2008 Posts

Here are the slides from the talk I gave at PHP Appalachia about using PHP and Asterisk. PowerPoint (585k) PDF (390k)

I do a little bit of work for a friend on the side every now and then. He has a small online store set up with a credit card processor to handle processing payments for his credit cards. Every so often if he hasn’t gotten orders in a few days, he gets a bit antsy and asks me to log in and check to be sure no orders have gotten through without him getting an alert. Dutifully, I do this, as it usually only takes me about 30 seconds to make sure everything is working - as it always is. However, a few months ago I tried to log into his virtual terminal account, I was treated to a ominous warning, informing me that my password had “expired” and asking me to enter my password again, as well as selecting a new password. I had never seen that before, so I checked to make sure I was logging into the right site and had not somehow managed to fall for a phishing attack. Sure enough, my password had “expired.” Hmm. This is lame. Maybe I’ll try to be smart with it and reenter the same password … nope. It’s smart. Can’t get around it. Because I had other things to do and this is already wasting my time, I concede defeat and create a new password for logging onto this site. Then, I do the unthinkable. Something that would make any security researcher and probably the “designer” of this system cringe in horror: I write the password down in a text file. Now anyone who manages to steal my laptop could potentially have access to this (of course, the file is encryped with the original password, though, so there is that). Fast forward a few months. Another e-mail, another log into the virtual merchant terminal to check its status, another “password expired” message. Ah hah! Maybe I can set it back to what it used to be. No dice. It remembers all my old passwords.  Every 45 days, I have to make and learn a new password or this website, which is a monumental pain since I only usually look at it about that often. I make another new password, and update my file. More of my time wasted. After 90 days with this processor, I have now had three passwords. Now, I know how to create an encrypted file. But think about the users. The people using this are not computer experts. They are small businesses. Let’s say Bob at Bob’s Sunglasses has this account. But Bob doesn’t want to spend all day logged into his merchant processor account. Bob has sunglasses to look at! So, he gives the login information to his secretary Susan and tells her to process and fill orders as they come in. After 45 days, Susan gets a warning message one morning about changing her password. After spending an hour on the phone with tech support, she is able to figure out how to change the password. Then, she does exactly what I did: she writes it down. Only she writes it down on a yellow post-it note along with the user name and account number (“just in case,” she says to herself) and sticks it right on the side of the monitor for everyone to see. Automatically expiring passwords, from a security perspective, is an extremely bad idea because it encourages unsafe behavior with passwords. While theoretically it sounds like a great idea, it perversely encourages users to write passwords down - the last thing you want them to be doing - and just makes it all the more difficult for them to use your product. A better approach is to encourage or require users to have secure passwords in the first place, and to foster proper care for passwords.

For many, today marks the beginning of the Olympics. All eyes are on Beijing. But, 08/08/2008 also has some significance that many, unless they are web application developers, may miss. Today is the official End Of Life for PHP 4.

I’ve written before about my curiosity as to whether or not the period we are living in will be well documented. So much of our lives are digital these days, and so much information has already been lost. I can look back at my own digital history and see how much information of mine has disappeared. I have this big box of floppies. There are like 200 floppies in this box. Yesterday, on a whim, I picked up a USB to 3.5” drive and started going through some of the old disks in this box. I want to get rid of them because I haven’t looked at them probably in 8 or 9 years. A lot of stuff had already degraded to the point of not being readable - these disks have moved with me many times and have not lived in an environment conducive to data preservation. Many simply refused to mount properly and a lot of what did was often riddled with data errors.

