July 2008 Archives

Heard today over IM from a sysadmin buddy of mine:

Peejay: I think my vacation is going to be hunting down the makers of courier-mta for public executions.
[...]
Peejay: In defence of Courier, it may just be this old version I hate more than life itself.

First of all, I love Linux. I discovered it in 1994(ish) right around the time that kernel 1.0 was just about to come out. The fact it was a home brew system, that it was a rebellious band of freedom fighters coming together as a community to create something great, and that anyone could contribute with ease all tickled my heart.

One of the great things about linux is that there is a real feeling that the community actually listens. I have no idea how you'd submit a bug to Microsoft or Apple, I really don't. I don't know if I need to be an MVP, an Gold level partner, a ACG (Apple Certified Genius(tm)(r)(c)) (actually I just totally made that up), or what. With Linux distros, desktops and major (and minor) projects there's generally a way to submit bugs or get support via bug tracking sofware of some sort, and more often than not you get a response. You can even submit suggestions and there is a good chance that it will actually get implemented or fixed (I believe a bug I reported to the Mozilla browser got fixed, go me!).

However there are now three bugs that I've reported and recently got updates about that pissed me off a bit.

[Bug 145524] Show emblems from Nautilus

In the main file manager for GNOME there is some inconsistancy with the "emblems" you can apply to folder icons... seems like a simple fix to me, but I'm not a GTK coder. The only real activity this has gotten over the last 4 years is people agreeing with me that it's a bug, showing examples of it, asking about the status, doing the classic OSAM (Open Source Asshole Move... I totally just made that up too) of "well you write a patch then!"

[Bug 85973] no drop down box for "find" in groups

This is another simple (to me anyway) omission when Pan (my newsreader of choice) got rewritten from the GTK 1.x to GTK 2.x toolkits. Basically the whole thing was re-written and a few minor details were missed. No biggie I guess. Except that in six (6) years this hasn't been done. It was re-prioritized around 2004, a suggestion made in 2006, and then in 2008 the commenter from 2006 was reproached for the way they did a OSAM.

[Bug 123796] hiding a panel with dual monitor moves panel to other monitor

This was an issue I got probably around the time I first got a dual monitor setup in 2003, 5 years ago, with an easily reproducible issue regarding panels and dual monitor setups. The only activity it's gotten in 5 years is people reporting that it's still happening.

These are the sort of things that turn people off to FLOSS and the community, which is sad. If you're not a coder with a good knowledge of the guts of the system the main ways you can contribute is to write documentation and report bugs, and people asking "how can I help" are constantly told this. But when those contributions are ignored for months and years, well, why bother? To put things in perspective, the last bug was reported on GNOME 2.4, the current version is 2.22, that's 9 releases (assuming that they did actually go all the way from 2.4, 2.6, 2.8 .. 2.22).

From the developer perspective of course, I'm sure it's tough dealing with an army of demanding whiners complaining that some incidental bug on some hardware or software set up that you may not have complaining that you're not fixing at the same time as you have a day job and put out software in your spare time for free, and not doing anything to help you along other than mention that it's still not fixed.... still not fixed.... still not fixed.....

Course, at least I don't have to pay Microsoft $99 per incident to be told it's not a bug, it's a feature, and it's my fault anyway. Well, that's how I imagine it is anyway. A search for "How to report a bug to microsoft" has the top results either dead links (requiring me to login with a live.com / hotmail.com email address), outdated information or articles saying how it's impossible to submit a bug to Microsoft. Submitting a search for "report a bug" from the front page of Microsoft.com crashes Firefox!!!

I don't know if it's better to not be able to report bugs, or report them and have them ignored... :)

[Bug 113556] META Refresh does not update back history as expected

This is the oldest bug in the list, one I reported to mozilla in 2001... looks like mozilla is doing a big bug-triage and this bug is being shuffled around.

Normally I'm not a huge fanboy, and I try (no, really, I do) not to turn into an Apple Fanboy (or a Linux Fanboy), at least to too extreme an extreme.

However, one thing I noticed a bit ago that I thought I should mention, at least in the "this is where Apple wins" department.... I opened up the iWork '08 spreadsheet program, Numbers and was asked to choose a template. For shits and giggles I selected "Budget" and was presented with this default document:

(Clicky Clicky for a bigger image)

So first of all it's beautifully setup, second of all it's functional, and third, it's well thought out. The sections and definitions make sense, it deals with the standard cases for a normal household budget. Also it allows you to relatively easily figure it out, giving very low barrier to entry by allowing the user to just plug numbers in to match your own particular circumstance. Oh, and this is probably the least colorful and "fun" of the templates that you're presented with.

Does excel have anything like this? I really don't like railing on Microsoft but when you start up excel you get an empty spreadsheet at worst, and a list of boring stock templates (if I remember right, no copy of Excel around here right now).

