I used to be in love with TekSavvy. I recommended the thing to anyone looking to escape the clutches of Bell Canada. Their plans were awesome, their service rocked my world, the lack of bandwidth restrictions made my geek heart do the happy dance. And on the rare occasion I had to deal with tech support, which wasn’t very often or for very long, they were rock solid beyond anything. I delt with their other departments only a tiny little handful of times, but even those were mostly all aces. The love afair ended a week and a half ago.

I’ve recently taken in a roommate. The afore mentioned roommate also used to come with TekSavvy. We’d planned to keep both services running, and attempt to combine them in such a way that internet speeds would go from borderline awesome to wicked awesome in 3 seconds flat. We called at the beginning of November, roughly, shortly after we’d escentially decided to give this whole roommate thing a try. It went back and forth between yes we can and no we can’t, and some very odd and less than amusing combinations of the two. We spoke each to several different people when we got our hands on these interesting combinations.

One thing lead to another, we wound up bouncing to the manager queue. Or rather, we thought we were bouncing to the manager queue–more on that later. Finally, we were getting something vaguely resembling consistency. We got sent to Elizabeth, who told us she was a supervisor in the sales department. Suddenly, we saw things get cleared up, straightened out, and appropriately beaten into submission. Bell got told they’d be doing what we wanted, when we wanted, and not to ask questions. We were ready to go, and all we had to do was show up on the day of the changeover. Except no, not really.

About four days before the day services were supposed to be switched over, and the day before Shane was due to jump a bus up this way, I wake up to a message on the answering machine. This message, from Alexandra, escentially undid what we’d just gotten everything but written confirmation was going to happen. Naturally, it involved a callback. And that’s when things got a little more interesting.

Apparently, not only was Bell not, as we were previously told, going to do what we wanted–on account of this was to do with an install that has nothing to do with any of Bell’s services, but for the last two weeks before this, we hadn’t, in fact, been speaking to a supervisor in the sales department. I still don’t think we were speaking to anyone managerial when we got the callback, though she claimed to be more senior than Elizabeth–whatever the hell that means. Needless to say, we were significantly less than enthusiastic to be having that conversation. We promptly canceled both our services right there in favour of Primus, who I’ve had dealings with before and left because I had a better offer.

Apparently we’re not alone on the list of folks who’ve run up against the Elizabeth issue. She’s told at least one other customer she was a manager as well, and made claims similar to that which she made to us–this customer has also, since, been corrected by someone else, including on Elizabeth’s managerial status. While I can’t say whether or not that customer’s contemplating the big switch, but it’s acts like this that ended up turning what I saw as an absolutely perfect service into something from which I wanted to run, quickly, in the opposite direction.

So long, TekSavvy. It’s been fun. In this case, you can thank your own customer service folks for the bad taste in my mouth. I do. And as of tomorrow, I won’t even have that.

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Sometime last week, a University of Ottawa student wound up needing to replace her iPhone. Someone decided she didn’t really need the one she had, so offered–rather forcefully–to take it off her hands. Two things make it headline worthy, according to 1310 news–one of which is untrue. The girl in question was blind–and, if it’s who I’m thinking of, I actually used to know her, and less accurately, the iPhone was incorrectly labeled as being specially designed for her with text to speech software in place. As much as I disagree with apple on several hundred levels, I do have to say they’ve at least done that right–the same text to speech software is available in every iPhone sold, at least in the last year or so. This particular one just so happened to have it enabled. That’s what made it extremely easy, once they decided to do it, for three Rogers employees to replace the phone. Had the technology she was using been specially designed for her use, the story probably wouldn’t have had the ending it did. Now if every news article could end kinda like these ones here, special needs included or otherwise.

Related: If this person’s the same one I’m thinking of, I kinda wondered what happened to her. Now, I know. Thanks, 1310, for that if nothing else.

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This is kinda nifty. Scientists apparently may have just found a way to contain antimatter. For the trekkies among the readership, you already get the references. For everyone else, have this as an explanation.

“This is science fiction become science fact,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

Antimatter is one of the mysteries of science.

Matter is essentially anything that has mass and occupies space — basically everything on Earth.

It’s believed matter and antimatter are identical, except that they have an opposite charge and antimatter destroys itself almost immediately.

Now that they can see antimatter, scientists might be able to answer some of the questions about any differences between the two.

Pavan said the amazing device may give some insight into what happened after the Big Bang created the universe.

