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Wednesday, June 24th

Tris(acetylacetonato)chromium(III)


That is the Chemical that we generated during a Summer chemistry course at Ithaca College, in 1981. I also stayed after the course and worked for the Chemistry department afterwards. That was pretty fun, although it included starting up a really old department computer by Paper Tape (and I could have done it bit by bit from the control panel, as well).

Anyway, I wanted to mention the name of the chemical, since it would be interesting to find out who went to that course with me - nothing was online then, and I can't remember anyone's last names... Perhaps someone else will find this blog entry via google and provide additional information.

Tris(acetylacetonato)chromium(III) - a cool substance. Also my first exposure to NMR/MRI machines, where I got to run the machine myself. Note that Nuclear Magnetic Resonance is the old name for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which is whithout the word Nuclear, so as to not scare people.
dgc03052 on 06.24.09 @ 06:05 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Wednesday, May 20th

The Job Market - the selectivity


The other thing about the job market today is how selective many people are being. So many of the postings list all these years required for every little detail. It seems reminiscent of just after the bubble - lets require 5 years experience for something that has only existed for 3 years...

Other positions, they want someone with 7-10 years of experience, at least 8 in X, 5 in Y and Z, and on and on... Basically, we want the person who used to be doing this job back, or someone doing the exact same thing for someone else. What is especially frustrating is to be close to the requirements, but you know an HR person is just filtering you right out of the running - even though it is something you easily could do. Other positions want 10+ years of embedded programming for a basic programming position - but let's be real - I did embedded programming 10 years ago, and I could do it now - but the stuff I did 10 years ago isn't especially critical to being able to get the job done today. For a senior level architect position, sure - but not for actual coding.

After all, this isn't like 10-15 years ago, where learning a new language, or field required going out to buy a book, buy a compilor, take a training class, and so on. So much of what is done today you may as well have a browser window open for searches right next to the editor window - I'm not going to try and remember every detail and difference between C shell, Korn shell, PHP, Perl, etc. - I'm going to look up specifics when I need them. I can program in any of them, I just have to lookup occasional details the first time I use them that month. Now I'm not saying someone with no experience can learn J2EE multi-tier concurrency issues that way, but anybody with a fair bit of experience, who matches more than half the requirements, can probably do the job - just with a couple of months worth of learning curve.

What's really frustrating is to see jobs that you know you could do stay open month after month. For several of them - I know I could have started that job when I first saw it (or interviewed for it sad ), and be fully up to speed by now, yet the position is still listed as open. The company has gone without anyone doing the job, and people are going without jobs...

Of course, some of these might be more phantom than real jobs. Perhaps the hiring manager would rather keep the requisition open, so that it could be cut if more cuts are needed, rather than someone they know, or because having the excuse of not having the right people gets you out of certain deadlines, or they just don't have the time to spend on interviewing (which means they won't get help, and won't get ahead). Whatever reason is behind some of these, it is frustrating to see them.

Oh well, can't do much about any of this...
dgc03052 on 05.20.09 @ 11:00 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


The Job Market - the process


Currently, I am stuck with the joys of job hunting. I have some part-time work, but not enough to get by on.

The interesting thing is how differently various companies behave.

Some companies are very automated - you get an email when you create an account with them (some that include your password - very bad style), an email for each job you apply to, emails if jobs are added that meet search criteria, and so on. They seem very professional, yet dealing with them generally seems like you are just sending information to /dev/null. You generally are successful in dealing with them, except for what counts - actually getting a job. I definitely like the ones that run searches for you, even though without having your resume delivered by someone who knows you, they are still generally a waste of time.

A very few companies actually do things "right". For example, I saw an opening with Expressor on LinkedIn. It seemed like a good fit so I applied. I got the immediate response email about my application (from LinkedIn). A couple of weeks later, I got the Thank you for applying, we have chosen to pursue other candidates email. While of course I don't like that - this was an email from a real person's email address (not that I tried to get any other communications), and it appears to have been sent when the job posting was removed.

In comparison, there are some of the large company sites. Sometimes you see multiple jobs, with identical descriptions. Clearly, if the descriptions are identical and fit, then they are all an equal fit - but I have no way of knowing if this is just multiple positions in the same group, or actually different positions. If its the same hiring manager then it is silly, and possibly annoying, to submit to each of them, but if its different hiring managers then I should... You hope the system will remove duplicates, but what about the adage of including custom cover letters - if the job ID is different, then there are different cover letters, so which one will they get?

From some of the same large companies, they seem to have a policy of putting a removal date on all openings. This means that for some of the jobs, they end up reposting them, which is another match for your search criteria, so you should send in another application. However, if this is still the same hiring manager - there really is no point.

I guess the biggest pain about the big companies is that there is no real feedback - it would take so little for them to send an email that the job you applied for has now been closed, yet without it, you don't have any idea if you still have a chance or not.


dgc03052 on 05.20.09 @ 10:06 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Thursday, December 11th

Time Management


Time management, especially when working from home, can be a very tricky thing. Lots of people have lots of advice about it, but just a couple of Software Engineering notes.

It is very difficult to juggle a deep thought task (like good development), with interrupt driven work. Nowhere does this seem more prevalent than in Standards Development, or part-time management. Ideally, I was supposed to spend half my time on new work, and half my time updating the OMA-DS Specs, and being vice-chair. You spend a week at a meeting, have a lot of action items to take care of, some of which require investigation. You (typically) have to deal with Jet-lag, and make progress on real development. The thing is, if you aren't going to get at least a couple of hours of deep-thought time, how much real progress can you make? Same thing if you are supposed to be helping other people out - you get interrupts, lose your train of thought, have to get back into the groove, then its time for another interrupt.

