::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

New washer/dryer, server downtime, proxy

News ·Thursday April 20, 2006 @ 11:46 EDT (link)

We bought a washer/dryer today, a set of white Kenmore Elite HE4s from Sears. They've gotten good reviews from Consumer Reports (Kenmore took the top three places, in fact), and the former owners of the house had a (graphite) set. We also picked up a Black and Decker Grass Hog.

Small (web-only) server downtime today due to Gentoo upgrades being slightly bonkers, but I pulled in some new Apache packages and all is well.

I've set up an IRC proxy, ctrlproxy; I've been meaning to for a while; it stays connected even when I need to disconnect (lets me stay opped and keep my nick) and multiple machines can connect to it, which means seamless switching between machines and not having multiple logged in accounts. I'm using the latest branch from bzr (yet another revision control system, and a pretty crappy one from what I've seen); there were several crashes at first; I debugged some of them and sent fixes to the author.

It's been raining most of the week; high time to finish cutting the lawn!

Happy birthday to my sister Emily.

Illegal invasion

News ·Thursday April 13, 2006 @ 00:52 EDT (link)

Wherein I rant about the current immigration issues.

I'll start with apropos quote that dear old Dad (in-law) sent me after reading the original item:

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

First, it's not immigration if you sneaked across the border or hid in a truck or otherwise got here illegally. Someone that did so is not an "undocumented worker", as if they just mislaid their papers or someone forgot to issue them. They are an illegal invader, or just "illegal", a tresspasser, and a criminal. As a legal immigrant who filled out all the paperwork and paid the required fees, any talk of "amnesty" is intensely annoying; it's usually just pandering for votes, anyway (and you won't get mine when I get my citizenship, which I should be eligible to file for within the year).

Where to begin? There's so much wrong with the situation, from understaffed, underequipped, and unsupported border ("ICE") agents to the bleeding heart open borders twits to the Mexican flags at the recent protests.

I suppose the protests would be a good place to start: since the illegals were all conveniently together, it would have been a great opportunity to round them up, check their papers, and deport them. Yes, I support deporting 11+ million people. Just because you've been breaking the law and gotten away with it for a while, and even gotten comfortable, doesn't mean I owe you anything. Of course, removing them doesn't do any good if they'll just turn around and sneak back in again, so we need a fence, too.

Jobs Americans won't do: "What harm do they do?", one may ask. After all, they do "jobs Americans won't do". Do they? Rush Limbaugh, April 3 (radio):
... What is this silliness that Americans won't do these jobs? Somebody tell that to the West Virginia coal miners. Somebody tell that to the Americans, those lazy Americans in Iraq on the battlefield.

This notion that there are jobs Americans will not do is getting a little bit histrionic to me. I'm sick and tired of being told by these elites in Washington, these politicians how we all refuse to work. They seem to think we're all raised like Ted Kennedy or married into wealth like John Kerry. The American people work. They work damn hard. The economy and the numbers there prove it but yet we're told, "No, no, no! The Americans are lazy. They're uppity. There are certain jobs that they will not do."

Well, check the coal mines. Check the military. I don't see any illegals there.
I liked another quote that I can't find now, that states that America was founded and became strong because there was no job that Americans wouldn't do.

They're cheaper: So, perhaps the story is that they work for lower pay than Americans would; well, if that's below minimum wage, that's illegal, Go Directly to Jail and Do Not Pass Go. But let's assume it's above minimum wage, but citizens and legal residents ("legals") aren't lining up to work for you; perhaps working as a cashier or in food preparation is preferable to picking strawberries in the sun. Well, that's sad, but let me let you in on a little secret on how you can get workers: pay more money. "Ah, but it's not that simple! Farmers can't survive without illegal workers." Respect the Invisible Hand.