The wicked that adds to the nifty? All the scientists involved are Canadian–from BC and Alberta, to be absolutely precise. I feel kinda special now. See? And they say you never learn anything from TV.

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Every so often, something will come along that threatens to kill email. And nearly as often, that ends up dying instead. And now, as of yesterday, Facebook has its own answer to email–and it’s even being advertised as something to give Gmail, Microsoft etc a run for their money. Before you start thinking that sounds vaguely familiar, read this.

Google tried its own email killer, only it was also supposed to take out Facebook. It fell over dead. Now, Facebook’s coming out with its own supposed email killer, aiming at Google–among others. Just one problem. Nearly as many people don’t use Facebook as didn’t use Google Wave. And at the moment, it’s not looking a whole lot like their new messaging platform is going to do entirely too much to draw in more usage. So I have to wonder if email will only be dead if you’re on facebook and/or care enough to switch. Since I don’t, and since my resistance of the service is kind of still there, I’m going out on a limb and making a prediction. Email is dead. Unless you’re not on Facebook. But then you probably don’t care.

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Sadly, Microsoft doesn’t see the user account control system as a bug. Sigh. Still, having done tech support for Vista, and then set up and rather extensively either used or seen used the system afterwards, if that’s the only thing I have to complain about–and so far, it is–it can’t be too terribly annoying. Particularly considering I’ve already found the off switch. I’ll take it. Now, if Microsoft wouldn’t mind too terribly not breaking what, at least for right now, is a pretty damn good Windows experience, that’d be really super extremely awesome. Since it’s Microsoft, and it’s Windows, and we all know both their histories, I’ll go ahead and start queuing up technically related rants. In the meantime, this is making me want to upgrade *my* machine. That… could get problematic.

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I came back to the parents’ place for the week, and to a computer who’s video card is still pretty well toast. They lack the financial room to get a new one, so in place of that, dad’s leaving his laptop here for the week. That meant setting it up so mom could check her email. Not too difficult for someone like me, you’d think, but Bell has decided to break email.

To start, they use Hotmail to manage customers’ mail, which kind of presents it’s own crazy fun times. When they set it up, though, they took fail to a new level. I’m not exactly technically challenged, and I still had to work my head around the brokenness. If they were setting it up themselves, the booze supply would be a whole crap ton lower. Short and simple: I despise Bell. I despise Hotmail. And right now, I wouldn’t mind taking a clue to both. Now where’s that booze?

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Every so often, I’ll consider finding some new and creative way to install Gentoo, my Linux distribution of choice. And sometimes, I’ll do it in such a way that it actually doesn’t blow up in my face. I’ve been trying to convince Shane to give it a try, but he hasn’t got an extra machine he can clean out and turn into a test platform. What he did have, though, was an instalation of VMWare and lots of free time on his hands. So it was high past time to shove an OS inside an OS.

The actual instalation process, for the most part, wasn’t a whole lot different from the steps I followed to install it on the laptop. But there were a few subtle differences in what was required. And naturally, they were just tricky enough that the easiest way to implement those differences was to blow the instalation away and start over. So we did, probably two or three times. On the third try, we managed to actually get the thing mostly up and running. By this point, we were very nearly on easy street. So I decided to do the exact same thing locally.

My install required a little bit more creativity, mostly because I was also using it as an excuse at guessing which VM settings would play a little bit nicer with our instalations. I got mine up and running on the fourth try, or thereabouts, and threw the modified settings at the first attempt at a Gentoo install. Now, with both machines up and running and not threatening to explode, we could play.

Shane’s heavily into the whole beta testing thing, so we went on a dependancy hunt to trick out his install with the requirements for at least one game he’s been testing. Then, we threw Gnome at it, and while that took its time installing, we threw a small party. The new and exciting part of all this was over by now–virtual Gentoo plays just as nicely as nonvirtual Gentoo, post-install. So now comes breakage.

I had no idea exactly how hard Gentoo, even in a VM, was to break. Or how easy it was to fix when it did. We’d try this or that nifty little trick, compile something, and watch it fall over. And in about 10 minutes at best, we had the why, the when, the how, and a fix was on its way down. The two things we didn’t intentionally break are apparently fairly common, or at least, simplistic issues–apparently, kernel 2.6.36 is still way, way too knew. As in things that depend on the kernel sources being installed–hello, NVidia drivers–fail quite fantastically at the compile stage. Same with the latest current stable version of Speakup, which escentially meant if we wanted the instalation to talk at us, we weren’t about to be using that kernel version. There’s apparently such thing as *too* bleeding edge. Who knew?