These days, at least you can occasionally work from home, and have some time where you can block out interrupts. Before, I always seemed to get into this habit - when I got to the point of being the person to go to for certain answers, I would start coming in later and later. Of course it helps that I would probably find 25-26 hour days ideal, rather than 24. But anyway, by going in late, the afternoon would be the time for me to be interrupted, and the evenings would be the time for real development. Kind of enforced no-interrupt time, but its not a good family solution.

The other area that is hard to juggle is switching jobs, or looking for work (I'm not referring to being totally out of work). You have these near term requirements to meet (like finishing for a major release), and yet you have these high priority interrupts to talk to various contacts, or investigate potential leads.

And just to prove the point, I take a break on this, because the school bus came, and its time to go greet my youngest...
dgc03052 on 12.11.08 @ 02:45 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Tuesday, September 23rd

The joys of upgrading


So I was getting extremely tired of the poor performance of my existing server (a P II!), and it seems to be going downhill, with strange quirks. The latest is a steadily drifting time clock - losing at least a couple of seconds every fifteen minutes or so - enough to cause problems with the typical time updates, so they start failing as being too far out of range.

Anyway, so I bought a new system - an Intel Q6600, 4Gb, 500Gb Sata drive. No monitor, graphics card, or the like, just raw performance. I'd like to be able to virtualize some older stuff, which is why the high-end CPU and memory. When everything is setup, then I'll move some of the older disks over to it.

Right now, Fedora 9 is giving me major problems - primarily PackageKit. I saw this blog entry while doing yet another search to try and debug stuff, and he seems to sum it up pretty well - http://www.dhoytt.com/mainblog/archives/2008/05/packagekit-new-default-manager.html. This thing is just giving me problem after problem.

I did a plain install, and then tried to update the software. Then I go to add some new software, but keep getting pointless errors about being unable to get a TID, and it having a ";" in it. Turns out that installing PackageKit installs both a daemon and a user component, and the install didn't restart the daemon, so it kept compaining about trying to talk to an old server. Not that it could bother to say that, or have something google-able that described it - I had to download the source code and search, and then browse through a couple levels of what could generate the error to find some idea about what was going on.

I get past that, and take some time to setup VNC, get the firewall ports set, and so on, and then finally reboot to test that everything is configured right. VNC working, so now it's time to go back.

Then I try to add software again. Now I just keep getting errors about not having the permissions to install packages. If I try and run as root - that is forbidden. If I run as me, sometimes I was getting prompted for the root password, but that seems to have stopped. The program starts up, lets me select things, and does all of its processing (which seems to take a long time to check dependancies), and then refuses - "Failed to install package. You don't have the necessary privileges to install packages". Browse the SELinux and other logs, and see some mentions of totally separate policies being used, that is controlled by PolicyKit, like org.freedestop.packagekit.update-system. I try to see what I can do there, but the Authorizations option from System | Preferences | System runs, and lets me see what is there, but I don't seem to be allowed to alter anything (the Modify icon never un-grays). Great, something else broken by default - no indication of what I can possibly do.

What is _extremely_ annoying is that they seem to have taken away the tools that actually worked - doing "yum install pirut", goes and tells me that gnome-packagekit is already installed and latest version - nothing to do. Finally, it did allow me to install yumex, so perhaps I can finally get back to what I was trying to do.

Oh, and incidentally, while composing this, I managed to get internet explorer stuck at 100% CPU - apparently real multitasking, like scrolling through the google history of searches before the window has finished updated isn't a good idea.



dgc03052 on 09.23.08 @ 02:46 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Monday, September 8th

RV042 trick


Also worth commenting, use the equivalent link to enable telnet... http://192.168.1.1/sysinfo123.htm?ConsoleSimulation=1, adjusted for your router IP address....
dgc03052 on 09.08.08 @ 03:05 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


RV042 Again... What a pain.


Well, it turns out I was wrong - setting the MAC address seems to have nothing to do with getting the RV042 working or not. It turns out there is a bug in the most recent firmware (and probably others) that if you set a different MAC address on the 2nd WAN port, Dual Wan won't work at all.

Not sure how it ever worked for me last time, but there was a power problem a couple of days ago, and ever since then my DSL connection (WAN2) was dropped (My boxes are on a UPS, but it looks like stuff outside the house was reset). I played around with all the same things as before, full power cycle of everything, reload the firmware, reload the settings, swap cables, and so on. Same problem as before - both connections worked fine on WAN1, both failed totally on WAN2. I finally found a comment on linksysinfo.org - http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums that was my exact problem.

I also found a comment about getting the wrong size MTU (576 vs. 1500), which could hurt performance, so I need to check that out.

Argh...

Some keywords that I would search for, just in case someone else has the same problem: RV042 WAN2 Failure problem DMZ, etc.
dgc03052 on 09.08.08 @ 03:02 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Friday, August 29th

LinkSys RV042


So I finally finished some of my home network setup a couple of months back - installing a router that can fail-over cleanly from the Cable Modem to the DSL connection. I went by price and features - I couldn't justify spending a huge amount on something that I only really needed every couple of months - if the cable modem is out for an afternoon, go to the basement and switch over to DSL for a while.