So, you pay 1.5x minimum wage, and people—legal people—start applying to work for you. You pass on the cost to the consumer. Ideally, they gripe but everyone has to pay this wage so they pay the higher cost, but then pay less income tax because they're no longer supporting the Mexican welfare state. Less ideally, growers are undercut by foreign imports and start to go out of business, but congress comes up with tarriffs and subsidies to save the day (protectionism? what's that... well, let's just say it's an encouragement to buy local).

Open borders, free movement of capital: The idea is that borders should be open and capital free to move where it wants, which seems libertarian (but isn't necessarily). Sounds like a fine idea, except that with the United States' social programs (also called "entitlement programs", usually by those opposed to them), the US ends up bearing the costs of the poor, criminal, and uneducated that move here: welfare, hospital stays, incarceration, policing, housing increases, etc. If those were dispensed with, it might make more sense to allow open borders (but with no handouts, would they still come?) but it would also be a country of small fiefdoms with a lot of anarchy in between.

Where do your loyalties lie? If you're coming to live in a country, your loyalties had better be with that country, and you'd better try to fit into it, not it to you. Previous waves of immigrants haven't demanded the US speak their language and provide government forms in their language, but the hispanics have, and they're getting it. That translates to higher costs to taxpayers, and to Spanish-speaking ghettoes springing up in cities across the country. It's Mexican flags and reconquista.

Sure, bring your culture here, but give it to the melting pot, don't try to impose it. I'm from Canada, but as a permanent resident of these United States, my loyalty is to the United States; I don't send money back to Canada, and I don't fly a Canadian flag. The freedoms I have here would allow me to do all of that, but I chose to come here, and it is my home. Billions of dollars that could be spent here flow from the US to Mexico; if legals had the jobs, I'm fairly confident that the money would remain in the US.

It's not amnesty if they have to pay a fine! A fine is a slap on the wrist and an encouragement of illegal behavior. If someone breaks into a house, you don't fine them and let them keep their loot. They forfeit anything they've taken, and their liberty besides. Illegals should be rounded up, have DNA samples taken to prevent re-entry, and be sent back across the border, possessions forfeit, to be sold by the government at auction.

What about the chylllllldrun? What about them? The parents chose to have them while illegal; personally I think their citizenship should be revoked and they should be turfed out with the parents. At the least, minor children should be sent back to Mexico with their parents. Children of illegals (or even legal immigrants), so-called "anchor babies", should not become citizens just by dint of birth within the borders of the US; that's a ridiculous interpretation of the 14th amendment: illegals are breaking the law by their very presence.

How can employers know? The US social security administration is very willing to verify the legality of SSNs; it's not a breach of privacy because the employer provides the information to the government, which only returns back whether the potential employee is legal or not—no other information.

As in many cases, the way to get rid of the problem is to reduce demand (consider illegal drugs, for example); this can be done by heavily fining those employing illegals, and jailing those responsible (a $100,000 fine per illegal and 60 days in jail, per illegal worker, should do nicely).

A net gain: So, fruits and vegetables cost a little more; the price of some goods go up, as services previously performed by illegals (janitorial work, construction) now cost more when done by legals, and must be factored into costs. But everyone's playing on a level field: farmer John can't hire illegals, but farmer Fred can't either, and if either does, the fines will probably put them out of business. With no-one hiring, the illegals go home; the government stops providing Spanish versions of anything, social service costs in the border states and areas with high illegal concentration fall, local spending increases, and everyone's taxes are reduced. With less illegals, legal immigration quotas are raised.

And America is back on the straight and narrow path, strong, self-sufficient, independent, free.

(Unfortunately, it'll probably never work. Republicans are in the pockets of big businesses that want illegals for cheap labor, and Democrats want to throw (our) money at them to pander to the hispanics to get their vote—probably the votes of those given citizenship by the 1986 amnesty; look how well that turned out.)

Tiny hoodlums breaking things

News ·Wednesday April 12, 2006 @ 23:44 EDT (link)

Finally got rid of a bug that'd been hanging around for ages: I'd fixed it on my machine, but apparently it still repro'd on other machines, because of a few other idle performance issues. It's about time; requiescat in pace.

