Posts

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RAM is a crapshoot

I’ve been having some problems with my 2.5 week old MacBook Pro where it spontaneously restarts. It happened again today while I was doing a backup and after some research on the web, I found that others were blaming RAM. So, I called The Chip Merchant and they said to bring my machine in and they’d look at it. I brought the machine in and while they couldn’t determine that RAM was the problem, they said that others have had problems with that brand of RAM and would replace it. Hopefully this replacement solves my problems. What I’d like to know is why is RAM such a crapshoot? I’ve bought RAM from The Chip Merchant for the last 10 years (through at least one change of ownership) and only had problems with the RAM I bought for my server last year and potentially now. I don’t blame them as other people have problems with RAM from other vendors. RAM is supposed to be a standard, but I guess manufacturing tolerances on the modules as well as the computers vary so widely, that there is no way to guarantee that a RAM module will work in any given machine. I would have expected that over the years things would have gotten better, but RAM seems to be the leading cause of computer wackiness.

Maybe in my next life I won’t have to deal with computers and the randomness associated with issues.

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President Bush is a Republicrat

It’s now more obvious than ever that President Bush isn’t as conservative as he made himself look in his first term in office. I think that he appeared and acted very conservatively to get re-elected (isn’t that the goal of all politicians?) and please his republican, some very conservative, base. His stance on immigration with the guest worker program and providing a pathway to citizenship for those that have broken the law shows have liberal some of his views are.

I don’t disagree with the guest worker program as it would (hopefully) reduce those coming across illegally (we’re really only talking about Mexico here as no one really cares much about illegals from other countries). It sounds (at least on the surface) like a decent solution. However, offering a path to citizenship for those that have come here illegally is doing two things that I don’t like: 1) it is encouraging more people to come over illegally and 2) it is rewarding those that have committed a crime. While it hasn’t been a felony to come over illegally (as far as I can tell), it is a crime nonetheless. Do I have a better solution? No. Bush is correct that we can’t just deport the millions of people here illegally. There are no easy solutions to immigration issues.

Knowing congress, no agreement will be reach in the immigration debate for some time, so all the pro and anti illegal immigration rallies and debates are kind of moot.

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Why is the church afraid?

With the release of Da Vinci Code movie today, there has been some press about the church being afraid of the movie and wanting to steer people away from seeing it. This just seems plain stupid to me; the movie is a story that I hope will be entertaining. I’ve been listening to the audiobook of it (I listen to the unabridged versions of the books as I like to hear all the details; one book I listened to was abridged and I could easily tell where pieces were missing) and am enjoying it…as a story. Do I believe it? I haven’t even thought about believing it; to me it is entertainment. (I’m enjoying the book so much that I just purchased Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons so I can listen to it next.)

As pointed out in the book, the church seems to be afraid of anything that is contrary to its own teachings and doesn’t allow its followers to think on their own. I’m not one that lets others dictate what I believe. I take in everything I can and make my own judgments and decisions based on the knowledge at hand. I personally view religion as a guide instead of an absolute way to lead my life. Blindly following reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984 (at least the Apple commercial based around his work) where people can’t/don’t make their own decisions.

Is it so bad that people do their own thinking? I thought that thinking set us apart from other species. Of course this is just my opinion, so please don’t send me hate mail.

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Is the MacBook Pro all it is cracked up to be?

I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a few weeks now and I have mixed feelings about it. I upgraded from a 15″ PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz to a 15″ MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Dual Core. I was expecting dramatic speed improvements, but in everyday usage (with all the junk I have loaded), it doesn’t seem blazingly fast. I’ve made a point to only run Intel native apps, but I’m suspecting that some apps that were just re-compiled for Intel have issues causing slow downs. However, compiling code is so fast that I can recompile an entire project with tons of subprojects in a minute or two.

One thing that is really bugging me is that, despite me having the energy saving preference set to sleep at 3 minutes, sometimes the machine doesn’t go to sleep at all or sleeps a long time after 3 minutes. So, obviously, some program is causing this problem. I haven’t been able to track it down, but I did write a program that logs all the processes running if the machine has been idle to 3 minutes and also logs processes running right before the machine sleeps. All this data hasn’t told me anything, but maybe someone else can shed light on the problem.

The jury is still out in my opinion on how much of an improvement this machine is over my old one; it definitely is an improvement, but I was hoping for more.

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Is it hard to polish software?