The reviews were really mixed. Lots of people loved it, but lots of people just never got them to work right. Well, I can really understand people having problems - I could get the first port to work great, but the second port seemed to always fail to connect. I fought with that off and on for days. I took extensive notes on what I tried (which I can't find right now), even did tracing over the wire of all the network traffic. Whenever it finally seemed like it would connect, it would drop offline from the DSL by the next day, and refuse to reconnect. There was some really helpful advice from some verizon techs on various bulletin boards, but it just wouldn't keep working.

Finally, I tried one final thing, that no one had mentioned - I set the MAC address of the RV042 to the same value as what the DSL modem showed that it presented to the network (from it's status pages, when just connected to the modem - not what the modem showed to devices that were connected to it over ethernet). That meant that when the DSL modem was effectively in passthrough mode - allowing the RV042 to do the authentication, the RV042 looked like it was still the DSL modem. That finally did it. No mention anywhere of Verizon needing that - they all talked about perhaps waiting a couple of minutes. Instead what I was seeing that you could get a different MAC address to work for a while, but by the next day, something was reset, and you had to be back to the original MAC address of the DSL modem. Very frustrating.

Overall, now that its working, the RV042 is pretty decent. It is a bit slower than directly connected to the cable modem, and it seems to occasionally block outgoing requests with policy violations that I can't figure out, but it does route traffic over both Cable and DSL. It can do lots of filtering, stateful packet inspection and so on, which is useful with kids in the house.

When I can find the notes I took, I'll see if there was anything else that needed to be done - it did take a while before I could get it to work even moderately well - I know that I _HAD_ to do a full reset of the device before the second network port would work - just powering it off and on did not work. Seemed like whatever state they left it in from the factory was screwed up somehow, despite going an configuring everything.
dgc03052 on 08.29.08 @ 11:36 AM EST [link] [No Comments]


vCardDav update


So, just an update on the vCardDav mailing list. I have to laugh, but it's not worth replying on the list... So I make a note in a reply about how a number of people in the IETF do not like using HTML, in a reply to someone who was using HTML - http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg00601.html. Sure enough, someone has to reply to that - http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg00603.html - to say that it isn't just the IETF, it includes him, and how he doesn't like the way I replied within the HTML, rather than in plain text.

Now, neglecting the fact that every email I have originated to an IETF mailing list I do in plain text, and that my replies are in the same format as the sender, I just have to find it funny - I complain that the place where people complain the most about not using plain text is in the IETF, so he complains about not using plain text in an IETF mailing list, claiming to not be part of the herd - "It's not just them - there are many other people (including me!)" . Of course he is part of "them" - someone complaining on an IETF mailing list.... Oh well.
dgc03052 on 08.29.08 @ 11:08 AM EST [link] [No Comments]


Flight Update


Just a final update on the flight - before we left, the upgrade standby list was in the upper 40's, with 7 people already having been upgraded. The flight standby list was in the 20s, so clearly lots of people had already checked in, and were trying to take an earlier flight. So of course, every seat was full, which combined with every seat in the President's club being full just made for a wonderful time.

One nice thing - once I got to Newark, I went ahead and went to Terminal A (where my final flight left from), since it listed a President's club as being available. That club was practically empty, just a couple of people, everything looked clean and fresh - what a wonderful change from Chicago.
dgc03052 on 08.29.08 @ 10:54 AM EST [link] [No Comments]


Wednesday, August 20th

Frequent Flyer Upgrades


For all the talk about how frequent flyers are only in it for the upgrades (according to US Airways, anyway - when they trashed all the mileage bonuses), it is rather ridiculous to travel on routes with a large number of frequent flyers - like red-eyes from SFO or San Jose, or my next flight, from Chicago to Newark. The plane is a 737-500 - with only 8 first class seats. On a Sunday flight into Chicago, I got the upgrade. However, outbound on Thursday is pretty hopeless. Currently 7 of the seats are full (5 being upgrades). However the current standby list is 27 people (and I am 5th, which isn't going to happen without a major change).

That means there are 32 Elite flyers on a flight with 8/106 seats - almost a third... Flat out impossible for more than 1 in 4 to get the upgrade, even if no-one was paying for first. As a Platinum, I am still 10th overall, so there are at least 9 other platinums onboard (probably getting what I deserve for going with a cheap fare).

And of course, it is a nearly full flight - currently a total of 5 empty seats...

sigh...
dgc03052 on 08.20.08 @ 10:01 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Sunday, August 3rd

Ranting


OK, so I am going to break a rule and rant. I'll leave out the actual name, so at least Google won't come up with the association, but it will be trivial to figure it out...

There have been a couple of posts in the vCardDav mailing list recently that just really tick me off, enough to send out a roiling flame - which I really try hard not to do. One of the editors, a young guy, kind of smart, knowledgeable in certain areas (but not sync) just can't handle that if you don't know something, it's OK to say so.

It is painfully obvious that he has never implemented a sync solution in his life, but he keeps taking a very superficial knowledge - which seems to mostly be just what other people have said on the mailing list, and acting like he's the expert. I guess part of it is to keep the distinction of being the editor, in charge of the spec, be an impressive authority, whatever, but it is just _so_ painful.

