The Blog of Harald

I’m sitting in the food court of the Toronto Stock Exchange building, using a “BWireless”:http://www.bwirelesszone.com/ 802.11b wireless Ethernet access point, checking my email and posting this entry. I even bought something online :-)

It’s performing quite well, once I moved out from under the overhang; apparently the AP is actually in their store (which is upstairs) so you get better signal in the open part of the food court.

That’s my geek moment for the day.

I was directed to a “wonderful curmudgeonly rant”:http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/curmudgeon/index_BigAndBlue.html in “The Orion”:http://www.oriononline.org/index2.html. It’s worth the time to read the whole thing.

bq. What we see all over our nation is a situational loneliness of the most extreme kind; and it is sometimes only recognizable in contrast to the ways that people behave in other countries. Any culture, after all, is an immersive environment, and I suspect that most Americans are unaware of how socially isolated they are among the strip malls and the gated apartment complexes. Or, to put it another way, of what an effort it takes to put themselves in the company of other people.

bq. This pervasive situational loneliness, of being stuck alone in your car, alone in your work cubicle, alone in your apartment, alone at the supermarket, alone at the video rental shop — because that’s how American daily life has come to be organized — is the injury to which the insult of living in degrading, ugly, frightening, and monotonous surroundings is added.

We chose our house specifically to be within walking/biking distance of our kids’ school, and we’re within walking distance of both the GO Train and the subway. So we’re not in complete suburban hell; we can get lots of places without our car. My “new commute”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/000315.html is going to be ugly, though.

Our neighbourhood is relatively old (for Canada :-), but it suffers many of the problems of modern suburban life. There are few amenities within walking distance (and particularly, no pub :). There used to be a grocery store, but it closed; Dominion decided that small stores were not cost effective. It’s now a Shopper’s Drug Mart, which does carry emergency rations, but it’s not the same. There is a small bakery close by, and (ugh) a KFC. Fairview Mall is walkable, but it is its own kind of wasteland. We have lots of parks and ravines, but they seem to be the terrain of the dog walkers. On the plus side, NYGH and _three_ medical buildings are all in walking distance :-)

I’d love to be able to walk and bike more (other than as recreation), but it’s not terribly practical. I’d love to cut my (non-car) commute down below an hour each way, but again, not practical; even if we lived downtown, we’d then have to commute uptown to take our kids to school.

People joke about how we can walk to IKEA. Who would _want_ to walk to IKEA? I’d rather drive there, and walk to the grocery store.

(Can you tell I’m not looking forward to driving to work next year?)

(via “Philip Greenspun”:http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/curmudgeon/index_BigAndBlue.html).

From Teal Sunglasses: It pays to pay well.. As usual Chuq nails several interesting ideas. But I particularly liked this quote, only slightly out of context:

bq. ask anyone who works for any company that builds things and deals with finances about the joy of figuring out who is responsible for warranty costs. Is it ever the group responsible for building reliability into the product in the first place? Nope. Want reliable products? Take warranty repair costs out of your development budgets, not your support budgets. and watch your development managers have big, ugly, purple cows…

Ouch, says I, wearing my CPE hat! CPE -> Current Product Engineering; my team fixes software that has already been released to customers. Software is different than hardware; repairing or replacing hardware is more expensive than patching software. Anyway, the costs for my team _do_ come out of the development budget. We also have a separate customer support hierarchy, responsible for all of the day-to-day handholding that customers need. Theoretically problems don’t cross into my domain until they are confirmed defects (as opposed to “controlled flight into terrain”), but in practice we end up debugging the hard problems on both sides of that line.

Anyway, it’s certainly fun and challenging work…

Once upon a time, on Suns (and X-terminals) in a land far, far away, the “Control” key was underneath the Tab key, above the Shift key. Then along came the PC keyboard, which swapped the two. For a while I used to remap my keyboard to put the keys back in the right places, but eventually I had to use too many native Windows machines, so I taught my hands the new Ctrl key location.

Apparently the people that designed Compaq notebook keyboards did so inside of a locked box. Every other laptop I’ve used (Dell, Toshiba, Acer, Sony) has had the usual three or four keys in the bottom left corner of the keyboard: Ctrl, Fn, Alt or Ctrl, Fn, Windows, Alt. Not my Compaq; it has Fn, Ctrl, Windows, Alt!