Tuesday, March 28: MOR delivered our furniture today; a sofa set, with two tables, two lamps, and a coffee table. They gave a time range of 1100-1400, arrived around 1140, and were done around 1200, which meant I didn't have to work too late. It's very comfortable.

Wednesday, March 29: Had to stay home again today, 0900-1200 this time, for MDM (cable Internet); the guy didn't arrive until 1100. Since most of the computers were still at the apartment I verified the connection with my laptop. "Silver" was the lowest level that provided the required static IP and unblocked ports for running my servers; it's more expensive than Speakeasy was (it was about $55/month) at $80/month, however we'll save some money using VoIP rather than a Verizon landline.

Friday, March 31: Ordered Vonage VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) connection, $24.95/month, first month free, but that doesn't really mean anything as they get you for a $30 activation fee.

Monday, April 3: I took my car in to Autosys today (which required us both to get up very early) for an oil change and their "spring special" tuneup; unfortunately the engine light's come on and so I had them run a diagnostic ($150, ouch) and there's quite a lot wrong with it, with the oxygen sensor only a beginning. It seems Boston is still exacting its toll from us; the snowy roads were not kind.

Thursday, April 6: Mowed 3/4 of the lawn (the battery gave out at that point; the grass was pretty long).

Friday, April 7: Went to the doctor about an allergic reaction; first time going to the doctor here, picked one in Bellevue, nice guy, prescribed Zyrtec and said it should clear up shortly. Called Waste Management, added yard waste collection (extra $9.23/month, sigh).

Vonage's package (some papers and a reconditioned Linksys router with two phone jacks) had arrived a few days ago, but I'd gotten annoyed at them since it appeared that they wanted their device to sit outside my firewall, and act as a router for my network, which I wasn't having. Turns out (from perusing their site) that it will work just fine behind the firewall, getting an address with DHCP.

Saturday, April 8: Having the phone chained to the Vonage router didn't appeal much, but Google answers provided some information about using the house telephone wiring. I picked up a multimeter, unhooked the outside wiring at the junction box, checked the line with the multimeter—all clear—and hooked the Vonage device to the nearby jack, et voilà: distributed telephony.

This is where this entry's title comes in: we had observed some broken toys on a lane next to our house; the lane is public property, the drive goes about to our back yard and then has posts, although it's paved a little further to behind our yard. I'd thrown away a few items left out because they were eyesores. A couple of our garden lamps had been broken not too long ago, quite possibly by kids cutting through our yard to go to this lane (could also have been by the MOR movers, though).

That evening I observed a kid cutting through our yard and yelled at him (and told them to clean up their mess when they were done). A couple of the kids went to talk to parents and, shockingly enough, they came back with plastic bags and started actually picking up their trash. What they'd been doing was taking (old, possibly already-broken) toys and hitting them with a baseball bat. Not the most constructive behavior in the world, but fine, their time, their stuff, as long as they kept the noise down. A little later, though, they picked up one of the broken parts of one of our lamps and started hitting it, so I had to go out and take it away from them. Fortunately, things ended well; some parents showed up and we talked with them, they agreed to have their kids tidy up their messes (and not cut through our yard), and I apologized for yelling at them.

Sunday, April 9: Went to Northgate, then met Honey at the apartment and cleaned the remainder (vacuumed and mopped kitchen and bathroom floor, cleaned bathroom and windows, did some laundry); I'll do a walkthrough with them this week and get our security deposit back.

