Technical Details

I saw this via Digg/Life hacker, an open source and free project manager called OpenProj. moving away from Windows is getting easier every day. The question is, move to what?

I installed the latest Microsoft updates last night, things went as they should, and then I turned off my machine (it gets a little warm in the office these days)

Only to wake up to my first system crash sans blue screen of death, it just spontaneously rebooted. I wasn’t doing much to stress the system either, reading blogs, email, listening to ATI FM radio and I had an ssh session going.

To that end, I’m blaming the MS’Tards for this instability. so I’d be wary of applying the patch until we here more about what’s happening out in the wild. Hopefully, there will be a patch to follow shortly.

Caveat emptor.

Update:

So far no more spontaneous reboots, but I’m always very wary when machines do strange things.

Update II:

Things are still fine which is reassuring, I’ve decided to upgrade my laptop we’ll see how things progress. 

So, I’ve been doing some testing with FreeBSD and boy has it been a long time since I’ve used a pure BSD implementation, and I have to say it feels very dated. The installer definitely errs on the expert user side of things. No wonder Linux has and does mop the floor with BSD.

I never realized how much I’ve come to like and depend on the System V’isms that are present in Linux and of course Solaris since they changed their numbering scheme way back.

There’s a bunch of little things like the installer is stuck back in 1997 and not very user friendly. Where the heck is curl? I installed all the supplemental packages and no curl annoying. Bash is in /usr/local/bin, what! bash isn’t a first class shell, all very odd. It’s probably me, but I don’t see any BSD in my future. There’s more things to come I’m sure, as I’ve just scratched the surface.

The default out of the box ssh is setup only for root/wheel sure it’s secure, but you might as well disconnect the Ethernet cable if you’re that worried about your server, stuff like this would drive a novice to distraction as opposed to being really really annoying, c’mon guys get a grip.

No SVN, I installed disc2 of the “extras” packages, no SVN, huh? No curl either which seems very odd.

No unzip either, have these guys been coding under a rock somewhere, time to wake up folks.

No dos2unix, I guess DOS is just to lowbrow for the FreeBSD crowd.

Oh FreeBSD why do you torment me so,  for heaven’s sake why on earth do you link /home to /usr/home you !@&#@? FreeBSDtards!

I love Firefox its a great browser and the plugin options are awesome, but this latest update doesn’t seem to be working with secure sites like e*trade and even my.yahoo.com portfolios very odd. All of this just  led me to change my e*trade password thinking I had some sort of major brain fart, unfortunately it was Firefox and the QA folks who had the brain fart. It would be really nice if Firefox didn’t force you to upgrade on a restart or at least gave you the option to defer the upgrade.

So I’m installing Solaris 10 on a Sunfire V100 with 128MB or RAM, very slow to say the least. Sun has improved the install and they now give you the option to disable all the open services they normally embraced, good for admins bad for hackers.

But the real reason I’m writing this post is the fact that their default disk partitioning is the most brain-damaged thing I’ve ever seen. Picture this, a 130GB disk, select the default partition option and you get

I’m sorry but 5500MB for the whole OS and everything else, WTF. I guess I’ll never upgrade the machine, install new packages or run anything that generates large log files (God forbid) etc.

Unbelievable, I’m totally slack jawed at the incompetence, hopefully the OpenSolaris folks will knock some sense into the Solaris team.

A nice collection of slide shows on scaling your web 2.0, there are some pretty common threads in all of these like caching using memcached, dealing with your opensource DB and clustering user data.

http://www.slideshare.net/group/webapps-scalability/slideshows

This isn’t a review of either product, just a somewhat interesting observation on the performance impact of on product on another.

I’m a big fan of virtual computer technology (Solaris zones would be included in this as well) they are great tools for testing and pretty handy to install or test software on that you aren’t so sure you want to put on your primary computer (reduce the clutter).

I’ve been using Virtual PC (VPC) since it was a company called Connectix, it’s generally worked very well and migrating vm’s between different machines has been a breeze. I haven’t found that to be the case with VMWare especially when the underlying hardware varies significantly. I liken VPC to a Phillips screwdriver and VMWare to a Leatherman when all you have to do is drive a few Phillips screws, one tool is easy the other is awkward and can be uncomfortable for more than a couple.

The real point of this story is that, I have both products installed on my system, I’ve noticed that after a few hours my VPC performance would start to lag, screen repaints were slow and my system would be jerky. Looking through the task manager I had lots of VMWare processes running, after stopping the VMWare services, VPC performance is back to normal, very unusual.

I think VMWare has a place and purpose but its insistence on exposing significant amounts of the underlying architecture is both good and bad, worst of all, it really complicates setting up and using a virtual machine. For now I’m sticking with VPC easy to use and move virtual hard disks to different machines.

Well it’s sort of an emulator, it seems to have the most realistic rendering on FireFox and Safari 3.0, as always IE seems to be out to lunch when it comes to rendering the page.