Another potentially kernel-related almost failure isn’t actually what I’d call breakage, but it is kind of annoying–and equally not either of our falt, lucky for us. This is the more common/known/widely experienced issue–when you run certain commands from the console or a remote session, it throws an “Unknown HZ Value!” error. It doesn’t actually break, and I’m assuming the results you get from that command are what you’d expect to get, but the error, or notice if you’d rather, regularly makes an appearance. We traced the problem to Procps, a utility package that contains several system monitoring programs among other things. I was about ready to report it, then saw it was already taken care of–hence the more widely experienced/common-ness of this annoyance. This is not something I’ll be fixing any time soon, but the activity so far as this bug report shows indicates people far more experienced than me with Gentoo, kernel tweeking and all the fun crap that goes with have it well in hand. Or at least are faking it very well. So now, we just sit back and see what else decides to implode.

The install actually went a little easier than I was hoping, if only because hey, I needed an excuse to break things on a more permanent basis. But, oh well. The OS works, on both machines, and any lingering loose ends we can safely reject any and all responsibility for. For my next trick, I’d like to see if I can install MacOS on the VM. I’d be interested in seeing how badly that breaks. In the meantime, time to go play fix the video card. Thank god for caffeine.

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Almost ironically, on perhaps the spookiest day of the year, the computer here at the parents’ place has decided to be on life support. After about half an hour of poking around with its software workings, I’ve come to one of two theories on just how borked the system actually is. Either the thing’s video card has died, or Windows forgot it had one. In either event, I get to turn the cell phone, in all its questionable reception glory, into a poor man’s netbook. Nifty, in an oh crap kind of way. I’ll go into more detail why I’m here once I have access to a proper keyboard, but for the next week, I get to either fix or kill the frankenputer. Hey, at least if HTML didn’t break, you’ll still see hockey posts. And whatever amuses me. Now, to go see if I can’t bring the frankenputer back from the dead.

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Remember when the iPad first came out, and there was all this talk of it escentially being the future of personal computers? Ever since then, and even before then, I’ve maintained a theory that a lot of what you’d see on the iPhone would find its way onto the Mac before too long. In my massive review of the iPad, I voiced some disagreement with Apple’s philosophy about what you should and shouldn’t be permitted to do with or install on their devices. In short, I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s app store, and in fact have sworn off buying an iPhone, iPad or iWhatever largely because of that. Well, plus the fact they’ve developed an alergy to the built-in keyboard but that’s neither here nor there. And, sure enough, the next version of Mac OS, to be released sometime in the summer of 2011, is said to include it’s very own app store. More details have been released throughout the day, which pretty much amount to the same thing you see on the iPhone/Pad making it into the next itteration of Mac OS.

Roughly translated, starting in the next version of Mac OS, you may be required to jailbreak your Mac before you can do anything with it that Apple doesn’t directly approve of–like, for instance, that whole fiasco re: Google Voice not being welcome on the iPhone for a few forevers. Or the relatively minor little issue of Apple deciding flash doesn’t belong on its platform.

Starting with the next version of Mac OS, you’ll more than likely be seeing the same restrictions placed on it that you do on your iPad. You may have bought the hardware, but you’ll still need Apple’s permission to do anything with it. In short, I called it. You escentially rent the iPad, and you’ll soon be renting your Mac to go with it. Welcome to the future, folks.

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I pride myself on being a geek. A very patient geek, even. But even still, the more I read about CPanel, the more I grew to hate it. And then, I got a chance to indirectly work with it. Now, I’ve come to despise it with the passion of a hundred thousand suns.

I started out helping Shane throw together some kind of a fix for a problem he was having with his WordPress installs. Or rather, several small problems that, when lumped together, became one very hugely gigantic ball of oh my god what the hell am I doing. That was well over 3 hours ago. From there, we ended up blowing away the WordPress install, trying our damnedest to get it to reinstall, banging our heads against Apache and Suexec, and generally coming this close to screaming. My poking at Suexec config files, at least those I could find in that not so cleverly disorganized mess CPanel calls a directory structure, told me it should be working the way it’s supposed to. But when WordPress went to do something as simple as generate a config file, it crapped out with permission errors. Okay, this wasn’t how I invisioned spending an evening, but hey, what the hell else was I gonna do?

