Monthly Archives: November 2005

eBay Feedback is a joke

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I bought a PlayStation 2 Network adapter off eBay a few weeks ago and still haven’t seen it nor heard from the seller. If it doesn’t arrive soon, I’ll have to start the eBay process to get my money back. Checking the feedback of the seller, she was almost all positive feedback. Reading the feedback, I see things like: “never recieved it, was told it was returned damaged. thanks usps.” and “cd cases broke, missing disc, but shipped quick & still an ok deal” both listed as positive feedback! The problem I believe is that if a buyer leaves negative feedback, the seller will do the same thing even if the buyer pays immediately after the auction closes. So because of fear of getting negative feedback, people leave positive feedback with negative comments. For the hassle and aggravation, I should have just bought this from a local store or a known dealer. On the other hand, my other recent eBay purchases were smooth and shipped quickly.

USB – Is there magic sauce to make it work?

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I really like the concept of USB where devices from different manufacturers plug into hardware made by lots of different vendors without having to worry about getting the right plug. From a user’s point of view, it is great as long as their are drivers for a particular OS. Some types of devices such as hard drives have drivers built into just about every OS, so you just plug it in and you’re golden. Other devices such as PDAs, you have a big problem. I’ve been writing USB drivers and applications that talk to USB for over 3 years now and must say that as a developer, I hate USB. It seems that no one knows enough about USB to implement it correctly on the devices plugging into the computer, so as a developer, I have to code around their issues. Furthermore, each USB device should have a unique vendor and product ID. Vendor IDs seem to always be fine, but the device manufacturers, for some reason or another, give multiple devices the same product ID. This would be fine if the devices had identical USB implementations, but they don’t. Two companies in particular that seem to play games are Palm and Sony with their PDAs. They’re probably either trying to conserve product IDs or someone didn’t have a clue that it should be changed as they expect that they’d be the only ones talking to the devices. It is such a nightmare to deal with these devices. Right now my desk has 8 PDAs so that I can test my code. Things were humming along fine until an issue was reported and the log indicated a problem with some code I changed. Now, I have to find every Sony CLIE that has the same product ID and test my fix against them. Right now, there are at least 7 devices with the same product ID.

Good news on evolution

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Apparently the voters of Dover, PA got fed up with their school board that is trying (the case is being fought in court and should be decided in January) to implement “Intelligent Design” in the biology curriculum. Eight of the school board members were voted out of office. Unfortunately, the ninth board member wasn’t up for re-election. Maybe there are still some “intelligent” people in this country.

(Also see this article where the Vatican seems to be against “Intelligent Design.”)

Conservative Neighborhood

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While my wife and I were walking our dog yesterday, we passed by the house where we voted (we vote in a garage) and they posted the election results for those that voted (in aggregate, of course). Based on the results, I live in a conservative neighborhood. About 65% of the voters cast votes xfor all the propositions (many conservatives supported Governor Arnold). This really wasn’t surprising to me, but it is interesting to see the political views of those in my neighborhood. Luckily no one tries to impose their views on me.

iPod Nano Dock

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Apple was nice enough to include an adapter so that an iPod Nano fits in a standard iPod dock. That’s fine and dandy, but I already own an iPod Mini dock where the adapter didn’t fit. Not wanting to buy another dock, I did what any engineer with a Dremel would do; I modified the adapter so that it fit in my Mini dock. Thanks, Apple, I was looking for a reason to break out the Dremel!