Waaa waaa someone call the wambulance. What a lot of whining there is in the previous posts. Now for something completely different.
I subscribed to DSL with Orcon and received my Siemens DSL modem. Yay for convergence -- it's a DSL modem, router and wireless hub all in one. You plug it in, and configure it using a wired connection. The configuration software is a breeze. All done in under five minutes.
Performance seems good, although we might have a few dead spots around the house when using a wireless connection.
There's no phone jack in our office downstairs so for now the DSL modem is sitting in a corner in the playroom. The attentive reader might wonder if I am deliberately careless (spilling coffee on laptops, putting cell phones in my back pocket while roller blading, putting DSL modems in children's play areas) but it's only for a little while... until we get an electrician to install a jack in our office. What could possibly go wrong?
Monday, 23 April 2007
Inventing things
My son Tyler likes to come up with all sorts of inventions. Sometimes he says that when he is a grown up he'll invent something to do XYZ. At breakfast I told him that he doesn't have to wait until he's grown up -- he can invent things now. Of course, he might not be able to make certain things until he is older, but he can still have ideas.
He was gazing into his bowl of cereal and came up with an idea: a bed with mosquito net and snack facilities. He said "Sometimes I get crazy ideas from my cereal and I don't know how to make them." I suppose gazing into a bowl of water was good enough for Nostradamus, so maybe a bowl of cereal is not such a bad place to get inspiration.
He was gazing into his bowl of cereal and came up with an idea: a bed with mosquito net and snack facilities. He said "Sometimes I get crazy ideas from my cereal and I don't know how to make them." I suppose gazing into a bowl of water was good enough for Nostradamus, so maybe a bowl of cereal is not such a bad place to get inspiration.
Alas poor cell phone
Sigh, another mishap with consumer electronics. I carefully put my cell phone in my back pocket while roller blading since I usually fall forwards. Just as I got back to the car, I fell right on my butt and wrenched the flip off screen off the phone. I also hurt my butt.
Quick trip to the Vodaphone store and now I have anew phone. Something very basic. Their cheapo flip open phones looked flimsy or were too expensive. I got a simple phone with exposed keyboard. It's simple to lock the keyboard but my concern was that previous phones I have had like that can dial emergency services by accident. In the US you have to be able to dial 911 from a phone at any time so when you "lock" the keyboard it means you can only dial a 9 or a 1. Ads on the sides of buses tell you to lock your phone to avoid false calls to 911, but locking it actually increases the odds of misdialing. The sales rep assured me that wasn't the case in NZ, but now that I play with the phone, I see that it is. If the keyboard is locked and you dial 111 it pops up asking if you want to place the call. Probably a bit less likely to fail.
Poor old Motorola, you served me well. From petrochemicals you came. To petrochemicals you shall return (by way of the instore recycling service).
Quick trip to the Vodaphone store and now I have anew phone. Something very basic. Their cheapo flip open phones looked flimsy or were too expensive. I got a simple phone with exposed keyboard. It's simple to lock the keyboard but my concern was that previous phones I have had like that can dial emergency services by accident. In the US you have to be able to dial 911 from a phone at any time so when you "lock" the keyboard it means you can only dial a 9 or a 1. Ads on the sides of buses tell you to lock your phone to avoid false calls to 911, but locking it actually increases the odds of misdialing. The sales rep assured me that wasn't the case in NZ, but now that I play with the phone, I see that it is. If the keyboard is locked and you dial 111 it pops up asking if you want to place the call. Probably a bit less likely to fail.
Poor old Motorola, you served me well. From petrochemicals you came. To petrochemicals you shall return (by way of the instore recycling service).
Friday, 20 April 2007
Coffee + keyboard = :(
We've all spilled something on our keyboards, I am sure but yesterday was a real doozy. I knocked almost an entire cup of coffee on the keyboard of my laptop. I immediately turned it upside down to drain things out and turned it off for a bit. I popped off some keycaps and mopped things up. It didn't seem well. I had to go to an interview so I left it to dry.
When I returned it seemed OK except that the control key was stuck. That turned out to be Sticky Keys (a Windows accessibility feature). Thank you Mr Google for that pointer. A few keys are dead though, including the 3/# key which makes it difficult to say C# in your resume (C InsertSymbol move-mouse double-click OK).