Monday, April 10: I called MDM technical support today (800-829-2225) (I'd emailed earlier, but I think it went to a marketing address). My new Internet address shows up in the SORBS dynamic IP list, which makes me sad as I paid for a static IP, and it's not just the principle of the thing, either, as it causes mail from Microsoft to bounce. I tried to get SORBS to remove the listing, but they said my ISP had to handle it. My jaw nearly hit the floor when the (first!) person I talked to not only knew what I was talking about, but said it would be taken care of that day. (Unfortunately, as well as that boded, it's still in the list two days later. I'll give them a day or two more and then call them back to see what's going on.)

Tuesday, April 11: Waited 40 minutes on hold to cancel our old Verizon number (yay! we hate Verizon, they've stiffed us at every opportunity). I also called the Royal Bank of Canada to see why they were taking $4 out of my Canadian account every month (which would soon put it in the red). Turns out it was for 15 (unneeded and unused) transactions monthly; I had it removed (I can still use the account for $0.50/debit or $0.75/cheque).

Wednesday, April 12: We (Word development) got our new machines today (dual core, not sure how fast, but fast), and were talking about machine names (the convention is to prefix with one's alias, usually <alias><number> e.g. JDOE3, but it's not a requirement). Best (Microsoft network) machine name ever: WHACKWHACK. As in "please review \\WHACKWHACK\public\bogus.dpk" (spoken as "whack whack whack whack whack public whack bogus dot dee pee kay"). Unfortunately somebody already has it, but AT came up with a suitable alternate: QUACKQUACK.

Moving day

News ·Sunday March 26, 2006 @ 15:30 EST (link)

Many things have happened since I last wrote; not the least of which being that we have finally moved into our house, and this is the way of it.

We rented a 16' Budget truck for Saturday the 25th, and on that day I and three co-workers converged on my office and drove over to our apartment in my car, getting there around 1100. I'd picked the truck up earlier and backed it toward the apartment; we'd been packing and removing boxes every few days for the past few weeks and made sure that the way was clear to remove the larger items. It probably took us an hour to load up, then about 30 minutes to drive over to our house in Duvall, and another hour to unload, punctuated by ordering pizza for the hungry laborers. After we dropped everyone back at Microsoft, Honey and I packed the truck again.there were still plenty of smaller items, e.g. the drawers we'd removed earlier, files, kitchen and bathroom items, laundry baskets, etc..and made another trip. We were pretty knackered after unloading, so we waited until the next day to bring the truck back (we had it from 0800 Saturday to 0900 Sunday).

I am also now involved in lawn care, which, I'm told, is both an art and a science. I ordered a broadcast spreader and a lawnmower from Amazon (better price than Home Depot; until now, I hadn't known Amazon sold tools, either). The spreader had to be assembled, which was a bit of an exercise, but it seems solid; the lawnmower just needed the handle to be folded back and some screws to be tightened (and to be charged). Yesterday (the 2nd) I spread some fertilizer on the lawn and pulled up a few dozen dandelions, most of them by the roots. I'll mow in a few days when the fertilizers had a chance to, um, fertilize. Very new at this lawn stuff but the seller has given me some helpful advice. We picked up Deep Space Nine season 2 and some GRE books with the other Amazon purchases.

Last entry I was fairly happy to have been accepted as a GNM student into the University of Washington's Professional Master's Program in Computer Science and Engineering, but unfortunately the class that I wanted, and the alternate both filled up. Maybe next quarter; perhaps I'll have written the GRE by then.

At work I'm trying to check my current outstanding fixes in. Lots of build breaks to navigate around, before I can even attempt to run the remote test suite (the local "quick" test suite passed already).

We've had to transfer various utilities: we no longer have Ista (water, sewage, electricity, trash); the City of Duvall handles water, Puget Sound Energy handles electricity, and Waste Management picks up trash, recycling and yard waste. Millennium Digital Media provide cable here, instead of Comcast; we also decided to get cable Internet through MDM, since Speakeasy's contractor wasn't able to install OneLink DSL out here. We're going to try to go with Vonage VoIP for telephone service (free long distance in the US and Canada). It's all part of the process of moving, which I hope we don't have to do again soon; we're still sore from loading and unloading the truck.