I’ve done a quick rTunes skin for the iPhone it looks the best in landscape mode, no artwork in portrait mode. Unfortunately it will probably be quite some time before I get my hands on one of these little beasts to do any real testing. I’ll package up this release in the next day or two, there are also a couple of minor bug fixes as well.

Check out http://testiphone.com/ seen via DZone.com

Here's a letter I mailed to Rogers today, not email, not submitted via web form, I had to get all old school because their web site sucks so bad I can't submit a "contact us" form and they don't publish any email addresses, so it's back to old school, who would of thought in the 21st century I'd be sending a complaint via mail, needless to say I'm totally pissed off and when your pissed off I understand the best thing to do is to act immediately!

So here's my little missive to good old Rogers:

To the Rogers Web Site group,

When trying to view my bill on-line I’m experiencing a number of problems. In Internet Explorer when selecting “Download Bill” I get a new browser window that eventually gives me the standard IE “cannot find the webpage”. In Firefox selecting “View Bill” tells me I don’t have a plugin installed, I have the Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 plugin installed so there should be problem, when selecting “Download Bill” I get a new blank window, no error message this time. Your session timeouts are too short, the first time I composed this message using your “contact us” form when I selected submit I was told the session had timed out and I would have to sign in again, very frustrating. After signing in I was taken to the main page not to the “contact us” page where presumably I would see your comments were successfully submitted message. So now I don’t know if my comments were submitted or not, doubly frustrating (So I’m forced to compose this message off-line and cut and paste it into the form) Your Web Presence is truly underwhelming and unwelcoming. AND YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER FIELD WILL NOT TAKE MY ROGERS CABLE BILL ACCOUNT NUMBER AND TELLS ME I NEED A VALID ROGERS WIRELESS OR HOME PHONE NUMBER, I TRIED MY FIDO PHONE NUMBER WHICH IS OWNED BY ROGERS AND YOU STILL DON’T GET IT. I CANNOT SUBMIT THIS COMMENT, and pray tell why do you need a Rogers phone number instead of a Rogers Cable account number (by the way the field length won’t support a cable account number either) when I’m LOGGED into your system, you should already have this information. What if I’m a consumer interested in some aspect of you services and I don’t have a Rogers home phone but want one, how on earth can I contact you via your on-line form.

Honestly this is way beyond common sense. I’m forced to send this via plain old mail, thank you for bringing us into the 21^st Century, Bell Satellite TV is looking better and better.

Disgusted,

Postscript:

Rogers finally responded via email of all things, the galling thing is they ask you to phone them to get help. Here's the email, what a bunch of buffoons. Even better the email didn't even have a subject, WTF? I originally posted this email on March 26, so it took them 3 months to the day to respond, lightning customer service in the new millennium. It would appear that they fixed their problem a few days after my original complaint, it sure is hard to find good help these days.

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, we appreciate your use of online customer service.

In your recent email, you have informed us that you are unable to access your online bill due to technical problems.

In response to your email,  we are sorry to hear about the difficulty experienced with your online account, as its somewhat difficult to troubleshoot via email, As this will necessitate some dialogue on the specifics of the problem, we do recommend that this be done over the phone. This will enable our technical representatives to assess the situation, determine the best course of action.

We suggest you contact the Website Support department at 1-877-343-5745, open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.  They will be able to assist you further regarding this matter.

We apologize for the inconvenience that we may have caused. Thank you for choosing Rogers.

For future reference with respect to this e-mail, please quote reference number

Regards,

Suzanne V.

I find this somewhat amusing but mostly exasperating:

To save album artwork with the Apple com library on Windows you do the following:

artwork = self.GetCurrentTrackArtwork()
if artwork and len( artwork ):
    artwork[0].SaveArtworkToFile("/PATH/TO/THE/FILE" )

Looks pretty simple, nice and clean, no problems, but take a look at the AppleScript library on OS X:

artwork = self.GetCurrentTrackArtwork()
data = artwork.data

# PNG HEADER ?     P     N     G
substr = [ 0x89, 0x50, 0x4E, 0x47 ]
idx = self.FindSubstring( data, substr )

graphic = None
if idx:
    graphic = data[idx:-1 ]

    fout = file( ARTWORK_IMAGE, "wb" )
    fout.write( graphic )
    fout.close()
    return

# JPEG HEADER                                    J     F     I     F
substr = [ 0xFF, 0xD8, 0xFF, 0xE0, 0x00, 0x10, 0x4A, 0x46, 0x49, 0x46, ]
idx = self.FindSubstring( data, substr )

if idx:
    graphic = data[idx:-1 ]

    fout = file( ARTWORK_IMAGE, "wb" )
    fout.write( graphic )
    fout.close()

To say there was a little hoop jumping going on here is an understatement, I also had to write the substring method to
search for the ordinal values, and if Apple adds a new graphic format for the cover art, my OS X version breaks and I have to
release a fix, not exactly flexible or easy to use, but maybe that’s the point. Tsk, tsk, tsk…