Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Body Hacks

I received my first aller­gy shot on Fri­day while vis­it­ing home for the weekend.

I feel like it’s my first body hack. I’m hav­ing aller­gens inject­ed into my body in hopes of ton­ing down my body’s immune sys­tem reac­tion to them. It’s trick­ing my body into doing some­thing the way I’d like, rather than the way it’s used to doing things. It’s an immune sys­tem mod­i­fi­ca­tion, one that I, for what­ev­er rea­son, con­sid­er more inter­est­ing than a reg­u­lar vac­cine, per­haps because the long sched­ule and main­te­nance of aller­gy shots sug­gests that it’s forc­ing my body to accept this change, and does­n’t come as eas­i­ly as a reg­u­lar vaccine.

Brain-Fried

I took four midterms today: one in sta­tis­tics (exper­i­men­tal design), two in eco­nom­ics (game the­o­ry and indus­try struc­ture), and one on data­bas­es. Even finals week won’t ever get this bad: we’re allowed to move a final if we have more than two in a 24 hour peri­od (and with 21 cred­its, you’d bet­ter believe I’ve all ready planned which ones I need to move).

A Typographic Moment

Over the past few weeks, I’ve start­ed down the slip­pery slope of learn­ing more about typog­ra­phy. I’ve sub­scribed to the RSS feed for ILoveTy­pog­ra­phy, and I’ve final­ly got­ten my hands on The Ele­ments of Typo­graph­ic Style, by Robert Bringhurst.

Today, I had my first typo­graph­ic moment. A night­mare, some may con­sid­er it.

I’m sit­ting in a long, dark lec­ture hall in Don­ald­son Brown, lis­ten­ing to my pro­fes­sor drone on about long-term asset depre­ci­a­tion and sell­ing equi­ty stakes. I’m in the midst of read­ing The Ele­ments of Typo­graph­ic Style when I look up and see the following:

1. Ari­al, 44 pt: a title for a slide, speak­ing to “Return on Assets Ratio”
2. Tahoma, 28 pt, bold: a boxed para­graph describ­ing why we need said ratio
3. Ari­al, 24 pt, bold: a boxed para­graph describ­ing the mean­ing of the ratio

I exam­ined the tops of the “t“s, find­ing Ari­al’s sig­na­ture slope, and the end of the “e“s, find­ing that obnox­ious slop­ing once more. I look down, eyes flit­ting over the Tahoma font, com­par­ing it to Ari­al, flit­ting back up, when it jumps out at me: my god, that title kern­ing is ter­ri­ble! The cap­i­tal R and low­er­case e are prac­ti­cal­ly in sep­a­rate words, and the t and i are on top of each oth­er, run­ning away from the a.

And that’s when it struck me: I’ve become a typog­ra­phy geek.

Wimping Out

I feel like I’ve let myself down, not dress­ing out for rug­by prac­tice this week.

My inner workout/running addict wants to push myself, wants to run laps and do drills and just have a good time. But my prac­ti­cal, self-pre­serv­ing side knows that anoth­er week of Advil to play, and limp­ing the rest of the day is just a bad idea. Bet­ter to take the time now to heal before the state tour­na­ment in November.

Rugby and Work

Rea­sons 18 through 20 why rug­by and work don’t go together:

1. It’s hard to sit still in a chair when your body aches in ways it’s nev­er hurt before.
2. Abrad­ed ears make it hard to wear canal­phones with cords loop­ing over the ears.
3. Torn elbows make chair arms painful to use.

Regular Expressions, and Nails

Every time I learn a new thing about reg­u­lar expres­sions, I find myself using it as a solu­tion to every reg­u­lar expres­sion match­ing prob­lem I find (see “When all you have is a ham­mer, every­thing looks like a nail”).

I just learned looka­head and back­ref­er­ences, and now, for exam­ple I had this great para­graph about how I used a looka­head unnec­es­sar­i­ly, but after some test­ing, I real­ized it’s not pos­si­ble to match what I want, and not con­sume extra char­ac­ters, with­out using what I used. Well, so much for that that post.

For those that were won­der­ing, the match I was per­form­ing is as fol­lows. I want­ed to match an amper­sand (&) that’s not fol­lowed by amp; (and is there­fore not prop­er­ly encod­ed for HTML), but not match a prop­er­ly encod­ed & amp;. I used s/&(?!amp;)/& amp;/ to do it. I test­ed &[^a][^m][^p][^;], but that eats the next four char­ac­ters after the &, which obvi­ous­ly does­n’t do what we’d like.

