Rants and Revelations

I spend a lot of time with an Apple support today. He wanted me to go through all the steps with the iPod Updater and iTunes that I’d already been through last night. All the time I kept whining about how many times I’ve gotten dud iPods in the past, and what an inconvenience it was. Finally, after exhausting all the other options, he said “I’m going to transfer you to another iPod specialist”. Oh, great, I thought, another hour going through all the same stuff. Instead I was on hold for 20 minutes or more, and the new guy finally came on he asked me for the dispatch numbers for all my previous iPod repairs. (Once again Apple proves itself incapable of looking up the information in their own damn database - idiots.) Anyway, he tells me that they’re going to give me a new Photo iPod! Score one for the power of positive whining. So I said “well, as long as you’re going to give me a new one, can I pay the difference in price and get a 60 gig one?” And he said “Sure”. And so evidently I’m goin got get a brand new top of the line 60 gig iPod.

Woo hoo!

So my replacement iPod arrived yesterday while I was at work. First thing when I get home, I plug it in and start updating it. But as it’s loading 4,000 songs, after two or three hours I noticed that I accidentally selected the Punk playlist instead of the Classical one to auto update on it, and I wanted Classical this time. So I attempt to change it, first by changing the iPod settings in iTunes, then by selecting “Update iPod”, and finally by ejecting it. Oh, I should mention that by this point, the iPod is scorching hot to the touch. By this time, though, iTunes is not responding, so I attempt a “Force Quit”. It won’t quit. I try a few more times. Still no luck. I try ejecting the iPod icon on the Finder, and now the Finder isn’t responding and won’t do a “Force Restart”. Then I notice that the clock on the menu bar hasn’t updated since I started loading the iPod. Time for drastic measures, I think, and restart the computer.

When it restarts, iTunes comes up but doesn’t see the iPod, and the iPod is display an icon of a folder with an exclamation mark. I try using iPod Updater to “Restore” the software. Then iTunes says that my iPod software has to be updated to 1.3 and launches the iPod updater again (I have several different versions of the iPod Updater on my system, and I guess I didn’t use the most recent one when I did the “Restore”). It tells me that the update is complete and to unplug and replug the iPod to continue, and when I do it tells me that it needs to update to 1.3, and then that the update is complete, and to unplug and replug the iPod to continue. Somewhere along the way iTunes then tells me that there is a 1.4 update available, and I go to the Apple web site to download the latest updater (and I delete all the other updaters), which tells me that it’s installing 1.5. I do so, and that leads to another cycle of iTunes and Finder hangs. I try using the “Restore” option in the iPod Updater again, with no different results, but eventually it tells me that it’s loading songs, and then after loading one song and starting on the other, iTunes and the Finder hang again.

I go through a bunch of different combinations of software restores, reboots and plugging it in with or without iTunes or the iPod Updater already started. Eventually I’m at the situation I’m at now, where the computer won’t see the iPod at all, and the iPod is showing a new icon, that of a disk with an exclamation point.

You know, this is the 4th time that Apple has send me a faulty iPod if you count the time they sent me back iPod #3 saying there was nothing wrong with it and I sent it back because they hadn’t read my letter on how to reproduce the problem. I don’t know if they’re making any money off of this purchase, but I suspect that it’s a major profit center for DHL.

Seen on Apple’s support site this morning:

Yay!

Our “feature players” are computers with no keyboard, no screen, just a tiny little 4 line dot matrix display with a few touch buttons. One of our sales and demo sites, in China, had a little problem - due to a bug in the version of software they’re still running they desparately need to rename a file before tomorrow morning. And in order to connect a keyboard and screen, or even a network cable so they could ssh in, they’d have to remove it from a rack and move it out of the projection booth. Don’t ask me why.

There were around 5 people at work trying to solve this problem, including my supervisor, the guy who signs the POs to pay us contractors, and two other developers. They called me into the meeting to discuss it at 4:00pm. At 4:15 I’d finished explaining how I’d solve it. At 4:30 I had a first burn of a CD that would solve the problem. At 5:00pm I’d fixed a couple of strange little problems with the first two cuts at it, and had an ISO that they could email to the site in China, have them burn it, and put it in the DVD drive and fix their problem.

(Technical details follow, you might want to skip this part)
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I got through the Word document hurdle I blogged about earlier by sending the moderators a complaint, which was responded to with a “All you had to do was ask, no reason to get so huffy” response. I guess learning is not something they do well, and suggesting they do something in a way that benefits everybody is not the nice thing to do. All has been well and good, I’ve gotten rid of three things and gotten one thing through the service. Today I thought I’d put out a “WANTED” looking for a filing cabinet. Now, it’s normal on Freecycle to put your location when you offer something, because then if you want that something you can decide whether or not it’s worth your while going to that part of the city to pick it up or not. But it doesn’t make sense to me to put the location in a “WANTED” message, because surely it’s up to you, as the wanter, to decide whether whoever has it is too far away from you or not. But the damn moderator rewrote my subject line to include my location. So now I just know that people on the other side of town are going to say “I won’t bother offering him this file cabinet, because it’s not worth travelling cross town to pick it up”.

Update: The response from the group moderator is “I just enforce the rules, I don’t make them up”, however I looked at both the Word document with the local rules and the Freecycle’s main FAQ and neither of them has it as a rule that WANTED items should have a location. One ettiquette pointer suggests a location on all posts, but it’s not a rule. One thing that is stated as a rule, however, is that moderators should not moderate every single post for ettiquette violations.

It’s been 6 days since I sent my iPod in. I haven’t killed my cow orker in the next cubicle yet, but I’m feeling a tiny bit stabby. The Apple (lack-of-)support site has a status of “Dispatch Sent”, whatever that means. The Repair Status Details page says that they received it on the 19th, and nothing further. How long does it take them to charge it up, hit “play”, and look 3 hours later and see that it’s not playing any more?

