Embarrassment

Some days I’m embarrassed to be a software developer.

My employer just switched brokerage firms, so I have to go to the new firm’s website to register my account. So far:

• The registration page doesn’t allow punctuation in my userID, so I can’t use my e-mail address. I have to choose yet another impossible-to-remember, minimum 8-character userID. At least they have a “remember my userid” checkbox on the login page.
• There is a “Password Hint” feature for lost passwords. There are only four questions. The answer cannot contain spaces (making “who is your favorite teacher” hard to answer). The hint response is not displayed, so you can’t see what you’ve typed, but you only enter it once, so you can’t be sure it is correct.
• I entered my phone number in +1.416.555.1212 format (the ITU/ISO international standard for such things). It was re-written as 14165551212; I wonder what their employees will do with that if they ever try to call me? I’m actually kind of surprised it accepted an 11-digit number at all, come to think of it!

They have a “contact us” form:

Closed Door

We closed the door in the office this morning for a party, to keep the kids out:

(The line at the bottom is the drive in the PVR, which is in the family room :-).

Disclexia

The girl speaks from the back seat:

Is that one of those geek songs? Rock the Taskbar?

Rogers Update

I appear to be back online.

• A technician came by my house on Thursday, spent less than 30 seconds “testing” my line, and then left without telling me anything about the neighbourhood-wide problem.
• A call center tech was able to tell me on Friday that they had isolated a “noise problem” in the area.
• A technician visiting the a neighbour was able to tell me that there was a signal problem in our six-house area, but he also didn’t know anything about the week-long, ongoing neighbourhood-wide problem.
• We had two analog cable outages on Friday, (recorded by my PVR, of course :) Since then my Internet connection has been rock-solid (other than my router locking up on Saturday night :).

I’d like to believe that it is unusual to have so many people working on the same problem and yet not talking to each other, but as I work for a large software company, I’m aware that this is the norm for most large organizations… *sigh.

Hospital Visit

My son was knocked off his chair by a friend at school today. He ended up rolling under a table; when he tried to stand up, he bounced the back of his head off the underside of the table.

He was still feeling nauseated and dizzy an hour or so later, and had added shaky vision, so we trundled him off to the hospital. The wait was surprisingly short given the snow on the roads today, but still, by the time we saw the doctor he was feeling fine. The doctor ran him through a whole battery of basic neurological tests, and he passed (that’s my boy! :). They let us go with a warning instructions for head injuries.

Rogers

My internet connection has been playing yo-yo this week:

The staff at the call center are all very apologetic, but they can’t tell me what is wrong; why the connection keeps going down for hours. I’m afraid that what is happening is that every time it goes down, a different technician pushes the reset button, but nobody is correlating the multiple outages. On the other hand, they say that it’s always a neighborhood wide digital outage (which would include Rogers Home Phone and Rogers Digital TV), so I hope someone is paying attention…

I Hate Insurance Companies

I carry insurance on my vehicles because of liability issues, because I want protection from catastrophic damage, and because I’m legally required to (in that order).

Two weeks ago my truck was hit from behind by a taxi while I was stopped at a pedestrian crossing. The guy hit me at an angle, so the right front corner of his car hit the left-center of the rear bumper. My truck doesn’t have any wishy-washy fiberglass or Styrofoam; it has a steel bumper, welded to the frame, with a plastic wrap-around cover.

Mythtv Update

Apparently I never posted about the latest changes. Most of this was back in September before fall TV started up…

My Knoppmyth installation was getting a little old and decrepit, even after the update for Schedules Direct. These days I use Ubuntu on all of the servers, so with the second release of Mythbuntu available I decided it was time to switch the PVR.

The first upgrade was relatively painless. I started with Mythbuntu 7.10, because it used the same MythTV version as my Knoppmyth install. First I installed onto my spare 160Gb drive; I have two, because I was originally planning to use RAID-1 on the PVR. Alas, the extra CPU and I/O required was too much for my wimpy PIII-933, so now I have a spare.