So I poked around some more, and discovered when CPanel installs Apache by default, it compiles things in a not very Suexec-friendly way. And convincing it to recompile, as I learned tonight, in such a way that it would actually do what we want without puking all over the place first, well, it wasn’t about to happen instantly. Apparently, something within CPanel tells it it’s alright to slap a random file in /etc to prevent Apache from actually being shut down, even in situations wherein it needs to be shut down–such as, for instance, to be recompiled. Finding that file, then finding out what it’s doing there, then finding out if just plain ripping it out would break anything, took a bit of digging. Then, after much hair pulling with both the web and command line interfaces to CPanel, we eventually, finally, managed somehow to explain what it is we were trying to do. Getting to that point, of course, just had to involve a tech support person from the hosting company who wasn’t a whole lot more clued in than we were–par for the course when you’re us. So we decided to take a random shot in the dark and rip out that file, then try desperately to convince CPanel that yes, it was perfectly alright to do what we’re asking it to do.

After about 2.5 hours of screwing with it, we finally have CPanel singing the right tune. It does its thing, eventually recompiling both apache and PHP to build in support for what we want to do–PHP as CGI through Suexec. Great, so now we just pray to god it works. By this time, my brain is pretty much sawdust, and we still have the initial issue I was trying to fix before all this to work out. Craptacular. So we get to doing that, and thank the freaking gods that goes through without a problem–now that we managed to exhaust just about everything we had access to to get to that point.

At the end of all this, I’ve come to a very important–well, to me, anyway–decision. If ever I find myself in a situation where I’m forced to use CPanel, I will not walk, but run terrifiedly screaming in the exact opposite direction as though this guy was after me. Faster, even, as I swear that thing is the software reincarnation of Satan. If you’re even remotely technical, at all, stay the hell away from CPanel. You *will* lose years off your life. And develop a strange craving for alcohol. Speaking of, where’d I put mine?

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A Meaford, Ontario school is the latest to give into the idea that wireless internet offered in schools is the cause of kids not concentrating or coming up with headaches during the week. As a result, they’ve decided to pull the plug.

Parents of students at St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school voted “overwhelmingly” to cut off the Wi-Fi, according to a statement released by the school’s parent council Monday.

“Parents voted to protect their children’s health and plug the computers back in with hardwires,” council member Andrew Couper said in the statement.

Wi-Fi “is something every school council across Canada should be questioning,” Couper said.

St. Vincent Euphrasia is one of a handful of schools to look into a Wi-Fi ban in recent months over fears it’s making students sick.

A group of Ontario parents dubbed the Simcoe County Safe School Committee believes Wi-Fi transmitters in schools may be responsible for a host of symptoms their kids show — from headaches to an inability to concentrate — all of which disappear on weekends.

Gee, I’ve developped a headache or two during the week in my time, and we didn’t have wi-fi in the schools back then. Added to that, nowadays the school isn’t the only–or, indeed, in some cases first–place to get itself wi-fi ready. If you have internet service, especially lately, you’ve probably got a wi-fi transmitter. If you don’t, your neighbour probably does. Or the coffee shop you swing past on your way to work. And yet, on weekends, these kids don’t display those particular symptoms. And that’s somehow the school’s fault because–oh nos, these parents don’t get this newfangled wi-fi thing. Really? Well damn, I’d love to be a kid again with things like this. Play sick from school and have mommy blame the school. Suddenly, I feel a headache coming on. I don’t think I can look for work today.

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We were talking at some small length about the possibility of this happening over dinner tonight, and then I come home to find this article in my feed reader–Google’s been experimenting with self-driving cars. There was a theory being tossed about at the table tonight that even if vehicles like this were to actually see common use, there’d probably be some version of regulation in place that says the driver (DO they even call them drivers if the car mostly drives itself?) would have to be able to assume manual control in an emergency. The article seems to confirm that, as Google was quick to point out there were always two people in the test vehicles at all times–one to assume control if need be, the other to make sure the software did what it was supposed to. Still, the fact this is being tossed about is rather kind of nifty. Even if that still very likely doesn’t mean I’ll actually be getting behind the wheel of one of those any time soon. And, bonus, they’re already drawing comparisons between this and the “Night Rider” series. It pays to read a bunch of geek blogs.

