My Gorram Frakking Blog

Comcast Block Port 25, AGAIN

I moved into a new house, got a new Comcast account for my internet & cable, and not four weeks later, they had blocked port 25, for exactly the same reasons they did it before.

I called the number again, and Eric was very competent and agreed to put in the unblock request. He also helped me to understand why Comcast suggests using a port other than 25. It’s not as ineffective as I had thought, but I still don’t think it’s worth the invconvenience.

His reasoning goes like this: By blocking port 25, they prevent most spamming viruses from getting to open relays that typically run on port 25. Even if the virus is updated to use port 587 (Comcast’s suggested port), Comcast’s mail server requires authentication, and so it won’t be able to send (of course, if they hijack your local Mail client, none of that will matter).

Now, if open relays start appearing that listen on other ports, then it won’t matter.

The real problem is this: Comcast claims that they had reports that spam was being sent from my IP address (at the time it was assigned to me), but they won’t tell me anything about these reports. Now, I’m certain no spam has gone out from my house. My wireless network is locked up tight, the access logs don’t show any unauthorized accesses, and I’ve never run Windoze, so there’s no way I got one of those viruses. So, the report must be in error. But I have no way to track that down.

Hopefully, thought, I’ll get unblocked. And maybe the FCC’s point of view will eventually prevent them from blocking port 25 after all.

Customer Service Experience

Before remembering that I had written an entry about this problem (which had the info I needed), I tried using the regular Comcast online chat customer support. The first time I called, they insisted this was a permanent block and there was nothing I could do to remove it. That, of course, wasn’t true. This time they tried to pull the same shit, and after explaining to them that I was able to unblock it before, she said no, now it’s really permanent. As it turns out, it’s not.

I also have been trying to get a PIN number, so that I can get online access to my account. The agent could only give it to me if she called my Comcast Digital Voice number (a service I have but don’t use because it makes my bill cheaper). She couldn’t even call the number listed on my account (which I do use).

Here are a couple of photos showing our conversation (their stupid chat client doesn’t allow copy-and-paste):

Electric Motorcycle Project

I’ve decided to convert my old motorcycle to electric. This involves ripping out all the gas-related parts, and putting in an electric motor, batteries, and associated control electronics to make it all work. I’ve started a new blog for the project, go check it out:

Electric Motorcycle Conversion Project

Image Upload Utility Idea

A quick entry to record an idea I had for a useful utility. A droplet application that takes the images dropped, makes a set of thumbnails, and uploads them and the originals to a server, and then puts markup on the clipboard.

It could be enhanced to pop up menus for frequent destinations, and image sizes. It could even pop up a crop editor, which could provide constraints for common aspect ratios/sizes/widths/heights. These could be set by destination.

Using dd to write floppy disks on Mac OS X

At work I had the need to write a bootloader directly to a floppy disk. In-house we use dd on Linux to do this, but it was giving me trouble on Mac OS X. I finally figured it out. Here are the instructions I wrote up:

These steps work on Mac OS X 10.5.2. They probably work on earlier versions, too, but I haven’t tried it. This works with a TEAC FD-05PUW USB floppy drive that I picked up at Fry’s (sometime in 2008-02).

When you plug in the USB floppy and insert a disk, the Finder will mount it on the desktop (if it’s formatted) and create a couple of entries in /dev like /dev/disk1 and /dev/rdisk1 (the actual numbers corresponding to the drive will depend on how many other drives are attached. Be sure you’re working with the right one!)

You would then be tempted to execute something like the following. Unfortunately, you’ll get an error:

If you try using the raw device instead, you get a different error:

In this case, the file is actually 195936 bytes in length. I’m not sure why it seems to write some of the bytes (I’m not sure it actually even wrote that many).

Using the buffered device (/dev/disk1 is correct, but it’s busy because it’s mounted by the Finder. If you simply unmount it via the Finder, then all the entries in /dev for the device go away, and you’re unable to tell dd what to do. The solution is to unmount the disk using diskutil unmount, which leaves the /dev/disk1 entry in place, and then you can use dd correctly:

After that, I think it’s safe to just unplug the USB drive, but I’d feel better if I knew how to completely unmount the device before doing so. In any case, the OS didn’t complain like it would if a volume were mounted and online.

DNS Standards to Support Wide-Area Bonjour

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to move my DNS services to third-party DNS providers, like DreamHost, FreeDNS, and DynDNS. So far, I haven’t found a provider that accepts arbitrary data for the various resource records’ values (including spaces), severely limiting how nice wide-area Bonjour can be. I’ve been able to advertise services, they just look bad.

For more information, consult these pages on Bonjour and Wide-Area Bonjour.

Here I’ve tried to collect relevant parts of DNS-related RFCs to provide evidence that DNS service providers should support arbitrary characters in their DNS records.

Summary: there’s no reason a DNS provider should restrict the content of any resource record name or data field, except for its length. Those providers who use HTML forms for configuration can also make it easy to use UTF-8 text by just accepting what’s entered into each form field, and handle conversion to BIND configurations themselves (if that’s their implementation).

Update: Time Machine

Feh. Time Machine sucks. After a painful setup process, I left Time Machine to do its thing. I just saw it mount a disk image that it created on the remote volume, so I know that all the speculation about enhancements to AFP (and possibly HFS+) are bunk. If it’s going to create disk images, it could do the same thing on any kind of file server. There’s no excuse for the AEBS not working.

That, I’m sick, and it’s pretty clear Cal’s going to lose to ASU. Fuck, what a shitty weekend.

Update: Feh. Time Machine does not estimate time remaining nor current data rate. I seem to be getting about 28.92 GB/h (over wired gigabit Ethernet).

Update: Time Machine really consumes CPU cycles. When the MBP is idle, the fans are not audible. Since Time Machine has been backing up, they’ve been continuously audible. The average data transfer rate has dropped to 16.9 GB/h. I have spent a few minutes of the last two hours watching streaming video, and doing a little bit of other work, but mostly it has been running undisturbed. mdimport is also running, not sure why.