It's this sort of thing that creates the Apple fanboys, and keeps them. The non-fanboys discount this sort of thing with "blah blah not industry standard software, blah blah too expensive blah blah pay Steve Jobs $200 every year for updates blah blah", but someone (like me) who is not a fanboy and who has the opportunity to experience "the cult of mac"... it blew me away.

Apple somehow was able to make spreadsheets fun. Fun! Spreadsheets!! Me and Firefly sat down and started plugging in our own numbers and watching the graphs go up and down and it was fun! WTF!? It's easy to talk about these things and discount them, but it's really weird when it actually happens.

Fanboy mode off.

So since I started my new job I've been running three times a week and going to the gym twice a week. This morning this started as normal waking up at 5:40am and finding the clothes I'd left out for the morning had been peed on by one of the kittens who got over the barriers we put up to prevent them from peeing all over the bed and clothes. I then found out that since June 3rd my weight has dropped exactly 0. The run didn't feel any easier than normal, and my time is down barely a minute for the 2 mile route to 22 and a half minutes. I'm really being frustrated with this whole thing, as it really doesn't seem to be doing anything.

Don't get me wrong, I know I'm doing it wrong, but as a rational person I had the idea that running 6 miles a week and going to the gym twice (though I rarely make it past 45 minutes in there) would do something all other things being equal.

And of course proper diet and everything, and the 2 hours of sitting on a train and 8 hours of sitting in a desk certainly doesn't help either. I'm wondering if just stopping the exercise would affect anything.

Bah.

It's things like this that make you sound like idiots instead of just passionate about your software or hardware dealer of choice (post from online forum regarding the (just) released iPod Touch 2.0 firmware):

OK, it's downloading!!!!! I swear, if there is one bug with 2.0, I'll be on the phone bitching out some customer service representative! I've been up for almost 60 hours without even laying down waiting for Mobile Me and this, it had better be perfect Apple!

Now, I have a feeling this guy is joking, but there were a bunch of similar posts that seemed less exaggerated and just as pissed off...

So I got somehow sucked into the TWiT TV 24 hour iPhone live netcast..... 24 hours of Leo Laporte sitting and talking about the iPhone and talking to people around the world as the different iPhone stores open from New Zealand all the way around the world to California. Yup, a video stream of a guy sitting in his basement doing nothing but talking. Yet as stupid as it sounds, and regardless of how you feel about Leo and the TWiT network (I not everyone is a fan) it's somehow strangely fascinating. Even if you call me a weirdo, there are over six thousand people doing the same thing. There's an IRC channel and a video chat channel, both full up, talking at such a rate that it's hard to keep up with anything. I was watching it when I went to bed at 11pm last night and when I got up this morning to go for a run (and couldn't, but that's another story) at 5:40 it was still going strong. I expected Leo to still be going, but I didn't expect both chatrooms to still be full.

It's definitely an interesting phenomenon if you think about it in terms of technology reporting. People are getting up to the second information about the world of the new iPhone (and the iPod Touch, and the new iTunes app store). Imagine the marketing potential of something like that, with that much rapt attention.... They're also crashing websites (few sites are able to handle 6000 people accessing them at exactly the same time it seems :) This last part has been pretty amusing, basically any site Leo mentions everyone goes to all at once, and it's unavailable.... (and when I got up it looked like there was a drinking game going on where if a site is crashed everyone takes a drink.... 6:30 is a bit early for me though :)

I suppose some of the other reason to watch is that there are (were) 10 new iPhones being given away to random people, so that's a good reason to be sitting in the chat or calling in to stream video to him to talk and give a sob story and hope to get a freebie :)

So I'm still undecided about the iPhone, and getting one. Yes, it's expensive, I could get it for a plan price around what I have now (only a few $ more a month, plus the phone of course), but I have a iPod Touch already (no internet not around wifi of course), the "Rogers is evil/confusing" thing, and that it sounds like the 3G internet access kills battery life, so if you're turning that off why not just keep the iPod Touch anyway... I think I'll wait for a few days at least to wait to hear what other people have to say, and lets be honest, I'll probably break down and end up getting one next week sometime :)

Anyway, congrats Leo on a unique new way of doing media and good luck on the last 1.5 hours of your 24 hour marathon!

So I finally got off the phone with Rogers and have a bit of information that might help my fellow Canadians with navigating the tricky waters that is figuring out WTF Rogers is doing with their plans. I have a feeling that they might not be so much evil as just too big and complex to appear anything but that.

First of all huge thanks to Pat in the customer service office for dealing with me and my stupid questions.

