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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Sun 21 Jan 2007

Would you buy a business system from this guy?

Category : Commentary/ballmer.txt

Steve Ballmer, esteemed (not!) Microsoft CEO, poured scorn on the Apple iPhone, in his trade-mark whiny, grating voice. But why would any business, in its right mind, dare buy software from one so oily?

I remembered when Richard Ellis in Singapore threw away its mostly new, still productive Macs to go all-Windows, I was told, "because Bill Gates is so powerful".

But they ought to have watched this monkey dance. Somebody had taken leave of his senses ("Get up, get up, come on, give it up for me") :

There's an illness in the corporate world. A sickness of the mind ("But like Microsoft or not, the unsated appetite of this company is a testament to the ability and drive of the folks running the show. In business, like in war, half-measures don't make it. And when you go into battle, it helps if the true believers are in command." Huh?).

And not just the corporate world. The developers, too, who follow in Microsoft's wake - in Microsoft's own words, used as pawns. Now, who are the fanboys and who's sucked into the Reality Distortion Field. I can't believe they're actually applauding it :

How un-cool can you get?

Now this, by contrast, is cool. From John Siracusa, at FatBits. Guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

Posted at 12:56PM UTC | permalink

Powered by Cutedge Software !

Category : Commentary/Platenspelers.txt

This is Klaas de Jong's web site :

Notice the Powered by Mac OS X and Cutedge Software logos? Of course, I love seeing these. Makes it all worth it doing this.

I would love it if more people tell me that their web site had been set up with the help of Cutedge software. There are examples, like this, because of the prior correspondence, but I couldn't be quite sure.

Posted at 6:59AM UTC | permalink

Fri 19 Jan 2007

AEBS Hanging - Theories and Hypotheses

Category : Commentary/NAT-PMP.txt

Just an update to the mystery of my Airport Extreme Base Station hanging since I've got my new MacBook Core 2 Duo.

I've tried almost every combination of Channel, Mode, and Multi-cast Rate using the Airport Admin Utility. I'd thought that I had hit on a certain combination that will work but I still found the base station hanging after a week, and so out went that particular theory.

So I'm putting forward another theory, namely, the hanging is caused by the use of the NAT Port Mapping Protocol (in Airport Admin Utility):

in conjunction with the use of automatic .Mac syncing in Systems Preferences:

I've tried almost every idea, so why not this?

The NAT Port Mapping Protocol option is new - it only appeared with the V5.7 Airport Base Station update. It is there to help make .Mac syncing go faster when you're syncing more than one machine on your local network with .Mac, behind your router. I've had that turned on since doing my last Airport Base Station firmware update.

I've had automatic .Mac syncing turned on only since I had the MacBook Core 2 Duo. For me, .Mac syncing alone is worth the subscription cost of .Mac because I change my development machines often. So after I had that effortlessly smooth transition to the new MacBook, I thought - why not make syncing automatic.

My theory is that some confluence of events relating to the use of the new Airport Extreme card in the new MacBook, together with NAT-PMP, together with the possibility that a sync was in progress when I decided to end a work session, caused the Airport Extreme Base Station to hang moments after I've closed the lid of the MacBook.

Now all this is just theory, not being able to debug the code in the Airport Base Station. The theory will die a natural death if the Airport network hangs in the next few days. But it's been a week now. So we'll see.

But the point is : that's what we programmers do all the time - formulating theories. I've often been hit with despair when my own software application keeps on crashing randomly, and it seems there's no way to figure out why except to pray to God. But what I've learnt is this - the way to solve it is to keep on generating theories - and have the ability, and stomach, to keep on testing them.

Writing good software is hard. That's why I'm willing to give the Airport engineers some slack and try to find ways around a possible bug - the alternative is to believe, as has been suggested when you do a Google search on this problem, that the base station is reaching the end of its useful life. If it survives another couple of weeks without hanging, I'll be prepared to believe that rumours of its impending demise had been greatly exaggerated.

OOps, I forgot to mention that the solution I'm trying out is to turn off the NAT Port Mapping Protocol option in Airport Admin Utility.

Posted at 1:10PM UTC | permalink

Thu 18 Jan 2007

Seeing a dark cloud in a silver lining

Category : Commentary/cloudsandsilverlining.txt

Apple's just brought in more revenue in one quarter (a record $7.1 billion) than they did for a whole year, just a few years ago, and I'm guessing what tomorrow's Straits Times headline will look like.

It'll probably be something like this :

"Options probe cloud Apple outlook as Mac sales slide"

going by the trend of years gone by. Want to bet? Let us see.

Also on tomorrow - Leopard Tech Talk, Singapore.

