Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at August 1st, 2005

A couple days of the week, I take care of my kids while simultaneously putting in a few hours of work. This is one of those days.

Owing to the fact that one of my clients has just moved from one office to another, I’m dealing with an issue related to their email. They can’t send. I’ve just put in calls to the IT department of the organization that owns the building they’re now in and to their email provider.

I’ve gotten voice mail at both places.

Having done everything I can, I’ve just decided that work for the day is done. Time to get groceries. I start making a list and get a call from my wife, allowing me to ask her if there’s anything else she thinks we need.

As we discuss the availability of fat free cheese, a call comes in on my cellphone. Meanwhile, one of my daughters (age 3) walks through the kitchen and into the bathroom.

I pick up my cellphone. It’s the IT guy from the building ACCESS is now in. We talk. I am now holding my normal phone (wife) in my left hand while talking to the IT guy on my cellphone (right hand).

My daughter walks out of the bathroom. She is not wearing pants.

Or underwear.

The IT guy is saying, “… the IP addresses are in a dynamic pool starting from…”

“I PEED!”

“… and continuing up to…”

“I PEED!”

My wife is giggling. My daughter runs out of the kitchen and downstairs to the basement. I manage to get the necessary information, close the conversation, and head downstairs to catch my kid before she sits on the couch.

It took thousands of years for humanity to develop the technology necessary for me to have this experience. Whether it was worth it, I leave up to you.

Posted by Jim at July 18th, 2005

Thin clients. Whatever operating system you prefer, you’ll find that you have a few available, allowing you to view the desktop of a computer far from you. I haven’t had much reason to mess around with VNC (the most common unix based thin client), but I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop. Part of this is because I administrate a server whose sole reason for existance is to allow people access to remote desktops (alias terminal services).

The last time I installed FreeBSD, I was amused to find a command line program called rdesktop. Rdesktop allows people to connect with windows just as well as a windows client, something that amused me as I am doubtful that Microsoft released the details of their RDP protocol. My only complaint was that they were apparently running RDP 4 instead of 5, opening the possibility that rdesktop would stop working as soon as Microsoft dropped support for 4.

This time I installed FreeBSD, I was amused to discover that GNOME 2.10 came with a gui for rdesktop and that RDP-5 is now supported. Not everything has been implemented, but that’s better than nothing.

As a result, I’m now able to administrate the Windows servers I’m responsible for via FreeBSD as well as XP and Mac OS X (which has an official Microsoft supported client). It also means that I can get at programs on my XP boxes from other OSes, something that entertains me.

It would be interesting if someone were to create an open RDP server. I imagine that there might be legal trouble as a result, but rdesktop doesn’t seem to have been shut down. On the other hand, the Remote Desktop client comes as part of XP and doesn’t really constitute any kind of money stream for Microsoft.

Terminal Server licenses, on the other hand, probably constitute a small but significant money stream (at $76 per person or device using the server). I can imagine they might get more upset about that.

Posted by Jim at June 10th, 2005

So maybe I’m behind the times, but I’ve been rather annoyed just now to discover that HTMLArea, a nice little wysiwyg texteditor that you can put into forms no longer exists.

At any rate, it doesn’t exist as an open source project any longer. I’m guessing that the company that created HTMLarea decided that they didn’t want to bother with support or possibly just wanted to control the project entirely themselves.

Whatever the case, all that remains is a website that lists wysiwyg text editors for forms. Through that, I found another decent looking text editor for forms. I’m in the process of putting it into a project for a client at the moment. We’ll see how that goes, but for the moment, it looks relatively easy to work with.

I’ll tell you how well it goes.

Posted by Jim at June 4th, 2005

Having come across the phrase “air blogging” on Nate’s blog, I’ve got to admit that that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been thinking about lots of things that I could blog, but haven’t actually been writing much. From a 3 to 4 per week schedule, things have slipped to twice a week. That’s better than a few weeks earlier this year in which I managed to write absolutely nothing, but not as good as I’d like.

In particular, I’d like to be writing more reviews of things that I’ve found cool or interesting (webcomics, kid’s programs/movies, software, ethnic foods/restaurants). I’d also love to be writing more about religion. I spent a few years of my life getting a B.A. in religion as well as a couple years in seminary and often feel an urge to write about all that, but haven’t so far.