A couple of months back, there was a long sequence about why you can't just store Diffs, and send those to perform sync. I mean, the overall concept it pretty simple - Sync Metadata, like the Sync anchor - when you did the last sync, and what the state was at that time, can easily get out of sync with the actual address book. You have to store the Metadata separate from the address book, since they are different applications, and you as the sync client just have partial access to the address book info - and generally just to a fixed set of fields, not under your control. In the real world, people can easily use more than one sync client, reinstall the client, reset the device, and so on, and you just have to deal with it. Additionally, you don't get invoked when changes are made in the address book - you just run when it is time to do a sync. Generally you can get access to when an entry last changed, but that is about it. That means you can't just keep updating some diff tree, like a source code control system when things actually change- you would have to keep a copy of the entire address book with your client, to be able to compare all the data just before the sync. Doubling all your storage requirements and doing a lot of extra comparisons is generally a pretty dumb thing to do, especially on a limited, battery powered device, even if it would occasionally get more "accurate" results (but maybe still not what the user really meant)...

Anyway, here we go again - the exact same thing over again - in http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg00554.html. Argh "Two-party sync is easy: just record diffs as metadata and exchange that in the sync protocol." Just absolutely no clue whatsoever about how things are done, or what is reasonable. Now, if this was a first time post about it, I would try to explain, but it is not - it just keeps on happening, so I just couldn't help it - I flamed him (a little) -http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg00555.html.

The other time I really flamed him was back at http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg00402.html. That time I was _really_ pissed off. He took a thread that I started to try and have a clear written explanation of why it was not just a bug in the client that it could not return the exact same vCard as it received in a subsequent sync (but rather a reasonable, and expected behavior), took a piece of what I said completely out of context, claimed that was my only reason, and that I was wrong, and that he was right with a slightly different view - which was _exactly_ what had been in my earlier port. I literally said that because of A, B, and C, thus D, and by the end of the thread he claimed that I said it was only A, and I was wrong, he was right, it was D. It was just so frustrating - I mean I was doing sync software when he started high school - working on the Intellisync SDK with Bob D., which sold incredibly well, did developer conferences on sync (I wasn't a very good speaker for the presentations, but did well in the hands on or 1 on 1 stuff), got sent to China to train people in Sync, all the courses and meetings we did at our site. I didn't mention that in the flame - not much point in being the old fuddy-duddy, and all that, but it was just ridiculous

Note the thread above was was caused from this post: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg00354.html, where the person just totally misunderstood how sync is done today, but after a couple of back and forth emails, he understood the explanations and revised his opinion. He was rather arrogant at first, but then really backed off when he understood. In a way, that thread was funny in a rather sad kind of way - a guy from Nokia insisting that it was merely a bug in the client to return a different vCard that was previously sent - when ALL Nokia devices map the data into a fixed structure, toss everything they don't understand, and return it all restructured the next time.

Unfortunately, there is also another guy there, incredibly smart, but also not well-versed in sync - an IMAP / Email guy, which is pretty different. His big thing recently was in http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/vcarddav/current/msg00432.html.... He throws in this idea, which on the surface makes sense, but with closer examination it has some major problems - it works for all the cases that already currently work, causes a lot more collisions and extra data to have to be sent back and forth at startup, and fails worse than doing nothing for all the cases that aren't currently handled. It has a big advantage in that it is easy to understand, and has a clear set of rules for implementer's to follow, and looks wonderful, but it still fails terribly. But I try to explain why, and he just picks little pieces out of what I send, and refutes those (most of them incorrectly because we are using different terms), and then ignores things for weeks on end. It is just so frustrating. I'm sure he still thinks he's right, and that in an ideal world both sides will just store the full vCard, and never lose metadata, but that is just so far from any reality it is frustrating.

I'm certain that if we got together with some of the long-time sync people (OMA-DS people), plus the last 2 guys (but NOT the first one), plus some of the other contributors on the list, things could be hammered out and be really good. Instead, we have basically wasted a year. The DS group submitted a proposal way back, which the first guy totally rewrote in a badly broken way in the first draft, spent months arguing back and forth every little thing until it was all the way back to the original, and he still doesn't get it. There was a whole bunch of stuff about why some text was completely the reverse of what it should be, and all he could do (the second or third time around) was suggest a "compromise" to change the MUST to a SHOULD, instead of reversing the logic.

Anyway, it's no wonder my boss thinks the group is a total waste of time - but I just would really like that spec fixed, since I have spent so much time in the past battling with it's flaws...

I should just be smart and unsubscribe, or have the incoming emails automatically marked as read, so I don't see them until I take the time to go review a whole bunch - that way I wouldn't get so irritated at the ignorance and arrogance.... Maybe if there are yet more stupid things posted...

End of Rant (For now)
dgc03052 on 08.03.08 @ 02:02 AM EST [link] [No Comments]


trivia


OK, so I've updated some of the junk lying around. In a sense, it is silly that I bother with this, but it is good to play around with PHP, and keep active. This blog doesn't have any fancy features, RSS, etc., but no-one reads it anyway (other than google & msn), as far as I can tell from the Apache logs. Of course, one still has to be careful - if it's on the internet, it's forever...
dgc03052 on 08.03.08 @ 12:34 AM EST [link] [No Comments]


Travel


Reading other people's blogs recently, I thought again about how I never do that myself. So, to start back up, I'll first cut and paste my input to Charles Stross's (love his books) blog, about worst travel experience:

A 72 hour trip from Manchester (NH, New England), to Beijing. Planned to arrive two days early, actually arrived a day late.