Posted at 3:24PM UTC | permalink

Mon 01 Jan 2007

The Ghost in the Machine

Category : Commentary/poltergeist.txt

I'd better scratch that last advice I gave about Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) settings. To recap, to improve the wireless reception that my MacBook Core 2 Duo is getting, I set the AEBS wireless mode to "802.11g Only", which did provide the MacBook with a consistently strong signal.

But the downside is : I found the base station hung up three times in the last three days.

The strange thing is, the base station hung up each time moments after I've closed the MacBook and put aside my work. The first time when I left to attend a funeral wake (eerie!). I was away for three hours, and that's how long our server (which sits behind the base station) was down. Fortunately that happened between three to six in the afternoon (our quietest period in a 24 hour cycle) so maybe not that didn't stop too many people from accessing the things that they want.

Then the next time was, after watching Man United beat Reading on Saturday night, I answered the last of the mail I had still pending, went to sleep, woke up at five (I'm an insomniac) and found the base station hung minutes after I had gone to sleep. I can check, using WebMon, when the last hit on the server had occurred. The site had been down another three hours.

At this point, at five in the morning, I'll admit I was open to any suggestion that a poltergeist had somehow followed me home and was watching my every move.

Then yesterday afternoon, I wrapped up some work for the year and went for a run. You guessed it! Almost two hours later, when I got back, I found the base station hung, almost to the minute I had left the house.

Now, if we have a poltergeist in the house, that must be some Internet TCP/IP-savvy ghost.

Not willing to give in to superstition, I've reset the base station settings to "802.11b/g Compatible" and everything else (channel and multicast rate) to the defaults, to see if we'll get another crash.

But that's, of course, superstition on another level, because I don't at all understand what all these settings do, unlike when I'm debugging my own code and I can find exactly the explanation for why things work the way they do, no matter how seemingly random. "When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer", so says Stevie Wonder. But life is lived among varying levels of illusion.

One man's superstition, another man's religion.

The title comes from The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler, which together with The Act of Creation and The Sleepwalkers, are three great books about the history of technology and the origin of ideas.

And a Happy New Year to all. It is the new year, at last.

Posted at 9:44AM UTC | permalink

Fri 29 Dec 2006

Airport on MacBook Core 2 Duo

Category : Commentary/AirportExtreme80211g.txt

I was having terrible Airport reception from my MacBook Core 2 Duo, when accessing an Airport Extreme Base Station. The reception was poor, wasn't steady, often wavering, and it even lost connection entirely now and then. Applying the latest Airport Software Update didn't seem to have any effect.

Then I thought of switching the Airport Extreme Base Station to use only 802.11g with a multi-cast rate of 6. Now, changing the multi-cast rate was probably voodoo/superstition, because I don't quite understand the effect that was having, but using 802.11g exclusively seems to have fixed the problem for me.

I've got another broadband line with another base station on 802.11b, for my older iBook and PowerBook. Strangely, my MacBook had no problems whatsover attaching to this base station, which is built into a SpeedTouch modem/router, and works only on 802.11b. That was what gave me the idea of switching the Airport Extreme to work on only one setting rather than supporting both simultaneously.

Also, I couldn't have debugged my problems with PayPal yesterday without this other broadband line and the spare server that I've hooked up to it. I created a new PayPal account using my wife's email address and set up a domain that I own, called lifeassets.com, and in a short while I was able to start making on-line payments to it. And that PayPal account is easily linked to a local bank account. So theoretically, I've shown I'm able to set up an on-line Internet business in minutes.

Now that I've got this set up, it allows me to see if I can package this payment processing system that we have into something more robust that other people can download and use. That's going to be one of the projects for next year.

Posted at 6:04AM UTC | permalink

PayPal

Category : Commentary/PayPalUpdate.txt

I think I've found where we're getting jammed up contacting PayPal whenever traffic on the 'Net gets too heavy, and because of this our server couldn't tell it had to generate a serial number to send out. But I think I can fix that now.

Things have gone back to normal. I can even access Macsurfer again, which I couldn't the last two days, so welcome back.

Posted at 5:12AM UTC | permalink

Thu 28 Dec 2006

East Asia-to-US Internet Chaos - An Update

Category : Commentary/ChaosAsia.txt

I had put notices on all my software download pages, about the intermittent Internet connections we are experiencing as a result of the damage caused by the Taiwan earthquake. Then I watched all the PayPal payments go through last night with no problems and so I thought everything was back to normal.

But, now that the sun is here (or at least I'm sure it is behind all those Monsoon rain clouds) and everybody from China to India is up, our connection with PayPal is acting flakey again. So I'm sure (and I'm checking) that it's due to some timing problems that are showing up now that more people jam the little bandwidth that the ISPs have been able to conjure while the data cables are being repaired.