It’s good to have lots and lots of ham­mers in your tool­box. Then you can hit every shape and size nail you come across.

(And apolo­gies on the nasty spaces for the amper­sands. Mark­down is con­spir­ing to prop­er­ly encode every enti­ty, which means I’ve got to space things out to stop it.)

The US Postal Service: We Don’t “Do” Numbers

My Shure E2c head­phones came yes­ter­day from Ama­zon, trav­el­ing from North Car­oli­na to Blacks­burg, VA via USPS. Ama­zon shipped them out of their ware­house on Mon­day, Oct 1, and said that they’d arrive some­time this week. The USPS web­site, how­ev­er, had some­thing else in mind: their track­ing data showed receiv­ing them on Octo­ber 1st, but had an esti­mat­ed deliv­ery date of Octo­ber 15th to Blacks­burg, VA.

The US Postal Ser­vice: we need two weeks to move a pack­age 150 miles.

Stupid Developers Make Life Suck

Note to OS X installer devel­op­ers: if you change per­mis­sions on any sub­fold­er of /System, break­ing print­ing, Spot­light search­ing, and track­pad dri­vers, I will kneecap you.

I have a Net­gear MA111 USB Prism-based 802.11b wire­less adapter. I bought it for test­ing KisMAC and fool­ing around with wire­less pro­to­cols. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Net­gear does­n’t make dri­vers for OS X for the device, but D‑Link’s DWL-122 is also USB and has a Prism chipset, and so their dri­vers make the Net­gear adapter work.

But D‑Link’s installer is a piece of total shit. They use the built-in Installer.app to run the installer, so there’s no points to take off for some Flash-based or Car­bonized instal­la­tion process. But, their devel­op­ers appar­ent­ly don’t know how file per­mis­sions works on a Unix-based sys­tem, and man­age to break the OS when they install a kext in /System/Library/Extensions.

Oh, they also put their pref­er­ence pane in /System/Library/PreferencePanes, which is reserved for Apple-only pref­er­ence panes, appar­ent­ly unaware of the exis­tence of /Library/PreferencePanes for installing any third-par­ty (that’s you, D‑Link!) pref­er­ence panes.

I can’t speak with as much vit­ri­ol about /System/Library/StartupItems or /System/Library/Frameworks, but I have a feel­ing that the same thing applies: /Library for third-par­ty items, because /System/Library belongs to the OS, and the OS only.

Again: if you write an installer for frame­works, pref­er­ence panes, and exten­sions for OS X, don’t break the sys­tem. I will per­son­al­ly hunt you down and punch you in the face if you do.

Bad Hardware and Good Customer Service

In the fall of 2003, I made my first com­put­er pur­chase, buy­ing a used iBook G3 from eBay. No soon­er had I bought the Apple­Care extend­ed war­ran­ty (with a stu­dent dis­count, thank­ful­ly, mak­ing it afford­able for a high school stu­dent) than the back­light cut out when I opened the screen. I took it in for a repair to an autho­rized cen­ter in Chan­til­ly, and researched the issue exten­sive­ly. It turned out that the back­light cable was being pinched in the hinge, a known prob­lem with this model.

How­ev­er, I would be fool­ish to think that my prob­lems would end there. The iBook came back, only to have the video scram­ble after about 15 min­utes of use, and the machine locked up. I took it back imme­di­ate­ly, and went back to Google to find out more.

I dis­cov­ered I had one of the dread­ed “Log­ic Board” iBooks: the log­ic board, either in the way it was designed or man­u­fac­tured, was prone to fail­ure, scram­bling the video out­put and mak­ing the hard­ware all but use­less. In addi­tion, the mod­els also had known issues with back­light cables, as I had found out earlier.

The repair cen­ter called a few days lat­er, say­ing that the log­ic board had been replaced, and every­thing was all set. But instead of com­ing back in work­ing order, my dear iBook now had no wire­less recep­tion (the anten­na was­n’t recon­nect­ed prop­er­ly), and the log­ic board died on boot. This time, I took it back to the Apple Store for anoth­er round of repairs.

The iBook came back from the Apple Store work­ing in fine order once more, with a func­tion­ing back­light, no scram­bling video out­put, and nor­mal Air­Port recep­tion. It chugged hap­pi­ly along for a few months, until…

Anoth­er log­ic board failed. Back to the Tysons Apple Store for anoth­er round with the Genius Bar and anoth­er week for the repair to be fin­ished. This was around June of 2004, as I’m prepar­ing to leave for my fresh­man year at Vir­ginia Tech, and so I was begin­ning to get ner­vous about this recur­ring prob­lem: if it hap­pens while I’m at school, what will I do?