Update: The combination of Time Machine and Leopard on the client and server make for some seriously fast network volume mounting! Whereas SuperDuper! takes ages to mount a network volume served by a Buffalo GigaStation NAS (first the volume, then the disk image on that volume, a process that takes several minutes), Time Machine and Leopard get the disk image mounted in seconds. After clicking on the Time Machine icon in the Dock, most of the time spent waiting for time machine to actually engage (with a tip of the hat to Picard) is waiting on the server’s drives to wake up.

I have yet to see how well the whole system does when I sleep the MBP, go to another network, and wake it up again. Maybe I’ll try that this afternoon. For sure I’ll try it when I go to work tomorrow.

One other note: When engaging Time Machine, the network volume does not mount; only the disk image mounts. Not sure how they pull that off, but maybe that’s one of the enhancements to AFP in Leopard. Hardware Growler reports both the server volume and the disk image mounting; just the network volume is hidden from the desktop (even though I have configured things to show mounted volumes).

When Time Machine begins an automatic backup, it does not display the floating progress window. Opening the System Preferencs panel shows a progress bar, though.

Update: Time Machine doesn’t deal well with lost servers. I engaged Time Machine, let it mount the backup volume (disk image), closed the lid on the MBP (it took a minute or more to sleep, but this is not new behavior in Leopard for me), and went to a breakfast place with free WiFi. There, I opened the MBP, saw the Time Machine screen still up, waited for Hardware Growler to indicate that the system had self-assigned an IP address, and then started moving through time. After a bit of back-and-forth, Time Machine appeared to hang (although the starry background animation continued). After several minutes (5 - 10), I decided to force-quit Time Machine. Pressing Command-Option-Escape had no effect, and after pressing it several times, Time Machine suddenly disengaged and there was a server-disconnect dialog on the screen.

Also, during the time that Time Machine was up, a dialog was presented asking if I wanted to join one of a couple of networks, including the free one at at the breakfast place. However, I was unable to click on any of the networks to select them, and hence, was unable to join a network (the window could move, and the “Other…” and “Cancel” buttons worked fine). Feh. Feh.

Time Machine, AirPort Extreme and ZFS

First, the good news. It’s not new news, but it’s still good. Leopard shipped with a read-only implementation of ZFS. To get a beta version of a full read/write ZFS, you need to have an Apple Developer Connection account (the free Online membership is enough). Look in the “Mac OS X” section of the downloads area. I’m using v1.1.

Now, the bad news: you can’t use ZFS storage pools as your Time Machine Backup drive. Sigh. I’m not surprised, but I had hoped. Eventually, it makes sense for Apple to move to ZFS as the default file system, but who knows how long that will take? For the time being, HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) file systems store meta data about files that other file systems can’t handle natively. I suspect this is true of ZFS, too. You can hack your way around these limitations, by simply creating additional files on the system and storing the meta data in there, but that’s ugly. My hope is that Apple will enhance ZFS to support HFS+’s metadata natively, and that will be that.

Time Machine has other limitations, too. I’m not too upset that I can’t yet use ZFS for my backups (so long as Apple fixes this in the next six months or so), but I am upset that I can’t use the AirPort Extreme Base Station as a backup file server. It was said, in the months leading up to the release of Leopard, that Time Machine could back up to the AEBS. In fact, it’s the reason I bought the AEBS: I couldn’t be sure that a non-Apple file server would properly support AFP, and I had it on good authority (Apple) that the AEBS would do the trick.

I can speculate as to why: other Mac backup solutions, like SuperDuper!, create a disk image on the target volume to work around limitations in AFP. Although I’m not certain of the precise limitations, they have to do with file ownership and permissions (for example, a user ID on one system is not necessarily the same as a user ID on another system). From what I understand, Apple has enhanced AFP in Leopard (and by one account, HFS+, or at least the filesystem API) to accommodate the needs of backup software.

So, at the last minute, Apple tells us that you can’t use an AEBS as a backup server, but you can use Personal File Sharing on another machine running 10.5. I have an older PowerBook sitting around, so I decided to buy a FireWire external drive and use that as my backup solution (for now).

I bought a Buffalo DriveStation Duo. I chose it because Fry’s had it (I could get it right now) and I was able to verify that it can operate in JBOD mode. I wanted to try using ZFS first, and if that didn’t work, the DriveStation supports mirroring.

I followed the directions in the Apple ZFS Readme’s Getting Started section. As described in the readme, it was necessary to repartition the drives to use the GUID Partition Table. I had a bit of difficulty with this. The volumes mounted when I first connected it, and I used the Finder to unmount them. I tried to make a ZFS pool before repartitioning, which ZFS did without complaint, and which subsequently caused a new volume to mount. I unmounted that, but attempts to repartition resulted in “resource busy” errors (the other drive repartitioned fine). Disconnecting the entire DriveStation and reconnecting it seemed to fix it.

I built a nice ZFS mirrored pool out of the two drives, shared it via Personal File Sharing, and mounted it on the other Mac. Time Machine refused to recognize it as an acceptable backup volume. I briefly considered making a disk image on the drive and trying that, but decided I disliked that solution enough that I didn’t want to use it even if it worked.

Attempting to use the ZFS pool on the local machine also doesn’t work.

The next step was to reconfigure the DriveStation as a mirrored array, with an HFS+ volume format. I tried to do this with the RAIDSetting application from Buffalo, but it failed with complaints about the “The old volume lable [sic] is not valid. Delete volume label by using disk utility.” After half a dozen attempts to repartition the drives as PeeCee drives, I still can’t get RAIDSetting to function without complaint. The front of the DriveStation shows a green #2 and a yellow flashing #1.

Also note: the RAIDSetting app from Buffalo only works on PowerPC Macs. Basically, the Buffalo DriveStation Mac support is crap, and I would recommend strongly against using it (if you want to use their RAID support).

I finally decided to just play through the pain, and ignore the error. It seems to set the drive into the right mode, so we’ll see what happens.

As I write this, I’ve mounted the new, shared HFS+ Backup volume on my MacBook Pro, and Time Machine is “Preparing.” I’ll try to post an update if it works.

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) First Impressions

Well, I’ve had 10.5 installed for about 24 hours now, and so far, it’s not really worth the money. In day-to-day use (as a developer), none of the new features has yet to significantly impact my life. Sure, windows look a little different, and settings have been rearranged, but so far I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. For reference, I chose to “Upgrade” my system, rather than “Archive & Install.”