On Friday, bad weather, but no problem, my flight to Newark (NJ, near NY,NY) was early, before it was supposed to hit. Delayed a bit, then board, then sit on the plane for a while. Then they cancelled, so everyone gets in line. Big problem - it was the Friday before all the local schools had a week's vacation, so everything is booked (and cancelled).
Managed to drain the batteries on two phones at the same time (One on hold, then talking with the elite desk, the other online checking for available flights), while in line still in the terminal. Best option I could get, they put me on a flight from Boston the next morning (45 miles, about an hour drive).

OK, so go back home, try to arrange a last minute ride to Boston (since my return was still to MHT) - of course most of the airport shuttles were full. Get to Boston Saturday morning, and of course, the flight is delayed. Fortunately, it was solely because of crew timeout issues, so it took off when they said it would, and I didn't miss the flight from Newark to Beijing (but it was close).

Flight to Beijing was average, some entertainment problems, and seat power broke after about two hours. Up by Greenland, lots of activity in back, someone was sick.
Right as the in-flight display shows us at our closest approach to the North Pole, I feel a long slow gradual bank, oh &*&#..... Sure enough, that sick person was worse, and there are no good hospitals in Northern Siberia (above Beijing), so we are diverting back to Goose Bay Canada, despite already being at the halfway point.
Another couple of hours go by, and we are getting close to Canada, and more announcements - the person felt better, so we were re-dirverting all the way back to Newark. Net result for that trip, a 13 hour flight from Newark, to Newark. Net result for the day, 18 hours from Boston to NY.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a good shot, but here is a fuzzy camera phone display of the inflight display - http://dchampagne.com/photos/SyncML%20Trips/2008%2002%20Beijing/img057.jpg

After an hour and a half, finally have a coupon for a hotel, and am on a shuttle bus to go get 5 hours sleep before trying again the next day (I was rebooked for the next flight - but a lot of people were rerouted all over the place, or delayed several days).

The next day, start the Newark to Beijing trip all over again - same plane, same entertainment problems (the choice of 8, no 4 channels), etc.. I also found out that shortly after I got through the line, the computers crashed (at 2 am), and the majority of the line had an extra half hour of sitting around...

I've also spent 8 hours on the tarmac at Montreal (Not allowed off because we were a diverted Madrid to Newark flight, and customs wouldn't take us), followed by spending the night on the floor in Newark with my 10 year old son (fortunately, he was able to watch all 3 original Star Wars movies, plus several others I had with me on my laptop), too many long delays to count, I was at the conference in Japan that started all the burning Dell laptop news, and having food poisoning all the way from France to NY (including going through passport control and customs trying not to lose it again).

dgc03052 on 08.03.08 @ 12:11 AM EST [link] [No Comments]


Tuesday, August 14th

Transportation Stupidity Agency


Been a while since an update, but since I sent this off in an email, I may as well repeat this here...

Reading an article of Christopher Elliot's articles "Airport security: there's no backing out", made me recall some of my own experiences.

One was about laptops and the TSA:
When I use my computer, and am going to use it again shortly, I generally just put it in standby mode - for example, when I am planning on going to the President's club. Well, I was going through the security line at Newark terminal C, and the X-Ray screener asked one of the other TSA people to send my laptop through again. It goes through again, and then he says "something still isn't right, let's try this," and pops out the battery, and sends the battery and laptop through in separate bins. While this seemed to address whatever problem they were having, they left me with a laptop that had to do a full reboot, and attempt to auto-recovery whatever I could afterwards.

Just something to be aware of - apparently if it's out of your possession, you better assume they can do what they want with it.

Another case was a screener in Bangkok, who took my _empty_ water bottle away from me, saying they weren't allowed, even empty... Apparently I might fill it up with unapproved water from the drinking fountain, rather than buying a new one. razz
dgc03052 on 08.14.07 @ 06:23 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Monday, February 19th

Server Rebuild


Finally, the server is back up and running....

I originally had a Windows 2000 Server system as the server. It's disks were pretty full (and very fragmented), and I wanted a more convenient Linux system available, so I was rebuilding an obsolete system as a Fedora 6 system, with a 250Gb disk. I also had gotten tired of the Comcast cable system having spotty availability (working from home, being offline for a couple of hours in the afternoon is a major pain), so I took advantage of a DSL offer, and wanted to setup a Linux box as a router to automatically switch between cable modem or DSL when there were problems.

Well, I had Fedora running, but not much else, when we had a nice ice storm.... The power decided to flicker on and off for a couple of minutes, including several periods of the lights being really dim. The only UPS I have is a small one, and it turned out that the Win2K server wasn't plugged into it - just the routers and cable modem were.

Well, of course, the old server refused to boot back up. After quite a bit of swapping disks to the Linux system and backing everything up, it turned out that one of the disks was fried. It ran, but accessing more than half the disk started getting the dreaded clicking of being reset, and general really bad behavior. Running the manufacturer utilities on it just told me to return it, giving me a nice code to generate an RMA from (unfortunately, it was well out of warranty). Trying to check it in Linux didn't work worth beans - no errors or bad blocks, but it was constantly resetting itself and retrying, and I guess eventually working (or remapping a bad block, but then more failing with every test).

Just for the heck of it, before running off a backup, I ran a memtest on the old system, and that was fried as well, about the top third of memory having periodic stuck bits.