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And they’ve announced it without biting one another’s heads off. have I stepped into an alternate universe? Apparently, they’re both in the starter stages of trying out LTE on their cell networks. For serious. LTE, also known as Long Term Evolution, in Canada? Potentially 100 mbit/sec download speeds–on your freaking cell phone? And just when I actually sort of almost got caught up with current tech trends. Oh, and hey look, we’re actually playing around with something the US hasn’t already had for 5-10 years–Verizon’s only just now rolling theirs out. Yeah, this must be one of those alternate universe things. Now let’s see if in a year I can actually use any of the phones that are supposed to run on this network. But hey, the prospect is kind of halfway to nifty. I think I’ll hang onto that.

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Warning: this is a blindness tech related entry. You may read if you wish, or you may not. It’s here either way.

KNFB is usually pretty well known within the blindness community for software, usually for your cell phone, that’s actually useable by folks who can’t see. So you’d think, when they team up with someone who’s got a bit of experience with similar software only for the computer, they’d come out with an accessible solution, right? If you said yes, give your head a shake then keep reading.

Their new e-reading software, available today for the PC and being called Blio, is branded as an accessible reading solution for the disabled. Except for the part where it isn’t. In their defense, they say there’s one coming. In our defense, I say so’s Christmas. Any bets on which one gets here sooner? Now, granted, even if it was accessible I’d very likely not use it–I rarely listen to audiobooks, nevermind the e-variety. But still, if your bread and butter is accessibility, you may not want to flub off on that. Not if you happen to have any sense of self-preservation, anyway.

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I haven’t been an AOL fan since ever. Mostly because everything they touch has a nasty habbit of turning to shit. Well, except for ICQ–that was already there. And now, technology blog TechCrunch has just fallen under their influence. I’m resisting the urge right now to just stop reading cold so I’m not disappointed, but I may quite possibly maybe regret that.

Attention TechCrunch. Please stay away from sucking. That would be awesome. Thanks.

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I’ve always maintained one of my chief reasons for not buying an iPhone, aside from the walled garden that is Apple, is its lack of a physical keyboard. I’m not a fan of carrying any more than I absolutely have to–this includes such things as an extra keyboard for the sole purpose of not wanting to throw my phone across the room in frustration. So I’ve been staying as far away from anything potentially iPhone related as I possibly can to avoid such episodes of frustration. I’ve been doing pretty good at it too, dammit. Then along comes ThinkGeek, with an iPhone case that includes a bluetooth keyboard. No more carrying around extra pieces of hardware. No more major excuses for not buying an iPhone–well, except the whole walled garden thing but I can possibly be convinced to overlook that. And no actual money for iPhone or case. Damn you, ThinkGeek. This is exactly not the kind of subliminal messaging I need.

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Remember that Wii I predicted wouldn’t get much use, on account of neither of my parents are really that much into the whole gaming scene? And, since unless you’ve achieved uber geek status, not being a gamer probably demotes the Wii from gaming system to glorified PC with a TV hook-up? Yeah, I think I’m brave enough to say I was wrong. I actually found them a use for it that doesn’t involve Facebook from the sofa. Like, say, Netflix from the sofa. Yeah, I know–I haven’t decided yet if I’m keeping mine, and I’ve already pointed them at it. They watch a crap ton of movies–way more than I do, even when I do have company. And there’s at least one TV series available that was being eyed up quite nicely by my father, so it balances out.

Since I already have an account on there, while I was over there for supper anyway I took advantage of the frankenputer to show them the ropes. They even took a look at actually playing a movie while I was there–and, surprisingly, had nothing bad to say about what they saw. High praise from a couple who rarely meets a piece of technology they don’t curse at. And I thought that was strictly reserved for geek culture–clearly, I was misinformed. They aren’t overly huge fans of the fact if they want to actually use it on the Wii, they need to order the disk from Netflix. Then again, neither was I upon discovering this fact but that’s Nintendo for you. Still, considering it beats the royal hell out of what Shaw Direct so far as on-demand stuff goes, I don’t think they’re about to pitch too huge a fit. So yeah, I can admit to being proven wrong. And hey, you don’t see me complaining.

