Book Fail

Posted on March 24, 2009 by molecularbear

Whenever I try to read science fiction lately I find myself thwarted by my own expectations. Over the years I’ve been paging through the Nebula and Hugo award-winners, apparently setting my literary demands higher and higher with each read. Here is a quick list of the books I’ve been unable to complete lately:

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder – a friend implored me to read this based on its fascinating setting. I worked at it a few times, but I couldn’t get past the ridiculous characters. I wish Schroeder had emulated Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama strategy: use a collection of forgettable mannequins to explore an awesome science fiction concept. Unfortunately for me, the early goings of this book featured a small ratio of Schroeder’s interesting scifi concepts to the roughly hewn characters and dialog.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis – science fiction stories that involve time travel back to an earlier part of documented human history are usually a turnoff for me. When I pick up a scifi book I want science fiction, not a goddamn Renaissance “faire”. After a few halting starts, I finally began to make headway in Doomsday Book… then I discovered a misprint in the form of a duplicated chapter combined with a skipped chapter. That annoyance, along with characters that I didn’t really care for and a plot that I wasn’t super keen about, was enough to cause me to put the book down.

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson – after reading both Red Mars and Green Mars, I apparently couldn’t bring myself to delve into another of these rambling tomes. I’m not dismissing these books; the series has fascinated me with believable technology, rich characters, and ideas on alternate societies and economics. While this is the trilogy on Mars colonization, there are chunks that feel like a bit of a grind. Maybe when I’m feeling more patient I’ll try to get into this one.

Sometimes I start to wonder whether video games, Netflix Instant, and HDTV have spoiled my love of literature. But then I recall my thoughts on the Hyperion Cantos and start to look forward to that next great read.

Posted in Books | 1 Comment

PHP zlib.output_compression fails to set Content-Encoding

Posted on March 16, 2009 by molecularbear

This is what the PHP docs say about the zlib.output_compression INI directive:

Whether to transparently compress pages. If this option is set to “On” in php.ini or the Apache configuration, pages are compressed if the browser sends an “Accept-Encoding: gzip” or “deflate” header. “Content-Encoding: gzip” (respectively “deflate”) and “Vary: Accept-Encoding” headers are added to the output. In runtime, it can be set only before sending any output.

Seems pretty straightforward, except that enabling this directive on an openSUSE 10.3 server (and an openSUSE 10.2 server) resulted in a bunch of gibberish as output. Meanwhile, the compression worked just fine on my MacPorts-enhanced MacBook.

After flailing around on Google and php.ini, I eventually eliminated SSL and the firewall as reasons for the problem. During this process I wasted a good amount of time on this bug. Basically, the docs say that you can set zlib.output_compression in your script at runtime, but in reality it doesn’t work.

I finally got down to business with Live HTTP Headers and figured out that enabling zlib compression on my openSUSE servers certainly compressed the content, but did not send the requisite “Content-Encoding: gzip” response header. Sending the header manually within my script (e.g. header("Content-Encoding: gzip");) would correctly turn the gibberish into uncompressed form.

Having already spent hours mucking around with this, I went with a quick and dirty solution:

ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
echo $page->toHtml();
ob_end_flush();

I hunted around Google for this problem, but only found PHP4 references from years ago. Maybe it’s time to ditch openSUSE on my servers… Ubuntu LTS might hit the spot.

Posted in HOW-TOs, Linux, Rants | 4 Comments

Mediawiki extension WTFs

Posted on February 4, 2009 by molecularbear

Had a number of WTF moments when looking for a wiki2pdf type of Mediawiki extension. I came across Pdf Export which seemed to be what I wanted. But as I looked over the extension, the WTFs began to pile up:

  • The required version of Mediawiki is 1.14, but the current version of Mediawiki is 1.13.3. WTF?
  • Okay, let me download the source… WTF? I’m supposed to copy-and-paste this into four different PHP files?
  • Interesting… there are edit links next to each block of code. Can I, an anonymous user, just edit this code? Ah, yes I can. WTF??

Looks like most extensions seem to be in an SVN repo, but Pdf Export does not appear to be among them. The main page for this extension lists the version as 2.0 (4-Nov-2008), but I’m not sure what that means if the distribution code is a publicly editable moving target.

I think what’s happening here is that the extension ecosystem is far more “organic” than I had anticipated. They seem to have made the task of collaborative programming as quick and open as wikis themselves. The concept is actually kind of cool.

Still, I’d rather install an extension with a pdf_export-2.0.tgz or something than copy code off a wiki that may or may not have just been modified by h4CK3R420.

Posted in Programming, Rants | Leave a comment

Tethering the Centro: A Tale of Failure

Posted on January 30, 2009 by molecularbear

I guess I can see it both ways on the subject of tethering.

Verizon wants to charge $15 per month on top of my “unlimited” data plan to allow me to use my Centro as a mobile broadband card. There are two opposing points of view one could have on this billing strategy.