Home Office Update

I had two computers on my L-shaped desk: my desktop and my work laptop (connected to a real display and keyboard, of course!). Switching back and forth between the two was getting annoying, until I read about a package called Synergy, that allows sharing one keyboard and mouse over the network among multiple computers.

I now have two displays side-by-side on my desk! Synergy works very well; the desktop switching is seamless, and all keyboard events (including the Windows key) get sent to the correct computer. Even the clipboards are synchronized; I can cut and paste between the two computers! Synergy can be configured to start at boot time, so even after a reboot (common on the work laptop), I still only need the one keyboard.

Orwell or Huxley

I saw this, and I had to share…

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.” —Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Google Reader 2

I’ve just discovered an annoying ‘feature’; in fact, one that many/most other feed readers had some version of, and the reason I stuck with Sharpreader for so long…

Google Reader automatically marks as ‘read’ any entries more than a month old.

Sometimes there are articles I want to be able to find again; because I want to read them with more attention, because I need more time to act on them, because I want to blog them, etc. etc.. I’ve been leaving them as “unread”, but I guess I’ll have to develop a different habit instead. “Starred items” is already overloaded. In some other feed readers I could add a “TODO” or “important” tag to the entry, but that doesn’t seem to be possible in Google. I see that I can email them to myself, although I’d rather not have to use two applications for this…

Voter Turnout

Yesterday’s Canadian federal election broke a new record; lowest voter turnout in history, at 59% of eligible voters. This apparently ranks us 83 in the world.

I received six voter registration cards; two for us, and four for previous owners of our house. We’ve lived here eight years and three federal elections. I called Elections Canada to ask if they wanted to remove those bad names from the list, and they replied “no”.

Cooling

The Dell Precision Workstation has a chassis fan right next to the CPU(s). They have this annoying habit of chirping like a cricket as they get old and worn out. One of the fans in my PVR was squeaking so loudly today that it was annoying me in the office, 15’ and two doors away. I unplugged the fan at around 2PM today. I guess it’s kinda important… :-)

(Yes, those temperatures are Centigrade. It’s not that cold in my family room!)

Linux Sux

OK, I exaggerate. Linux as a server is an awesome tool. Linux on the desktop sucks like a Hoover.

I decided to try Ubuntu 8.04 on a desktop machine. My primary goal was to have a MythTV client, so I could watch recorded TV when the kids had taken over the main television (for the Wii, of course! :). I’ve been a casual Linux user since kernel version 0.91, and a regular user since RedHat 5.0 shipped. I used Sun and SGI desktops, NCD X-Terminals, and even early Desktop Linux for 10 years before I started using Windows. Desktop Linux has come a long way since then, so I figured it was worth a try; I was experienced enough to work around any problems that came up.

End of an Era

McAfee to buy Secure Computing

bq. San Jose, Calif.-based McAfee Inc. said Monday it agreed to buy Secure Computing Corp. for $5.75 per share in cash, or about $413-million. Secure’s preferred stocks will also be redeemed for cash, adding another $84 million to the value of the deal.

That price appears to be a 25% premium on yesterday’s close; not too shabby. I should have held my 16 shares a few months longer :-).

Shooting Themselves in the Foot

Toronto has a problem with the Asian Longhorned Beetle and so the transport of wood, and in particular firewood, is restricted. Some areas of Toronto, including the protected conservation areas, are quarantine zones.

Because the Rouge Valley is protected, the Glen Rouge Campground, owned and operated by the City of Toronto, has a rule that firewood must be purchased from the park; you are not allowed to bring your own.

Unfortunately, the wood the sell is disgusting. We bought the best bag we could find in their woodlot, and it was still so wet that my axe and knife were both covered in water droplets (the knife after I tried shaving a couple of pieces to see if that would start a fire). After several attempts, including resorting to lighter fluid (something I’ve never had to do in 32 years of lighting fires!), we gave up. The only thing we could get to burn was the dry kindling we borrowed.