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So, remember that long ass time ago, when I brought up the fact that Canada was getting its hands on Netflix? Well, they did, and it’s not altogether entirely bad. It helps their case that Canadian customers get a month free to play around with it–something I’ll be taking advantage of rather fully, if you ask me. I look at this from a typical user’s perspective, and a visually impaired person’s perspective. Fortunately, for the most part they come out–in my view, anyway–as a lot of the same thing, so I won’t bother separating the two.

My test movie, after some searching, was Lost in Space (1998). They didn’t have quite a few of the things I’d of prefered to test instead of that–a point against Netflix as a whole, from what I hear, as the American users tend to have the same problem according to sources. What I did notice however was right off the bat, the user interface–at least on the part of their website–is easy to navigate, visually impaired or not. The layout seems simplistic enough. Things are generally where I’d expect them, and you don’t typically have to click more than 3 times to get somewhere. The critical stuff’s two at most–a plus, for sure.

From an actual movie playing perspective, it gets even simpler. Sound quality comes off as TV quality at worst, DVD quality at best–I don’t have the world’s greatest ear for the finer details, plus my speaker system’s a little higher end–your milage may vary. Volume seemed to be acceptably set by default on Windows, though twitter reports from at least one Mac user that isn’t necessarily the case–again, your milage may vary. I do like that if you close the browser or otherwise get the royal boot, it picks up where you left off. Can’t argue with that particular feature much.

They use Microsoft’s silverlight player, which I’m told isn’t world’s greatest to use for sighted people, nevermind the visually impaired. But, even that having been said, it’s not completely useless to either. If you’re in a pinch, or the visual options just don’t do it for you, they have some pretty sensible keyboard shortcuts, which should work whether or not you can see the screen–they worked for me, anyway.

Added to that, as said you get a month free to play around with it, and the subscription’s only $7/month after that. It lets you stream movies/TV shows to any device that supports it, though you can’t rent the DVD’s like you can in the US. Considering I don’t exercise the most legal means of obtaining my local copies of certain media, I didn’t see that as weight either direction on the scale. The site, player and all, responds quickly enough for my taste, and if I had some other device with which to play, I might be inclined to see what I can make it do.

All told, for $7, I might consider sticking with it. If only because it’s another option for movies to watch when Jess and I are sitting around the living room and don’t feel like channel surfing. I might stick it out. What would make me lean more towards sticking it out is a bit more of a selection. Most of the searches I ran came up not available. For a monthly payment, even if it is just $7, I kind of expect a little better than that. Still, they just opened, so I’m willing to give them a chance. Getting more of the movies I’d want to see, though, wouldn’t hurt its case any. In the meantime, thanks for the free month, Netflix. I just might have too much fun.

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Microsoft’s been on a “let’s find reasons to kill off XP” kick since the advent of Vista, let’s just get that out in the open right now. If Vista wasn’t a hugely steaming pile of crap, they would have probably done away with XP long before now. But, it was, and they didn’t. So now they’re coming up with new and some might argue better reasons for folks to not use XP. Like, say, Windows 7–which I’m told is supposed to have all of Vista’s cool and none, or at least less, of Vista’s suck. And XP service pack 3, which kind of lead to their dropping support for anything running an older XP version. And now their latest torpedo aimed at the USS XP. It’d been tossed out there as an unofficial rumor, but it’s since been confirmed. The newest version of Internet Explorer doesn’t like XP. And was probably designed that way.

Now, the million dollar question–is that a good thing? For someone like me, who’s machine was only purchased about 2 years ago now, I’d have to say yes. If only because it was originally clocked to be able to run Vista–it shipped with Vista on it already, not that vista *stayed* on it–and can therefore, by its very nature, more than likely support 7 and not break a sweat. But for someone who’s only machine is kissing 10 years old because that’s about all the computer they can aford, that might not be quite so positive. Even in this day and age, there’s a hell of a lot of people out there who swear by IE and very little else. Personally, I use it only because most of the things I do don’t work very well in firefox, and that’s only going to become more apparent if I land one of the two jobs I’m staring at.

So, pretty much, unless you’re in my technological situation, you’re going to be faced with a simple choice. You can buy a computer that can support Windows 7, then upgrade to Windows 7, or use Firefox. I’m going to put my recommendation behind Firefox. Now, to go find me a job so I can work on converting them to same. Blog ya later.