A few things are better. The variety of user interface styles has been reduced, and brushed metal is gone, replaced by a nicer-looking gradient (the Menu Bar looks a bit too much like a title bar, and I thought something was wrong with it until I realized it was transparent, and I was seeing the stars in the default desktop image through it).

Xcode has at least one improvement: it shows error messages in the editor window, directly underneath the offending line. It also complains a lot more about implicit conversions from double to float, but I can fix that.

One thing I’m not sure I like is that many standard icons have changed. Some have changed dramatically, like the System Preferences icon (it now looks like the iPhone’s Settings icon), and others have just been modified. These kinds of changes leave insecure users (like my parents) feeling disoriented, and I think they’re generally a bad idea.

One big fix: Apple Mail no longer seems to break long URIs! It has taken three or four major releases (an unacceptable delay to fix a minor, but very annoying, bug), but non-Mail clients can finally use long URIs sent by Mail without having to hand-edit them (Mail used to break them in a way that destroyed the URI for non-Mail clients).

Hardware Growler still works. My ARM development tool chain still seems to work. The Keyspan USA-19HS USB-to-serial adapter still seems to work. The FTDI USB-to-serial IC on the Sparkfun EM406 SiRF III Evaluation Board still works. ZTerm still works!

In the next post, I’ll talk about my experiences with Time Machine, the AirPort Extreme Base Station and ZFS.

iPhone Success!

After help my my good friend on the iTunes team, we determined that my account was still registered as a corporate account, rather than an individual account (iPhone only works with individual accounts). This was the result of me being a customer for more than 10 years.

I called AT&T back, and the CSA very quickly took some action to somehow finalize the conversion of my account from business to individual. Apparently, this final step had not been taken by the previous CSA. As soon as she did that, I was able to activate my phone, and my number ported within the hour (probably faster; I didn’t check it until an hour later).

Thanks to everyone (especially Mike W.!) who helped set this mess straight.

So far, I’m blown away by the phone, but there are some peculiarities. First and foremost, I wish all list views could have entries deleted by gesturing, rather than having to enter edit mode. Perhaps Apple will refine this sort of thing soon.

More to come, I’m sure…

iPhone Activation Woes

Feh. I’m sitting here with my beautiful new iPhone, trying to go through the activation process. iTunes keeps reporting to me how sorry it is that AT&T has determined that my current account cannot be used with the iPhone. It provided me a number to call, or offered me the option of creating a new account, which is really not what I want to do. I’m sitting on hold with a very kind Canadian customer service agent for AT&T.

Apparently I am on a promotional rate plan that is incompatible with the notion that all existing Cingular/AT&T customers can upgrade to iPhone. Okay, fine, after several attempts, he was able to switch me to a non-promotional plan.

Then, it turns out, my account is a business account. This is very strange. I’ve never asked for a business account. I’ve had my Cingular (the new AT&T) service since it was called Pacific Bell Mobile Services. Not once have I ever been told I had a business account. I’ve always used the “personal” account avenues when contacting Cingular (personal account contact numbers, the personal account link on the web page, etc.)

So, the poor Canadian CSA is waiting on hold with the AT&T business account division to convert my business account into a personal account, which should then allow me to activate my iPhone. Apparently the benefit of having a business account is that only a poorly staffed call center can handle your specific issues.

Sigh.

New AirPort Extreme base station

Well, I just finished installing my new AirPort Extreme base station. This is the one shaped like a Mac mini. The new software is very nice. They added the client signal strength graph feature, something that used to be there, then wasn’t, and is now back again. They’ve also added link status lights to the ports on the back (although no indication of connection speed).

There were a couple of things that caused a fair amount of difficulty. One was that the new admin software has been renamed. The old one was called “AirPort Admin Utility.” Thew new one is “AirPort Utility.” I kept trying to upgrade my software before I realized the difference. When I was on the phone with Apple tech support, the agent told me this was a frequent source of confusion.

The other problem I had was that Comcast’s cable modem seems to not assign a DHCP address to a new MAC address without being rebooted (this is what initiated the aforementioned support call). The AEBS behaves as if it can’t get a DHCP address from Comcast, which is exactly what’s wrong. The fix (in my case) is to unplug the cable modem for 30 seconds or so, and plug it back in. (Note: the Apple support agent wanted me to unplug it for 5 minutes, but I told him I’d try 30 seconds first—it worked).

I have yet to hook up a drive, the whole reason for getting it in the first place. I want to find out if they’ve improved AFP enough to where applications like SuperDuper! can back up over the network without needing to create a disk image first.

Now, to get an MBP with 802.11n networking in it…

Carbon Application Development in D

D is a very nice programming language by Walter Bright. Carbon is a very nice API for developing Mac OS X applications. I wanted to develop Carbon applications in D, so I created an open source project to let others do the same. Please check out Darbon, and let me know what you think!

This is what I want next: iPhone

This is the best phone ever, and I want one. The Apple iPhone.

Followup: MacBook Pro Kernel Panic with External Monitor

Some time ago I wrote about how my shiny new MacBookPro crashes whenever I plug in an external monitor. Turns out, Apple displays don’t make it crash.

I wrote a bug about it, and Apple responded well. They gave me a tool to use to record information about the monitor.

Interestingly, I no longer have privileges to read or append to the bug I originated, and neither does my friend at Apple. I finally wrote a new bug referencing the old one to try to get some info, but it’s been four months (and a few updates) without a fix.

Also, I’m on my third MBP since then, and it still crashes, so I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a hardware defect (but it could be a hardware design flaw).

Leopard

There are some cool things coming in Leopard (Apple’s newest version of OS X). I recommend you take the time to watch the Keynote Address. As usual, there’s a bunch of eye candy/fluff in Leopard, and it’ll be interesting to see if they fix any of the numerous bugs that have been around since day one.

Mail

So, they’ve added a bunch of wizzy stuff in Mail that I could care less about. The ToDo thing might be cool; we’ll see. I really want to know if they fixed the URL-splitting bug. My insider friend tells me that bug is fixed in Leopard, but it wasn’t mentioned in the keynote (had it been, it would’ve received the loudest applause).

