Of all the hardware that can break…
... it has to be the one that's most difficult to replace.
Today, my Gefen HDMI over Cat5 adapter died. Well. It didn't die completely, it just lost its ability to produce a stable image. What is transmitted is very intermittent and in the few seconds the image is available, it's heavily distorted.
Also, it's not the obvious issue (faulty cabling) as the problems did not go away after using two very short (1m) cat 5 cables to test.
Now this is really bad for a variety of reasons:
- Only just last Saturday I bought Star Ocean and Tales of Vesperia for my 360, giving me a total play time of 1.5 hours so far.
- Yesterday I noticed that Worms: Armageddon was released for Xbox arcade and I have already invited Ebi after the huge success that was our earlier Worms evening on the 360.
- My setup is totally dependent on the two extenders as I am covering more than 20 meters of distance between receiver and projector. No extender, no Xbox, no Wii, no projector.
- Last time I waited around six weeks for the extender to arrive
Of all the hardware I'm having at home, the HDMI extender is the worst to break. Not only is it very hard to replace (see above), it's so deeply integrated into my home cinema setup that just debugging what was going on took a ladder, a screwdriver, a hex-wrench and unwinding an ungodly heap of cables.
All of that in an apartment whose temperature is currently at 30°C (86 °F) and with a hell of a headache.
I'd take anything else going down. Anything but that Gefen extender. My XBox? Sure. Shion? It'd suck, but sure if it has to be, go ahead. My reciever? That would hurt as it was very expensive, but at least it's easily replaced.
Why did it have to be that Gefen extender? Why??
digg bar controversy
Update: I've actually written this post yesterday and scheduled it for posting today. In the mean time, digg has found an even better solution and only shows their bar for logged in users. Still - a solution like the one provided here would allow for the link to go to the right location regardless of the state of the digg bar settings.
Recently, digg.com added a controversial feature, the digg bar, which basically frames every posted link in a little IFRAME.
Rightfully so, webmasters were concerned about this and quite quickly, we had the usual religious war going on between the people finding the bar quite useful and the webmasters hating it for lost page rank, even worse recognition of their site and presumed affiliation with digg.
Ideas crept up over the weekend, but turned out not to be so terribly good.
Basically it all boils down to digg.com screwing up on this, IMHO.
I know that they let you turn off that dreaded digg bar, but all the links on their page still point to their own short url. Only then is the decision made whether to show the bar or not.
This means that all links on digg currently just point to digg itself, not awarding any linked page with anything but the traffic which they don't necessarily want. Digg-traffic isn't worth much in terms of returning users. You get dugg, you melt your servers, you return back to be unknown.
So you would probably appreciate the higher page rank you get from being linked at by digg as that leads to increased search engine traffic which generally is worth much more.
The solution on diggs part could be simple: Keep the original site url in the href of their links, but use some JS-magic to still open the digg bar. That way they still get to keep their foot in the users path away from the site, but search engines will now do the right thing and follow the links to their actual target, thus giving the webmasters their page rank back.
How to do this?
Here's a few lines of jQuery to automatically make links formated in the form
<div id="link_container"> <a id="xxbc34fb" href="http://example.com/articles/cool_article">Cool Article</a> <a id="xxbc38fc" href="http://example.com/articles/cool_article2">Cool Article 2</a> <a id="xxbc39fk" href="http://example.com/articles/cool_article3">Cool Article 3</a></div> |
be opened via the digg bar while still working correctly for search engines (assuming that the link's ID is the digg shorturl):
$(function(){ $('div#link_container a').click(function(){ $(this).attr('href') = 'http://digg.com/' + this.id; }); }); |
piece of cacke.
No further changes needed and all the web masters will be so much happier while digg gets to keep all the advantages (and it may actually help digg to increase their pagerank as I could imagine that a site with a lot of links pointing to different places could rank higher than one without any external links).
Webmasters then still could do their usual parent.location.href trickery to get out of the digg bar if they want to, but they could also retain their page rank.
No need to add further complexity to the webs standards because one site decides not to play well.
Bugs, Bugs and more Bugs
I love my job. Ever loved it, always will love it.
But if you ask me what the most annoying aspect of it is, then I would answer you that it's stuff always breaking all around me.
Whatever I do, there is no guarantee that any defined thing will work like it's expected to, it will break from one moment to another or it will never work. There are hardware failures, OS failures, software failures - each and every day I lose at least one or two hours due to stuff not working or suddenly stopping to work.