As software engineers (especially ones who work on forward-facing user interfaces), we are taught to think about usability. Many of us are not good at it - including me (though I’m making a conscious effort to get better about it and “think more like a user”). Large companies, on the whole, have mastered this because they can expend huge amounts of money on research and focus groups to study what people want and how they interact with their software. Apple is a master at this. And, this is why the GIMP is terrible to use when compared to Adobe Photoshop. Oh, sure, the program itself is perfectly capable, but the interface was clearly designed by an engineer and not a graphic designer. The other approach is, of course, to separate the engineers from the UI design people. In a company the size of Apple or Adobe, I’m sure this is probably what they do. But small to midsize companies simply can’t afford to do that and, even if they could, somewhere along the line some engineer has to interface with the front end code. But thinking about the “user experience” is not just related to programming - any industry that has to deal with people who are not native or fluent with that industry can benefit from trying to “think more like them.” The hotel I’m staying in for OSCON here in Portland, the Doubletree, is a good example of this. When you exit the elevator on the fifth floor, there is the standard sign that rooms 500-520 are to the right, and 521-541 are to the left. The room numbers are not on the doors - they are on small plaques next to each door. But, the plaques don’t uniformally face the hallway or face in a uniform direction - some face the way you are walking from the elevator and some, strangely, face the opposite direction so that they will never be seen unless someone is walking from the opposite direction as they would normally walk when looking for a room. Think about this for just a second. The time when those plaques are needed the most is when someone is first finding their room, and they will almost always be coming from the elevator. After that, you usually remember, generally, where it is. In order to see half of the signs on the floor, you have to turn around and look behind you as you are walking. To add to this, think about how you would normally look for a room in a hotel. Do you go all the way to the end of the hallway? No - you probably stop about 10-15 feet from the end if you determine that your room is not one of the remaining ones. So unless you are paying careful attention to the plaques on the wall, there is a chance that you will not ever see your room. This is the reason I spent ten minutes walking up and down the hall trying to find my room: it was at the very end of the hall with a plaque that was only visible if you were walking the opposite direction. Now, it’s not like this breaks my entire world. I found my room, put my stuff down, and went out for a beer. But when looked at through the lens of usability, which software engineers are very familiar with, it could certainly use improvement. I’m sure the design makes perfect sense to the building architect and to all the people who work in the hotel. But to a guest, it makes little sense and requires extra time spent looking for their room.

By now, I’m sure we all know about search engine friendly (SEF) URLs - that is, URLs that are able to be traversed by a search spider. Spiders don’t like to see a bunch of stuff on the query string (file.html?blah=foo), but do like standard URL patterns like /file/foo.html. Not to mention that it’s a lot easier to read. But what happens when you need to do something more complicated - say, rewrite using different types of conditions with optional arguments? Say, for instance, I have a script that takes arguments like this: /file.php?id=1[&view=1] And I want to rewrite it to look like this /file/(id).html[&view=1] In this case, the view argument is optional and could relate to any number of unique cases, such as internal viewing or refcode tracking, for instance. Well, your first thought might be something like this: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\file\/\d+\.html [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/file\/\d+\.html(.*) RewriteRule ^\/file\/(\d+)\.html(.*) /file.php?id=$1&$2 [L]` But it doesn’t work. This is because the query string isn’t part of the URI available for the rule to match. But, mod_rewrite, being the cool Swiss Army knife it is, lets you get around this by back referencing to the condition. Using the % operator instead of the $ allows you to reference parentesized expressions in the condition, like so: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/file\/\d+\.html RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.+) RewriteRule ^\/file\/(\d+)\.html?(.*) /file/file.php?id=$1&%1 [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/file\/\d+\.html RewriteRule ^\/file\/(\d+)\.html /file/file.php?id=$1 [L]` It’s described here in the docs. I thought this was a pretty cool solution to a problem that had been vexing me.

I ran into a situation today where I needed to diff files on a remote server against the ones on a local server when the only connection method I had to connect to the remote server was FTP. I wrote a little quick and dirty script to diff files over FTP. It’s stupid simple - it downloads the file and runs diff on it against a local file, outputting the result. It’s great for finding changes on a webhost that cripples real developers by only offering FTP. It’s also a great companion to ftpsync, which apes some of the functionality of rsync, again on crippled webhosts. The command format is: ftpdiff <local file> <username:password@host:/path/to/file>