More

There’s tons more cool shit. Watch the video.

Neat Scrolling Trackpad Tricks

So, if you use the index fingers on opposite hands, and put them far apart on the trackpad, you can hold one still and move the other and watch things scroll (sort of). Sometimes it helps to make initial contact with the trackpad simultaneously. If you move one up and the other down, they can cancel each other out.

Cinema Display Seems to Work

I just tried plugging in my 22” ADC Cinema Display (via an Apple DVI-to-ADC adapter), and it did not cause a kernel panic as did the Princeton LCD19D monitor. Hopefully, the school projectors will work, too, or I’m screwed.

Lest You Think I Have No Sense of Humor About New Technology

In my head, Jason is suggesting not buying one of the new machines because he read about my problems, so maybe this is still bitter and annoyed:

However, I don’t think that Apple should’ve released these new PowerBooks without more testing. I don’t think I’ve done anything particularly esoteric so far, yet my experience has been less than stellar.

Don’t get me wrong, when the new MacBook Pro works, it works very well. But for the amount of money I’ve spent, and the sacrifices I’ve been willing to make (e.g, not being able to run “mixed-mode” apps, like in the 68k-to-PowerPC transition days), I feel like things should work better.

4 Cycles, 5446 mAh Capacity

After a “proper” recharge-full discharge cycle, my MacBook Pro battery is reporting 5446 mAh capacity.

MacBook Pro Kernel Panic with External Monitor

Followup

Wow. I keep finding more things wrong with this Intel machine. Now, if I plug in an external monitor (something I had not yet tried at home with my Cinema Display, but which I just tried now with a Princeton LCD19D flat panel display), I get a kernel panic. If an external monitor is plugged in when I reboot, I get a kernel panic. I’ve sent the crash report to Apple, but who knows if anyone will ever see it? Meanwhile, I’m now stuck without being able to use my big screens.

Here’s the crash reporter info and the unfriendly message I sent along with it to Apple (I have no tolerance for crap like this):

MacBook Pro Sleep Seems to Have Issues

I decided to run my battery down to do the calibration as suggested in the MBP manual. I got one warning about imminent sleep, and dismissed it. As I was copying a folder, the Mac went into forced sleep right in the middle of playing the “copy complete” sound. It repeated this sound a half-dozen times before the system finally went to sleep.

It darkened the screen, the little white LED came up dully (as it does when the screen’s asleep), and then eventually it went into full sleep mode.

I tapped the shift key, to make sure it was really asleep. On my PowerPC AlPB, this is ignored. On this machine, it woke right up. I used it for a few more minutes, and then it completely shut down losing anything I had not yet saved. This was pretty bad.

I’ve now launched XBattery and plugged it in. Let’s see if it gives us any more juice. Currently: 5419 mAh capacity, 3 cycles.

More Migration Difficulties

I reinstalled the OS (via “Erase and Install”, removing unneeded languages, printer drivers and apps), completed the Setup Assistant without migrating. Then I allowed Software Update to run, updating to 10.4.6, and updating 9 other apps. Finally I ran Migration Assistant again, and it ran into the same problem: Apparently I have more than 60 million gigabytes of data in my home directory.

I’m currently on the phone with Apple support, but I am not hopeful that they’ll resolve this issue (update: nope).

I tried before to remove all of my movies & images, but I had left music and sources from work in there. Maybe I should remove all four of those and try again. Here goes…

My New MacBook Pro

Yesterday I picked up a shiny new 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro. The packaging was expectedly beautiful, and the thing came up immediately after I powered it on. Nicely, Apple didn’t insist that I charge it overnight before use; instead, they said to do the charge calibration steps sometime in the first week. It was 3/4 full when I got it. The beauty ended there…

I made sure it was plugged in and charging, and got started. I’d head good things about the Migration Assistant, so I opted to let Tiger migrate everything from my old PowerBook to the new one (via the Setup Assistant). I put the old one into FireWire Target Disk mode, and let it rip. After a few minutes, it had determined that there was in excess of 60,000,000 GB (yes, sixty million gigabytes) of data in my home directory to be transferred over. Unfortunately, I opted for the 100 GB hard disk (thinking that would’ve been enough), and so all the stuff on my old (80 GB) drive wouldn’t fit.

Note the computed sizes of my home directory data to move (sorry about the utterly crappy photograph). Click for a larger image.

The other unconscionable thing the Setup Assistant did was go to sleep before finishing (mind you, it was plugged in and powered). I tried again later with the Migration Assistant directly, and it had basically the same problem. I’m guessing there’s either a 32-bit int where there should be a 64-bit int, or someone forgot to swap bytes (I hate little endian, and this is one of the biggest reasons i hate Intel architecture, but since the old Mac is mounted as a drive on the new system, I doubt this is the real problem).

I’m now reformatting, reinstalling, and trying again. I’ll post again after that’s over.

Soekris net4521 Single Board Computer

I got my net4521 a few days ago, and after borrowing a CF card (‘cause I stupidly forgot to get one of my own), I had it up and running Pebble Linux (from Tor Amundson) in no time. A few days later the CM9, miniPCI 802.11a/b/g card, arrived.

I’ve been poking at getting the 802.11 card up-and-running, and met with some success. Right now a kind soul is helping me learn how to use buildroot to build a Linux from the ground up for use on this box. We’ll see how that goes, and I’ll try to post the steps here.

Damned Hotlinkers

I discovered that the vast majority of the bytes I was serving was due to sites that hotlink, that is, sites that use image src URIs that refer to my site (thereby stealing my bandwidth), rather than copying the image to their own site and serving it themselves. Using Apache’s RewriteEngine, as described in this article, allows me to refuse to serve images referred by any page not my own.

Hopefully this will put a stop to the practice. I currently only FORBID the request, but I may serve up some obnoxious image instead. Not yet sure.

Cingular GPRS and Mac OS X

I just subscribed to the $20/mo, 10 MB/mo plan that Cingular offers. Unfortunately, while you can use your cell phone to subscribe, and they can give you all the information you need (although it’s like pulling teeth to get Mac info…like so many others, they only officially support Windoze), you can’t download the necessary modem script to enable the whole thing to work.