The warning signs go up again.

Evening update : The payments are going through again. You can almost feel the herd stomping out of the offices and going home.

Posted at 1:47PM UTC | permalink

Wed 27 Dec 2006

Taiwan Earthquake Disrupts Asia/US Internet Access

Category : Commentary/TaiwanEarthquake.txt

A strong earthquake off Taiwan late last night damaged underwater data cables carrying Internet and voice traffic between Asia and the United States, disrupting Internet access for most people here in Asia.

I'm experiencing intermittent connections when I'm trying to load pages from sites outside Singapore, but I'm still seeing hits coming in to our server from the US, United Kingdom, Australia, etc..., so this may be what they mean by connections being intermittent.

According to Cable News Asia, the damage could take days to clear. So, if you find this site responding sluggishly, this is the reason why. In the meantime, the various national telecoms providers have started arranging for alternate routes via Europe, so we should start seeing improvements in the flow of Internet traffic soon.

Posted at 8:27AM UTC | permalink

Tue 26 Dec 2006

A Leopard Christmas

Category : Commentary/leopardChristmas.txt

This was my Christmas gift, to myself - the Leopard Early Start Kit. Well, what can you get a guy who has everything (he needs :-) ?

But this gift took three days to unwrap. It's a 5.4 gig download and when it broke, inevitably, after a day or so of downloading, I had to start all over again - until I realised that you can interrupt the download, make a backup of what had been downloaded up to then, and then when I next hit a break in the connection, restart from the point where I had last made the backup.

I found that I could even move the download to a faster machine midway through the download - by pretending to start a download session on that other machine, "steal" its DownloadEntryIdentifier, below, and give it to the download file that I'd been building up - and the download will carry on from where it left off. If this information could help the other people on the Apple Developer Connection program shepherd their downloads toward completion, then it could perhaps alleviate the congestion those Apple servers must be experiencing.

I had expected a boxed set, but it looks like I'm not going to get one. My Apple Store order shows that it has been completed. (You mean, I don't even get a T-shirt? The Developer Connection T-shirt I got the last time I signed up remains my favourite). One moment I had 500 USD and the next it's sucked out to Apple and all I got are these lousy downloads. What a great way Apple has found to print money.

Anyway, my Leopard exploration starts in earnest. "Another year over and what had we done?" I'll have a better idea what I can do next year when this week is done.

And, yes, a Merry Christmas and a Great Year Ahead to all who'd dropped by.

Posted at 1:04PM UTC | permalink

Fri 22 Dec 2006

A TCP/IP Primer

Category : Commentary/tcpipPrimer.txt

I found a good primer on TCP/IP.

We've been setting up this network panel for ages (since OS 7, 8 or 9?) :

but what does Subnet Mask really mean, and how does it work to help our Mac find another machine? And what is TCP, or IP, for that matter?

The Mac's a hugely more powerful, productive and useful machine since those early days and it's important to know a little bit more about what goes on underneath, if we want to reap its enormous power. Really, it's a lot of payback for a little bit more work. I've aways felt that Mac users are great for understanding things conceptually and not by rote, and so, if you can find a really understandable, readable guide on basic networking principles, you really ought to dig in. Like Black Elk says, "let's see how it's made and what it means".

So, Daryl's TCP/IP Primer is good place to start :

"The difference between this (a primer) and an FAQ, is that most FAQ's, in practice, tend to be question-and-answer oriented, and generally seem to try to cover ALL issues, not just the ones frequently asked about. This primer is intended as a starting point for someone who has an interest in the subject, but doesn't know where to start or what questions to ask. This should also help to broaden the understanding of people who have worked with TCP/IP for a while, but either haven't had the time to study all the less-than-useful theory behind the subject, or have been somewhat overwhelmed by the many theoretical details and have missed the big picture."

Also, I've found this IP subnet mask/CIDR calculator widget. (CIDR - what's that? You'll find that covered in the primer.) It's great for fiddling with, to get an idea what's going on when you flip those IP numbers. Great companion tool to have while you're reading the primer.

Posted at 4:11AM UTC | permalink

Wed 20 Dec 2006

"Attack-Neutered Mutant Zombies"

Category : Commentary/zombies.txt

I found this while researching the literature (if you can call that literature) on computer security : "The Strange Tale of the Denial of Service Attacks Against GRC.com".

I guess it's Shakespearen in its re-telling of the age-old struggle between the forces of good against evil, and about tragedy and hubris.

I've developed a healthy respect (and fear) of the carnage that the zombies and evilbots can wrought. I now want to know everything that can be learnt about this field.

Here's another useful article I want to bookmark: "Trends in Denial of Service Attack Technology" - CERT Coordination Center.

Posted at 3:47PM UTC | permalink