scott.hodson.blog

Back in October I ordered a new Studio XPS 16 notebook, with a Intel Core i7 chip and Windows 7 x64. I was a bit bummed though because my estimated delivery was Nov 11th, almost a whole month out, but i decided it’d be worth it.

A day or so later decided I wanted the 16″ RGB LED screen instead of a 15.6″ WLED screen because while you can always upgrade RAM and HDD, you can’t upgrade your screen so I decided to pay a little more to get the better screen. But Dell can’t change an order, they can only cancel your order and create a new order. The problem was that it put back at the end of the line, and it pushed my delivery date another 4-5 days. GRR….

So while I’m waiting I get a new desktop for my wife. Her trusty Core 2 Duo, XP machine (also a Dell Inspiron) is almost 3yrs old and has gotten a bit slow. So I order a nice XPS desktop for her, Win7 x64, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 1GB video card, great box. Dell ships it and we get it a week later.

Meanwhile, still waiting for MY laptop, I get an email from Dell: “We’re sorry, we had a problem with our back-end systems, we had to cancel your order and place a new order in its place. Your new delivery is December 18th”. AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

Then, last night, I log into Dell.com to check on the status of the order and sure enough this 3rd order has now been canceled, no reason given, no notification sent to me, no new delivery date, nothing at all.

I know HP has Core i7 notebooks out but I’m not sure I like the models they have. However, with the way Dell has been treating me I think I have no choice but to look elsewhere. This has been an aweful experience. Meanwhile, the Dell Inspiron E1505 which I’ve been using for over 3 years now, day in and day out, has gotten slow (Windows rot), has cracks in the corners, and just recently the Alt key to the left of the space bar has broken off. I realllllly need a new laptop guys.

I think the recent announcement of Google Ventures prompted unwarranted negative responses in the blogosphere. To many, this seemed like a distraction from their core business. However, Google is starting to see a flight of top talent leave. As their stock options have reached their 4+ years of vesting many want to take their new fortunes and create their own Googly startup. Google realizes one of their advantages has always been their ability to attract the best talent in the world to come and work for them. There is another company that the top talent in the world used to want to work for: Microsoft. And we’ve seen their brain drain, mostly to the benefit of Google.

As Google matures and moves more into status-quo corporation mode, it’s good to put some money aside to invest in some of these startups being created by Google alumni. Of course, we’ll see how much money they actually invest. Saying they’ve set aside $100M (an amazingly nice, large, round number) doesn’t mean the money will actually be invested. So we’ll have to wait and see where they place these funds, if at all.

I came across this review on the Apple site. Scary!

I’m pretty impressed with the new Google Chrome browser. While it seems to perform fast, like Safari (also based on WebKit), my favorite feature so far is the “View Source” UI. Hitting Ctrl-U (same hotkey as Firefox) to view a page’s HTML source brings in up in a separate tab (not a separate window or Notepad (blech IE)) and included really nice color-coded HTML, validates, and external resources (CSS, images, JS files, etc) are hyperlinked so you can click on them to view them.

Also, I like how the integrated search works. You can press Ctrl-K (same hotkey as Firefox) or you can just press “?” in the address bar and enter your search terms and it will perform a search on your default search engine.

The mutli-process architecture is also very impressive and takes the approach of an operating system, making the browser more stable with multiple tabs, each running plugins or other embedded content simultaneously running in its own process outside of the browser.

As the rollout of the 3G iPhone continues its wide distribution, it seems people can’t get enough of the apps on the iTunes AppStore. Many of the apps are free, and most of those that are not free cost less than $5. These small-priced apps are interesting, because at that price-point they are akin to ringtones, which people have spent billions of dollars on over the years. This offers an exciting opportunity to developers to sell very low-priced apps that can sell in huge volumes. And because the distribution of the apps are centralized (iTunes) and they can install over-the-air without being connected to a Mac or PC there is much less friction for buyers to get their hands on these. I think the iPhone and iPod Touch platform is a very exciting opportunity for small, independent developers.

As part of my job I visit a lot of client sites throughout the week, frequently connecting my laptop(s) to various LANs. I also work on my home network and various WiFi hotsports. Needless to say, I’m attaching and detaching to a lot of networks throughout the week. In fact I’m typing this from a Starbucks in Orange, California, USA.

More and more networks are blocking port 25 (SMTP) to prevent spam from being sent from their network. As an Outlook user that makes my life difficult because, unlike Apple’s Mail.app, which can automatically work with multiple SMTP settings, each email account is mapped to one single set of SMTP server settings at a time, and when I switch networks I have to go in and manually make changes in about 3 different screens per account. I usually have to do this 3-5 times a day and it’s a hassle.

I’ve considered for some time to switching my email to be hosted by Google Apps, and I’m still leaning that way, mainly for spam filtering. However one other main reason is that I’d have one SMTP server that doesn’t run on port 25, so my SMTP traffic won’t be blocked (assuming they don’t block Gmail’s port 587). Also, Gmail’s SMTP servers uses TLS for encrypting outgoing messages, so network nodes between me and Gmail can’t read my outgoing email. Well, in a short-term fix to this problem I just set up my Outlook to use Gmail as an SMTP server, but kept my POP settings the same.

Just follow these instructions for configuring POP with Outlook 2007 but ignore the POP settings and just setup the SMTP settings using your Gmail account. It’s working fine for me now!

A server that had some MySQL datases (including the one for this blog) on it became unbootable after performing some Windows Updates, so I had to migrate everything to another server. When I went to get the mysqldump’s of the databases a few of the database dumps were blank for some reason. I’ll have to figure out why later. So now I had no backup when I thought I did.

Luckily, I figured out how to pull the raw data files MySQL uses and was able to restore the databases using the native DB files. Here are the steps I took. This was a MySQL 4.1 server.