Shared hosts are a reality for many small businesses or businesses that aren’t oriented around moving massive amounts of data. This is a given - we can’t all afford racks full of dedicated servers. With that in mind, I would urge people to be more careful about what they do on shared hosting accounts. You should assume that anything you do is being watched. Take, for example, the /tmp directory. I was doing some work for a friend this weekend whose account is housed on the servers of a certain very large hosting company. While tweaking some of his scripts, I noticed via phpinfo() that sessions were file-based and were being stored in /tmp. This made me curious as to whether any of that session data could possibly be available for public viewing. My first move was to simply try FTP’ing up and CD’ing to /tmp directory. No go - they have the FTP accounts chrooted into a jail, so the obvious door is closed. However, the accounts have PHP installed, so I can do something like this in a PHP script: <?php system("ls -al /tmp"); ?> With this little bit of code, I can look into the tmp directory even if my FTP login is chrooted. Fortunately, sessions on this host are 600, so they’re not publically readable -  this was my primary concern and the reason I took some time to check this out. But people are putting lots of things into the tmp directory with the misguided idea that it is their private temporary file dump, including one idiot who put a month’s worth of PayPal transaction data into tmp and left it 644 so that it was publically viewable. Now, I’m a nice guy and the only thing I’m going to do with this information is laugh at it. But keeping in mind how dirt cheap hosting accounts are, there’s not a high entry barrier for someone with fewer scruples. The key thing to remember is that, if you need temporary file storage on a shared host, do it someplace less obvious, set the permissions so that only you can read/write to it (600), and clean up by deleting files as soon as you possibly can.

My Facebook news feed hasn’t update since May 15th - a span of four days, in which I know many of my friends have posted or at the very least updated their status. With 50-something friends, I know for sure some of my friends are updating - my feed just isn’t reflecting it. So, after Googling about (Facebook’s site, for the record, is extremely unclear about contacting the company and/or reporting bugs), I found this: Great! A place to file a report. So I type in my report and submit … D’oh. Apparently, I’m not the only one having this issue, either. C’mon guys, get it together! At least let us users know what’s going on.

The PHP that comes standard with Mac OS X Leopard doesn’t come with the PECL PS extension. PECL PS requires pslib, and the last version I verified to work the PS extension was 0.2.6 (I still have an outstanding bug for that). There’s a minor little bug that prevents it from compiling on OS X, so here are the steps necessary to get PECL PS working on Leopard: Download PSLib 0.2.6. Unpack to somewhere on your filesystem (I use /usr/src) cd pslib-0.2.6/src Apply this patch to pslib.c (patch pslib.c leopard_pslib-0.2.6.patch) cd ../ ./configure make make install By default this puts it in /usr/local/lib. Now install the PS extension using PECL. pecl install ps When it asks for path to pslib installation, /usr/local/lib Once it’s done compiling, add the .so to your php.ini. You may have to move the .so or alter extension_dir in your php.ini. sudo apachectl restart

You can use the Linux command ngrep to “watch” what is going into and coming out of memcache. ngrep is an amazingly useful tool for troubleshooting a wide array of network issues; I previously have used it extensively for troubleshooting SIP errors. In this case, I’m using it to be sure memache sessions in PHP are actually working. codelemur ~ # ngrep -d lo port 11211 interface: lo (127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0) filter: (ip) and ( port 11211 ) #### T 127.0.0.1:60912 -> 127.0.0.1:11211 [AP] get a804f5517468d4696c60da7eaf8a7179.. ## T 127.0.0.1:11211 -> 127.0.0.1:60912 [AP] VALUE a804f5517468d4696c60da7eaf8a7179 0 16..test|s:4:"test";..END.. ## T 127.0.0.1:60912 -> 127.0.0.1:11211 [AP] set a804f5517468d4696c60da7eaf8a7179 0 1440 16..test|s:4:"test";.. # T 127.0.0.1:11211 -> 127.0.0.1:60912 [AP] STORED.. It doesn’t help too much if you have multiple memcache servers (which is kinda the point of memcache), and since it’s raw data you can’t inspect the packets if they’re compressed, but in a testing environment, it’s a great way to be sure all things are kosher.