So anyway, that system is junk, and everything was moved over to the Linux system. Of course, that requires installing lots of extra packages, Perl bundles, switching cgi scripts from Dos format to Unix format, fixing up embedded dos paths (f:/apache doesn't work well compared to /usr/bin/perl).

Anyway, the internal file system server (Samba) has been running fine, and now the web server is finally mostly back up. Some nuisance stuff to debug still, but anyway....
dgc03052 on 02.19.07 @ 11:35 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Saturday, December 23rd

Vista Resource Hogging


Jeff Hodges posted an interesting set of links regarding Vista's DRM support a-cost-analysis-of-windows-vista-content-protection. The whole idea of tilt bits, and encrypting and decrypting everything before it even goes over the PCI bus seems just crazy. Just how much performance of the system is supposed to be sacrificed for all this? How much reliability?
dgc03052 on 12.23.06 @ 01:45 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Wednesday, December 13th

Identity Karoake


Ok, this is really funny. Identity Karoake... "Very Frightening Indeed". Lyrics available at bohemian-rhapsody-in-the-key-of-id
dgc03052 on 12.13.06 @ 11:58 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Tuesday, October 24th

More Symantec stuff


Turns out lots of people have had Symantec problems, such as http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/06/20/symantec-live-update-fun/.

There is also a short article on tracking down handle resource leaks at "How to keep Windows XP stable".

And while I'm at it, an article on the really, really, hidden files - http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml, that includes quite a few useful references.
dgc03052 on 10.24.06 @ 06:36 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Sunday, October 22nd

Software Support 101


I think I have the ideal big company software support process figured out -

Step 1) Have user fill out form, with many detailed fields for software, version, OS, free disk space, etc.

Step 2) Ask user to reboot, ignore what was submitted from step 1, and ask for detailed information on the software in use, version info, OS details, free disk space, etc. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 3) Ask user to uninstall, reboot, reinstall, and reboot the first product that the company makes mentioned in the answers from step 2. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 4) Ask user to uninstall, reboot, reinstall, and reboot for every product that the company makes listed in the answers from step 2. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 5) Ask user to uninstall, reboot, manually delete files, clear all temporary files, manually delete registry keys, reboot, then reinstall and reboot for every product that the company makes listed in the answers from step 2. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 6) Inform the user that their system/registry must have gotten corrupted, and that they need to wipe their disk, and reinstall everything on their system. Ask if that fixes the problem.

Step 7) Inform the user that they have a really rare case (actually just very rare to persist to this step), and provide steps to disable the first product that the company makes that was listed in step 2. Ask if this fixes the problem.

Step 8) Tell the user that this really should take care of the problem. Provide steps to disable every product that the company makes.

So far I have seen this from HP (for their printer drivers - net result was to disable the services with the problem "HPZinw12.exe takes almost 100% of the CPU in a laptop"), Symantec (discussed below), and Diskeeper (which had the added bonus that the product would automatically wipe the disk for you, to make sure you didn't skip any steps).

Now maybe if I could patent this, we might get somewhere.....
dgc03052 on 10.22.06 @ 02:29 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Friday, October 20th

Symantec System Slowdown Utilities, er....

mood: Irritated

Or, Norton Internet Security 2006, Norton AntiVirus 2006, DeadUpdate (I mean LiveUpdate), and so on.

So I was recently browsing around, and saw some of the usual complaining about how much Symantec drags down your system. Specifically, Ed Foster's Gripeline at InfoWorld, at Gripe1, Gripe2, and some of what it references - such as What_Really_Slows_Windows_Down. It reminded me (again) of how bad Symantec has gotten..... Oh for the days when Peter Norton was involved....

For background, I have used Norton Utilities since the very early DOS days, and still have the 1985 edition of Peter Norton's Guide to the IBM PC. Still have backups with the original DOS tools as well, lying around somewhere. Things became much less useful when Windows got popular, but still. I loved all the original Peter Norton stuff, utilities, and so on. Very useful stuff when writing device drivers, building custom PC hardware, and the like. More out of loyalty than any real reason, I picked up Norton Systemworks when I needed some utilites. What a disaster.... Norton Ghost appeared to work great - reboot, do full backups, everything verified, and so on. Only problem was, everything was unrestorable. Totally worthless, never got anywhere with it. I had other backup software, so other than a huge waste of time, no problems, removed Norton Ghost, but left the other tools in.

Norton Internet Security and Antivirus trial version came with the laptop, so when the trial ran out, rather than do all the uninstall, and play with other stuff, I just kept them. So things were clearly resource hogs, and some of the tools were worthless, but I kept them, rather than take the time to remove everything and probably have half the same issues with other tools. I actually liked Norton Password Manager, which came with the 2004 version of Systemworks. It seems they might be resurrecting it in the Norton Confidential program, but I can't see buying anything new from them...

Anyway, along came 2005, and with the renewal prices versus upgrade prices, I went ahead and upgraded. Well, that was a waste of money. Systemworks no longer included the password manager, and there were all sorts of uninstall/install problems. It was horrible trying to get NPM from Systemworks 2004 up and running with the 2005 versions of all the tools. 2005 Systemworks wouldn't install without uninstalling the entire 2004 version, installing the old over the new either failed, or created problems.... Anyway, I eventually got it all running together - one of those things where a lot of time has already been invested, a lot of the issues are finally known, so why throw away the money already spent and buy a new set of tools with a new learning curve.

Along comes 2006, and same issue again. Once again I went with the cheap route, and upgraded.

