panel for heat-convection, though — count me crazy: it’s only a 1A/12V power connection, so would have trouble creating dangerous levels of heat without triggering its own thermal fuse.

Since the source for SBG6120 is available, perhaps SBG6580 will be there too (it seems to be an evolution of the same product: add some ports) … that would give true future-proofing of the device, allowing it to evolve into an Asterisk server, proper VPN tunnels, SNMP that’s usable for end-users (non-head-end), etc.

No far, no SBG6580 (or SB6580) on Motorola’s website, nor at Modem-Help.co.uk, and every google shows marketing information (nice google-bomb there) but nothing detailed nor usable.

So… where’s the source?

From: Juliet Burgess <juliet.burgess@oracle.com>
Subject: MySQL Support
X-Source-IP: acsmt355.oracle.com [141.146.40.155]

MySQL User:

I am reaching out to you because I was told you were interested in learning more about MySQL support.

Here is a link showing our prices and various levels of support and what you get at each level. http://mysql.com/products/enterprise/features.html

I have discounts available for quotes that close in June, as it is our year-end. I also have extensive multi-year discounts available this month.

Would you have time to talk on Monday?

Let me know of your availability and I’ll give you a call.

Thank you,

Juliet Burgess
Oracle – MySQL Sales Team
214 707 4971

Unfortunately, this conversation starts with a false statement:

I am reaching out to you because I was told you were interested in learning more about MySQL support.

I tried to recall asking Oracle anything, and went through past calls and emails. I didn’t find anything, and eventually Juliet confirmed that she is bulk-mailing from a list of email names given in a web form.

Let’s ignore for now that I always opt-out of additional unsolicited communication.

Juliet really should have started the conversation with the truth:

you downloaded a product from us, and I was reaching out to see if I could further the dialog

This would have been a true statement. That’s not what she used.

Juliet took a list of emails — some of which including mine didn’t want additional callbacks — and claimed that we asked a question. She sent a spammy unaddressed email (ie there is no “to:” part there) that triggers spam-blockers as it is. That kinda sucks, but I’m sure she’s not the only one at Oracle doing it, and I’m sure she’s not the only tech person ignoring opt-outs.

The worst is that she chose to lie. How, seriously, can we begin a conversation and a relationship with a lie?

The Spoiler: ALAC.

Ken and his wife (I forget her name) had a number of concerns — she didn’t know how to let her Mac switch between two preferred Wifi networks automatically, didn’t know how to use a graphics package on her Mac, and hadn’t considered asking the Apple Store for help… so here are some un-checked paths to problem-solving here.

For what it’s worth, Apple Stores have both in-store experts to help you fix your problems — some stores are 24/7 — and they have classes at more civilized schedules to help you build your skill and independence. Few people seem to consider this perhaps because there’s no Microsoft store, no Dell Store, no HP Store to help them, but Apple’s “Genius Bar” has helped me diagnose problems before, politely and quickly.

As Rev. J. Paul tells me, had Ken and his wife walked into an Apple store, Apple might have recommended ALAC, the Apple Lossless Audio Codec — this is a lossless format similar to FLAC, but can be selected as the Apple Default format — this triggers both CD/media import, and the “convert to” option for converting existing tracks.

J. Paul uses Max, but he’s very particular about his content, and tends to use extensive tagging, and may have additional album art or associated content to keep together. ALAC includes metadata so that moving the file moves the metadata with it.

Ken and his wife may never find this post given their difficulty in finding help in an Apple store. Anyone else searching might get a few pointers from this.

$ touch /Volumes/ALLANC_16G1/.metadata_never_index

I’ve recently found that the following should also work:
$ mdutil -i off /Volumes/ALLANC_16G1
which can be checked using:
$ mdutil -sv /Volumes/ALLANC_16G1
/Volumes/ALLANC_16G1:
Indexing disabled.

Needs verification, and it’s only useful when you have a MacOSX at your disposal. I used the first trick inside MySQLFS (around v0.4.0) but will look further into the second. This is one of those “making a note for you and for myself” kind of posts)

When I worked at Motorola, as any development and innovative company has, we had a number of tricks and workarounds. One of these was a modified cable used to load firmware like they do to handsets in the factory — a Factory Cable, or FC. In this case, it drew power from the host system.