Admittance, grammar rants, Roe vs. Wade for men

News ·Tuesday March 7, 2006 @ 15:02 EST (link)


Dining room Good news: I've been accepted into the Professional Masters Program (PMP) in Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E) at the University of Washington (UWa.), as a Graduate Non-Matriculated (GNM) student, which lets me take a few courses and see how I like it before enrolling (which also requires taking the GRE and getting letters of recommendation).

Move status: We're still moving a few boxes every few days; we've moved all of our books and most of the dishes we don't use, camping gear, some DVDs, and some office supplies. We had a little trouble with the blinds (couldn't move them) but the seller told us they're just really heavy; knowing that we wouldn't damage them by pulling harder, we had no trouble moving them. We have a Budget truck reserved for the weekend of the 25th and some helpful guys from work to help move the larger items.

Speaking of work, I took a chap from work (MS from MS) to the airport last Friday. Here's a sad story about bears. Louis Voyer, a travelling preacher, sent us some news of his recent US trip (he calls Mississauga home). In other news, my bug count's low and I'm having no trouble hitting my goals even with all the new areas that I've been assigned.

Mini-rants: The pairings "might could" and "might would" are awkward and, to me at least, sound uneducated. "Might" takes an infinitive, so the first would be correctly "might be able", and the second is redundant and collapses to just "might".

The accounting firm of Gipson & Woodruff, P.S., based in Kirkland, sent a form letter to our new house, proffering their services. This letter container two errors: "effect" for "affect" (common, but still inexcusable), and "The congress" for "Congress" (which should be capitalized when talking about the U.S. Congress, as they were). Needless to say, I'm not inclined to let a company that lets such shoddy prose out of their doors do my taxes. I prepared a scathing letter (in Word 12, natch) but I probably won't send it.

Thank you all for allowing me these rants.

A case dubbed Roe vs. Wade for men is in the Michigan courts now (comments, news articles). In a nutshell, it argues that men that don't want a child shouldn't have to pay child support for it, since the woman has the choice of abortion or adoption. In some egregious cases, men have been hit up for back support payments for children several years after the fact, have been tricked into fatherhood, or even end uup paying for kids that aren't theirs (the state sometimes doesn't even stop the required payments, much less returns the money). The guy filing the suit doesn't expect to win, but he expects to bring the issue to peoples' attention; that he has done.

I was having some trouble with my RAS connection to work; I called the helpdesk and the issue was elevated to tier 2 and they managed to get me a fix, in the form of an IPsec service update. Yay.

Recent books/movies:

A frustrating few days

News ·Tuesday February 28, 2006 @ 22:50 EST (link)

15 bugs at the start of the week, goal was to get to 13, reasonable enough. By the end of Monday, I had 10 more bugs (I don't meant to imply I'm alone in this, either; the whole team was getting swamped). Probably another six or seven on Tuesday, with maybe five total fixed between both days.

By now I've accumulated about 25 fixes which I want to check in, so on Wednesday I run the quick tests, which pass after a minor fix, and sync up my changed files with the current build; I lose just about the whole day to build breaks (it's primarily the usual suspect, the installer (.msi) client project). Thursday I try to run the remote test suite but I have a huge failure count. On looking at the screen shots, there's a random "Microsoft Office can help" dialog popping up preventing several tests from working. I eventually track down a fix, or at least a workaround, tests pass, I check in, yay. It's now Friday evening and I'm up to 28 bugs.

It's a busy weekend, but there is light at the end of the tunnel; at 0400 Monday I'm down to 13. A few highlights

  1. Extra item shows up in the schema collection. Pretty simple, although a pain to track down: just an off-by-one in a string copy, so simpleSchema.xsd becomes simpleSchema.xs. Other code references the schema, which isn't found by the original name so another entry is created with the right name.