Every so often I get the urge to check out desktop Linux - just to see how things have progressed and whether or not it is in a usable state yet. For the last few times, the distro of choice I have tried has been Ubuntu, as that seems to be the new de facto starting point for a desktop distro. Before beginning this review, let me first say that desktop distros have come a long way over the last few years, and Ubuntu is by far the most usable of the ones I’ve seen. Ubuntu itself has come a long way and, for someone who is willing to compromise on some points, is quite usable for someone who’s willing to spend some time tweaking things. Having said that, it still has a ways to go before reaching Windows. And it’s not even in the same league as Mac OS X. First, a little about my test rig: An AMD Athlon64 3700+ with 2 gigabytes of memory, two 250gb SATA hard drives (one for Windows, one for whatever OS I’m testing at the time), and dual GeForce 7600 GS’s running three 19” Samsung LCDs. Not your standard setup, mind you, but not ultra advanced and bleeding edge, either. The installation: The installation is much the same as previous releases of Ubuntu: load up the live CD and, from within the live environment, launch the installer. The installer itself asks fewer questions that the Windows XP installer, yet seems to be able to do more. And doesn’t require endless reboots to get everything working. My installation proceeded mostly okay (being that Windows resides on sda, I installed Ubuntu in sdb), except that after I installed and rebooted … nothing. It kept booting into Windows. I reinstalled again just to be sure I didn’t blitz through the boot record screen, but sure enough, writing to the MBR on sda doesn’t work when you have two SATA drives and you’re installing Ubuntu on sdb. This has been a bug for at least the last two times I’ve tried to install Ubuntu. I can fix it with grub commands and properly write a boot record to sda, but for the purposes of testing (and because I’m lazy and wanted to play with it) I just plugged sdb directly in and removed sda. So I’m up and running. This is something that would befuddle a lot of folks, but to be fair I’ve had problems with Windows in the past, but it seems like it would be an easy fix. So I have Ubuntu installed now. Yay. Next step is to get my three LCDs working. This is where we run into what I think is the biggest hinderance to desktop Linux: X. If I plug three monitors into two video cards on a Mac, it’s going to turn on all three monitors and allow me to drag things between them all effortlessly (one big desktop). If I plug it into Windows, I’ll need to download the drivers, but after that, no problems. Not so in X, though in fairness it is likely more due to the intrangisence of Nvidia when it comes to providing open source support. First, if you want to do anthing, you have to download a “Restricted” driver. This is Ubuntu-speak for “we didn’t want to compromise our oh-so-precious ‘free’ principles in the name of usability” (in case you can’t tell, I have very little patience for zealotry). In Ubuntu 8.04, the Restricted Drivers Manager has been poorly renamed to Hardware Drivers. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, since a driver for hardware may or may not be restricted. So, I download and install the Nvidia drivers. Next, fire up the nvidia-settings utility to fix the X config. I was running this from the shell, but I later discovered that it puts a nice menu item in the Administration for you. It sees all my cards and, using this, I am able to configure everything up. You have multiple options for ways to do three monitors, but only one works: Xinerama. You could do three separate X screens, but you can’t move windows between them. You could do Twinview on one screen and a separate X screen but, again, you couldn’t move windows between a dual screen and the third monitor, the windows on the Twinview screen don’t maximize and minimize properly, and the login screen is right in the middle of the two monitors so that it’s very difficult to see what you’re tying when you login. Only Xinerama lets you move windows between the three monitors, allows them to maximize properly, and has the login on a single screen. This was about an hour of changing settings and restarting X before I got it right. The downside? It still isn’t supported in Compiz, which is a real bummer becauase compositing window managers was one of the things I was really looking forward to using. Anybody know if Compiz accepts bounties, because I really want this feature? So no Compiz. Oh well. Next, get my other hardware working. I have a Logitech MX1000 Laser (greatest mouse ever, by the way), and I like to map the buttons to do various things (most notably, I use the “cruise” buttons to go back and fourth on web pages). In order to get this to work: sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-evdev cat /proc/bus/input/devices (find Logitech USB Receiver) sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf Changes: Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Configured Mouse" Driver "evdev" Option "CorePointer" Option "Name" "Logitech USB Receiver" #this should be the name of the device which I made bold here. EndSection sudo apt-get install xvkbd xbindkeys gedit ~/.xbindkeysrc Changes: /usr/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Alt_L]\[Left]" m:0x0 + b:12 /usr/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Alt_L]\[Right]" m:0x0 + b:11 After restarting (yes, again) I have working buttons. Yay. The volume control on my Microsoft Natural Egro 4000 works now. It seems like this required some hacking last time around. Yay. Now to install some developer tools so I can get to work. I love Synaptic; I wish Mac OS X had real package management the way Linux does - it’s one of the things Linux really has going for it, though I generally prefer Gentoo’s portage manager. So I install Eclipse. Huge package, and I was getting really crappy download speeds, so I let it run all night and went to bed. The next day found Eclipse installed and ready to go. Installed PHP, SVN, Apache. So I now have the tools to work. My conclusions: I like Linux. I really do. I want to see Linux succeed on the desktop. And Ubuntu has gone further, faster than any other Linux distro. It is now by far the most fit and ready to use of any desktop Linux distro. I have a usable system now, and, theoretically, there is nothing stopping me from using my machine for most of my daily work. Having said that, there is a lot to be said for style. First of all, it’s ugly as sin. The Gnome UI, while it is much improved, is still terrible when compared to Windows and OS X. Also, who thought that brown was a good color for a UI? Second, the names of some of the tools are un-intuitive: “Hardware Drivers,” “SCIM Input Method Detection,” “Authorizations,” and others need to have more intuitive names, and once you use any of them, the layout is not really intuitive either. The initial screen layout with a menu at the top and a taskbar at the bottom is also not really all that usable, though it can be corrected by removing the top panel. I’m using it now (typing this in Drivel) so it is usable, but it still can’t displace my Mac for ease of use.