This cable would toast USB ports, therefore I caused it to get the official name “EFC” or “Evil Factory Cable”

I just realized the hard way that some domestic PCs protect themselves — as they should to as many actions as could possibly damage the system yet remain undetectable to a support guy. In this case, mine just protected itself:

How cool is that? Sure, a Dell is “just as good but cheaper”; often you get what you pay for. Paying a dollar to protect my system from a mistake that I can make, as a technology genius (Genius, I tell you!), that’s a simple choice to make. If only more people would consider their gear over the long-term.

I’ve noted before that making up a new format for anything poses a low chance of being compatible with anything, and that compatibility is accidental at best. Choosing any other format to be compatible with, to form some agreement, means that you already have compatibility with one other existing entity, meaning:

• you can learn from the comments and notes about what that project’s architect discovered and learned
• whatever is compatible with that entity maybe accidentally compatible with your product
• generic upstream tools require much less work to adapt to your tool
• compatibility with anything means you have designed with compatibility in mind, so you’re not so wedged into a colloquial hole as the next guy

The counter-point, by choosing your own way, no matter how much better you may think it is, you’re now responsible for evolving and supporting all the tools that are in your users’ toolbox. This means that if decide, for example, that Julian dates shall be used, you generate a gap between your project and all the tools that don’t yet support Julian dates. Even if you have no competition in the world, your users have these little obstacles that build up. Faced with a knock-off of your fantastic tool that poses no such obstacles, you’ll soon be replaced.

I like to get things done. Finish, and go home, or hack on something else.

There is the feeling of “I hate having to fix my tools before I can use them to get stuff done” that actually pushes me away from Microsoft — even before they “evolved” the Office suite to use a random new UI. Indeed, rather than Julian dates, that “Ribbon Menu” now makes OpenOffice more compatible with our learned skill at Microsoft Office than Microsoft is.

This “Ribbon Menu” breaks residual knowledge; in forcing users to accept this impact to productivity, what benefit is the Ribbon Menu giving to users? If you’re going to break with the pack, have a good reason other than “we’re going back to how it was done before 16-bit CPUs were invented”.

By changing your users to a better interaction that is used by some other app, you support that app, you consolidate the UI that should have been described from the start, and you gain compatibility. You might accidentally gain compatibility with a few tools that work on that other project or tool.

For these reasons, I would ask:

On a new project: what are you compatible with?

If the answer is “nothing” or “an old 8-bit format” or “the dead language of spoken latin”, rethink your decision, if you ever considered the possibility of compatibility, to marching to the common drummer of the blizzard of possible standards.

On an existing project: are you going to turn down anything that consolidates user experience or formats?

Keep in mind, the next question could be “what will you do next year, when your competition appears, and has compatibility?”

OK, maybe I don’t like to keep telling people where I am I understand it’s interesting to some, and I appreciate the attention and concern people have for me, but it’s easier if I can embed a bunch of rich links, and people can take a look for themselves. I am significantly affected by interruptions, and I also foster independence where I can.

The web has built up in a number of competing paths, like how NYC Subway was as many as four different companies in competition before they merged, leaving more inactive stations than active ones, and a lot of unused tunnels where squatters live.

Some people don’t read travel sites, some use dopplr, some use tripit. I want to offer this information to both so that the person can use whatever they have used thus far. Tripit has a wider understanding of existing travel formats — itineraries and notices and such — but dopplr has some users, so it makes sense to feed dopplr from tripit to leverage tripit’s higher intelligence. Dopplr added ical subscription in 2008 which James Senior nailed, and Jon Udell shared thusly:

Then I realized that Tripit publishes an iCalendar feed, and that Dopplr can subscribe to iCalendar feeds. So I made that connection, and now my Tripit events are showing up in Facebook.