Now, all along, my system would periodically get really slow, and start having failures opening windows - all the classic signs of resource starvation. After some reviewing of http://www.sysinternals.com/ , and Mark's blog - http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/ (now at the new location of http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/default.aspx), somewhere around the Sony Root kit fiasco timeframe, I finally look into it. Symantec is an enormous resource hog, but so is Outlook, and my tendancy to leave a half dozen Word windows open, a couple of spreadsheets, and so on. Best I can come up with short term, without the real time to devote to it, is to bump the available handles way up - e.g. follow http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126962/en-us, and bump the sharedsections value up, since I don't run multiple users.

That works for a while, but still have to periodically reboot to get enough resources back (every couple of weeks - normally I just suspend).

One time, my system runs out of resources quite quickly, so I look into it some more. It turns out LiveUpdate is running every 5 minutes (apparently because it was failing, and rescheduling for 5 minutes later), AND their symlcsvc.exe license manager service is leaking 42 handles every single call. Well this clearly is a problem, so now that I know why the failure is occuring, I reboot and look into it further.

Turns out, after reboot, LiveUpdate now succeeds, but symlcsvc.exe still leaks 42 handles every time LiveUpdate runs - even if I just manually run it, and it finds absolutely nothing to update. Well, that is clearly a bug, and to me, a pretty serious one, since LiveUpdate defaults to running pretty frequently - something like every 2 hours, which means it always runs after every resume. Now, the workaround is obvious, run LiveUpdate less frequently, but I figure I'll try to be nice, and report the bug to Symantec support. After all, I have no idea when the bug started happening - it may have been recently introduces by a previous LiveUpdate, so maybe it could actually get fixed.

Now note, I don't expect them to just suddenly believe I know what I'm talking about, but I did have the vague hope that if I give them all the details to very quickly replicate the issue on their own, somewhere along the line someone would actually take the 2 minutes involved, replicate the issue, and log a bug.

Well, that is just the start of a huge waste of time, showing the uselessness of Symantec support and Symantec QA. I've linked the emails below, with summaries. Unfortunately, I don't have my initial report - since their messages never include anything we ever sent in before. What really ticks me off is that my sole expectation from all of this was for them to log a bug in their internal system, so maybe a developer would actually fix it - but no - never happens. Instead they finally tell me to use the workaround I suggested in my initial report - gee - that really helps. If you are interested, you can follow how I include screen shots, process viewer details, and everything that should easily show a developer what the issue is - or I have my summary interpretation for each. Many thanks to sysinternals, as usual.... Note that at the bottom of each message, I added links to the Next and Previous, as well as links for attachments, or the Outlook message format where the images don't export properly....

You can either start here "1 - RE'Case002-372-278' .htm", or see the extended text by viewing just this blog entry from the link entry below.

Of course, I have a similar story with Diskeeper trashing disks (and that they feel it's not their fault, even though their scan shows no problems, but then proceeds to basically wipe the disk), but maybe some other time.



dgc03052 on 10.20.06 @ 02:39 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Thursday, October 19th

Blog Cleanup


OK, so as usual, spammers have found things, and did the usual blog spam comments. Not sure if those are related to the "karma" negative votes (or if those were just the spammers seeing if they had access), but finally made a pass to clean things up, ban some of the recurring IP addresses, and disable comments on the entries that seem to be regularly spammed. Of course it won't hold for long, spammers being the slimes that they are, but anyway.... If I continue to use this very sporadically, then I may just totally disable comments, or if I feel the need to regularly post, I may have to move over to blogspot or something....
dgc03052 on 10.19.06 @ 08:17 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Travel - Countries


So I guess that updates the countries I've stayed in (meaning a real night in a hotel, not just the airport) to be:

Edit from 5/20/09: See WIKI for current data: "DGC Wiki"

Canada (Montreal, Vancouver)
China (Mainland - Shanghai, Beijing)
England
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong (really an administrative district now - but separate passport stamp)
Ireland
Italy
Japan
The Netherlands
Singapore
Spain
USA (At least AZ,CA,CO,DC,FL,GA,MA,ME,NH,NJ,NY,OH,PA,TX,VA,VT,UT, plus day trips)


dgc03052 on 10.19.06 @ 03:25 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Travel


Edit from 5/20/09: See WIKI for current data: "DGC Wiki"

Yet another update....
After the April 06 DC trip, there has been:
May 2006, D.C.
June 2006, Osaka, Japan
July 2006, Hawaii (Cruise)
July 2006, Vancouver
August 2006, Beijing
August 2006, D.C.
September, 2006, San Jose, CA
December 2006, D.C. (pending)

dgc03052 on 10.19.06 @ 03:13 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Friday, April 21st

More Travel


May as well update the list -
Madrid was fine - I had Dennis fly out to meet me, then we both flew to Rome.
Trip after that was Vancouver (Early April 06), followed immediately by London, to which I brought Adam and Martha.
I have most of a week home, then it's D.C for the end of April.
Then I could be going to Paris for an OMA-DS interim (but probably won't).

The next trips on the schedule are Osaka and Vancouver.
Looks like I forgot a couple of trips - Austin for a TEG Interim Nov 05, plus Phoenix for another one in March 06.