I will again be attending OSCON this year in Portland, Oregon on July 21st - 25th. Come and say hello!

At dealnews, we have an internal Jabber server that we use for our internal communications. As part of that, we have a number of internal chat rooms for the various areas of the company. I’m a big believer in automation - that is, scripting various repetitive actions that I have to do every so often. One of these little things is joining our developer chat channel each morning when I get to the office. Unfortunately, there’s no built in way in Adium to do this, nor does Adium expose native AppleScript commands to join group chat. It does for other functions, but group chat functionality is conspiciously absent, even though there’s a long standing feature request to implement this. So, we have to hack it. In this case, I used AppleScript to imitate keyboard input set CR to ASCII character of 13 tell application "System Events" tell application "Adium" to activate keystroke "j" using {command down, shift down} keystroke "development" keystroke CR end tell So we have a script, but how to automate the launching of it? I mentioned MarcoPolo before. It has quickly become one of my favorite pieces of Mac software. In this case, I use MarcoPolo to launch the AppleScript (with a 10 second delay to allow time for Adium to start and connect to the Jabber service). You can launch AppleScripts using the osastart utility like so: /usr/bin/osastart /Users/codelemur/Scripts/DevChat_AutoJoin.scpt It sucks that it’s like this, and I wish they would expose a more native way to do this, but it does work.

I’ve been a happy Gentoo user for the last few years. There’s so much to like about it: built from source with only what you need and Portage beats the pants off RPM, among many other reasons. But lately, I’ve been getting a little annoyed with it. My annoyance has to do with the releases … or lack thereof. And, the communication about said “delays” … or lack thereof. There used to be four Gentoo releases a year. A few years ago, they went to two releases a year. Last year, they completely skipped 2007.1 release. Now, we’re three months into 2008 and the 2008.0 release, which was supposed to be released to the public as stable on March 17th, hasn’t even been seeded to mirrors for public beta yet. 2007.0 is still the official stable release of Gentoo - a release that is more than a year old at this point. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t really need an updated live CD to do installs with. I have new machines with an onboard SATA controller that isn’t supported by the kernel in the 2007.0 release but is supported by the 2.6.23 kernel which was in the Gentoo sources at the time. I was at an impasse, unable to install Gentoo on my equipment until I got around it by compiling my own updated kernel and rolling my own live CD. But, I wouldn’t have had to do that if the Gentoo release team could at least come close to hitting their release schedule. I’m not asking for the universe - just get within the same month as the schedule says and we’ll call it good. There’s also been disturbingly little communication about the reasoning behind these “delays.” There was one post to the site about the 2007.1 release being cancelled. There’s been no communication on the site whatsoever about the delay with 2008.0. The things on the front page right now talk about the monthly newsletter and some new trustees of the Gentoo foundation. I know it’s free software and I shouldn’t complain, but for those of us who make our living using Gentoo, it’s a bit annoying to say the least. You won’t need trustees of a foundation if there’s no foundation … because everyone goes somewhere else because the distro is updated less often than a phone book comes out.