1. Each DB is stored in a folder in the “data” folder where MySQL Server runs.
2. Copy the folders of the databases you want to store to another location
3. Since the server I wanted to migrate to was running MySQL 5.0 and not 4.1, to get access to my data I had to install an instance of MySQL 4.1 on another machine, stop the MySQL service, then copy the data folders of my databases to this other 4.1 server’s data folder. Then restart the MySQL server.
4. Then, with the databases back online, I attempted to perform a mysqldump, but I got errors that the “.cnf” on some of the tables were not available. Then I tried doing a backup from the MySQL Administrator GUI tool and got a similar error message when it showed the list of tables. The tables that didn’t have errors were MyISAM tables, and the ones that did have errors were InnoDB tables. From the MySQL website about MyISAM Table Storage:
   

   Each MyISAM table is stored on disk in three files. The files have names that begin with the table name and have an extension to indicate the file type. An .frm file stores the table format. The data file has an .MYD (MYData) extension. The index file has an .MYI (MYIndex) extension.

   These three files for each table are stored in the database folders that we copied. The reason some of the other tables were not working was that InnoDB tables are stored differently. Again, from the MySQL website about InnoDB Table Storage:

   If you specify no InnoDB configuration options, MySQL creates an auto-extending 10MB data file named ibdata1 and two 5MB log files named ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 in the MySQL data directory. To get good performance, you should explicitly provide InnoDB parameters as discussed in the following examples. Naturally, you should edit the settings to suit your hardware and requirements.

5. These InnoDB data and log files are stored in the root of the MySQL data folder and I was getting the errors because I had not copied those over as well. The new machine that has 4.1 on it already had these files but I didn’t care since I didn’t have anything important on that server’s databases so I just deleted the new server’s InnoDB files and replaced them with the ones from the server that I was trying to recover.
6. When I started the server with these updated InnoDB files I got another error, something about the file length not matching the correct file length. So I just deleted the log files and left the ibdata1 file there by itself. When I restarted the server hat state t came up fine. I quickly did a mysqldump of these databases then restored the dumps onto the server running MySQL 5.0 and I was back up and running

Now I need to figure out why the dumps weren’t executing properly in the first place, which caused me to go through all of this. This teaches an important lesson that I already knew: practice disaster recovery so when a disaster actually hits you’re sure that you have the knowledge, data and files that you need in the correct state that you need them in. If I had practiced recovering from a server crash and tried restoring my databases from my backups I would have noticed that some of the databases weren’t creating good MySQL dumps and I could have prevented myself from doing a MySQL restore without good .sql dumps.

I recently received a phone bill of more than $300 on my fax line the other day. The fax line number is a Cox Telephone number. The reason the bill was so high was that there were several strange calls to Asia (South Korea, Singapore, and Japan). I never call anyone in Asia, and the only device attached to the line is a fax machine. I thought maybe my kids were pushing buttons on the fax machine but the calls were too late at night for them to be playing with it.

After calling Cox and complaining about these calls they kept trying to upsell some international dialing plan. They didn’t believe me that I didn’t make these calls! I finally got them to submit a refund request and turned off all international dialing capabilities for that phone line.

Recently, I received a letter denying my request for a refund, stating that their switch showed that the calls originated from my line. I still have no idea how that’s possible. I’m certain it’s a bug or someone hacked into their phone network to make these calls against my account.

If you have Cox Telephone service, keep an eye on your long distance calls because their phone network or billing system is incorrect and/or vulnerable to hackers using their network at your expense.

So I think the MacBook Air will be a flop. It is the same size (screen-wise) as a MacBook, has less horsepower (slower CPU, slower and smaller hard drives, etc), fewer connectivity options, and it costs more. And for what? Just to be thinner and have the latest, coolest looking one? It’s a CEO, show-off send email, process docs, etc, laptop that’ll turn some heads next time he’s in the First Class cabin of his LA to NYC flight, not a mobile knowledge worker productivity workhorse. I guess students will like it too for coolness as well to write their papers on.

I guess if you don’t mind trying to get important stuff done at a slower speed, but at least you’re looking sexy doing it, and don’t mind paying more money for it then it’s for you!

I think eventually this will replace the MacBook and then it won’t matter: if you need a notebook that cranks speed-wise then you’ll get a MacBook Pro.

I’m all for ditching the optical drive though, not needed 99% of the time. I think we’ll see a thinner MacBook Pro sometime this year as well.

P.S. Don’t laugh at me or call me a hypocrite if you see me strutting around with one of these at some point.

Here’s a comparison of similar small notebooks from other vendors, compared to the MacBook Air

On OS X 10.4.11 (no leopard yet!) when I try to install the mysql gem I get an error, something about native bindings.

ScottBook:~ root# gem update mysql
Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Attempting remote update of mysql
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb update mysql
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lm... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lz... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lsocket... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lnsl... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.
Provided configuration options:
--with-opt-dir
--without-opt-dir
--with-opt-include
--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
--with-opt-lib
--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
--with-make-prog
--without-make-prog
--srcdir=.
--curdir
--ruby=/usr/local/bin/ruby
--with-mysql-config
--without-mysql-config
--with-mysql-dir
--without-mysql-dir
--with-mysql-include
--without-mysql-include=${mysql-dir}/include
--with-mysql-lib
--without-mysql-lib=${mysql-dir}/lib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-mlib
--without-mlib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-zlib
--without-zlib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-socketlib
--without-socketlib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-nsllib
--without-nsllib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/gem_make.out

This should fix it (and yes after the first “–” there is another “–” preceeding the “/usr/local…” path).

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config


References:

• http://hivelogic.com/articles/ruby_rails_lighttpd_mysql_tiger/
• http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/133380