Who in their right mind does that? They committed two egregious sins: _changing_ a “standard” keyboard layout, and putting a seldom used key (Fn) in the bottom left in place of a commonly used key (Ctrl). I don’t expect most people to know all the emacs Ctrl sequences, but the Ctrl key is used in all sorts of Windows keyboard shortcuts (especially select all, cut, copy, and paste)!!

Even worse, the Fn key cannot be remapped; it is intercepted by the keyboard controller, and used in combination with other keys to generate scancodes for keys that don’t physically exist, like the numeric keypad). _Some_ Compaqs have a BIOS switch to swap the keys; mine doesn’t. So I can’t even swap them back…

For now I’ve found a Windows keyboard remapping utility, “KeyTweak”:http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/ and I’m using it to change the Caps Lock key to another Ctrl key (thus putting the Ctrl key back where it was a decade ago). I’ve done the same thing on all of my Linux boxes at home. It’s not an optimal solution, because I still have to use other machines with the Ctrl key in the bottom left…

Grrr…

(Everything else about this laptop is spiffy, btw; the keyboard is my only complaint :-)

We can have interesting incidents involving fear of the unknown. In this case, one of the better variations on “the dog ate my homework” almost happened to a UofT Comp.Eng. student. Read all about it:

ECE496 And Terrorism!!

(via Karen Reid).

I remember the days when “rms”:http://www.stallman.org/ refused to port “Emacs”:http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html to “Windows”:http://www.microsoft.com/ (or the “Macintosh”:http://www.apple.com/) because they were closed platforms and violated the spirit of free software.

Today I have “Emacs”:http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html, “Apache2”:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/platform/windows.html, “PHP”:http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.php, “Perl”:http://www.activestate.com/activeperl, “Python”:http://www.activestate.com/activepython, “MySQL”:http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/windows-installation.html, and “Firefox”:https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ all running on my spiffy new Windows XP based laptop…

I feel so un-pure :-)

Canada and the USA have had their share of differences in the past (softwood lumber, for example :-), but things appear to be getting worse:

h3. Maher Arar:

bq. U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft insisted Wednesday [November 19th, 2003] American law enforcement officers acted properly when they deported Canadian Maher Arar to Syria last year on suspicion of terror links.

bq. During an hour-long meeting Wednesday with Solicitor-General Wayne Easter, Ashcroft said U.S. security officials followed U.S. law in the Arar case despite protests from Ottawa that American authorities should have returned the man to Canada.

bq. “Mr. Ashcroft assured us that, from his perspective, the decisions that were made were certainly made within the context of the laws within the United States and he feels that there were no laws broken in that regard,” Easter said following the meeting.

h3. ” U.S. won’t change policy on deportations to third country”:http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/12/04/cellucci_passport031204

bq. The U.S. government will continue to deport Canadian citizens to third countries if they pose a risk to American national security, said Paul Cellucci, U.S. ambassador to Canada.

bq. He emphasized that the U.S respects the Canadian passport, but homeland security comes first.

bq. Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty Canada said he found Cellucci’s comments troubling.

bq. “It contravenes international law and should, and can play, no part in any effort to increase security,” said Neve. “If anything, (he) is fostering greater insecurity in the world.”

( Maher Arar, a Syrian born Canadian citizen, was deported to Syria when he landed in the USA en-route to Canada from a routine business trip. There he was tortured and forced to sign confessions about his (non-existent) connections to terrorism).

h3. “Canadian flag causes flap in the U.S.”:http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/story.asp?id=066271BE-AC4A-4322-B23D-6E7B44C2B575 Maple Leaf on baggage irks ‘sensitive’ Americans

bq. Canadians should be careful not to appear “boastful” to Americans, who are insecure because of the war in Iraq and admit they are annoyed by northerners showing off the red maple leaf on their luggage when they travel, a recent federal report warns.

bq. “Some participants expressed a certain amount of annoyance at what is perceived as a systematic attempt by Canadians to make the statement that they are not Americans by sporting the maple leaf,” said the recently released report. “This underscores the American sensitivity at feeling rejected by the rest of the world ….”

Wow; this from the country that “waves the flag” more than pretty much anyone else. How many US flag bikinis have you seen recently? :-)

which leads into:

h3. “Are You A Closet Canadian?”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/12/03.html#a541

bq. far from being Americans ‘lite’, Canadians have fundamentally different values and worldviews from Americans, and those differences are increasing. Canadians are now much closer to their European contemporaries than to Americans, closer to Europeans, in fact, than are the British. America is now largely isolated in its prevailing worldview from the rest of the developed world. Its values are closer to those of autocractic developing nations than to those of other nations that have made the transition to democracy and constitutional liberalism.