Well, this isn’t working today — consistent 410 errors — but maybe this can be averted with some constructive UserAgent settings. Maybe Tripit became tired of people leveraging its smarter service to feed Dopplr. Need more time to figure this out after I do my Expenses. (ugh) Dopplr does allow a push of a calendar from iCal, which is nice but may require my iCal to start/stop regularly to do the push/update. Hmm. There has to be a way to script that…

Eventually, either Dopplr, Tripit, or something that these spawn will become the disused stations of the web, but in the meantime, if someone is using that and can hit their shared info rather than call me at 2am in a strange timezone, it gives me more sleep

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --start|stop

I think I missed somewhere how to populate and bring online a VMWare image without pointy-clicky actions. No worries.

I do notice that when my MacOSX-10.6.2 — a fairly modern OS — changes networking setup (VPN connects, disconnect Wifi, renew DHCP, etc) there is a huge shuffle of activity and some log messages about the Mac doing “the right thing”: backups, sync, etc. Most of that seems lightweight, but if I don’t really need it, I like to deactivate it.

The VMWare stuff is not so necessary today, so I decided to offline it.

I found its config as a launchd system-wide Daemon: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.vmware.launchd.vmware.plist — so taking that apart, I found it’s a one-shot fire-and-forget like the cheesy rcX.d that I don’t like about linux (as discussed, based on a hotly-contested decision to make daemon start/stop possible in packages added/removed from the system — USL did this, whereas ODT collects a /etc/inittab.d/ directory, which allows auto-restart)

So I took that apart.

cauldron:~ allanc$ sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --start
VMware Fusion 196839: Starting VMware Fusion:
chown: /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages/antivirus.iso: No such file or directory
Internet Software Consortium DHCP Server 2.0
Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 The Internet Software Consortium.
All rights reserved.

Configured subnet: 172.16.83.0
Setting vmnet-dhcp IP address: 172.16.83.254
Opened:
Recving on VNet/vmnet1/172.16.83.0
Sending on VNet/vmnet1/172.16.83.0
Verifying and re-installing files from /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/thnuclnt


This has a few gems to consider: what’s that yummy antivirus.iso, and how can I use that to auto-define a VM? Hmmm…

Anyhow, for when I forget this next time, this how to start/stop the VMs.

It’s very difficult to maintain any sort of compatibility with another company, even when there is relatively tight communication.

It’s even difficult to maintain compatibility when there’s no sharing, communication, or agreement. It’s very much like hammering changes with set of tests, and looking for leakage.

It’s much more difficult when the two entities are competing providers.

When the compatibility issue is within the same company, within iterations of the same product, there’s no excuse.

What’s the Apple ideal here? carry 5 separate phones?

Am I flirting with the risk of losing my Apple ID?

I’m not some evil phone-cracker, and I pay for everything I have. Heck, I use bittorrent as a try-before-you-buy. I’ve purchased as many as 4 copies of software (hello, Starcraft) rather than cheat when I’m in the wrong country and need something.

Checking my system logs, Apple software itself has shaky behavior: warnings that it’s violated its own constraints, obsolete function-calls, etc. The cheap iPhone cable I picked up occasionally seems to disconnect (ie every time with the older phone, never with the newer)

Is it possible that my unlocked phone, plus one of Apple’s own errors, plus this cheesy cable, can brand me as a thief, cracker, all-around bad-guy?

Apple also make a product-suite called iWork, which competes with Microsoft Office. For example, Pages competes with Microsoft Word.

Suppose Apple offered these products on Microsoft Windows — a direct competitor to their OS product, and a product which directly competes with their product on their competing OS. Whether “Pages” works smoothly, or doesn’t, that probably reflects poorly on the “Pages” product, and by allusion, whether all of Apple software is generally of good or poor quality.

If “Pages” tends to run very very well on Apple OSX, but poorly on Microsoft Windows, it probably implies that Windows has performance problems, and OSX is obviously the better OS to run things like the “Pages” application. That means that making “Pages” run well or poorly on the competing OS reflects on the perceived quality of the competing OS.

In short, Apple could make Windows look bad, and influence buyers over to OSX.

Does that seem fair? Who is really to blame? Doesn’t Apple have the obligation to at least adapt to the environment to which it’s writing software, and make it work? Isn’t that target environment really the foundation to which Apple has to make their product work? At the end of the day, the OS came before the application, so errors should be resolved in the application side.