I’m getting ready to launch a new open source project, and, as everyone knows, you can’t do that without a cool sounding name. :P I’ve picked out about six cool sounding names, and I’ve been looking them up on GoDaddy to see if I could go ahead a register the domain name. And wouldn’t you know, all of them are already taken. Now, this wouldn’t irritate me so much if there was actual content on the sites. But every single one I looked up is squatted by link farms. I am literally 0-6 right now. Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken. well, you can stil get one from a strange country :-P - [bash.org](http://www.bash.org/?369)

This weekend in Atlanta, I had the chance to hear an extrodinarily talented musician. I want to give him major props for one of the best concerts I have seen in a long time. Matthew Ebel (you can buy/listen to his stuff on iTunes too) has a sound that is somewhere between Ben Folds and Billy Joel. If you like Piano Rock, or are just looking for something good to listen to, I highly suggest you check him out. I already bought all three of his albums.

Recently, I’ve been expermenting with PHP’s PS functions - the PECL extension that allows you to directly output PostScript from your scripts. There are other projects that come to mind (html2ps is another one that will render to PostScript) but I wanted somsething more tightly intergrated into my script. Mysteriously, when I went to install my scripts on the new Poweredge I bought, I began to get there strange errrors: ps_findfont() [function.ps-findfont]: PSlib warning: Trying to insert the glyph '.notdef' which already exists. Please check your afm file for duplicate glyph names. I couldn’t understand what was going on - it was working fine on the previous server. After googling about the web and wracking my brains for about two hours, I checked the versions of PSlib  installed on the two servers. Both were masked by Gentoo’s Portage system, but the unmasked version on the previous server was 0.2.6, whereas the one on the new server was 0.4.1. After I masked out 0.4.1 (thanks to Gentoo’s awesome package.mask) and downgraded back to 0.2.6, everything began working again. So there you have it. Apparently the PECL PS extension is not completely compatible with the most recent version of PSlib, and downgrading back seems to work. Hope this helps somebody!

After my debacle with the 1U servers I bought (see my previous post), I went by a local technology recycling center and picked up a couple of off-lease Dell Poweredge 1750s. It’s what I should have done in the first place. Anyways, I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to mount these servers in a rack. I wanted it to be mobile and easy to move as moving is something I have been very familiar with over the last few years. After not finding what I wanted anywhere, I was able to find rack rail at  zZounds (a music store that I’ve ordered guitar stuff from before). So I decided to do it myself. The first step was to understand the measurements of a 19” rack. Originally designed to hold railroad signal switching relays, 19” rack measurements are specified by EIA-310-D. The strips from RaXXess are standard rack rail at 0.625” in with. They are mounted at 19” apart from the outside of the rails, giving a distance between the inside edges of the rails of 17.75”. The depth isn’t specified, so I decided to make mine 30” deep. After that, it’s just cutting! It took 4 2x4’s at 10ft and a sheet of plywood. The pictures below will explain better than I can in words the process of building this thing. The first step was measuring and cutting. This was actually the most tedious part of doing this whole thing was getting the measurements right - as Dad always said, measure twice, cut once! I cut four 24.5” pieces, four 22” pieces, and four 36” pieces. Here’s the completed frame 1, with a Dell Poweredge 1750 in to test and be sure that I had the measurements right. The rails had been mounted on the inside towards the back of the frame to give the server face some protection. Closeup of the server in the frame. Adding the top and bottom pieces now. Mostly complete. By now you can see what I’m aiming for. And here’s the finished product! I added plywood sides and casters to roll it around. The total cost was about $100. The most expensive items were the rails (which came in at about $50 shipped) and the casters (which were $20 for four locally from Harbor Freight). After that, it took me about four hours cut and put everything together. It’s not quite finished yet - I want to add doors to the front and back to ease transport a little bit as well as handles on the sides to make it easier to lift in and out of a truck. I haven’t put the servers in it yet - I’m waiting for rails to come in for the servers since they didn’t have any where I bought them from. I’m also thinking about slaping a coat of paint on it to make it look a bit better. Otherwise, it’s pretty sweet!