They recommend you download GPRS Script Generator, which requires that you pay the $10 shareware fee before you can generate the necessary script. Fortunately, a very quick search on Google turned up an article on how to configure the Mac for Cingular Motorola use. It provides a modem script that seems to work well.

I have a RAZR V3, and I modified the script to connect at 115200 bps (rather than the default 57600). It worked great!

This is all temporary, of course, ‘till I get my 3G card. We’ll see how smoothly that goes…

My New HPI RS4 Pro 4 Hara Edition

I should’ve been packing, and then sleeping, before getting up at 0600 to catch a flight to the ’rents for the holidays. Instead, I spent the day (after work, of course) finishing the car, an HPI RS4 Pro 4 Hara Edition electric R/C. Three long nights, perhaps a total of 25 hours’ build time. Here’s a picture of the (more-or-less) finished car:

Click for a larger image

There’s also a large Gallery of pictures taken throughout the build process.

Overall the kit is well-crafted, with high-quality parts and a clear instruction manual. I do have a few complaints about the parts references, which caused me to waste a bit of time searching parts bags, but in the end, no necessary part was missing. I’ll try to post a more thorough review, along with descriptions of the specific issues I had.

This car will be my (actually, my team’s) entry into next semester’s EE192 class and next year’s Natcar competition. Hopefully the professor will allow us to use this car, and our intended processor, the Cypress PSoC.

Apple Ordering Problems

I ordered a Mighty Mouse last Thursday, after much anguish trying to determine if it was suitable. No Apple store had it in stock, and few even had it on display (both of which I consider egregious errors on Apple’s part).

So, I finally placed an order via the online store on Thu 8/4. At this point, they’re estimating 2-4 days delivery (it was same day/one day). I get an order confirmation, and forget about it for a couple days. I go to check status during the weekend, and the system is “down for scheduled maintenance.”

I check order status today, only to discover that the order has been canceled. So, I call, and after speaking to three different people, learn that due to a prior fraudulent order using my credit card, I can no longer use that card with Apple’s online store.

Back in April, I received an order confirmation email for a new PowerBook. Now, I never placed this order, so I called Apple. They quickly canceled the order, but my card was never charged (AFAIK). I tend to use a debit card with a $1000 daily limit, so there’s no way for something as expensive as a PowerBook to have been purchased.

At no time, did Apple inform me that my card was flagged and could never be used again. Nor did they inform me when my Mighty Mouse order was canceled, nor did they inform me that the card was invalid when I placed the Might Mouse order.

And, to top it all off, the Mighty Mouse delivery estimate is now 7-10 days. While the fraud supervisor was gracious enough to approve this order and give me free overnight shipping, and he made it a “replacement” order, which apparently increases one’s priority a bit, he could not really do anything to make up for Apple’s incredible lack of communication.

Much of this could’ve been avoided, of course, if Apple had just shipped 200 mice to each store instead of 20. If they were trying to keep it under wraps, they could’ve ensured that a subsequent larger shipment arrived a couple of days later, rather than leaving everyone hanging.

But really, why make such an effort to keep it a secret? Who the fuck cares if we learn that Apple is going to ship a new mouse? How could it possibly affect anything about Apple’s business? I’m not suggesting a six-month-early leak. But a week or two would not give anyone any kind of competitive advantage, and might have kept a few people from buying competing mouse products in anticipation. Instead, Apple has probably driven away frustrated customers.

In any case, secrecy on this product was not so important that Apple couldn’t have shipped more units.

TextWrangler & BBEdit as External Editor

I use tools like Perforce and Subversion on a daily basis. I’m a Mac user at heart, and I hate tools like vi and emacs. However, Perforce and Subversion both use external editors like vi and emacs to allow the user to change things, namely checkin comments.

Well, BareBones Software has a pretty decent little text editor called “Text Wrangler” that comes with a command-line utility edit to make it easy to use TextWrangler from the command line (they also make BBEdit, TextWrangler’s commercial big cousin). Invoking edit (use "bbedit" when working with BBEdit) all by itself launches TextWrangler. Specify a file name and TextWrangler opens that file, allowing you to edit it with a proper Macintosh user experience.

But, edit can do much more, including this: if you invoke edit -w <file>, it will open that file in TextWrangler, and block until you close the window! (I’ve tried this before using Apple’s open -a command, but it immediately returns, making it useless.) This means you can use edit -w in the external editor configurations in Perforce and Subversion. And, if you add --resume to it, it will return to the Terminal.app after you’re done editing. This may not seem like much, but it’s more than any other non-CLI Macintosh text editor has been able to do.

Note: Chris Cotton tells me that TextMate also supports this usage.

Basic configuration for most UNIX tools is to set the $EDITOR environment variables (like this in bash:

EDITOR=edit -w --resume
export EDITOR

Read on for alternative information on how configure these tools.

Why Intel is Bad for Apple

Speculation hit the fan a few days ago when CNet (and WSJ?) reported that Apple would end its partnership with IBM and Motorola, and switch from using the PowerPC to using the Intel x86 architecture (I had heard the rumor even earlier through some old friends). Knowing this is almost meaningless, because there are so many details missing. For example, will Apple simply start manufacturing x86 computers that can run Mac OS X or (shudder) Windows? Does that mean that Mac OS X would run on any x86 PC?

This just in: the rumor is true.

Almost certainly not. Despite soaring sales of iPods, Apple’s income comes almost entirely from the sale of Macintosh hardware. Releasing Mac OS X for x86 would kill their Macintosh hardware sales, because very few people would continue to go to Apple when they could get machines elsewhere for much less. I don’t see any way Apple can make the switch without a significant drop in income.

But that’s not the real problem. Apple could still make x86-based hardware that runs Windows, but allow Mac OS X to run only on their hardware. This would piss people off, but it’s completely feasible (I’ll post another entry about how sucky it will be for loyal Mac users to switch to x86 hardware).

The real problem is much more complex and subtle. And at first blush, doesn’t sound like a problem. It sounds like a windfall for Mac users. Try to follow along.