Application errors are the application’s fault, not the OS. To claim otherwise gives reason to question the objectiveness of the auditor.

Same issue, but Microsoft making Office run on Mac. It runs poorly, hogs resources, and generally runs for short times without crashing. Obviously, this is Microsoft’s issue to deal with; to think otherwise implies a certain bias away from Apple.

I just made it easier.

Since I live out of a suitcase, this makes my life easier.

I’m using the same process as before (using the evil “screen” tool), the GUC232A, plus a few extra bits, totalling:

• A Mac
• A USB-to-Serial device using the PL2303 (like my GUC232A made-in-China for $10, but a bit more expensive as RadioShack #55004488)
• A Basic DB9 Null Modem (ie RadioShack #26-264)
• A Basic DB9 Female/Female Gender-Changer (ie RadioShack #26-230)

Notice how these things are easy to get to? I think a WinTel works in place of the Mac, but mine don’t stay running for long enough.

Anyone from JDSU may say “well, gee, this is fairly basic”, but rather than follow the rules like a mantra, I wanted to do this with easier-to-pack parts that can be replaced or cross-shipped if needed.

This is what works:

The trick is that the GUC232A is only 45cm/18inches long, but I can put a standard USB extension on it, route it through a US-4A or bang it on an unused server port anywhere.

The numbers have a bit of a delicious pattern; let me expand a bit from the Wired How-to Article, which presented this example:

The Digits themselves break down as follows:

Simple, right? The barcode will also start and end in a 0-0110 sequence, which breaks the xx-xxx pattern. I cannot see Mr Washington’s article, the hosting has trashed it, so maybe this stuff is already discussed. The Wired Article is really hard to take apart from there — examples would have been nice — so I’ve expanded a bit on it.

Although we could look at the barcode digits as simple replacement cyphers — similar to the glyphs on the TV show “Fringe” — there is a key to the barcoding numbers themselves that would let a reader build a barcode cheat-sheet or lookup just before decoding a barcode to reduce the chances of error. Let’s remap the table above, add sample barcodes, move the zero after the 9, and add an asterisk markup so that we have an example of that as well:

digit	code	barcode
1	10-001
2	01-001
3	11-000
4	00-101
5	10-100
6	01-100
7	00-011
8	10-010
9	01-010
0	00-110
*	0-0110

You can see how the progression of the 4 leftmost digits of each 5-bit sequence is actually a binary increment. The rule for that sequence seems to be “no more than two ones per digit”, and the 5th digit toggles one/zero to ensure that each sequence has two. Zero is pushed up to the “ten” spot, so it doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of no ones at all — for which the check bit would have to be 2. And what about 7? skipped. above, 7 is actually 8, 8 is actually 9, etc.

Asterisk is basically “zero” but with the spacer moved, perhaps to help key the scanner to the size and use the data itself as start/stop bits, the same way the 6-of-8 is done on an old floppy disk (leading bits are zero, after a spin there’s enough 0-0-1 and 0-0-0-etc to key the reader).

So now we have the magical logic to generate the bit patterns for the barcode digits, let’s markup the barcode and overlay some digits:

Now that looks a lot easier to digest.

Comments?

He didn’t ask what I had done, I didn’t volunteer it. I don’t need to swing a pedigree around, usually the recommendation I make are fairly obvious, sometimes only in hindsight.

It seems he and others seem to believe that if they haven’t heard of a particular issue, it cannot occur. This ignores:

• Problems that occur that are not voiced because “it’s no use, they’ll never fix it”
• Problems raised that are not escalated to the entity that can make a difference
• Problems that are raised high enough, but are deemed “not a real problem because I haven’t seen it”
• Problems difficult to replicate in a different country (similar to the comma problem I had in shell-based math, fails only in France)

People who discuss design and are aware of staffing/labour management don’t often bring things up for no reason. Of course, there is always room for a “painting the bike shed” discussion, but no one intends to waste staff hours. Typically, resolving things at design-time avoid staff-hours down the road.

Young architects don’t fully understand this, until they’ve done a few projects, and realize that they cannot personally see every problem.

It’s the equivalent of when software developers realize they cannot personally fix every known problem.

“Seeing is Believing”, eventually we get past the “Not Seeing is disbelieving” stage.