… or, beware of deals that look too good to be true. In my professional career, I have now found only two things that have a 100% failure rate. The first was a batch of Digium TDM-400P FXO/FXS card. Every single one we deployed from that batch at my previous employer failed. I hear they don’t have those problems anymore - using a different fab shop now, I guess. But I still don’t like that card for that specific reason. The second 100% failure rate came just this evening. The culprit is this little POS: Dual Xeon 2.4GHz 2GB ECC 120GB 1U Rack Mount Server being sold by Geeks.com. Look, it’s a 1U for $375. I’m not expecting the universe out of these things. With that in mind, let me document the last two days of my life. I ordered two of these little guys about a week ago, and they arrived on Tuesday. I intended to turn one into a general purpose test and development box, and one was going to go to Atlanta to replace the 1U Celeron in my friends’ data center. So I get the machines home, unpack them and try to boot. The first one won’t POST. No beep, no video, just a bright orange surrender HD light. Research tells me that the motherboard is fried. The other one booted up fine. I figured I was just unlucky, so I RMA’d the first one today and was going to put the OS on this one. Well, the OS install went fine but when it came time to reboot … presto. The exact same thing as the first. No video, no beep, orange HD light. Of two machines ordered, both of them failed within 48 hours and both in the exact same way. So now I’m out at least $60 in RMA shipping charges - and I have no servers - just because this company apparently has no Q.A. So take my experience as an example of what not to do when ordering a server. A good deal can turn into a major headache incredibly fast. Me? I’m ordering Dells from now on.

… or maybe the water. Unless you were living under an Internet rock, you likely know that today was Keynote Tuesday. That is, the day Apple CEO Steve Jobs tells us loyal apple fanbois what we will be spending our money on this year. The star of this year’s show was the Macbook Air, a thin, light laptop designed to fit somewhere inbetween the Macbook and the Macbook Pro. At first I was wow’d by the Air. Jobs, as always, is the consummate showman and I will admit that I bought into the reality distortion field for a little bit. Then the “air” cleared and I began to think about what the Macbook Air really is. So let’s take a look at the Macbook Air and where it fits. Maximum thickness of 0.76”. The Macbook is a quarter inch or so higher at 1.08”. Weight of 3 lbs. The Macbook, a slightly heavier 5 lbs. Battery life is slightly longer at 5 hours. The Macbooks average between 3-4 in my experience. However, the battery is not removable, whereas I could carry several Macbook batteries with me. For $1200 more, you can get a solid state drive. 2GB of memory, and only 2GB of memory. The Macbook comes in at 1GB standard, but can be upgraded to 4GB. In my opinion, these are the areas where the Air wins. Now, let’s look at where it loses. 1.6ghz / 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo. The Macbook slides in at betwen 2.0 and 2.2 ghz. Storage is an 80GB 4200rpm PATA drive, whereas the Macbook boasts an 80GB 5400rpm SATA drive. Granted you can get a 64gb SSD drive with the Air, but for $1200 I can’t believe that anyone other than the biggest fanboi will be buying those for that price. The Macbook can be upgraded to as much as 4GB of memory. The Air is stuck at 2GB, and since it’s sodered onto the board, it’s stuck there forever. 1 USB plug? No onboard Ethernet or FireWire? No mic plug? No optical drive. Granted, you can buy an external drive, and you can use that boot from another computer thing, but that doesn’t help you if you have no other computer. Now, Brian Moon often tells me that I don’t think from the point of view of an average user because I’m not an average user. While it’s true that I’m not your average user (as a computing professional, I have needs generally beyond most consumer computing gear), I like to think that I can look at all choices and choose the best one. In this case I just can’t understand where this product is being targeted. I just don’t understand how anyone could want to trade off all the features you get with the regular ol’ Macbook for what is essentially a small gain in dimensions and weight, and the “wow!” factor, especially when all those added features on the Macbook come in at $300 less for the top-end Macbook model. At that price, you could upgrade the memory and buy an extra battery and still come in less than the base price of the Macbook Air, with the only tradeoff being that it’s 0.32” thicker and 2lbs heavier. I can’t believe that any informed consumer is going to choose a feature poor Macbook Air when the standard Macbook, at between $300 and $750 less, is just so obviously a better deal. Brian Tiemann said it best: “a ridiculously overpriced, feature-poor, and generally useless pig of an idea.” Also, I wonder if Steve Jobs knew Randy Newman was going to go all Michael Moore on everyone. Someone please be sure he never sees a microphone again!