  2. Undead toolbars. Create a new custom toolbar, restart, delete the toolbar, restart, it's baack! Little trickier: turns out every "main window" clones the toolbar, and on delete one wasn't getting removed—the one in the VBA window (I was distracted by a comment that claimed otherwise).

  3. Incorrect correction. On Japanese Word, when \alpha is autocorrected to α, the "stop autocorrecting" item on the "on object" floating menu was always checked. Turns out that in Japanese, sometimes backslash and the Yen sign are equivalent, sometimes not. When you type \ it displays as ¥ but still acts as a backslash for autocorrection. However, we fetch the display text, not the document text. When we populate the floating menu, we check if there's an autocorrect item for ¥alpha, and when there isn't, we assume the user has turned off autocorrection for it. Fix was to temporarily turn off the "convert backslash to yen" flag when formatting text for the autocorrect lexer, although this still needs to be examined to see if we always want to convert in this case.

  4. Another set of settings. Creating another Word application and toggling an option fails. Turns out it crashes the other Word because the application was created without a window, and somebody was assuming we had one. Only tough because it required debugging another instance and because someone threw a spanner into the gears of my finely-tuned debugging environment (remember those remote tests I was trying to pass earlier? the Office test framework guys like to stomp all over everything and not clean up after themselves).

Watched The Devil's Own and Saw II (one can only work so long) plus we're going through M*A*S*H again. We're still going over to the house every few days to drop off boxes, mainly books but also random office supplies, today our bikes, and some boxed china.

And finally: a bug bounced its way around Office, finally getting handed to me by the Word dev manager (speaking of Word dev, we had our group meeting today and everything seems to be on track, although there's still lots of work to be done). A customer has a VB (not VBA, VB 6 actually; positively ancient and losing support fast with the takeup of VB.net) application that worked fine in Office 11, but slows to an absolute crawl on Office 12, except when run under the VB 6 debugger.

I tracked it down to our idle loop: VB calls us through a "component manager" interface so that Word can run various idle tasks (cleanup, delayed layout, etc.), apparently when user code calls DoEvents (and their code calls DoEvents thousands of times in a loop for some reason). If there's nothing much going on, we don't want to just wait around so we give back time to the operating system, as well-behaved programs ought: a second here, 500 ms. there, 60 ms. somewhere else, as it happens. That's all fine and good most of the time, but not when we're being called thousands of times by an external program. Turning off these delays in the "component manager" case caused an amazing speed increase. We may not want to turn them off entirely, just if we're called in rapid succession; I'll get consult some other devs in the area to see what the best fix is. That was nice to nail down, though. Setting up the client program was a bit fiddly; I could debug on my own machine, but it had to be as an OEM test user so their program would install properly.

I'm in the market for a lawn mower; I'm thinking of going with a Black & Decker rechargeable (cordless) model: no cords, no gas, what's not to like? I also got a lot of good lawncare advice from the previous owner of the house. I'm also going to get a spreader (for fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) and a set of shears; that should do for now. We still need to get a washer and dryer, although we're pretty sure which we want, a nice refurbished set from the Sears outlet in Tacoma. Also our furniture (sofa, loveseat, chair) will be arriving in a few weeks.

Nice visit and then wretchedly sick

News ·Monday February 20, 2006 @ 14:53 EST (link)

We left Friday night (the 17th) to pick up my mother and grandmother in Abbotsford; it's about a 2.5 hour trip. We crossed at Sumas, as usual; no trouble finding them; they fed us dinner and then we headed back, getting in after midnight. Since we're not in the house yet we put them up on our couch and air mattress.

We had a delay at US customs on the way in since they thought I had failed to turn in my conditional green card after getting the permanent one. Actually, I'd turned it in in Seattle when I filed the paperwork to remove the conditional residence, and had gotten a stamp in my passport to use as a temporary card until the permanent one arrived in the mail. They may have missed that stamp due to a paperclip that was stuck earlier in my passport, and the stamp was after a couple of blank pages.