In lieu of writing something interesting, I’ll just give a quick rundown of some things I wanted to write about:

Master’s Project:
I haven’t done a thing on it in the month. I’m not sure why. I imagine I needed a rest from it bearing in mind that it was the source of much stress for me in April. Basically, if I hadn’t gotten an extension on that project, I would have had to finish it at a very unsatisfactory point in it’s development or simply take my master’s project hours over again. That would have been a massive waste since those hours are all I need to finish the program.

Gaming:
I really want to do more role playing games, possibly even run a campaign. At this moment I’m tryng to figure out some basic rules for conflict resolution and character creation. Then I’ll be ready to playtest things. Ed… I may need to bounce some ideas off you with regards to mechanics.

Novel:
Again, I haven’t done much with this since beginning my master’s in Information Systems. Masters degrees tend to kill what spare time you have.

Computers:
Basically I’ve got a pile of stuff to write about here. I’ve recently installed FreeBSD 5.4 on my FreeBSD box. It’s less convenient to install that the 4.x series. In the 4.x series, you could pick your window manager and install Xfree86 as part of the install process. In 5.4, you install X.org and the window manager as packages (or ports) after you’ve installed the basic system. There’s some sort of patch necessary to make gdm work that I still have to research and install. Once I get that going, I’ll be able to get back to things like my soundcard, cd-rw, flash, java, cvs, usb 2.0 (it works in 5.4…), and all the other programs I like have running on Freebsd.

Knowing that I’m going to spend hours configuring my machine is the sort of thing that makes me run screaming toward the Mac OS X or Windows XP. Which reminds me…

My iBook no longer recognizes my router to be a wireless access point. I’m pretty sure that the router’s the problem as the laptop works just fine at Kava House, detecting something like 4 available networks the last time I was in.

Politics:
Remembering the previous President Bush’s visit to Hope College while I was attending, I was interested to watch the whole mess at Calvin College a couple weeks ago. One thing irked me though…

Dr. Jelks appeared on Hannity and Colmes. In the course of the conversation, Hannity said the following to Dr. Jelks:

“HANNITY: I find this fairly amazing coming from — you know, you’re upset about the president’s position on the issue of a war and the last resort. And you believe the administration launched an unjust war, et cetera.

You say that his environmental policies have harmed creation as part of this letter.

Do you know what bothers me about your position? This is for both of you professors. If both of you had your way, those mass graves would still be being filled. I have yet to see a letter to Saddam Hussein (search) from either one of you.

If you guys had your way, the torture chambers and the rape rooms would exist. You two obviously haven’t looked at the pictures of dead babies laying in the street because Saddam launched weapons against them.

Where’s your letter against Saddam? Because it would still continue if you had your way.”

This sort of thing annoys me immensely. There are good arguments for going into Iraq with force just as there are good arguments for using other means to remove Saddam Hussein from power. This sort of attitude toward other people’s views makes talking through an issue and coming to some sort of workable agreement impossible.

That I’ll write more on that sort of thing is more or less inevitable. It’s admittedly pointless since extreme views probably make better television than careful, nuanced views, but I just can’t think that that sort of speech helps anyone either on the right or the left.

Posted by Jim at May 16th, 2005

I’m currently trying to make my Mac useful as a second work computer. For various reasons, Creative Suite isn’t an option–mostly because I’ve already got it on my Windows computer and I don’t want to buy it again for the Mac.

Anyone have suggestions for free/cheap/open source OS X apps for graphic design? Particularly for web design? What about good FTP programs?

I know that scribus and the gimp work on OS X once you’ve got X running. I haven’t gotten around to that yet. I use Eclipse for programming and am happy with it.

Anything else I might try?

Posted by Jim at May 2nd, 2005

In Neal Stephenson’s book “Snow Crash,” a person who’s decked out in electronic gear to the point that they are online almost all the time is referred to as a gargoyle. In the book, that particular name comes from the fact that the Metaverse/internet is viewed by means of goggles and someone who wears them constantly looks rather peculiar.

Like many things in science fiction, the idea seems real because it feels like we are moving in that direction all the time.

At any given moment I may be carrying a:
flash drive
laptop
pda
mp3 player

and now (as of today):
a cellphone.