I took the “survey at environics”:http://fireandice.environics.net/surveys/fireandice/main/fireandice.asp?surveyID=1, and came out quite firmly in the bottom right-hand corner, the “Idealism and Autonomy” Quadrant. I’m sure you’re all shocked by this…

I brought the new (well, old) server home last week; installed Debian on it on Saturday. (Debian is a strange distribution, but that’s another blog entry :-).

I decided that I was going to move the MP3 collection from the Win2K box to the new server (running Linux). So I want to put my smaller 15Gb drive in place of the 30Gb drive that’s in there right now, and put the 30Gb in the fileserver. I dutifully repartition the 15Gb drive into two pieces, format the two partitions as NTFS, reboot into DOS, and ghost the boot partition from the 30Gb to the 15Gb. Boot up, and everything works ok. Remove the 30Gb drive. Boot up; can’t login. Every account is the same. With the 30Gb drive in place (but not as the boot drive or system partition), the system works; without it, nobody can log in.

I noticed that when the machine booted with both drives, it thought that the system drive was still drive F:, so I tried removing drive letters from all drives. Another series of reboots; still no go (although the system drive is now C: like it’s supposed to be).

I’m stumped at this point. I Googled, and most people said “system restore”, but I’m not sure I want to go down that road yet. I did see a couple of articles suggesting that voodoo might work: the suggestion is to reformat the 15Gb drive from the ground up (to make sure no old data is interfering with the ghosting or booting). I’ll try that tonight; if it doesn’t work, I may have to go the system restore route; Ugh :-)

Anyway, that’s what I did last night, instead of folding laundry :-)

Five Whys

bq. When you are faced with a problem it is useful to stop and ask why five times. It is easy to do but few people do it.

bq. This is a very simple yet very powerful technique. The aim is to ensure that a problem stays solved and never happens again. We do this by identifying and eliminating the root cause of the problem. When the root cause is eliminated the original problem is solved permanently.

This looks like an interesting technique, but I fear that the examples are somewhat contrived? I’ll have to try it out at work, and see if I get any interesting results…

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog:

bq. It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT’s main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.

Yay, “Tate’s 2003 Web Advent Calendar”:http://www.advent-calendars.com/2003/index.html is up! It’s a story that appears one page per day leading up to Christmas, starting Tate, the cat who laughs…

Check it out!

So I see an article like “Well-Designed Weblogs”:http://larsholst.info/blog/index.php?p=40 and I think “wow, I wish I could design web pages that look that good!”

And then I think I _could_, if I invested the time required to learn how. But I’m too busy being good at a bunch of other interesting things :-)

Oops; I’ve been a little busy.

I received my new laptop on Monday and I’ve been busy with setup and copying files and settings from the old desktop. We have a code freeze today, which isn’t helping (trying to develop code _and_ rebuild your environment at the same time is … interesting). On the other hand, I was able to be extremely productive from home on Thursday with the new machine, so it has been worth the effort.

It’s been a hectic week personally. G. had a hockey practice on Monday night, after which we went out for dinner for my birthday. I had a curling game Tuesday; Michaéla had a board meeting on Wednesday (and I was coding in front of the TV, playing with the new VPN); and Thursday night cards was much busier than normal because people came over for Andrew and Michelle’s birthdays.

Tonight I’m going to collapse in front of the TV; I might get some blogging done. Saturday is hockey, hockey, rolemaster. I’ve (finally) received the new VPN hardware that I’m supposed to test, so I’m probably going to play with that on Sunday, along with the usual laundry and cleaning (and Michaéla et al have a 3:15 curling game that day).

Next week we leap into the pre-Christmas rush…

So the first time I fired up the VPN client, the rules on the firewall allowed the ISAKMP negotiation, but not the ESP data. I fixed that and tried again. This time, the firewall no longer rejects packets, but doesn’t pass them through, either. Debugging ensues. Debugging is made extra challenging by the fact that the VPN client disallows split tunnelling, thus killing the SSH session to the firewall each time it is started. Lots of running tcpdump in the background is required.

Eventually I gave up and ate supper.

I tried again after supper. The VPN comes up perfectly; the spiffy intranet portal appears. Apparently something previously cached has been un-cached. However, the connection only lasts about 5 minutes, then dies. Debugging does not follow; it’s time to play Euchre.