Let me give you an account of what happened since the beginning of 2009:
- When installing two previously configured servers at a collocation center, one didn't start up at all (opening and reclosing the case fixed that) and the ESX server on the other machine refused to connect to the VMWare license server despite a working TCP/IP connection between them which turned out to be a missing host file entry despite connecting via IP-address.
- One day later, Outlook on a computer of someone I'm looking after the PC a bit decided to trash the .PST-file and I had to remotely guide (on the phone) the person to restore it from the backup.
- Yesterday, my Firebug suddenly stopped working. At least the console-object wasn't any longer available in my scripts and the console itself didn't work. Reinstalling the Addon helped (WTF?)
- One of my two Vista Media Center PCs suddenly stopped to play any video file, despite me not doing updates on these machines to prevent stuff like this from happening. To this date I have no idea how to fix this.
- My Delphi 2007 installation just now decided to stop displaying the online help. Trying to fix that by reinstalling it ended with an Error message containing title and content of "Error", but not after first completely uninstalling Delphi with no way of getting it back (you know... "Error" again). This was fixed by removing D2009 and then reinstalling 2007 and 2009 - a process that took 2 hours of installation time and another three to figure out what's going on.
- When I was frustrated enough and wanted to vent (i.e. write this post), my WordPress just now decided to do something really strange to the layout of the "Add New Post" page which made it impossible to post anything. Disabling Google Gears and restarting the browser helped.
Our everyday technology is becoming more and more complex, thus causing more and more strange problems, requiring more and more knowledge and time to work around them. If we continue on that path, sooner or later it will be impossible to keep up with fixing problems popping up.
That will be the day when I'll hopefully live on some island way off the net and all this stuff.
Automatic language detection
If you write a website, do not use Geolocation to determine the language to display to your user.
If you write a desktop application, do not use the region setting to determine the language to display to your user.
This is incredibly annoying for some of us, especially for me which is why I'm ranting here.
The moment Google released their (awful) German translation for their RSS reader, I was served the German version just because I have a Swiss IP address.
Here in Switzerland, we actually speak one of three (or four, depending on who you ask) languages, so defaulting to German is probably not of much help for the people in the french speaking part.
Additionally, there are many users fluent in (at least reading) English. We always prefer the original language if at all possible because generally, translations never quite work. Even if you have the best translators at work, translated texts never feel fluid. Especially not when you are used to the original version.
So, Google, what were you thinking to switch me over to the German version of the reader? I have been using the English version for more than a year, so clearly, I understood enough of that language to be able to use it. More than 90% of the RSS feeds I'm subscribed to are, in fact, in English. Can you imagine how pissed I was to see the interface changed?
This is even worse on the iPhone/iPod frontend, because, there, you don't even provide an option to change the language aside of manually hacking the URL.
Or take desktop applications. I live in the German speaking parts of Switzerland. True. So naturally I have set my locale settings to Swiss German. You know: I want to have the correct number formatting, I want my weeks to start on Mondays. I want the correct currency. I want my 24 hours clock I'm used to.
Actually, I also want the German week and month names, because I will be using these in most of my letters and documents, which are, in fact, German too.
But my OS installation is English. I am used to English. I prefer English. Why do so many programs insist to use the locale setting to determine the display language? Do you developers think it's funny to have a mish-mash of languages on the screen? Don't you think that me using an English OS version may be an indication that I do not want to read your crappy German translation alongside the English user interface of my OS?
Don't you think that it feels really stupid to have a button in a German dialog box open another, English, dialog (the first one is from Chrome, the one that opens once you click "Zertifikate verwalten" (Manage certificates) is from Windows itself)?
In Chrome, I can at least fix the language - once I found the knob to turn. At first, it was easier for me to just delete the German localization file from the chrome installation because, due to being completely unused to German UIs, I was unable to find the right setting.
This is really annoying and I see this particular problem being neglected on an incredibly large scale. I know that I am a minority, but the problem is so terribly easy to fix:
- All current browsers send an Accept-Language header. In contrast to the earlier times, nowadays, it is actually correctly preset in all the common browsers. Use that. Don't use my IP-address.
- Instead of reading the locale setting in my OS, ask the OS for its UI language and use that to determine which localization to load (actually, this is the recommended way of doing things according to Microsoft's guidelines at least since Windows XP which was 2001).
Using these two simple tricks, you help a minority without hindering the majority in any way and without additional development overhead!
Actually, you'll be getting away a lot cheaper than before. GeoIP is expensive if you want it to be accurate (and you do want that. Don't you?), whereas there are ready-to-use libraries to determine the correct language even from the most complex Accept-Language-Header.
Asking the OS for the UI language isn't harder than asking it for the locale, so no overhead there either.