The iBook worked prop­er­ly again after that repair. I used it as my pri­ma­ry machine (despite hav­ing a brand-new Dell Lat­i­tude that was required for the Col­lege of Engi­neer­ing) through the entire fall semes­ter. After a cou­ple of soft­ware update issues and issues that I thought were hard­ware but turned out to be soft­ware, life was good, and the lap­top worked fine.

In the spring semes­ter, in March, the back­light went out once more. Since there are no Apple Stores with­in hun­dreds of miles, I had to call Apple­Care Tech Sup­port to get a repair set up and get the machine tak­en care of. While I was on the line with the tech sup­port guy, I casu­al­ly asked if I could talk to some­one in Cus­tomer Ser­vice about the machine’s repair his­to­ry. After the Short­est Trans­ferred Call Wait Ever (the music usu­al­ly nev­er even starts play­ing when you call Apple), I spoke to a guy named Andrew. No soon­er did I ver­i­fy that, yes, I was Christo­pher, and yes, I had been trans­ferred regard­ing an iBook G3, than he offered to send me a brand-new iBook G4 to replace the machine. After hash­ing out cred­it card infor­ma­tion (in case the G3 did­n’t make it back), and ship­ping infor­ma­tion, I had a new com­put­er in my hands to use.

Cus­tomer Ser­vice That Kicks Ass: if the cus­tomer even makes the slight­est hint that they want some­thing more than just a stop­gap repair, offer to replace the thing right off the bat. Don’t fight with them, don’t make them beg or prove their point. Just take care of the prob­lem, do it with a smile, and you’ll win a cus­tomer for life.

Hacking the OS: Kernel Extensions and Software Updates

Hack­ing the OS: Ker­nel Exten­sions and Soft­ware Updates

My iBook G4 can’t be con­sid­ered a com­put­ing beast by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion. The inter­nal dri­ve was a measly 30 GB when I received it from Apple in the spring of 2005. As a workaround, I quick­ly migrat­ed to exter­nal dri­ves for stor­ing data: start­ing with a 40 GB FireWire exter­nal dri­ve in 2004 (back when I had my iBook G3), to a com­bined total of 1.05 TB across six dri­ves, all attached over a FireWire hub.

Life was grand: I had three 3.5″ dri­ves, with 200, 300, and 320 GB of space. I had my iTunes library on the 200 GB, movies and TV shows on the 300 GB, and the 320 GB was spare space, used for inter­mit­tent back­ups and tem­po­rary stor­age. All three dri­ves were in 3.5″ MacAl­ly FireWire/USB 2.0 dri­ve enclosures.

10.4.9 intro­duced a nasty bug: dri­ves con­tained in any 3.5″ MacAl­ly enclo­sures no longer spun down when not being used, nor did they spin down when unmount­ing and eject­ing the dri­ves. Sud­den­ly, I had three exter­nal hard dri­ves which were con­stant­ly spinning.

After rolling back my sys­tem to 10.4.8, I began to brain­storm solu­tions. I had test­ed the dri­ves with oth­er point releas­es, and knew that some­thing in 10.4.9 was get­ting in the way. I down­loaded the 10.4.8 Com­bo update, and the 10.4.9 Delta, and opened up both in Paci­fist, look­ing at the ker­nel exten­sions to see what kexts were updat­ed in 10.4.9.

Some Googling and dig­ging around inside the kext pack­age con­tents led me to set­tle upon AppleStorageDrivers.kext as the like­ly offend­er. I ran a spe­cial back­up to a spare hard dri­ve to test my the­o­ry, and installed the 10.4.8 ver­sion of the kext over a sys­tem updat­ed to 10.4.9. Lo and behold, the dri­ves spun down prop­er­ly once more.

I was much more care­ful with the 10.4.10 update, and for good rea­son: AppleStor­ageDrivers were even worse. The dri­ves would now inter­mit­tent­ly spin down, with no rhyme or rea­son as far as I can tell. After anoth­er kext replace­ment and test­ing, I’m now run­ning 10.4.10 with my alter­na­tive kext.

I sub­mit­ted a bug report to Apple and am in the process of updat­ing them with the ker­nel exten­sion find­ings. I should find a devel­op­er with Leop­ard to make sure that the bug did­n’t sneak into 10.5 via kext changes. It’s Bug Radar 5084136.