CONSUMER POV: They want to charge me twice for the same data? Have the $100-dollar bills clogging their arteries finally cut off the circulation to the corporate brain!?

VERIZON POV: We view the customer as a piñata that can be beaten until cash comes pouring out. A tethering charge is just another nail-encrusted board that can be used to pound that stupid piñata until it bleeds green.

I have very little respect for cell phone service providers. The contracts, the incompatibilities (i.e., GSM vs CDMA), the ridiculous charges for text messaging, the insulting mall kiosks, and the aforementioned tethering cost… every time I turn around I feel Verizon’s blackened claws raking across my wallet.

Looking at past bills, I’m only pulling around 20 MB/month on the Centro. This paltry amount would obviously increase if I were able to attach that Internet pipe to my MacBook. Even so, I still wouldn’t use enough bandwidth to warrant a recurring extra charge. This calls for a workaround!

PdaNet – this is exactly what I’m looking for, except that it only runs on Windows. And no, I don’t feel like setting up a virtual machine to get it working. UPDATE: since originally writing this post I have acquired a Droid, and PdaNet has produced an OS X version. Works great!

USB Modem – aha, supposedly USB Modem works on OS X and even Linux. Unfortunately this note at the top of their homepage gives me pause:

However, for more reliable work with Sprint or Verizon carriers you may need to purchase their tethering plan.

A somewhat vague statement, but certainly not an encouraging one. The problem is that having an unofficial tethering capability is such a low priority for me that I’m not sure it’s worth playing around with programs like these to see if they work. Though if needs be, I will always pursue that route rather than pay some ridiculous Machiavellian tethering charge.

Posted in OS X, Smartphone | 1 Comment

Palm Centro battery drains in flaky coverage

Posted on January 23, 2009 by molecularbear

Maybe Verizon doesn’t have any “dead zones”, but one of my workplaces has what I’ll call a Maelstrom Zone. Even though I’m stationary within the Maelstrom, the Centro seems to bounce back and forth between a Verizon network and an “Extended” (read: roaming) network. Moreover, coverage swings wildly between 0 and 4 bars on just the Verizon network alone.

This results in missed calls, poor call quality, errors sending texts, and delays in receiving texts. But more annoyingly is that after a full day in the Maelstrom, the Centro’s battery has drained to a sliver. This will happen even if I barely use the device; the tidal forces of this strange vortex are enough to rip away the Centro’s life energy.

I’d love to see a log of the cell towers that the Centro is using over the course of the day, but I’ll save that experiment for another time. My main concern was how to prevent the battery from draining so drastically. I hit up some forums and wound up trying a couple of things:

Changing the Select Band parameter from Automatic to Home did NOT work. This makes some amount of sense because of the wild oscillations I see in Verizon (read: Home) network coverage while in the Maelstrom. I wish I could select an Extended band so I could verify that the issue is Verizon network coverage in the Maelstrom.

Changing Date & Time to Automatically set: Nothing WORKED!. I guess trying to keep the time updated while in the Maelstrom is pretty taxing. I went from leaving work with around 1/5 of the battery left to having maybe 4/5 left.

Posted in Smartphone | 5 Comments

Fantasy football non-lessons learned in 2008

Posted on December 15, 2008 by molecularbear

I just lost Week 15 which means I’m out of the Championship game and will be playing for third place. I sort of choked because I made a bunch of lineup tweaks and started these guys:

  • QB Shaun Hill [10 FP]
  • WR Davone Bess [2 FP]
  • K John Carney [6 FP]

When I should have stuck with my usual crew of:

  • QB Matt Cassel [31 FP]
  • WR Bernard Berrian [10 FP]
  • K Rob Bironas [14 FP]

Those moves cost me a shot to win it all. The problem is that I had very logical reasons for making these decisions. For example:

Matt Cassel had put up -2 FP against the Steelers, barely had a decent 19-FP game with a last minute TD against the miserable Seahawks, missed practice time grieving over the loss of his father, and was about to face a Raiders team ranked in the top ten against the pass. Meanwhile, Shaun Hill had two TDs in 4 of his 5 previous games and was facing a Miami D ranking in the bottom half of the NFL against the pass. What happens? Cassel throws a career high 4 TDs while Hill is shut out of the endzone.

The problem is that you can look over the stats, make decisions that seem logical, and then have everything blow up in your face. You want to play the matchups, but most of the time they don’t mean shit. You want to listen to the experts, but they’re right barely 50% of the time. You want to apply some sort of reasoning to the whole process, but there is so much randomness that it doesn’t seem to matter.

So what is the lesson here? There is no lesson. Wanna see the top draft picks of the newbie owner who is going to the Championship game? Here are his first five rounds:

  1. Eli Manning
  2. Willis McGahee
  3. Marvin Harrison
  4. Vince Young
  5. Fred Taylor

If you can go to the playoffs after a draft like that, what the hell is the point of playing at all?