Something tells me my laptop will be seeing a doctor soon. Anyway, it motivated me to set up my desktop computer again. Amazingly I still remembered my password (two passwords ago). Took about one minute to get it connected to our DSL wireless modem. Woo hoo. Dual mon again. Now I can be 30% more effective.
When I returned it seemed OK except that the control key was stuck. That turned out to be Sticky Keys (a Windows accessibility feature). Thank you Mr Google for that pointer. A few keys are dead though, including the 3/# key which makes it difficult to say C# in your resume (C InsertSymbol move-mouse double-click OK).
Something tells me my laptop will be seeing a doctor soon. Anyway, it motivated me to set up my desktop computer again. Amazingly I still remembered my password (two passwords ago). Took about one minute to get it connected to our DSL wireless modem. Woo hoo. Dual mon again. Now I can be 30% more effective.
Washing machine blues
Sigh. Probably if you calculated the mean time between failures we're not doing any worse than usual. The problem is that we have had to buy a whole lot of things upon arrival in New Zealand.
Our washing machine lasted a few days then started complaining about OE. The manual says that means it couldn't drain ("(O)utlet (E)rror"?) and that you had to open a door, drain a hose, poke around inside. I wouldn't have been surprised to find sticks, stones, acorns, pretty shells etc but all seemed clear. A technician came out expecting to find something but didn't. Of course, when he was here it started working again. Two loads later it died. One new drain pump later and all is good.
I must say that for the most part I have been impressed with the quality of service when things go wrong.
Our washing machine lasted a few days then started complaining about OE. The manual says that means it couldn't drain ("(O)utlet (E)rror"?) and that you had to open a door, drain a hose, poke around inside. I wouldn't have been surprised to find sticks, stones, acorns, pretty shells etc but all seemed clear. A technician came out expecting to find something but didn't. Of course, when he was here it started working again. Two loads later it died. One new drain pump later and all is good.
I must say that for the most part I have been impressed with the quality of service when things go wrong.
Car Stereo
As soon as we arrived in New Zealand, we headed to a Toyota dealership to buy a Toyota Prius hybrid. Petrol in NZ is rather expensive. It was a second-hand import (very common in NZ since Japan also drives on the left) so most of the display and many of the controls are in Japanese. The onboard computer has useful functions like where to find the nearest golf course (in Japan) and the GPS is hilariously confused about where we are (off the map as far as it is concerned).
Anyway, it had a cassette deck (!) but no CD player. I told them I wanted a CD player installed under the screen in the empty bay. When I took delivery they had installed a multi-loader in the boot (== trunk). There was a little display between the steering wheel and the driver's door, but most functions had to be accessed using a remote control. Atfer a few days we were going crazy. Obviously the driver can't operate a remote control while driving, and the passengers can't either. Plus every time we put the stroller into the boot or take it out we risk clobbering the multiloader. I called the dealership and expressed my profound dissatisfaction. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the player stopped working.
Once we had finished house hunting, we scheduled it for servicing. I took the car to the dealership to be fixed. What followed was like something out of Fawlty Towers -- confusion all round about who was fixing what, exactly where my car was (at an independent stereo installation place), confusion about what they were doing (they thought they were fixing the multiloader). After some firm insistence we have...ta da a nice single disc CD player that lets a passenger pop in a CD.
The trade off was that we lost the use of the screen. The only function I ever used was the fuel economy report, and I would only look at that occasionally out of geeky interest. The screen isn't completely dead though -- it still flashes up a safety warning -- or at least the first two characters mean "safety" in Chinese. I could probably puzzle out some of the rest given a dictionary and sufficient time.
We had to get a few other things fixed. In the course of (re)learning to parallel park on the other side of the street we managed to scrape off some of those lead wheel balancing things that they attach to the rim of the wheel. And the kids had stress tested the cup holder.
After driving only a Prius for a few months, it was strange to drive a conventional Toyota Corolla when we visited family in Christchurch last week. When you stop at lights, the petrol engine doesn't turn off. How strange is that?
Anyway, it had a cassette deck (!) but no CD player. I told them I wanted a CD player installed under the screen in the empty bay. When I took delivery they had installed a multi-loader in the boot (== trunk). There was a little display between the steering wheel and the driver's door, but most functions had to be accessed using a remote control. Atfer a few days we were going crazy. Obviously the driver can't operate a remote control while driving, and the passengers can't either. Plus every time we put the stroller into the boot or take it out we risk clobbering the multiloader. I called the dealership and expressed my profound dissatisfaction. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the player stopped working.
