Monthly Archives: March 2009

Flaw in San Diego’s water conservation plan

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Another letter to the editor:

In your article http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/mar/20/bn20water12926/?zIndex=70189 about the mayor announcing his plans for water budgeting, he is missing an important component, the number of members of a household. The water budget is based on water usage in fiscal years 2005-07. Using this is fine as long as other variables remain the same, namely the number of people in a household. Our son was born in May 2007 and since then our water usage has increased to wash his clothes, his cloth diapers and him. While we are doing everything we can to conserve by replacing our backyard with artificial grass and removing our front lawn to replace it with drought tolerant landscaping, not everyone can afford to do that. For families that added a child or even started caring for someone else at home in the last 2 years, this water budgeting needs another variable and that is the number of people residing at a residence. Maybe the mayor and city council will consider this before voting on the plan.

It probably won’t get published because I recently had a letter published, but we’ll see. I’m going to send this to the mayor as well.

Holiday season in March?

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This week was a pretty exciting week for a geek like me. Google Voice was rolled out, iPhone 3.0 was announced, and the hardware for our new Zimbra server shipped. Google Voice, the successor to GrandCentral has lots of cool features. So far I like the SMS forwarding and the voicemail transcription is interesting (it sort of works; it seemed to get a phone number pretty well). The call quality seems decent and the ability to call any number from the web site is also quite useful. I discontinued my GrandDialer application as I don’t have any time to work on it. Another developer is working on GV Mobile which looks quite promising.

iPhone 3.0 looks cool and I can’t wait to see it released.

The Zimbra hardware means that my company can start moving towards a real email solution; the hosting provider we use is just awful and quite unreliable despite their claims. In addition, running our own email will reduce external bandwidth and give us more control. The downside is, of course, that if there are problems, I can no longer point the finger!

The disappointment this week is that MIMO Monitors has said that supplies for their 740 have been scarce and don’t know when they’ll be able to get them. I had ordered one to try out. The touchscreen didn’t interest me, but the webcam did; they are having problems getting the touchscreens.

Who says hacks don’t cause problems?

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The other day I had lunch with a friend and a friend of his wanting to get into Mac development. We were talking and this guy said that he admired a company that created “haxies”. I said that I really disliked them as their software can cause problems left and right with the system.

The very next day, I got a ReceiptWallet crash report where the user said he pulled down a menu and tried to create a new library. This action is pretty basic and just uses actions in the nib. In this user’s case, it caused ReceiptWallet to crash. Normally I would have ignored this and just said it was some fluke, but I decided to dig deeper. Here’s the top of the crash report:

Process:         ReceiptWallet [99875]
Path:            /Applications/ReceiptWallet.app/Contents/MacOS/
ReceiptWallet
Identifier:      com.ggtenterprises.receiptwallet
Version:         2.0.9 (2.0.9)
Code Type:       X86 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [98]

Date/Time:       2009-03-11 16:49:08.632 -0600
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.5.6 (9G66)
Report Version:  6

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000000c0226ccb
Crashed Thread:  0

Thread 0 Crashed:
0   libobjc.A.dylib               	0x935cd688 objc_msgSend + 24
1   com.apple.AppKit              	0x947c453b -[NSApplication
sendAction:to:from:] + 112
2   com.apple.AppKit              	0x9487317c -[NSMenu
performActionForItemAtIndex:] + 493
3   com.apple.AppKit              	0x94872e81 -[NSCarbonMenuImpl
performActionWithHighlightingForItemAtIndex:] + 220
4   com.apple.AppKit              	0x9484fb5a AppKitMenuEventHandler +
6608
5   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x964d4143
DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*,
HandlerCallRec*) + 1181
6   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x964d357d
SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*,
HandlerCallRec*) + 405
7   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x964efed2 SendEventToEventTarget +
52
8   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x9652423d
SendHICommandEvent(unsigned long, HICommand const*, unsigned long,
unsigned long, unsigned char, OpaqueEventTargetRef*,

I then looked at what was loaded in memory and saw this:

  0xeb2000 -   0xeb4fff +com.unsanity.menuextraenabler 1.0.3 (1.0.3) /
Library/InputManagers/Menu Extra Enabler/Menu Extra Enabler.bundle/
Contents/MacOS/Menu Extra Enabler

Hmmm, looks like a “haxie” that deals with menus. While the company that makes these haxies has repeatedly said that their software doesn’t cause problems, but until users can prove to me that the problem is reproducible without the haxie installed, I have no insert in pursuing the matter. In a post about two years ago, a member of Apple’s DTS team wrote that they don’t investigate any crash that has haxies in it.

While I use one program (1Password) that patches the system, it is quite stable and only affects a few programs (Safari, FireFox, NetNewsWathcer). I’m just really tired of haxies that touch stuff that they shouldn’t.

Fun with multi-homing

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We have a bunch of Xserves running Mac OS X server at work. Most of the machines are only using one of the 2 built in Ethernet ports as they are on the LAN. We have 2 machines that are customer facing and we just added a dedicated inbound connection for them. Being the clever person that I am, I decided that to ease the transition between the old and new IP blocks, I’d block the new connection into the second Ethernet port and we’d be good to go. Turns out it isn’t that easy with the Darwin kernel. I setup the default connection to be the new network connection and traffic to the new IP addresses worked fine. However, traffic to the old address got hung up. After a lot of investigation, I determined it was due to Asymmetric routing. No problem, I thought, a few commands and it would work. I managed to do this in Linux by following an article, but it wasn’t so easy in Mac OS X. Basically the traffic coming in to the old IP block had the responses going out through the other Ethernet interface out over the new IP block. Many routers block this as it kind of looks like an attack of sorts.

OK, so now that I was stuck, what would I do? I spent about 12 hours on this issue and through some magic use of Apache proxies and another server, I was able to get things working. It isn’t pretty, but it solves the problem until we can get an A record changed (we have no control over that record).

Lesson learned, really, really, think carefully before deploying Mac OS X as a server; it can be quite frustrating to do things that I believe should be simple. Maybe I expect too much and OS X Server isn’t designed for me.

Misinformed Author

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As is pretty routine in our lousy local paper, I read an article where the author didn’t bother to do his research. He lumps LinkedIn with MySpace and Facebook as social networking sites routinely used by those under 18. Here is my letter to the editor:

In your article today (Saturday, March 7) about social networking sites, your author has clearly failed to due his research as there is a glaring mistake in the first sentence. The author lumps LinkedIn with MySpace and Facebook. Anyone that has used LinkedIn or visited its home page knows that it is for professionals and is quite unlike Facebook and MySpace. In fact, I suspect that very few people under the age of 18 use the site. I’ve used LinkedIn for several years as it has helped me establish and maintain professional contacts. In fact, I routinely receive job inquiries and last summer was offered a job based on contacts through LinkedIn. LinkedIn is clearly not the same as MySpace and Facebook.