Picture this: Apple makes the switch to Intel-based hardware. Mac OS 10.5 is released and runs flawlessly on it. All of your favorite apps release updates (never mind that these will be expensive upgrades, not maintenance releases), even Metrowerks. Then, using the knowledge gained from the 68K-PowerPC migration and a clever adaptation of WINE (an open-source implementation of the Win32 API), Apple adds the most significant feature: the ability to double-click a Windows application and run it on your Macintosh. No Virtual PC, no separate environment, no Start menu.

It’s not that big a stretch. The windows might even look like Aqua windows. No doubt it would be a boon to Mac users, and would remove serious hurdles to Mac adoption across all market segments.

Mac users would notice a difference. See, Windows applications generally suck. While Apple could put the window close box in the right place, the OK and Cancel buttons would always be backward. Text selection in fields would be different (although Mac OS X kinda broke that anyway). Pressing the Tab key would tab through all of your controls, regardless of your system settings (although maybe some apps could be made to respect those settings). In many cases, menu shortcuts would require that you use the control key, not the Command key, to access them (no, you would not simply be able to replace “ctrl” with “command” inside WINE…for many reasons I can’t get into here). I could write an entire article about differences between Mac and Windows apps, pointing out the real reasons why Windows is inferior to Mac OS. But I think most of you understand this. The Windows UI is fundamentally different from that of the Mac.

OK, so you say to yourself, so what? I’ve had to run VPC for years, I’m used to that. It’s only in the one app I have to use, but now I can have it run fast? Sign me up! This is a perfectly understandable reaction. There’s no reason a Windows app couldn’t run at nearly the full speed of its Windows XP counterpart (there would be some overhead mapping I/O to the Mac OS, but not much; double-buffering windows takes time).

Now imagine you’re a software developer making an application for both Mac and Windows. Your Mac customers comprise, generously, 15% of your market share (you’ve got more competition in the WIntel market). In reality, it costs you to work on the Mac version enough that your Mac margins are pretty slim, but it’s still more income overall.

All of a sudden, Mac OS X/x86 is released with WINE. It doesn’t take you long to realize that you will lose only a few of your Mac customers if you drop the Mac version of your product, because now they can run the Windows version just as easily. Sure, it’ll take a year, maybe two, for Apple’s base of Intel users to grow enough. But the old version of your app will still be available for your Mac customers who don’t switch.

But you’ll save so much money on development! Now all you have to do is make sure each new version of your Windows app runs on Mac OS X/Intel! And you won’t have all of the marketing costs associated with delivering multiple versions of your app. What a boon!

If this sounds alarmist, it’s because I haven’t explained it well enough. (I have to get back to work, and I’ve already spent too much time writing this.) But think it through. Software developers who’ve made Windows and Mac OS versions of their applications will inevitably drop their Mac efforts. It’s in their bests interests. Most people don’t care enough to do more than grumble. They need the functionality, hamstrung as it is, to do their work. They will continue to pay for the application, especially because they can run it reasonably well. Mac-only developers will rarely, if ever, be able to profitably compete with established Windows applications. The growing momentum to provide Mac versions of applications will stop dead in its tracks.

It may take a few years, but you will slowly see the erosion of the Mac into an elegant OS for launching crappy apps.

And how long after that will once-loyal Mac users simply switch? There are so many more hardware choices in the WIntel world. Apple can never allow Mac OS X to run on that hardware, so we users won’t see that benefit if we stick to the Mac. And once all our important applications are available only in their Windows flavors, what’s to keep us using the Mac? Safari? Mail? iMovie? Sure, there will be some who stick around, like those who use FInal Cut Pro 90% of the time. But most of us? What would be left?

All of this is predicated on developing an architecture that allows Mac users to “painlessly” run Windows applications. Does anyone believe that will never happen?

The move is certainly bad for us. Within a few short years, we will lose many of our native Mac applications. But within a decade, it will be bad for Apple, too, as users abandon a platform that’s lost all its advantages.

.xxx Will Never Work as Intended

ICANN has finally approved .xxx as a top-level domain. Unfortunately, according to one article, the strictly volunteer use will never encompass the majority of porn sites because ICN, the group responsible for administering the TLD, is going to impose rules about where and how a porn site may operate. Not only that, but domain names will cost significantly more than .com domain names do today:

The new domain will cost less than $100 and will be available to registrants willing to adhere to the predetermined best business practices.

There will remain countless porn sites in the .com TLD, dramatically reducing any “save the children” benefit that proponents claim the new domain provides.

Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” First Impressions

Okay. I’ve been running Tiger now for about 24 hours. Rather than work on my CS184 final project, I’ll tell you a little about my experiences. This isn’t terribly well organized, but I want to write things down before I forget them.

In a nutshell: there were some frightening hiccups along the way, and some bizarre behavior by the Spotlight indexer, but it all seems to be working fairly well now.

Windoze Sucks

What a bunch of assmasters the people in Redmond are. According to David Kirkpatrick’s article, Jim Allchin, some cheesehead at Microsoft, says Longhorn will be much better than previous versions of windows. At the start of the article, he (Kirkaptrick) writes “Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide.” And he’s proud of that fact!

So what? So what if your company is so big it can cram its product down the throats of millions of unaware customers. So fucking what? All the things Longhorn supposedly will do (like automatically reconfigure its network settings when you move from office to home), Mac OS X (even with its sucky-assness compared to OS 9) has been able to do for years. “If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen”? This is a feature? With its armies of engineers (and a year and a half to go), this is the best fucky Microsoft could come up with after decades of stealing other’s ideas? Losers.

“Longhorn will automatically clean up, or defragment, your hard drive, if it is required.” Whoopdie-fuckin’ do. Mac OS X’s filesystem rarely requires defragmenting. But my old housemates shitty home theater PC choked on its own excrement if he did defragment daily.

Longhorn will show me the first page of a document instead of an icon? BFD. Been there, done that. I can put the same file in multiple places on my drive? Been there, done that.

“Microsofts research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items.” That’s because Microsoft has never encouraged any sense of consistency among its legions of third-party developers, and because Windows’ window management is piss poor, at best. No wonder people have a hard time finding things on windows. It’s a direct result of the design of the UI. (More like LI…”loser interface”).