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Or, rather, it’s evil, but perhaps it’s less evil than certain alternatives out there. In this case, surprisingly, Google’s answer to Apple’s success–Android. It’s being advertised as being probably the most open system currently available, but there’s an article being floated now that tries to question that. Oddly enough, the article makes sense. Android may be the most open system available, or at least more open than Apple’s, but it’s just open enough that the individual carriers may decide to lock it down on their own. From the article:

Case in point: the last couple of Android phones I’ve gotten as demo units from Google: the EVO 4G and the Droid 2, have been loaded up with crapware installed by the carriers (Sprint and Verizon, respectively). Apple would never let this fly on the iPhone, but the openness of Android means Google has basically no say in the matter. Consumers will get the crapware and they’ll like it. Not only that, plenty of this junk can’t even be uninstalled. How’s that for “open”?

It gets better, too–carriers have just enough maneuvering room to close it off on their own, and in their own way.

And it’s not just Verizon, it’s all the carriers. One of the great features of Android is that you can install apps without going through an app store, right? Well, not if you have an a Motorola Backflip or a HTC Aria running on AT&T — they’ve locked this feature down. How? Thanks to the open Android OS.

Oh, and how about tethering? It’s one of the truly great features of Android 2.2, right? Well, not if you have a carrier that doesn’t want to support it.

Google has to defer to them to enable their own native OS feature. It’s such an awesome feature — in the hands of Google. Once the carriers get their hands on it — not so much.

On the one hand, you’ve got Apple telling you what you’re allowed or not to put on or do with your phone. On the other hand, you’ve got the carrier telling you what you’re allowed to put on or do with your phone. And telling Google what it’s allowed to put on the phone it manufactures.

There are a few more examples in the article–skype, anyone? But you get the idea. Between the two, if I was force to pick, I’d have to say maybe Apple isn’t quite so evil. And now I go thank my lucky stars I’m not actually forced to pick.

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In the days of Windows and only Windows, the usual routine was find a bug, hit report a problem, kick back and maybe someone would get around to eventually, if you asked really really nice and forked over a hundred, maybe possibly fixing it. If they weren’t busy sucking back a beer or something. There was no real two-way exchange of information, per say–they either fixed it and you didn’t know about it until later, or they ignored it and you didn’t know about it until later if at all. Flash forward to the last week or so.

As I make no secret of, I power this site on WordPress plus about 20 wickedly handy plugins to take care of everything from statistics to adjusting things so folks who come across a 4-year-old link that no longer works can still find the entry they’re looking for at its new location. It was that latter redirect plugin that decided at one point to give me issues. For the record and those curious, if you want something similar for your own site the plugin is Smart 404, and it only works–to my knowledge, anyway–on WordPress. Now, before my year or two of experimenting with that other blogging platform, I had this site running under a different piece of software. That piece of software, still in development, took care of my needs back then with the exception of the whole comment spam thing–but the way it handled links in general was just different enough that when I set this up, and included the old entries from my first attempt at a blog, those links promptly broke. Not horribly, just a slight enough change that Apache threw a page not found error.

WordPress in general is very good about redirecting things within its own isolated environment to where you want to go. So, for example, if you were to go to http://www.the-jdh.com/index.php?post=123, it would redirect you to the appropriate post automatically–and to the appropriate, much more readable URL of that post–with no coaxing from me whatsoever. Kind of wicked nifty cool in an “I’m a lazy tech geek” kind of way. The problem is, there’s no native functionality for redirecting other links, not created by WordPress, to their appropriate wordpress equivalent. Enter the redirection plugin, Smart 404.

When I set it up to do what it was intended to do, though, I ran into another, slightly frustrating, problem. If you were to go to http://www.the-jdh.com/year/month/date/some_post.html, which was the old link structure on the blog, even with the plugin in place you’d get a 404 instead of being redirected to http://www.the-jdh.com/year/month/some-post/, which is one of WordPress’s default structures. Now, if we were talking closed source projects here, I’d of just switched to something else that did a similar thing–I’d have a better chance of seeing the problem fixed, and sooner, by doing that. But instead, it started out entirely in public comments on the blog of the developer of the offending plugin.

The actual conversation was, were it to happen over IM instead of blog comments, very short yet still very effective.

I posted a couple comments over there, pretty much explaining what happens when someone references one of the old, non-working links, and what according to the plugin documentation is supposed to happen. After running a real quick test to get access to exactly what it was the plugin was trying to do, the conversation effectively turned very quickly to something like this.
Dev: Okay, try this line of code and let me know if it breaks.
Me: *copy, paste* Okay, looks like it doesn’t explode. And hey, it does what it’s supposed to now. Who knew?
Him: Awesome. *throws it into CVS*
Me: Hey look, new version. And there’s the fix I tested. Awesome squared.