Once we had finished house hunting, we scheduled it for servicing. I took the car to the dealership to be fixed. What followed was like something out of Fawlty Towers -- confusion all round about who was fixing what, exactly where my car was (at an independent stereo installation place), confusion about what they were doing (they thought they were fixing the multiloader). After some firm insistence we have...ta da a nice single disc CD player that lets a passenger pop in a CD.
The trade off was that we lost the use of the screen. The only function I ever used was the fuel economy report, and I would only look at that occasionally out of geeky interest. The screen isn't completely dead though -- it still flashes up a safety warning -- or at least the first two characters mean "safety" in Chinese. I could probably puzzle out some of the rest given a dictionary and sufficient time.
We had to get a few other things fixed. In the course of (re)learning to parallel park on the other side of the street we managed to scrape off some of those lead wheel balancing things that they attach to the rim of the wheel. And the kids had stress tested the cup holder.
After driving only a Prius for a few months, it was strange to drive a conventional Toyota Corolla when we visited family in Christchurch last week. When you stop at lights, the petrol engine doesn't turn off. How strange is that?
Monday, 26 March 2007
More broadband woes
This is getting weird. I am wondering if I have accumulated some bad network karma somehow. Maybe I should change the byline for this blog from "random musings with a technical bent" to "incessant whining about broadband". Just composing this entry, the Vodem claims to be connected but is experiencing DNS resolution failures.
Anyway: Mo's laptop was refusing to connect to the wired connection in our apartment. No sign of life at all on the PCMCIA card (the machine is so old it doesn't have integrated Ethernet). She tried the obvious solutions then had me look at it.
No problem with the wall -- our other laptop connected just fine although I did have to explicitly ipconfig /renew. I suspected the PCMCIA adapter. Quick look in the XP device manager (long time since I poked around in there) showed that Windows had disabled the device. It claims this is usually because of resource conflicts. Very strange. The only change in the config of this machine in recent memory is unplugging the PCMCIA smart card reader that Mo no longer uses.
When things work, it's sweet. But sometimes I wonder how the hoi polloi are supposed to manage.
Anyway: Mo's laptop was refusing to connect to the wired connection in our apartment. No sign of life at all on the PCMCIA card (the machine is so old it doesn't have integrated Ethernet). She tried the obvious solutions then had me look at it.
No problem with the wall -- our other laptop connected just fine although I did have to explicitly ipconfig /renew. I suspected the PCMCIA adapter. Quick look in the XP device manager (long time since I poked around in there) showed that Windows had disabled the device. It claims this is usually because of resource conflicts. Very strange. The only change in the config of this machine in recent memory is unplugging the PCMCIA smart card reader that Mo no longer uses.
When things work, it's sweet. But sometimes I wonder how the hoi polloi are supposed to manage.
Saturday, 24 March 2007
Define "gmail"
We gave our kids (5 and 2.5) toy plastic cell phones. They were thrilled. Tyler told Andrew he was going to send a gmail to his phone. He then patiently explained that a gmail is an email except it goes to a phone instead of a computer.
I was amused at his definition but even more amused because while at a different software company I actually worked on a product feature called Intellishrink (research and product) that routed email to cell phones, shoehorning them to fit into the smallest number of SMS packets.
I was amused at his definition but even more amused because while at a different software company I actually worked on a product feature called Intellishrink (research and product) that routed email to cell phones, shoehorning them to fit into the smallest number of SMS packets.
Friday, 23 March 2007
Free Wifi
Robert Kang of Augen mentioned to me that the Parnell merchants were sponsoring free wifi so off I went to Starbucks on Parnell Rd. (Veinte Americano was four shots of espresso!)
Usual drill: open browser, register for free account, hit submit... and nothing. Rats. Simple enough PHP form, but no evidence that a postback occurred. The form was on the 192.168.1 private subnet...maybe IE7 is blocking something?
Usual drill: open browser, register for free account, hit submit... and nothing. Rats. Simple enough PHP form, but no evidence that a postback occurred. The form was on the 192.168.1 private subnet...maybe IE7 is blocking something?