I guess I shouldn’t complain so much. After all, I made the playoffs and had the potential to play for the whole ball of wax. The season was so much more enjoyable with the tools and gameflow that CBSSports provides as opposed to the garbage that Yahoo puts out there. I mean even consider a “premium” league for 2009 to get a little more customization.

The Shambling Corpses will rise again!

Posted in Fantasy Football | 1 Comment

Averatec 2300 series sucks

Posted on December 10, 2008 by molecularbear

So, user comes to me with a two-year-old Averatec 2300 laptop that “won’t boot”. He’d had some weirdness with his XP install before so I went in thinking the OS was messed up somehow. But once I actually got the laptop in my hands, I realized I was dealing with a hardware problem.

Symptoms

  • Powering on, you can hear the optical drive whir (inserting a disc will cause it to spin up)
  • Power light is on
  • Wifi light is on (assuming the wifi switch is not “OFF”)
  • HD light flashes once
  • Fan does not spin
  • I do not hear the HD spin up
  • No BIOS screen, display is unlit

Searching around on the web, I found a lot of people complaining about Averatec. The most relevant thing I found was a thread with the amusing title of 2370 sleep turns into coma.

Diagnosis

Even if the RAM were bad (and I had successfully memtest’ed it a week or so ago) I’d expect to hear the fan spin up. Basically, the laptop hardware seems to be “stuck” in a suspend/hibernate state.

Treatment

If this were a desktop I’d pull the CMOS battery and use a jumper to clear the BIOS. Unfortunately, the impression I got from the Intertron is that there is no jumper and the battery is soldered to the board. Rather than spend the rest of my day trying to revive this piece of garbage, I’m just going to grab the hard drive, copy the data off, and tell the guy to buy a non-Averatec laptop.

Posted in Rants | 3 Comments

I found XMMS again!

Posted on December 9, 2008 by molecularbear

These past few years I’ve been frustrated with the media players that modern Linux distros have been pushing. I have my music organized nicely in a familiar directory structure and I usually just want to play an album. I don’t want to import my music, download cover art, do CDDB lookups, or otherwise integrate my audio into some big iTunes clone.

All I want to do is: 1) browse to directory and 2) play music in directory. Yes, the abstractions/features that iTunes clones offer are cool and useful, but I want simplicity on my Linux workstation. I’ve wrestled around with Amarok and Banshee, but generally end up getting annoyed. I don’t know what happened to XMMS, but when reading Linux Journal I saw a screenshot that contained an Audacious window – the look/feel appeared identical to XMMS.

Grabbing Audacious from my package manager, it’s obviously a fork or evolution or whatever from XMMS. Finally, I’m back to my simple music player.

Browse to directory. Play directory.

Posted in Linux | Leave a comment

TortoiseSVN “connection closed unexpectedly”

Posted on December 8, 2008 by molecularbear

This burned several hours of my time so I thought I’d add this post to the others that I found on the Intertron.

I had debugged every possible angle when trying to get a Vista machine to checkout a repo from an svn+ssh server. At last I figured it had to be a subversion client-server version problem, rather than an issue with the SSH keys, and so it was.

For reference, I’m using TortoiseSVN 1.5.5 and the server is running openSUSE 11.0’s subversion-1.5.0-96.1 package.

The solution, as many have stated, is to downgrade to TortoiseSVN 1.4.8.

Posted in HOW-TOs, Micro$oft | Leave a comment

FOSS in the workplace: FAIL x 3

Posted on November 19, 2008 by molecularbear

While I run Linux on the servers and IT workstations, I’m always looking for opportunities to deploy the OS and FOSS in general in a “user” context. I’ve made three attempts that all failed:

  1. The Web Browser: after an employee got some annoying Windows virus, and I was unable to reinstall due to some licensing problem, I finally stopped running in place and installed Ubuntu. This was the perfect opportunity as this employee primarily works through a web browser (Firefox, no less!). Turns out that the website that works with Firefox on Windows doesn’t work on Linux – not with Firefox… or Opera… or any other browser I tried. Yeah, the problem is probably due to some stupid crap that the website is doing, but this was one case where I was sure that Linux would work out. He still uses the machine from time to time, but it’s supplemented with his Windows laptop.
  2. The Scanner: an older scanner/copier/printer needed a computer attached to it. Perfect for Linux!, I thought, until I discovered that SANE couldn’t deal with it. No problem, I had a newer color scanner that should do the job… SANE didn’t support that either. And so off went Ubunutu and on went WinXP.
  3. The Office Suite: did a WinXP install for someone, knowing that they’d probably need some Windows-only apps. Having had some success showing OpenOffice.org to my girlfriend, I figured I’d install that instead of MS Office. After explaining to him that OOO is compatible with MS Office, the guy gave it a try. A week or so later, he said he was just more comfortable with MS Office and wanted to ditch OpenOffice.

It’s all pretty discouraging. In situations that seem ideal for Linux, in the end I’m forced to use Windows. Though to end on a positive note, I will say that I’ve had nearly global success employing Firefox and Thunderbird.

Posted in Linux, Micro$oft | 1 Comment