I’ve been using Parallels for a few weeks now running Windows XP and am amazed at how well it works. In the latest release candidate, they’ve cleaned up a bunch of things, but stil seem to be missing some very obvious user interface issues, most likely caused by the cross platform libraries they’re using or something like that. If you look at the screenshot below you can see that the popup button definitely doesn’t look right.

UI.png

Is it so hard to fix this? I hope that it’s cleaned up for the final release. Furthermore, the popup isn’t a true popup button. Popups in OS X show the menu in line with the button. The image below clearly shows that this isn’t a true popup button.

UI2.png

I think that the engineers working on Parallels are stellar at doing the low level stuff, but it looks like they need a bit of help with the user interface. (I’m available for contract work, if they need help :-)).

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Sync Services can make a mess and here’s a way to clean it (maybe)

I think that Apple’s Sync Services is an excellent technology and has a lot of potential. It is not quite mature, but I have high hopes for it in the future. One of the problems that has been brought up on the Sync Services developer mailing list is that there is no good way for an end user to remove data from Sync Services and unregister it if they remove a program. All developers are in the same boat and Bare Bones, developers of the popular Yojimbo that I’ve blogged about have written a FAQ about it for their product. Unfortunately this really isn’t a solution, especially for people that want to keep clean systems.

This morning, I decided to attempt to write up a solution to this issue. While my attempt doesn’t solve everything (it only unregisters items from Sync Services and doesn’t actually remove the data from Sync Services or .Mac), I’ve decided to put it out there and include the source code. The app has been lightly tested and may cause issues on your system, so only use it if you know what you’re doing. By downloading this, you take full responsibility for using it and if it nukes your data, I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do. Having said that, make sure you have a backup first and good luck. This app uses undocumented Apple calls and is likely to break sometime in the future.

You can download my creation here. It’s quite small, so don’t be surprised if it downloads almost instantly.

The application and source code are free to use and modify. While I’d appreciate some feedback on if it helps, there is no requirement to do so.

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Telemarketers be gone!

A few years ago, when I became self employed, I was looking to simplify some things about my business and decided to get rid of our second and third phone lines (one was a fax line). I had to find a way to handle the occasional inbound fax and messages for work. All my outgoing calls were made on our home phone as we have unlimited long distance and don’t get that many calls on it. I decided to get a number from JConnect as it handled both voicemail and faxes. It worked out well and I soon realized that I should just give out that number as our home number so that we could cut down on the telemarketers. That started working OK, but its important didn’t solidify until we moved and we chose not to forward our old number and couldn’t keep it. Now we use this number exclusively for all, but family, friends, and a few others. It has been a huge help in eliminating unwanted phone calls. The $165 per year is a small price to pay for this little bit of peace and quiet.

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Is my job easy?

I sure hope my job isn’t easy, because if it was, I’m definitely doing something wrong because it isn’t easy for me. Over the years, I’ve heard people say that other jobs are easy or are hard without ever experiencing them. Take teaching, for example, outsiders think that teachers get it easy with summers off and leave school around 2:30 pm or so. What they don’t see is teachers getting up at 6:15 am, staying at school until 4 pm and then coming home and doing lesson planning for awhile (at least the dedicated ones). Do I know what it is like to be a teacher? Not really, I’ve given a few lectures for my local CERT, taught CPR and First Aid in college, but I really don’t know what it is like to be a teacher day in and day out. However, my experiences have shown me that it is damn hard to prepare for a simple lecture and can’t imagine what it is like to prepare for 5 classes a day.

What about my job? Well, as I say, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. There are some “easy” parts of my job, but they don’t last long because easy usually means done quickly so they’re over and done with in the blink of an eye. Some people think that a feature or a design is easy just because some other application may have implemented it. Do I have any idea how long someone else spent implementing something? A feature may look simple on the surface, but the time and effort implementing a feature could be huge.

If I ever say that someone else’s job is easy (and I haven’t done that job myself), I need to remind myself that I need to be slapped.

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Yojimbo, funny name, cool app

yojimbo-crumb.gif

I just started using Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software to store random stuff as I’m working on dropping all non-Intel native software. One of the features that it has over some of its competition are ability to encrypt items and/or passwords (allowing me to drop the other password storing app I was using that isn’t Intel native) and it is extremely fast. They appear to be using SQLLite which is built into the OS; the app I was using before seemed a lot slower and had to load an extra database application at startup. This allows me to trim down the software that I’m running. Yojimbo’s support of inline PDF and other files is excellent. I played around a little with syncing to another machine and that worked flawlessly as well.If you don’t already use an application for storing random stuff (passwords, commands you can’t remember, tips, etc.) or even if you do, definitely take a look at Yojimbo.