Yeah, it was literally that easy. And a very awesome reason for why sometimes, being able to actually see the program’s inner workings is a very good thing–you get to escentially debug and test a patch for your own problems, rather than waiting on the software’s tech support department–if they have one–to get around to communicating with the developers, who may or may not then get around to actually diagnosing and fixing the problem. The open source community as a whole gets major props for that. And major props to the Smart 404 developer for being nearly as quick to implement solutions to problems as his users are at finding problems to fix. And huge props to WordPress, because–really, do I need a reason? Now excuse me while I go consider for the thousandth time learning PHP or something.

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Unless you’ve been under a rock all afternoon, you’re probably aware already that former US Senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash in Alaska at 86 years. Now, being that I live in the great white north, beyond the whole “series of tubes” quotation, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about this US Senator. According to some, he was apparently quite the moron. Well, sir, you very well might have been an idiot. But you’ve provided years of hillarity among my particular geek circles with that one quote. For that, you’re awesome. And because it still makes me snort, here’s the infamous monologue in video format. Yes, brought to you by that very same series of tubes.

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A couple weeks ago, I made mention to the fact Canada’s only real alternative to DSL from Ontario east was taking it to their customers again, in the cleverly sneaky form of decreasing the quality of service provided and maintaining the same pricing structure. At the time, all the techy blogs were up in arms about it–and that was pretty much as far as it got. I suppose Rogers should be congratulated for finally breaking that barrier, what with the Ottawa Sun doing us all a favour and publishing their own take on it. And y’know, reading that doesn’t make me feel any less like kicking Rogers squarely in the face. But I’m still no closer to reconsidering my decision to avoid having anything to do with their internet packages for as long as I have at least one other alternative. On the bright side, at least geeks aren’t the only ones who’re about ready to slap around a Rogers employee–this was posted under the finance/money section of the Sun, for the curious. I’ll take my small moments of satisfaction where I can find them, thank you.

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Does anyone actually even remember remotely considering doing something relatively useful with Google Wave? A few geek blogs I follow were all over it when it first opened up–hell, even Mike was singing its praises for a time. It was supposed to be the thing to replace email/twitter/facebook/what have you. How’re we doing on that? According to Google, not well. So it’s dying a slow and painful death that’ll drag out until the end of the year. I won’t say I saw it coming, but well…

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I have a long and complicated history with Windows XP’s service pack 3. Mostly, it consists of me installing it and it doing all manner of bad things to the machine it’s installed on–like, for instance, being partially responsible for the temporary breakage of an internet connection. Recently though, I’ve noticed a slightly disturbing trend. Machines older than mine and less stable than mine are taking SP3 with little to no problem and even less headache. And I’ve personally seen it installed on one with plenty of other problems of its own–hello, less than stable IE 8. So there was definitely something out to get me–now I had proof.

After exiling SP3 from my machine for being pretty much a complete and total failure, I’d also a while later gone ahead and got rid of Eset’s Smart Security product for a whole host of other, unrelated reasons I’ll get around to posting at some point in the maybe not too distant future. That fixed a few dozen other slightly irritating, but not ultimately hindering, problems. After seeing SP3 crop up on some of these machines and ultimately not cause mass amounts of destruction, I decided just before I came down here to install it again on mine. I took that opportunity to test IE 8 out on a non-frankenputer as well, but I’ll save that for when I figure out what about the offending machine is making it break. And, surprise of surprises, it didn’t result in extreme amounts of bloodshed, or physical damage to the computer.

So, after much of the getting pissed with Microsoft for making yet more work for me, and after confirming not once, but five times that SP3 did not, in fact, break me severely on install, I officially withdraw any cursing, swearing, or overall snarkish remarks directed at Microsoft on its behalf. Instead, I shall officially aim those remarks at Eset/Nod32, and add them to the 50 billion others I’ve had plenty of time to prepare and direct at the offending antivirus manufacturer. But don’t worry, Microsoft still has much for me to snark about–I still have to figure out in exactly how many pieces they’ve managed to break .net framework on this machine, which may or may not warrant a separate entry. But SP3, at least so far, is not as evil as it looked a few months ago. Good job, MS. Now fix your framework, goddammit.

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