Fried SIM
All of a sudden the Vodem got confused. It would ask what Vodafone subsidiary to connect to. Specifying Vodafone NZ didn't help -- it would just say you had to be registered on their network. WinXP system restore the previous day's state didn't help, but some sleuthing (take the SIM card from my phone and put it in the Vodem)led me to believe the SIM was fried. With a different card it at least knew about Vodafone NZ. I wasn't game to try connecting since I don't have a data plan for my phone.
The EULA is generic and doesn't pertain to the release software but there is a EULA for NZ on the flashdrive of the Vodem. The tech support numbers in the EULA are no longer in service so I went to my friendly neighbourhood Vodafone franchise and $20 later had a new SIM card and a connection again.
Why did I have to pay for the SIM card, you may well be asking yourself? The store was not owned by the same franchisee as where I bought the Vodem. I figured $20 (actually $30 incl a $10 credit on the account) was better than a drive to the North Shore in rush hour traffic.
Interestingly the EULA claims they used a GPLed SAX parser.
Various menus in the Vodafone "Mobile Connect Lite" have problems -- including unhandled exceptions that make the whole app terminate unexpectedly. Do you ever get that itch to debug someone else's stuff, or is it just me?
The EULA is generic and doesn't pertain to the release software but there is a EULA for NZ on the flashdrive of the Vodem. The tech support numbers in the EULA are no longer in service so I went to my friendly neighbourhood Vodafone franchise and $20 later had a new SIM card and a connection again.
Why did I have to pay for the SIM card, you may well be asking yourself? The store was not owned by the same franchisee as where I bought the Vodem. I figured $20 (actually $30 incl a $10 credit on the account) was better than a drive to the North Shore in rush hour traffic.
Interestingly the EULA claims they used a GPLed SAX parser.
Various menus in the Vodafone "Mobile Connect Lite" have problems -- including unhandled exceptions that make the whole app terminate unexpectedly. Do you ever get that itch to debug someone else's stuff, or is it just me?
Monday, 19 March 2007
White screen of death
Since moving back to NZ we have discovered texting. Along the way I have been exploring uncharted menus on my little Motorola cell phone. I told it to clean up all read texts. There was a brief pause then all was white (the white screen of death?) then after a few seconds the phone came back in it's default desktop. Can't repro -- the next time I tried, it prompted Y/N and then deleted the messages just fine.
When the boat comes with my worldly belongings I really must read the manual for this thing. I've been finding menu items that suggest it can receive faxes. Maybe I should start carrying a loupe.
When the boat comes with my worldly belongings I really must read the manual for this thing. I've been finding menu items that suggest it can receive faxes. Maybe I should start carrying a loupe.
Vodem as tamagotchi
Remember those tamagotchis -- electronic pets that needed constant love and attention? My wee vodem is a bit like that.
As I noted in another post, the driver software doesn't cope very well with hibernation or stand by modes on my laptop. The solution seems to be to disconnect the device and wait until it has unloaded (systray icon disappers -- sometimes requires mousing over for XP to realize it shouldn't be displaying the icon anymore) and THEN go to standby. I just thought I had done it right but no, when I resumed there was the dialogue asking if I wanted to fire up Visual Studio to debug it.
Fortunately this time it didn't require a restart. Before I figured this out I would often end up with some weird contention where the driver software was half-dead and then it had loaded another instance. You get two icons on the systray and can't connect.
As I noted in another post, the driver software doesn't cope very well with hibernation or stand by modes on my laptop. The solution seems to be to disconnect the device and wait until it has unloaded (systray icon disappers -- sometimes requires mousing over for XP to realize it shouldn't be displaying the icon anymore) and THEN go to standby. I just thought I had done it right but no, when I resumed there was the dialogue asking if I wanted to fire up Visual Studio to debug it.
Fortunately this time it didn't require a restart. Before I figured this out I would often end up with some weird contention where the driver software was half-dead and then it had loaded another instance. You get two icons on the systray and can't connect.
Thursday, 15 March 2007
TradeMe
I signed up for the New Zealand Software Association and attended their monthly dinner in a restaurant at a yacht club. Rowan Sampson, one of the founders of TradeMe.co.nz gave a talk on their business. They recently sold for a gazillion dollars to an Australian newspaper syndicate, so they are quite famous in NZ.