Edit from 5/20/09: See WIKI for current data: "DGC Wiki"

So I guess add to the list:
April 2006, D.C. (pending)
April 2006, London
April 2006, Vancouver
March 2006, Phoenix
February 2005, Rome
January 2006, Madrid
December 2005, Athens
November 2005, Austin

dgc03052 on 04.21.06 @ 12:22 PM EST [link]


Saturday, January 28th

Cobwebs


Well, I guess I am busy generating yet another cobweb site on the web, with just not having the time to keep anything up to date. Since I'm not advertising with any of the other bloggers, I guess that's OK. Makes it easy for the one reader (me) to keep up.

Anyway, I guess I can at least update the travel list.
The singapore trip went fine, followed by a week in Athens for the OMA meeting - representing Funambol in the SyncML-DS meetings (well, OMA-DS now).
Just about to head out to Madrid, then Rome. Spain is a repeat, but I guess I'm adding Italy and Greece to the list.
Oh well, time to finish things before travel...
dgc
dgc03052 on 01.28.06 @ 09:40 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Tuesday, August 30th

Accelerando


Currently reading Accelerando, by Charles Stross. Pretty neat stuff about Martioshka Brains, The singularity, and so on.


dgc03052 on 08.30.05 @ 03:58 PM EST [link]


Sunday, August 14th

XSLT


Been struggling with xslt a bunch recently. The tools we use to generate specs include a bunch of stylesheets to convert docbook to fo (and then to PDF, or just directly to HTML). The catch is that they are from 2003, and there have been a _lot_ of changes to them since. And of course, you can't just drop them in and go, some of the changes are incompatible.

Worse, I've tried to use the XSLT debugger in XMLSpy to try and figure out what is going on, but that can't succeed in running either new or old. Very frustrating trying to learn the quirks of the tool, while also trying to figure out the core functionality.

Oh well, such is the life. Do enough to get by for now, and keep trying to figure out the issues. Just keep plugging away at it.
dgc03052 on 08.14.05 @ 04:10 PM EST [link]


Saturday, August 13th

Travel


Reading Normon Walsh's blog about travel http://norman.walsh.name/threads/travel , and how many countries one has stayed in makes me wonder - I'm not even sure what my count is. It's always a bit weird to be asked at the red cross before donating blood (very good idea) - what countries have you visited in the past X years (it keeps changing, it seems). And then the questions about SARS countries, and the bug of the month.

So, guess I'll start counting, and since I don't have great records, I suspect I will remember more later, and while I'm at it, lets be specific about cities (maybe I'll total up the states too)...

Edit from 5/20/09: See WIKI for current data: "DGC Wiki"

The recent ones:
October 2005, Singapore (coming soon, already ticketed)
October 2005, Not sure, Bay Area USA, maybe, or else NJ.
September 2005, Munich, Germany (coming soon, already ticketed)
July 2005, Piscataway NJ, USA
July 2005, Chicago Illinois, USA
June 2005, Provo UT, USA
June 2005, Dulles VA, USA
April 2005, Dublin, Ireland
March 2005, Piscataway NJ, USA
February 2005, Orlando FL, USA
January 2005, Palo Alto CA, USA
December 2004, NY NY, USA
October 2004, Tokyo, Japan
August 2004, San Jose CA, USA
July 2004, Montreal, Canada
April 2004, Barcelona, Spain
January 2004, Austin TX, USA

Then it gets vague - International I can get from my passport, but who knows what states. It should include the first 9 SyncML testfests (or 0-8), plus some of the standards meetings...
June 2002, Hong Kong
January 2002, Amsterdam, Netherlands (two weeks)
December 2001, Londan, England
November 2001, Kyoto, Japan
?October 2001, San Fransisco CA, USA
June 2001, Tampere, Finland
February 2001, Nice, France

And a couple more Orlando trips...
July 1998, Shanghai, China

Then I'd have to find my old passport, but I think this was it...
? Outside LA CA, USA (with Lockheed)
? Atlanta Georgia, USA (with Lockheed)
? Washington DC, USA (with Lockheed)
? Dayton, OH, USA (with Lockheed) - Air Force Museum is cool...
? Denver/Boulder CO, USA (with Calcomp)
? Los Angeles CA, USA (with Calcomp)
Spring? 1990 Munich, Germany (with Calcomp)
Spring? 1990 Paris, France (with Calcomp)

College interviews (86, 87)
Los Angeles CA, USA
Bay Area of CA, USA
Boston MA, USA
PA

And going way back includes Orlando and Denver.

So I guess for countries that means:
USA
Japan
France
Germany
The Netherlands
Spain
Hong Kong (really an administrative district now - but separate passport stamp)
Mainland China
Finland
England
Ireland
Canada
Singapore (soon)
12 or 13 - whoohoo....

dgc03052 on 08.13.05 @ 10:07 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Tuesday, August 9th

Software Patent


Pretty freaky - one of the patent applications from back in 98 finally got approved - Patent 6,925,477

Pretty freaky. Especially that the way I heard about it was from a company trying to sell me very expensive plaques....

Of course, I really don't like software patents at all, but that's another story.
dgc03052 on 08.09.05 @ 03:31 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Monday, August 8th

Weblog Purpose - General


Darryl Champagne's blog

dgc03052 on 08.08.05 @ 10:03 PM EST [link]


Initial entry


OK, Still testing. Running on my own server, seem to have the directories and permissions figured out now.
dgc_health on 08.08.05 @ 08:59 PM EST [link]


Initial setup


This is the initial setup of GrayMatter.
dgc03052 on 08.08.05 @ 08:17 PM EST [link] [No Comments]