It is way too much electronic crap, all of it with slightly different purposes that don’t really overlap. There are redundancies, of course between the bunch of them, but mostly they each serve their own unique purpose in my life.

The newest acquisition (the cellphone) is for work purposes. Due to the fact that I now spend some days moving from office to office, it’s become hard enough to get a hold of me that a cellphone is actually a necessity. Ditto the laptop as I’m sick of leaving files at home (on one of the three available desktops) and realizing that I need them or having no easy way to demonstrate a web page to a client.

Thus I end up carrying piles of electronic junk with me at all times and I have multiple methods of connecting to the internet. We’ll see how I like it. In the meantime, I think I might have to get a bigger backpack. That or breakdown and get a laptop case with lots of pockets.

Posted by Jim at April 21st, 2005

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had to fix a problem someone was having with Microsoft Outlook.

Well, I finally figured out the solution. This is good because Microsoft never did call back.

Here’s the problem: You’re supposed to be able to click on the “To:” button when you’re writing a new email in Outlook and then see a list of all the people in your address book. Unfortunately, this was not happening. The list clearly existed because a scroll bar was there, but you couldn’t actually see anything. Clicking where a name normally would be didn’t make anything visible.

Interestingly, the same problem occurred when you opened the address book in Outlook, but if you resized the address book all the names appeared. Of course, the dialogue that appears when you press “To:” does not resize–no chance of an easy workaround there. Worse, the lack of an address book makes Outlook useless.

When I called Microsoft, technical support led me through the process of making Outlook recognize the path to the email file and then to the address book within that file. I was leary of this approach as it seemed obvious to me that it was some sort of problem with the part of the program that handled the graphic user interface.

We’ll never know for sure because of the nature of the solution:
Upgrade to the most recent Office XP service pack.

People might reasonably ask why I didn’t think of that immediately. I’ve been kicking myself on that one for much of the afternoon. It’s generally one of the first things I try.

It’s a basic rule of system administration. If something doesn’t work, upgrade to the most recent version and try again. Remember it. It will save you some time.

That assumes, of course, that you don’t manage to completely screw up your system in the process.

Posted by Jim at April 19th, 2005

I’ve been allowed another semester to finish my master’s project. This is a good thing. This way it will be the project I want it to be rather than the projext I’d have handed in next week.

You can bet you’ll be hearing more about it in the near future.

Posted by Jim at April 13th, 2005

Every so often in the course of doing Windows system administration you end up calling Microsoft. My experience with MS tech support ranges from good to not so good.

The good experience occurred in 1997 when my parents bought me a copy of Word 97 for Christmas. It wouldn’t install. I called technical support (for free) and they told me how to solve the problem.

Fast forward to 2004: Last year I had to call them with a server licensing issue. They moved me back and forth between 2 departments at least twice before one of them decided they actually had the power to solve the problem.

Today: I called them today and stayed on the phone with them for 4 hours. During this time they tried little more than I’d already tried myself, put me on hold to discuss the problem with other people at the call center, and finally told me that they didn’t know how to solve the problem. They’ll call me back tomorrow.

Did I mention that Microsoft moved their call center to India? So there’s also the added accent barrier. Not to mention the fact that I don’t always enunciate as well as I might, making things a little more difficult for them.

Things that made the experience particularly special:
1. The way the call got cut halfway through the process.
2. Starting from scratch with a new person.
3. The time spent on hold was literally long enough for me to fall asleep. Imagine waking in your boss’ chair, phone embedded in your ear, to an Indian accented voice saying, “Hello? Jim? Hello? Jim?”
4. I spent four hours of my life talking about Microsoft Outlook. I will never get that time back.
5. Microsoft tech support now costs $35 per incident–except for development related incidents. Then it’s $245.

Posted by Jim at April 1st, 2005

As someone with an interest in usability/HCI, I often read OK/Cancel, a webcomic devoted to making jokes about computer usability. That means the webcomic has one of the smallest potential audiences imaginable, but it is funny… at least if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

It being April Fools day, they’ve come up with one of the least usable websites you could hope to find. I love it. My only disappointment was best put by one of their commenters “What? No flash intro?”

A particularly wonderful touch is that certain (but not all) information is placed based on size of your screen. Thus, if your screen is the right size, the copyright information will actually cover part of the comic.

Visit before they take it down.