TradeMe is the eBay of NZ, with an ethos reminiscent of Craig's List e.g. a dating section, having the "community" vote on contentious issues like whether to auction the chainsaw used to chop down the tree at One Tree Hill (a significant Auckland landmark). The presentation style was refreshing -- mostly about considering the user experience, understanding the demographics of your user base etc. PowerPoint without bullets, and very few words. I was reminded of a presentation by Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor who is well known for work on Creative Commons) that was more like a Laurie Anderson multimedia performance -- single words flashing by on screen behind him.
TradeMe accounts for 2/3 of all web pages served up in NZ. I assume they are hosted within NZ. I wonder if there is sane pricing for broadband somewhere.
TradeMe is the eBay of NZ, with an ethos reminiscent of Craig's List e.g. a dating section, having the "community" vote on contentious issues like whether to auction the chainsaw used to chop down the tree at One Tree Hill (a significant Auckland landmark). The presentation style was refreshing -- mostly about considering the user experience, understanding the demographics of your user base etc. PowerPoint without bullets, and very few words. I was reminded of a presentation by Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor who is well known for work on Creative Commons) that was more like a Laurie Anderson multimedia performance -- single words flashing by on screen behind him.
TradeMe accounts for 2/3 of all web pages served up in NZ. I assume they are hosted within NZ. I wonder if there is sane pricing for broadband somewhere.
Monday, 12 March 2007
Broadband in temporary housing
We've gotten spoiled living in Seattle. There's free wifi at coffee shops, whole neighbourhoods (like the U District) that have free wifi, and failing that you can always piggy back off people's unsecured wireless networks.
The biggest shock coming to New Zealand is that you not only have to worry about bandwidth, but you have to think about how much data you are consuming each month. With data caps and overage fees, noone is offering free wifi.
Meanwhile we are staying in a temporary apartment on the edge of the CBD. You can pay for wired internet: $70 NZD per month for 10Gb cap, 1Mb speed. The actual performance is terrible. Their IT guy tells me they are not throttling people and are experiencing severe congestion. Plus their ISP blocks VPNs (or else I am timing out on password validation). I need to connect to two VPNs on a daily basis if I am going to get any work done so let's talk about the Vodem.
This is a cute gizmo from Vodafone that offers 3G broadband. Plug it into a USB port and wait a minute or so while it installs. It contains a flash storage device with the installation software. Pop in a SIM card and away you go.
To its credit, it does work, most of the time. Signal strength is good from everywhere that I have tried in Auckland. VPN connections work just fine.
The downside? Terrible latency, buggy driver software that can't cope with standby or hibernation modes on my laptop, a tendency to go dead after a few hours (name resolution failures), a UI that doesn't actually tell you that you are near your 2Gb cap (for accurate measurements, poke around in the dump of registry keys under File/Save System Information, then click "Extended Information" and scroll to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER], then divide the numbers by 100... you get the picture), and a EULA that doesn't even remotely pertain to the actual product.
Sigh. Soon we will be in a house and we'll be able to sign up for a proper broadband plan. Meantime I am limping along.
The biggest shock coming to New Zealand is that you not only have to worry about bandwidth, but you have to think about how much data you are consuming each month. With data caps and overage fees, noone is offering free wifi.
Meanwhile we are staying in a temporary apartment on the edge of the CBD. You can pay for wired internet: $70 NZD per month for 10Gb cap, 1Mb speed. The actual performance is terrible. Their IT guy tells me they are not throttling people and are experiencing severe congestion. Plus their ISP blocks VPNs (or else I am timing out on password validation). I need to connect to two VPNs on a daily basis if I am going to get any work done so let's talk about the Vodem.
This is a cute gizmo from Vodafone that offers 3G broadband. Plug it into a USB port and wait a minute or so while it installs. It contains a flash storage device with the installation software. Pop in a SIM card and away you go.
To its credit, it does work, most of the time. Signal strength is good from everywhere that I have tried in Auckland. VPN connections work just fine.
The downside? Terrible latency, buggy driver software that can't cope with standby or hibernation modes on my laptop, a tendency to go dead after a few hours (name resolution failures), a UI that doesn't actually tell you that you are near your 2Gb cap (for accurate measurements, poke around in the dump of registry keys under File/Save System Information, then click "Extended Information" and scroll to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER], then divide the numbers by 100... you get the picture), and a EULA that doesn't even remotely pertain to the actual product.
Sigh. Soon we will be in a house and we'll be able to sign up for a proper broadband plan. Meantime I am limping along.
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