On Saturday we took them to Fred Meyer to pick up film, then over the WA-520 bridge over Lake Washington to see Bill's place, then to Microsoft, into my building; we went by the store and visitor center but it's only open weekdays. Our last stop was our house, we gave them the tour and unloaded the box we'd brought with us. We ate lunch at Subway and took them to Applebee's for dinner. Mom gave me a DVD of our wedding they'd had transferred for a late birthday present, and a few other odds and ends and notes from my sisters (hi sisters).

On Sunday we went to Northgate as usual (second meeting, because, one bathroom, four people, good luck). They were having their yearly soup and salad luncheon, fortunately for us, so we stayed. Then, we headed back, this time via Aldergrove; it seems to be a slightly more direct route. I drove there, Honey back. Naturally we stopped at Timmy's for a coffee on the way out. No trouble with customs this time; I think the guy cleared up any "missing card" status; he just asked if I'd turned in the conditional card and I told him I had and he waved us through.

We stopped at a Wendy's on the US side of the border, and then I slept some of the way back. When we got home and I woke up I was feeling dizzy and queasy; I staggered into the house and lay down but even with my eyes closed everything was spinning. I threw up a couple of times and then felt a little better and managed to get to sleep. I was feeling somewhat better in the morning but still felt it would be better if I worked from home.

Moving the Internet

News ·Wednesday February 15, 2006 @ 22:21 EST (link)

I am ecstatic about SpeakEasy. They deserve all kudos. I ordered a moving package from their site which I received yesterday (postcards, some stickers for IP info and technical support, numbers to call, moving tips); I called them, quickly got all the information I neede—and the news is good—and the tech gave me his direct line to call back with the move order (even if he did do it for the commission, if they do that, so what; he was very helpful). The good news is that DSL (the same service) is available there; if we don't already have a voice line it's $6 more a month, and their VoIP (voice over IP—voice telephone service over the Internet) is $27.95 for unlimited long distance in the US, which (assuming their service is decent) beats Verizon like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. It will be a happy day to cease dealings with Verizon.

Speaking of helpful salespeople, that reminds me, we bought some furniture recently; Mor was having a super bowl sale where they pay the sales tax. We got a white leather living room set (couch, loveseat, chair, side tables, coffee table, and lamps); salesperson was very helpful; they'll be delivered in about 8 weeks due to availability (so unfortunately not in time for my mother's visit).

Speaking of Mom's visit, she arrived yesterday and she and Grandma Martin will be visiting us over the weekend; she wants to see our house, and the Microsoft campus, and we may take her up to Edmonds on the ferry and to some parks etc., and to Seattle, depending on what they want to do.

The sellers called Sunday night and said they were out and we could pick up the keys from them, so we drove over, bringing with a few things in the trunk, to take posession (although we and the bank have owned the place since December and rented it back to the sellers for two months). Everything's great; I was worrying that a ping-pong table wouldn't fit in the TV room but it will, and our furniture and kitchen table will fit fine upstairs.

Today we went over to the house to drop off a form for the mail carrier so we can start receiving mail there, and brought a few boxes of books and miscellaneous items along for the ride.

Smart card reader driver not so smart

News ·Thursday February 2, 2006 @ 17:58 EST (link)

About a month ago I finally got my RAS connection to work working (I think it was a bad routing table on the client). But it's still a little tricky: the smart card driver is broken and tends to lock the process (sometimes the entire machine); fortunately it will relent and return control if the USB card reader is unplugged. So the login process goes something like this:
  1. Connect the USB reader and insert my smart card (badge).
  2. Open the IT Connection Manager, click Connect, enter PIN.
  3. After it connects and gets 5-7 seconds into verifying the password, disconnect the smart card reader.
  4. Wait for the machine to be scanned, and terminal serve to my machine.
Our DVD player is back, we got an automated call this morning and I picked it up after work at the local store; seems to be working fine and they actually provided a callback number for the technician that worked on it (I imagine that's at least partly self-interest; Circuit City probably contracted out to the company, and if the player fails and we tell Circuit City first, it'll probably be a black mark against the contractor). We started E. R. season 4.