Allchin talked about an upcoming 64-bit release of Windoze. Kirkpatrick writes, “For Allchin, this is a very big deal for businesses and individuals. The reasons are technical, but the bottom line is that 64-bit computers will be much faster. They should also be more secure.” Is this what Allchin is spouting? Sorry, wrong and wrong. Not even the 64-bit Tiger will make your computer faster or more secure. Application developers will have to re-build their apps, and even then, most of what you’ll get is the ability to address more memory. Which will probably mean that developers will create even more resource-hungry apps, creating additional burden on our already-overtaxed I/O subsystems.

And, I should point out, that the G5 is already a 64-bit processor, and Tiger ships this weekend, as opposed to “the end of the year” in Allchin’s predictions.

Windows “Just Works”? Give me a break. Windows seems to go out of its way to prevent the user from getting work done. What a joke. And to those blind cattle who use windows: you suck, too. It’s your fault Windows is as wide-spread as it is, and it’s your fault computers suck as much as they do. Windows even pulls down the Mac (which, despite being utterly superior to Windoze, sucks too). Sure, lots of people use Windoze. Lots of people believe in a god, too, and look where that’s getting us.

And Kirkpatrick, as a Mac user, you’re way to upbeat and positive in your story. Afraid you’ll lose future interviews?

Figures.

RayTracing is Fun

CS184’s assignment due a few hours ago was a simple ray tracer. So far, the most work, but also the most fun. I implemented a ray tracer that supports ellipsoids and triangles, point lights and directional lights (oops, forgot to mention that to the reader…hope (s)he picks up on that from the images), subsample antialiasing (jittered). It also renders to the screen and outputs jpeg directly, and uses an ANTLR-generated parser to read in scene files. Here are the images I submitted along with my assignment.

Some represent mistakes, but they’re interesting anyway. I thought my images were cool, but Sarah Beth’s snow globe takes the cake. Creative and refractive. How cool is that?

If this works, Ecto kicks ass

I’m not sure how to use it yet, but I’ll give it a try. Hopefully it will play nicely with SmartyPants.

This is some indented text. Dunno if it’s really block-quoted, or what. Hmm, no, not block-quoted, which means Ecto might restrict the HTML structure I can impose on my entries.

Now, let’s see what the iTunes button does: Let Go from the album “Details” by Frou Frou. Cool. It inserts the currently-playing song. Not sure why that needs to be a button right here in the app, but I guess we’re all likely to have lots of need to make emergency references to songs…

Why Apple Fucked Up with Aliases

Aliases used to be this thing in the Mac OS, prior to Mac OS X, that allowed applications to remember where a file was located. More importantly, if you moved that file, the application could still find it. They worked across network volumes, too, automatically mounting a volume if necessary.

With Mac OS X, Apple recommends that an application store URLs to reference files. The problem with URLs is that they are just fancy pathnames to files, so if you move or rename a file, they break. To be fair, I’ve seen documentation that suggests CFURLRefs should be used only for transient storage of a file reference, but this gets abused across the board.

Safari’s downloads window, for example, is guilty of this. Try donwloading something, moving it, and then finding it via the download window. You can’t. And Apple puts the blame on the user by popping up a message saying, “Safari can�t show the file ‘foo.pdf’ in the Finder because it moved since you downloaded it.”

Fuck you, Apple. So what if it moved? You can find it, almost always. You had tried and true, superior technology, and when you shitcanned or otherwise drove out all the true Macintosh engineers, replacing them with NeXT Unix weenies, you got rid of that good technology. Everyone knows engineers brought up on Unix are lazy, and don’t give a rat’s ass about the user. Well, that attitude shows through in Mac OS X.

lib2html

I’ve created a Delicious Library-to-HTML converter. It’s very raw, but it gets the basic task done. I’ll try to avoid schoolwork by continuing to improve on it over the weekend.

Followup: Brother MFC-8840DN

A while back posted an entry about my Brother multifunction laser printer. In it I mentioned that 20-lb 3-hole paper almost always jammed, but that 24-lb paper worked. Well that wasn’t quite true. 24-lb paper works about 70% of the time, but still jams far too frequently.

The longer I own this printer, the more and more disappointed I am with it. I could care less about the fax and scanner if the printer doesn’t meet all my needs. It’s painfully slow (at least compared to the HP 2300N at work), and often times can’t print.

For example, printing AMC theaters movie listings from Safari results in a command syntax error. Printing the same page to a PDF file and then printing also does not work.

The Brother MFC-8840DN Multifunction Laser Printer

I recently bought the Brother MFC-8840DN Multifunction Laser Printer from Staples online. I wanted an HP 2300DN, but what I needed was a duplexing, networkable, Mac OS X-compatible laser printer. Mike Kobb pointed out the Brother, and I decided that it was a much better deal.

It arrived the day after I ordered it (free shipping!), and I excitedly set it up. It’s very important to pay attention to the installation instructions—there are a great many pieces of stabilizing tape that need to be removed.

Of course, getting a Windows XP machine to work with it proved to be difficult, but the Mac OS X setup was a breeze (just copied the PPD, didn’t bother with the MFC ad-ons yet). The printer supports Rendezvous, which is very cool.

Now comes the bad part: Almost everything I’m going to print will go into a three-ring binder. So, I bought some Hammerhill 20 lb. 3-hole multipurpose paper, which claims to work well in any copier or laser printer. Unfortunately, my MFC-8840DN just couldn’t cope. It jammed 9 out of 10 times. My first attempt to get support from Brother was useless. My second attempt was better, in that I got a response, but they simply said that the printer is not advertised to work with 3-hole paper. Although the user manual mentions kinds of paper you should not use, it does not even mention 3-hole paper. Another exchange with the customer service rep produced nothing helpful. The manual did recommend Hammerhill 24 lb plain paper, so I decided to try a heavier stock.

The only way to get that was via Office Depot online, so I ordered a ream. Fortunately, using Hammerhill brand 24 lb 3-hole paper seems to work. If it starts to screw up again, I’ll post here and let you know.

I finished Halo

What an accomplishment. I played the entire game through on “Heroic” difficulty, and re-played the last level on “Legendary.” The alternate ending was cute. I wonder if there’s another ending for playing the entire game on Legendary.