What I learned about the plans

• You don't have to put a iPhone plan on an iPhone, you can put any voice and/or data package onto the iPhone when you purchase it. The only stipulation is that the plan is current, so if you're grandfathered in with a plan that's no longer around, sucks to be you.
• While your voice plan may not be current and therefor not transferable to an iPhone, your addons (ie: the $11 bundle for voicemail/callerID/etc) may be. So if you have a bundle for addons now you may not need to get a new one.
• If you don't get one of the iPhone plans and want voicemail, you can get either normal voicemail or the visual voicemail, you don't need both. If you go for the visual voice mail as an a la carte item it's $8.
• The extras on a voice / data / extras a la carte plan are:
  
• • $6.95 "access fee" (*cough* money grab)
  • $0.50 911 fee
• If you're looking for other discounts, you can pull the "I've been a loyal Rogers customer since the '90s, what can you do for me, look, I'm committing to a 3 year plan with you!" card, they do have flexibility in the plan costs, but not the phone costs (unsurprising as Apple traditionally has given no flexibility in pricing of their hardware). It sounded like it was up to the discretion of the person you were dealing with, and your own payment history, etc. My thanks to Pat who was able to do something for me here without me committing to anything or having anything being contingent on getting a phone.
• Your eligibility for getting an iphone at the $199 or $299 price is if you haven't bought a new phone in the last year.
• The 60GB Data plan can be added on to any "vision" phone, ie: any iPhone or smartphone, but not some random POS normal phone.

Here are some "gotchas"

• If your voice plan is $30 or less they charge an extra $50 for the phone. So if you're going for the 250 minute voice plan for $30 you pay $249 for the 8G iPhone instead of $199. This I call horse-shit.
• If your voice plan is $30 or less they charge an extra $50 for the phone. So if you're going for the 250 minute voice plan for $30 you pay $249 for the 8G iPhone instead of $199. This I call horse-shit also.
  
• Visual voice mail is something that is a double edged sword, and not the kind where one edge is good and one is bad, in this case both are bad....
  • It's a separate charge from the data ($8)
  • It uses data transfer
  • It uses minutes
  • ... so a triple edged sword if you think about it!
• If you go with a higher plan than you need for voice or data you can change it after the fact (and still within your contract), but if you downgrade you may (she wasn't sure of this) pay a $50 downgrade fee. So if you get the 6G data package and find out after a few months you're only using 100mb a month, you can move to a lower data plan, but you pay. Oh, and if you drop a data plan altogether you pay as well. This is unsurprising of course.

• Make sure your new iPhone is working before you leave the store
• Make sure your new iPhone is working before you leave the store
  
• Pat reiterated several times (to make sure I got it through my thick skull) that if you buy your phone (at a rogers store of course) and the salesguy screws up somehow while activating it and bricks it, and you leave the store, it's now your responsibility and you get to take it to apple to send it away to fix it, or whatever. However it's bricked and you're still in the store and find this out, they can just put it aside and get a new one for you. If you leave the store and find out after that it's not working, "sucks to be you".

What I forgot to ask about was things like

• Is there a cap in data overages?
• How is the 3G coverage in the Valley?
• How can I tell how much data you're using as the month goes on?
• Does the plan I was looking at have texting in it as well (d'oh! talked about this but forgot to find out about it on the last plan we talked about!)

Even with all my conversation I still couldn't find on the website where they had the details of some of the plans that I was looking at, so if you are really wanting something specific, it's probably best to call in. Oh, and when you do, be nice, they are finding out about this stuff after we are it seems (though they know the inner details of the non-iPhone plans way better). iPhone in Canada has some info too.

Hopefully this'll help someone out there figure this stuff out, it at least got some of my questions answered. Now at least if/when I get one I can go to the guy and say I want plan X, with options Y, Z and Q, here's the SKU for it, and hopefully speed things up.

So my car got a bit smooshed last week, coming home from the gym. *sigh*. Coming home, turning into my driveway and either I didn't look hard enough, or the guy behind me was going way too fast, but I turned and I suddenly hear this screen and a thump as he hits me on the front right left quarterpanel. Basically caved in the body and gave a good scrape on the door (crappy cell phone picture included). Everyone was ok thankfully, mostly it's just going to be my pride and my pocketbook that's hurt, as app

arently ICBC has "special" rules for turning into a driveway which essentially says that if you're the one turning into the driveway, you're at fault. The guy on the phone told me that the best I could hope for was 75% at fault, the other guys' skid 20' of skid marks aside. Luckily of course this is what insurance is for, but sadly the 11 years of safe driving means nothing, or next to nothing (so much for the "one free accident" thing I heard about). So I lose some discount on my insurance (the suck when a "sports" car like mine has such high premiums to begin with), pay some money over 3 years (not sure what's up with that), and of course it goes on my insurance record. Or at least it'll be something like that, I have yet to hear from them with any official word. Course, when you have a monopoly in the province, it seems there's not a lot you can do but some bitching and whining :(