Tag: Technology

This is a common line I read all the time in reference to software products I see on the web; most recently with Parallels. I’m not sure if consumers really understand that software developers aren’t catering to one person (in most cases). I fell into this trap with my NotifyMail program where I implemented every feature request that came in. This was counter productive for a number of reasons. Mostly, the people that wanted the features had already bought it and it wasn’t going to get them to buy more and the more obscure features I added, the harder it was to maintain and document. In the case of Parallels, people seem to say that if XYZ USB device doesn’t work, they’re not going to buy it. While USB support is important, the product does so much else that it is easy to justify the $40 (pre-order price). These people that are buying Parallels have easily spent $1500 on a system and are complaining about a $40 product that doesn’t do everything. While I like to see lots of my pet features in products, it won’t prevent me from buying the software. I purchase a few products a month and send in features requests on occasion. There will always be features that I want that aren’t in a product, but it doesn’t mean that everyone else wants the same feature.

People need to judge a product in if it does a job even if it doesn’t meet 100% of the requirements. Unless someone writes a product himself, it is unlikely that any product will do 100% of the things that he wants it to do. That’s reality.

It seems that I keep visiting technologies or parts of projects I’ve worked on in the past. Recently, I had to deal with web sites and HTML. At one point in my past, I wrote a web server and learned a bit about HTML and how all that worked. While I was still in college, I learned HTML and hand coded my website (no more of that…too many other things to do and it is far too complicated for me). My recent project caused me to look at websites and run them through the W3C Validator. The results are kind of scary; most of the sites I looked at failed validation. What does this mean? It means that web browsers (and other tool that look at websites), have to work extra hard to handle non-standards based sites. This is prone to errors and causes the software to not work well. Then the user blames the web browser or other software instead of putting the blame squarely where it belongs, on the website author. Every Tom, Dick, or Harry can put up a website. It sure doesn’t mean that he has a clue of what he is doing. Even I have to periodically check my site to make sure it is valid; unfortunately for me, I’m still used to things 10 years ago which are no longer valid which means I make a lot of mistakes. Someday I’ll try to learn the right way to do things. By using blogging software and a web authoring tool, I don’t have to deal with it much. However, there are a few things I shove in that seem to cause problems, such as aligning text/graphics, setting borders on pictures, and using the target tag in links which are no longer valid.

I don’t have an answer on how to solve this, but it gives me a new found respect for the non-leading web browser. For the leading web browser, web designers make it work with that and some say tough luck to the others even if their sites aren’t valid.

It’s time for me to sell my PowerBook G4. It has been a good machine for the last 2 years, but as technology changes, I need to keep up as my customers and users have already done so. Like all the machines I have owned, I use them a lot, but don’t abuse them. My PowerBook has been my main machine for the last 2 years and it has served me well. We’ll see if anyone is interested in it. There are still a few reasons to own a PowerBook as opposed to a MacBook or MacBook Pro (PCMCIA slot, runs Photoshop, Word, etc. faster as those applications aren’t designed for Intel, yet, and it can still run Classic which the new Intel machines can’t). I’m not a great salesman as I can’t honestly say that I’d purchase this machine over a new MacBook, but that’s just me and I don’t need to run non-Intel native applications all that often.

Yesterday turned out to be one of those days that makes me hate technology. First it started (actually left over from the previous week) where I could only sometimes access a server I use for my job. I no longer run that server, so all I could do was figure out the problem and tell the person in charge of it to fix it. Unfortunately or fortunately, I have the knowledge to figure out the problem. Turns out that the 2 DNS servers that are used for that server were returning different values, so depending on which DNS server got my request, would determine if I could connect to the server. Very frustrating, but at least I figured out the problem. The second major network problem had to do with my dad’s network. He had turned off all his equipment when he left on a trip and when he turned it back on, weird things started happening. His entire network uses DHCP, so it should have just worked, but I believe a bug in the firmware of his router (a Linksys WRT54g) was assigning the same IP address to 2 machines and his iMac was complaining. So after some futzing and me helping him, my dad updated the firmware on the router, restarted everything and was almost in business (I had to help him secure his wireless access point). He wanted me to teach him what I was talking about so that he wouldn’t have to call again, which I appreciate, but it seems that networking has a lot of vodoo in it, especially when you deal with a very mixed environment. He has a Windows XP Home edition PC, and iMac (OS X 10.4), an iBook (OS 10.3.9) connected via 802.11b, a Linux box running the SlimServer software (connected via ethernet), and a Squeezebox (connected via 802.11b). Since I helped him setup a bunch of the pieces, I end up being the only person that can diagnose the network.

Luckily the Linux box requires no user interaction and I set it up to use Zero Configuration so that it doesn’t matter the IP address of it so my dad can update his music and the Slimserver software also uses it, so it is easy to configure. The problem in this type of DHCP environment is sharing files. It would appear that Windows needs to know the IP address of the Mac in order to share files as my dad’s network has no master domain browser. This makes things extremely problematic if the IP address of the Mac changes. I could setup the Mac to use DHCP with manual addressing, but that didn’t seem to work. I have no idea what the problem was, but if I get a few hours, maybe I’ll re-investigate it. I wish things were easier, but they aren’t.

I’ve been doing computer networking of sorts for the last decade, so I have a lot of random knowledge about how things work and how to set things up. My own personal network is several times more complex than any home network because I run my own DNS server, use DHCP with static addressing (most machines on my network get the same IP address based on MAC address), and other weird stuff. I have more than a dozen devices on my network; sometimes I’m amazed that everything works.

I think that the Apple stores are pretty neat, well designed, and promote a good shopping experience. However, I can’t say that I’d wait in line overnight like these dorks just to be some of the first people to goto the Apple store in New York. Some customers came from Texas, Scotland, and California to the opening. I sure hope they didn’t come just for the store opening, but the video clip sure makes it sound like they are king dorks. Do I care if I see Steve Jobs? No, he may run a company that has cool products, and he may be a good speaker, but I could care less if I see him in person.

As I was talking to the guy at The Chip Merchant, we both said that Apple (and the Apple store) immediately say that bad third party RAM is to blame. While it is quite easy to blame RAM, it is such a cop out. For awhile now, my PowerBook’s DVD drive has been flakey, probably due to dust on the lens. However, I’ve needed the machine all the time, so I never sent it in for repair. Now that I have a spare machine, I decided to clean off the PowerBook and reinstall the OS. Due to the flakey DVD drive, it took a lot of tries and attempts at blowing the dust out of the drive to get the computer to read the install DVD. So, I called up AppleCare to see about replacing the DVD drive. They had me do the usual BS steps of using Disk Utility to repair the disk and repair permissions and then zap the PRAM. Of course, I knew this wouldn’t help as I probably already cleaned out the crap for now. The next thing they asked was if I had extra RAM in the machine. As I’m not one to lie, I said yes, knowing full well that RAM was not the cause of this problem. The lady on the phone was nice enough to send out the repair box anyway and let me “test” the machine without the RAM to see if the problem persisted. Yeah, sure the problem is caused by faulty RAM that I’ve had in the machine for almost 2 years.

I’ll send the machine in for repair when I get the box as it is still covered under AppleCare and the DVD drive either needs to be replaced or cleaned. I realize that the support reps work from a script, but given the age of the machine (almost 2 years old), isn’t it quite possible that the drive needs a cleaning?

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.

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.

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.