“SmartyPants”

So, I got this nifty little MT plugin called “SmartyPants.” If I installed it correctly, the quotation marks around “SmartyPants” will be proper open- and close-double-quotes, even though I typed them as straight quotes (") when writing this entry.

Cool…

OS X Still Sucks in So Many Ways

I just recently came across this message in the Finder when I tried to rename a running application:

Are you sure you want to change the name of <appname> while it is open?

Changing the name of an application while it’s open may cause problems with the application.

This is caused by the same problem experienced in ScreenSaver: if you change the name of, or move, the folder of pictures to which ScreenSaver is pointing, it will lose track of it.

Both of these problems happen because Mac OS X dicourages the use of Aliases, system-standard data structures for referring to file system objects. Instead, applications are encouraged to use path names. The problem with a path name is that it’s fragile: if you move the item or change its name or the name of any of it’s enclosing directories, an extant path no longer points to that item.

AirPort & USB Problems with AlPB and Panther

I love my new 15” Aluminum PowerBook G4 (1.25 GHz, backlit keyboard, SuperDrive) very much (many thanks to my facilitator at Apple who helped make it a reality). It’s mechanically much more sturdy than was my TiPB, the fan runs almost never, and the backlight works (which is why I replaced my otherwise fine TiPB). I also think Panther (10.3.1, build 7C107) is a huge improvement over Jaguar.

However, I’m starting to have serious problems, and I don’t know how much of it to blame on Panther and how much to blame on the new hardware.

It started yesterday or the day before, when I restarted (I can’t remember why) and all of sudden my separate keyboard and mouse stopped working (I typically connect the PowerBook to my 22” Cinema Display which has a black/clear Apple keyboard and mouse connected to it). I have an Apple ADC adapter which is normally plugged into the DVI port and the USB port on the right side of the PB.

The USB devices had no effect on the UI, and the mouse light was dark. After a bit of unplugging and re-plugging, I discovered that if I plugged the mouse directly into the port on the left, everything came back, and I could plug the mouse back into the Cinema Display.

BTW—I’ve noticed that unplugging or plugging in a USB device causes a sleeping PowerBook to wake. I understand this to be a problem other PowerBook/Panther users are experiencing, and not just on AlPBs.

I came into work this afternoon, plugged everything in and opened the lid on the PowerBook. Everything came up fine. I read through the day’s mail (Mail), checked to see who was online (Adium), listed my bugs (IE; normally I use Safari, but Bugzilla doesn’t work quite right with it), and then headed for lunch with the group. When I came back, both screens were dark, and hitting keys on either keyboard failed to wake the machine (this is the kind of problem I’d been having on my TiPB prior to Panther).

So, I held the power button until the PB shut off, pressed it to start it up, and ran into the same USB problems described above, but slightly different. Before, the mouse’s light would not come. This time, the light was on, but the mouse had no effect. I unplugged it and plugged it back in to the Cinema Display, but now the light was off for good. I finally discovered that I had to plug the ADC adapter into the left-hand USB port to get those devices to work at all, but they still had no effect on the UI (although the mouse’s light would at least come on).

Apple System Profiler shows two USB roots. Nothing under the first, a hub under the second, a hub under that, and an Apple Optical Mouse under that.

Now, here’s where it gets much worse: the PowerBook thinks there’s no BlueTooth and no AirPort! They’re not off, they’re simply not installed!

So I restarted a couple of times throughout all of this, trying various things (e.g., I removed the Cinema Display from the mix altogether). The PB now recognizes that there is BlueTooth hardware, but refuses to see the AirPort card. And no amount of restarting or USB device permutations seems to make USB work. I just tried plugging the mouse directly into the left port, and the light comes on feebly (just sort of flickers, and not in the way it does when you move the mouse and it gets brighter), but the cursor won’t move.

At this point, I’m at a loss. I’m writing this entry using the PB’s own keyboard and mouse, and hopefully that will hold out so I can get some work done today.

Oh, one more issue: I got into a situation a couple nights ago where the keyboard backlight refused to come on (or be adjusted). The room I was in was very dark. I had to restart to get it straightened out.

I hate Cocoa

I’m getting so tired of hearing people say things like “our product for Mac OS X features a completely new Cocoa-based user interface to take maximum advantage of Apple’s new operating system.” Cocoa does not give an application any superiority over Carbon. Cocoa is not more stable, nor does it perform better. It doesn’t even really make life any easier on the developer.

But people continue to buy into the hype, and then regurgitate it on their customers.

Crap.

Panther & Office X

Here’s a hint for those of you upgrading to Panther. I just tried running Office X for the first time since installing Panther, and Word kept crashing. After a little investigating, I realized that (for some reason I don’t remember), I had Office X 10.0.0. After applying three updaters, Office X 10.1.5 seems to work fine.

http://mactopia.com/

HTTP Future Features

I have no idea what’s in store for HTTP 1.2 and beyond, or if there’s even any work being done on it. But here’s one feature I’d like to see.

In general, an HTTP request is made to be secure or non-secure by the scheme used in the URL sent by the user agent (https: or http:, respectively). However, this puts a burden on the developer of the website (usually a webapp) to ensure that URLs get written correctly.

This is a consequence of the use of SSL for HTTP security. SSL happens at a protocol layer below that of HTTP. The secure connection is established first, then the HTTP protocol is layered on top of that. By the time the server gets a chance to determine what resource is being requested, the SSL connection must have already been established.

It makes much more sense for an HTTP request to be made, and if the server determines that the requested resource is secure, that the connection then become secure. In other words, the requested resource should be able to dictate whether or not it needs to be secure.

This means we need a way to transparently make secure a connection that began unsecure.

There are complications with this, of course. Many times, information needs to be sent as part of the request in a secure fashion (your login and password information, for example). A way to handle this needs to be devised, of course.

Even the specific URL might need to be secure. That’s what HTTP currently does. The only thing you can’t keep from prying eyes is the IP address and port to which the request is being sent.

There are ways to mimic this behavior. For example, an unsecure request to a secure resource can cause a secure redirect. But redirects cause problems in the user agents, most notably involving the back button.

Okay, that’s all I can write for now, but I’ll try to get back to this subject later&hellpi;