Lots of new bugs coming my way at work, new areas, some interesting performance and idle-time issues.

The people that sold us our house are in their new place, but haven't finished moving out yet; they'll be out and we'll be in by the 13th, which is when my mother arrives in town to visit us and sundry relatives across the border in la Colombie Brittanique.

On the Net::SSH2 front, someone's looking to get it to work on perl 5.6; I set 5.8 as the require version to avoid cruft and compatibility hacks, but I recognize that 5.6 is still used in a lot of shops (e.g. despite an attempt at an upgrade, athena's still using it), and I'm willing to work with this guy and anyone else so interested to make the required changes, although I would like to keep the 5.8 "path" as clean as possible.

Good news about our DVD player: CityAdvantage did come through for us; in about 10 days after we dropped it off at our local store (the web page said we'd have to ship it out, but our receipt differed and we went with it), we got an automated call saying it was ready for pickup; picked it up the same day, it was wrapped in tape with the name and contact info for the tech that fixed it (probably because it's contracted out, and if Circuit City hears back first then the contractor gets dinged financially or perhaps dropped). We can take it back within 90 days and get it repaired for free if it fails again, which is a reasonable cushion. Count us satisfied.

rt.cpan.org SSH bug list roundup

News ·Friday January 27, 2006 @ 19:46 EST (link)

I visited rt.cpan.org today to check out some bugs I'd gotten emailed for Net::SSH::Perl and Net::SSH2. I think I've learned a lot at Microsoft about taking care of bugs, especially that they don't always need to be fixed. I rejected a good many because either I didn't want to add functionality to or redesign a legacy module (Net::SSH::Perl) when there's a new hotness (Net::SSH2) (although I am still fixing bugs, and in most cases I'd take a patch), or because I'd requested clarification, logs, and/or (minimal) source and the requestor hadn't replied back for six months or more, because they were dupes (people really don't check the list), because the bug was elsewhere (user code or another module or a bad install), or because it was a legacy design issue. Some I actually fixed, sometimes incorporating provided code; sometimes I fixed documentation instead.

Altogether I knocked off about 20 bugs; I wish I could take care of that many that quickly at work. (Of course the real difference is I scrub my work bug list daily and the people reporting the bugs are usually more clueful—usually SDETs and very rarely random users—although certainly not always.)

Our (Onkyo) DVD player died last Saturday (the 21st), suddenly refusing to load DVDs (it circled the 6-CD load tray and then reported NO PLAY). We'd only had it since April. Fortunately (?) we had Circuit City's CityAdvantage plan, so we were able to return it to the store at the Bellevue Crossroads mall (the site says it needs to be returned by mail, but the receipt said differently). They'll repair it if possible and replace it if not. I'll definitely be reporting back about how things go.

I had 5 bugs at the beginning of the week and my goal was to get to 4 (it goes by percentages); unsurprisingly I had another 10 dumped on me and my build was failing. My stats stood at about -500% until I finally got Word to build on Wednesday, because of the small delta. I'm now down to 3, which is 200% of my goal (the small delta works both ways) and I may knock off another few this weekend (although one requires Windows Vista so that's pretty hard to work on unless testing has set up a machine for me to terminal serve into).

Honey left Tuesday to fly to her parents' in WV to attend her grandfather Isiah (I think that's how it's spelt, it's not like Isaiah in the Bible, although he'd say it was) Hedrick's funeral, her father's father. She'll be back Monday.

We hope to get into the house by February 2nd if the sellers can get into their new place by then (they're waiting for a key from their builder who's waiting for a permit from city hall); if not, we expect to be in by the 13th. We're certainly looking forward to it.

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