Please, developers, please have mercy! Stop the annoyance! Stop it now!
Internet at home
I'm a usually very happy customer of Cablecom. They provide internet-over-tv-cable and as here in Switzerland, basically everyone has tv cable and because they provide nice pure ip addresses (no PPPoE stuff) and because when you are not trapped in the administrative trap, then it just works. Cablecom internet is never down, very speedy and usually I'm envied for my pings in online matches of whatever game.
All these are very good reasons to become a customer of Cablecom and depite of what you are going to read here shortly, I would probably still recommend them to other users - at least those with some technical background because, quite frankly, of all the ways to get broadband here in Switzerland, this one is the one that works the easiest and the most consistent.
But once you fall into the administrative trap, all hell breaks lose.
Here's what happened to me (also, read my other post about Cablecom's service):
Somewhere around the end of May I got a letter telling me that I would get sent a new cable modem. Once I've got that, I should give them a call so they can deactivate my old one. Also, if I don't call, they'd automatically disable the old modem after a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, I never got that modem. I don't know who's to blame and I don't care. Also, I could not have anticipated the story as it's now unfolding because the letter clearly said that I'd get the modem at an unknown later date, so I wasn't worried at the time.
At the beginning of June, I've noticed the network going down. Not used to that, especially not as it was down for a whole day, I called the hotline and told them that I suspected them of shutting of my service despite me not reciving the modem.
They've confirmed that and promised me to resend the modem. Re-enabling the old one was not possible they've told me futher on.
One week later - not having recived the modem - I've called again and they told me that the order was delayed due to some CRM software change at their end, but they've promised me to send it that week.
Another week passes. No modem. I call again and they tell me that the reporcessing of orders was delayed, but that I will get the modem that week for sure. Knowing that this probably won't be the case, I've told them that I will be on vacation and that they should send it to my office address.
Another week passes and I go to vacation.
Another week passes and I call the office to ask if the modem (that was supposed to arrive two weeks ago the latest) has arrived. Of course it didn't. What made me actually make the call was the fact that I've received a press release from Cablecom announcing more customers than ever - the irony of that bringing my memory back to the non-existing internet at my home.
So I called support again. They did notice that my order was late, but they had no idea why it was taking so long, there was no way of speeding it up and they had no idea when I would get the modem (keep in mind that I'm paying CHF 79/mt for not working internet access).
At this point I've had enough and I've called someone higher up I know working at Cablecom.
In the end, I was able to get internet access using that route, but it's not entirely official and I still have not the slightest idea of when/if the problem with my actual account will ever be fixed.
Pathetic.
Still: If everything goes well, then you have nothing to fear. From a technical standpoint, Cablecom owns all other currently widely available methods for broadband internet access, so this is what I will be sticking with. Just be prepared for longer service intermissions once you fall into the administrative trap.
Hosted Code Repository?
Recently (yesterday), the Ruby on Rails project announced their switch to git for their revision controlling needs. Also, they announced that they will use the hosted service github as the place to host the main repository on (even though git is decentralized, there is some sense in having a "main tree" which contains what's going to be the official releases).
I didn't know github, so I had a look at their project.
What I don't understand is that they seem to also target commercial entities with their offering. Think of it: Supposing that you are a commercial entity doing commercial software development. Would you send over all your sourcecode *and* all the development history to another company?
Sure. They call themselves "Secure". But what does that mean? Sure: They have SSL and SSH support, but frankly, I'm less concerned with patches travelling over the network unencrypted than I'm concerned with trusting anybody to host my code.
Even if they don't screw up storage security (think: "accessing the code of your competition"), even if they are completely 100% trustworthy (think: "displeased employee selling out to your competition before leaving his employer"), there is still the issue of government/legal access.
When using an external hosting provider, you are storing your code (and history) in a foreign country with its own legislation. Are you prepared for that?
And finally, do you want the government of the country you've just sent your code (and history) to, to really have access to all that data? Who guarantees that the hosting provider of your choice won't cooperate as soon as the government comes knoking (it happened before, even without legal base at all)?
All that is never worth the risk for a larger company (or for smaller ones - like ours).
So what exactly are these hosting companies (github is one. Code Spaces is another) targeted at?
- Free Software developers? Their code is open to begin with, so they have to face the problems I described anyways. But they are much harder to sue. Also, I'm not sure how compelling it is for a free software project to use a non-free tool (rails being the exception, but we'll talk about that later on)
- Large companies? No way (see above)
- Smaller companies? Probably not. Smaller companies are less of a target due to lower visibility, but sueing them for anything is more likely to get you something in return quickly as they usually don't dare prolonged legal fights.