I know top X lists are almost passe at this point, but that’s not going to stop me from giving a shout-out to some of the applications that daily make my life easier: MarcoPolo MarcoPolo is a neat little application that is capable of executing actions based on a set of rules. That is, if something on the system changes (such as an IP address, power status, USB or even the light level), it can execute a series of commands (such as mounting network drives, setting the screensaver, changing the default printer, etc). It can even run arbitrary shell scripts! Why this is useful to me: At dealnews, we (the dev team) all use MacBook Pros for our development work and constantly alternate between home and office. Whenever I arrive at work in the morning, the minute I plug my MacBook into the network, MarcoPolo senses that the IP address has changed from my home and changes the default printer, mounts some network shares, adjusts the screensaver settings, and runs a few other custom shell scripts I have to set up my environment. All without having to do a single thing. When I get home, it executes still more commands to change to a remote development environment. Completely effortless. XMeeting XMeeting is a SIP softphone (and videoconferencing application, but I’ve never used the video features) that allows you to connect to a SIP server and place calls using your laptop. Why this is useful to me: At dealnews, we run Asterisk as our phone system (see my earlier posts on Asterisk). One of the many nice features of Asterisk is its standards compatibility - that is, you can use anything that can talk SIP with Asterisk. Since CounterPath has apparently decided that Leopard compatibility for their free softphone (X-Lite) is not a priority, XMeeting comes to the rescue. As a bonus, it actually acts like a Mac application and doesn’t do the stupid things that X-Lite did (like messing with the system volume). Quicksilver Quicksilver is the single application I cannot live without. On a Mac without it I am almost lost. More than just a launcher, it is a tool to help you work more efficiently. You can press Ctrl+Space and type what you want and Quicksilver will launch what you need. That’s a horrible description for how cool this app is. **Why this is useful to me: **Without Quicksilver, I am lost. It makes it literally so fast to move around your Mac without taking you hands off the keyboard. A quick hit of Ctrl+Space gives you the ability to launch programs, open files, navigate contacts and send emails, and make quick notes among many othe things that this program can do. It is essential to my everyday life as a Mac user. DejaMenu DejaMenu is a neat little program that will display the current application’s main menu as a popup menu where the mouse is whenever a key combination is pressed. **Why this is useful to me: **I use my MacBook Pro with a second monitor when I’m at the office. One of the things that has infuriated me for awhile as a Mac user with multiple monitors is the inability to have the top menu bar either on each monitor respresenting the application on that monitor, or the ability to have it move with whatever monitor the mouse is on. It’s irritating to have to go back to the main monitor when the application is running on a different one. DejaMenu allows you to pop the application menu wherever your mouse is, which makes things a little easier. Additionally, I mapped the key combination to a button on my Logitech MX-1000 to make things even easier.

While in general I only use this blog for discussing programming, computers and my life as an engineer in dot-com, it’s only natural that, every now and then, a personal post will slip in. And this is as good a reason as any. On December 26th, I asked my girlfriend of almost three years to marry me. She said yes!