I remember this same argument, but by proxy: “I know a really smart guy, and he didn’t fix that problem, so that problem can never occur obviously”. I’m sure the logic errors there are obvious.

In this case, I elected to make my changes, and discuss them in hindsight. Some people recognize that I have the chinese habit of smiling and stopping when I see that I’m in an impossible task such as describing a round world to early Europeans. I don’t want to avoid making these changes, because that results in a waste of staff-hours that I don’t want to cause just to prove my point.

I’m not much a fan of waiting for my Wintel box to boot up or wake up, and it needs so many additional things to work: an extra trackball because the touchpad sucks, needs a wart on the bottom for a serial connector, needs much bigger power connector with extra internationalization tools to connect to foreign power sockets, etc. I fear when I’m on a client’s site, and the serial port in the wart doesn’t work… like a week and a half ago: I had to borrow a laptop to connect to the devices, which wasn’t very professional. I decided I’d find an alternative, and my Mac just always works.

I wanted a way to connect to one using my Mac OSX-10.6.1. The following works:

1. install osx-pl2303 with this link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2303/files/osx-pl2303/0.3.1/osx-pl2303-0.3.1-10.4-universal.dmg/download
2. OK, I rebooted rather than load the driver from the command-line.
3. You can plug in your device and check for the driver using kextstat — mine shows nl.bjaelectronics.driver.PL2303 (1.0.0d1)
4. connect using the cable that works on your Wintel to the PL2303 device (mine’s a GUC232A made in China)
5. Mac OSX comes with the screen tool, so I used screen /dev/cu.PL2303-00002006 57600
6. works fine

This process might work just as well on a Wintel, and is a smaller device to carry.

(Installing RDC-2.0.3)

Part-and-parcel to this, if I ask for a piece of software, chances are, I want that piece of software. No more, no less.

Installing Remote Display Connection v2.0.3, I suddenly had to quit other Microsoft software because it was forcing an update. You’ll notice above that this is installing Remote Display Connection, it has nothing to do with Entourage.

(Surprise! Hidden update)

… but Aha! You can’t update something secretly if it’s running!

I don’t recall asking for an update. Chances are, I had that software open because I was using it. If I wasn’t, it would not be open. Let’s not force me to stop working just to get more attention, shall we Microsoft? And lets not run updaters or anything else secretly that I didn’t ask for.

I only wanted a Remote Display Connection — nothing more — and only because I’m forced to connect to a Windows server. …because your networking protocol is so bloody weak, I have to use FTP.

Some of the changes will probably filter down into 10.5.x, but not all — only enough to reduce their engineering costs of back-ported support issues.

One interesting one is the Printer Drivers Update.

The gist: Software Update will also update drivers for third-party printer.

OK, not earth-shattering revolutionary stuff, but what I see is:
Apple Software Update will begin to update third-party content on your behalf

That’s like updating the extra little free tools I have, such as Adium, sfCubed, MailDrop, Perian, Cha-ching, Visual Hub (if it wasn’t toast), VLC. It’s a step towards that goal, which is really: making it simpler to update.

Google aggregates RSS feed in Google Reader; RSS can easily represent updates with a rich XML digital description; these could be “subscribed to” in Software Update. We therefore have user-selected update channels, just like OpenSource and Linux have (for free).

Luckily, autoreconf works now. Considerably better, more portable, and I don’t have to maintain it.

40+ requests daily still come in for my autogen.sh script — even though my site lost a disk and was offline for a month. It wasn’t so complex.

For a new project, or a bare SVN or CVS checkout (or the GIT equiv):

autoreconf -vfi or autoreconf --install

Seriously. Try it. When the autotools get updated, autoreconf does as well, so you don’t have to. Plus, if your version is new than another developer, you don’t have to make a portable autogen.sh; rather in the vein of qmake and Imake, the platform would already have the right versions to work with the platform rather than the sourcebase figuring it out.

In this case, I like the platform knowing what works best with the dev tools you already had to install on the platform (it’s a developer-side thing, not a get/build/user side)

So: don’t use autogen.sh. I’ve revoked my butt-kicking-great version for this reason.