A rant on brace placement
Many people consider it to be good coding style to have braces (in language that use them for block boundaries) on their own line. Like so:
function doSomething($param1, $param2) { echo "param1: $param1 / param2: $param2"; } |
Their argument usually is that it clearly shows the block boundaries, thus increasing the readability. I, as a proponent of placing bracers at the end of the statement opening the block, strongly disagree. I would format above code like so:
function doSomething($param1, $param2){ echo "param1: $param1 / param2: $param2"; } |
Here is why I prefer this:
- In many languages code blocks don't have their own identity - functions have, but not blocks (they don't provide scope). Placing the opening brace on its own line, you emphasize the block but you actually make it harder to see what caused the block in the first place.
- Using correct indentation, the presence of the block should be obvious anyways. There is no need to emphasize it more (at the cost of readability of the block opening statement).
- I doubt that using one line per token really makes the code more readable. Heck... why don't we write that sample code like so?
function doSomething ( $param1, $param2 ) { echo "param1: $param1 / param2: $param2"; } |
SPAM insanity
I don't see much point in complaining about SPAM, but it's slowly but surely reaching complete insanity...
What you see here is the recent history view of my DSPAM - our second line of defense against SPAM.
Red means SPAM. (the latest of the messages was a quite clever phishing attempt which I had to manually reclassify)
To give even more perspective to this: The last genuine Email I received was this morning at 7:54 (it's now 10 hours later) and even that was just an automatically generated mail from Skype.
To put it into even more perspective: My DSPAM reports that since december 22th, I got 897 SPAM messages and - brace yourself - 170 non-spam messages of which 100 were subversion commit emails and 60 other emails sent from automated cron-jobs.
What I'm asking myself now is: Do these spammers still get anything out of their work? The signal-to-noise ratio has gone down the drain in a manner which can only mean that no person on earth would actually still read through all this spam and even be stupid enough to actually fall for it.
How bad does it have to get before it gets better?
Oh and don't think that DSPAM is all I'm doing... No... these 897 mails were the messages that passed through both the ix DNSBL and SpamAssassin.
Oh and: Kudos to the DSPAM team. A recognition rate of 99.957% is really, really good
Windows Installer – Worked around
I've talked about Windows Installer (the tool that parses these .MSI files) before and I've never really convinced that this technology really does its job. Just have a look at these previous articles: Why o why is my hard-drive so small?, A look at Windows Installer and The myth of XCOPY deployment
Yesterday I had a look at the Delphi 2007 installation process and it dawned me that I'm going to have to write yet another blog entry.
It's my gut-feeling that 80% of all bigger software packages in Windows can't live with MSIs default feature set and they have to work around inherent flaws in the design of that tool. Here's what I found installers doing (in increasing order of stupidity):
- Use a .EXE-stub to install the MSI engine. These days this really doesn't make sense any more as 99% of all windows installation already have MSI installed and the ones that don't, you don't want to support anyways (Windows Update requires MSI).
- Use a .EXE-stub that checks for availability and thereafter installs a bunch of prerequisites - sometimes even other MSI packages. This isn't caused by MSI-files unable to detect the presence of prerequisites - it's because MSI-files are unable to install other MSI files and the workaround (using merge packages) doesn't work because most of the third party libraries to install don't come as merge packages.
- Create a MSI-file which contains a traditional .EXE-Setup, unpack that to a temporary location and run it. This is what I call the "I want a Windows-Logo, but have no clue how to author MSI files"-type of installation (and I completely understand the motivation behind that) which just defeats all the purposes MSI files ever had. Still: Due to inherent limitations in the MSI engine, this is often times the only way to go.
- Create MSI-files that extract a vendor specific DLL, a setup script and all files to deploy (or even just an archive) and then use that vendor specific DLL to run the install script. This is what InstallShield does at least some of the time. This is another version of the "I have no clue how to author a MSI file"-installation with the additional "benefit" of being totally vendor-locked.
- Create a custom installer that installs all files and registry keys and then launch the windows installer with a temporary .MSI-file to register your installation work in the MSI-installer. This is what Delphi 2007 does. I feel this is another workaround for Microsoft's policy that only MSI-driven software can get a windows-logo, but this time it's vendor-locked and totally unnecessary and I'm not even sure if such a behavior is consistent with any kind of specification.
Only a small minority of installations really use pure MSI and these installations usually are installations of small software packages and as my previous articles show: The technology is far from fool-proof. While I see that Windows should provide a generalized means for driving software installations, MSI can't be the solution as evidenced by the majority of packages using workarounds to get by the inherent flaws of the technology.
*sigh*