The next evening arrives. I fire up tcpdumps and a script to monitor /proc/net/ip_conntrack, under the assumption that connection tracking isn’t working properly (leading to the 5 minute timeout). I start the VPN client. Everything works; no session timeouts, no firewall issues. Hours of rapturous intranet browsing follows. I also play with using SSH through the VPN, out the corporate firewall, and back to the home firewall :-).

While I’m happy that everything’s working, I could live without the whole “attempt to debug problems that later mysteriously vanish” thing…

While taking a break during the execution of this program, I decided (on a whim) to write it down.

Saturday:

* 8AM hockey with C.
* 10AM hockey with G.
* kids laundry
* _adult_ laundry
* find the floors in the house
* _clean_ the floors in the house
* ditto for the bathrooms
* add 30Gb drive to yvonne, copy data, remove 15Gb drive
* organize photos and MP3s that are currently spread across three computers
* nap
* 4:30PM: watch old-timers hockey game
* blog

Sunday:

* brunch with dad & lil sis
* Lion King matinée
* dinner at Black Forest Room

So far I’ve done the hockey, I’m halfway through laundry and finding floors, and there’s about 90 minutes left until the hockey game :-)

A couple of recent weblog entries finally inspired me to get a round tuit and make the text on my site resizable. I’m also playing with CSS image replacement techniques to bring you the sunrise (set?) banner. The old pretty borders with offset text boxes were fun to lay out, but I’m bored with them now so I’ve removed most of the borders in this revision. Finally, I was tired of having separate “layout” and “colour with layout” stylesheets, so I’ve collapsed them back into one file.

* “Full Page Zoom”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/11/09/fullPageZoom gave me the idea to use box sizes and margins in ems instead of pixels. The min-width: attribute on the sidebar works in Mozilla (to truncate the little graph) but fails miserably in IE 6, so don’t make your fonts too small.

* “font size rounding”:http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/20031118T075030.html gave me the trick I needed to make the font sizing the same in IE and Firebird.

Seen on “Halley’s Comment”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/archives/2003_11_16_halleyscomment_archive.html#106933175797022052

bq. I remember reading a company brochure about sick kid benefits early on when my son was little and I was still doing a classic corporate grind job. They had an employee benefit that was like renting a loaner car when your car was in the shop, but this was a loaner mom if your kid was sick and you had to be at work. All sounded so modern and reasonable. If my kid had a 104 fever all I had to do was drop him off at this hospital day care facility conveniently located 45 minutes from my house in the opposite direction of work, then they would care for him and I could work all day and pick him up at the end of the day.

My goodness; would people actually do this? Would an employer _expect_ it of their employee?

Actually, I do know people for whom “my kid is sick” is not an excuse to stay away from work. But those employers typically offer no benefits and small paycheques, so that doesn’t apply here. People in those situations have a network of neighbours, friends, relatives to rely on; they cannot survive otherwise.

Is there a trust issue here? Have we (employees of companies that _do_ offer benefits) become a group of people that trusts an institution more than we trust our friends, relatives, neighbours? Or is this a corporation trying to optimise their “human resources” to extremes?

The mind boggles. I’m with Halley on this one:

bq. The brochure was so glossy and pretty. I kept turning it’s many panels over trying to find the page that acknowledged NO KID WANTS TO SPEND THE DAY WITH A STRANGER IN A HOSPITAL WHEN THEY’RE SICK WITH AN EARACHE AND A 104 FEVER AND NO MOM WANTS TO LEAVE THEIR KID WITH ANYONE ELSE WHEN THEIR KID IS THAT SICK.

Do you know “what to do if the Internet goes down?”:http://www.thetoque.net/031118/internetdown.htm

Yet again, an example of a common phenomenon: if it came from the computer, it must be right.

An interim report on the August 14th, 2003 power outage has been published, and SecurityFocus picked up the story here: “Computer trouble had wide impact in Aug. 14 blackout”:http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7490

My eyes gravitated to this quote from the report:

bq. “Unknowingly,” the report continued, “they used the outdated system condition information they did have to discount information from others about growing system problems.”

This not to pick on First Energy; the problem could have (and has) happened to anyone. If someone is calling you and telling you there’s a problem, you should at least investigate, instead of blindly trusting the computer.

As Horatio Cain said on CSI:Miami last night: “Trust, but verify”.

It has been 5 years, but I’m once again working for “a profitable company”:http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/financials/quarters/2003/q4.html.

It is a pleasant change :-)