I fixed yesterday’s problems with the machine locking up every time I tried to burn a DVD by opening up the case and reseating all the cards and cables. Yeah!

Last night I worked on setting up a new computer for the flying club’s ops center. The old one started freezing up and dying about a month ago, and so I took it home to work on, and then never had time to work on it because of the move. Even after reseating everything and cleaning, it still freezes up after a few minutes of operation - it continues to work and the screen refreshes, but it no longer responds to the keyboard and mouse. A club member donated a machine which was even slower than the original (400MHz versus 550MHz) and has less ram (384Mb versus 512Mb). But it’s adequate. I installed Morphix Linux on it, which probably isn’t the best choice but it uses XFCE4 as its user interface unlike most small Linuxes that use IceWM or Blackbox or Fluxbox, which look like somebody with really bad colour sense and latent depression tried to copy the worst features of Windows 95. XFCE4 uses a Mac OS X-like application dock, and uses bright pastel shades so that it looks like something out of this century. The ~/Desktop/Autostart directory contains a script to start up Firefox with a special home page with some links that I find useful.

I stripped the stuff that users shouldn’t be doing off the menu bar, and set it up in /etc/init.d/xstart so that when a user logs out, the user’s home directory is blown away and re-copied from a read-only file system “safe”, and the display starts again. That way nobody has to worry about any of their web cookies, passwords or other cruft being left behind. And because it’s Linux, I don’t have to worry about them installing stuff or getting viruses or spyware.

You know what’s even more annoying than having to reburn a DVD and spend two hours preparing a test? When you go to burn the DVD and it hangs up your entire computer, flashing the caps lock and scoll lock keys on your keyboard, forcing you to power cycle the computer. And it happening not just once, but four times with your last two DVD blanks. THAT is annoying.

You know what’s annoying? Having to rebuild two systems back to the previous version, burn a new upgrade DVD (when you’ve only got 2 DVD blanks left) and upgrade the two test systems back to the new version with the upgrade DVD, all because you put “||” where you should have put “-o”. That’s annoying.

I haven’t been flying in a while so I went out for a aimless wander around. I noticed the landing light was out before I left, but I’m bad so I didn’t deal with it until I got home. I’ve never changed a landing light before, but I did it. Not exactly Tina Marie level of owner maintenance, but I’m proud of myself.

After the hard drive problems I mentioned in a previous blog entry, my new hard drive arrived, and today I actually had time to install it.

I partitioned the new drive like the old drive, but with bigger partitions (because this was a 160Gb drive instead of an 80Gb drive). Being old-fashioned, I used fdisk instead of whatever the young kids use (parted?). Then I booted with a rescue CD and did the following to mount and copy all the partitions:

for i in 1 2 3 5 6 8 9; do
mke2fs -j /dev/hdb$i
mkdir /mnt/hda$i /mnt/hdb$i
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda$i /mnt/hda$i
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb$i /mnt/hdb$i
rsync rsync -aSuvrx –delete /mnt/hda$i /mnt/hdb$i
done

Then with everything copied over and swapped around the drives and attempted to boot with the new one.

Ok, how many people spotted my deliberate mistakes?

First off, I forgot to install grub on the hard disk. So I had to boot back with the original drive as hda and the new drive as hdb. I couldn’t get grub-install to even recognize /dev/hdb or hd1. So I went into the raw and wolly grub shell to do it.

Second mistake was that I forgot my /etc/fstab uses labels. So I had to quickly google how to put labels on the partitions using e2label. But I couldn’t figure out how to label a swap partition, so I changed the swap entry in /etc/fstab to not use labels. Not sure why I didn’t just convert them all to not use labels, but I’m trying to be a little more modern.

Third mistake was that somehow /tmp ended up not globally writable. I think all the other files and directories had the right permissions, so I’m not sure why that one was different. Probably because it’s the only partition whose top level is globally writable.

Everything seems to be working now, so my fingers are crossed.

I just attempted to join Rochester FreeCycle out of a sense of futility at all the stuff we had to throw away when we moved. But when I attempted to join, I got an email that consisted of a Word document. strings(1) indicates that it’s just a page of plain text, asking me some questions. So why the hell is it a Word document? Are they saying that people who don’t have $700 to waste on a software package or who aren’t willing to pirate software aren’t welcome? What about people who refuse to read email on Windows?

Sure, I could probably fire up OpenOffice.org and read it, but why the hell should I? If it can be expressed in plain text, then send it in plain text dammit! And if it can’t be expressed in plain text, I probably don’t want to read it. I read my email using a plain text mail reader (mutt) and it works ssh’ed in from work, or over a modem connection from Ottawa, or (in extremis) using a 2400bps modem on a tiny little PDA screen. I’m not going to change that to suit you, so don’t even try. And calling me a Luddite isn’t going to change anything.

After my post Time to find out if my iPod AppleCare is valid, I decided to try calling Apple Support. As expected, dealing with Apple Support was time consuming and painful.

The first problem is that this iPod is not the one that I registered AppleCare for. As anticipated, this meant that I couldn’t just register on the support web site for the repair. So I called. And as anticipated, the support guy couldn’t figure it out. At least not without putting me on hold about 4 times to consult with other people.

In spite of the fact that in order to activate my AppleCare extended warranty I had to enter all sorts of information on-line, it’s evidently damn near impossible for Apple Support technicians to type in your name and maybe the serial number of the iPod you currently own, and find out the serial number of the iPod that this one was a warranty replacement for, and maybe the contract number for your extended support contract. Haven’t these people ever heard of databases?

Anyway, he eventually figured it all out, and he’s sending me a box. But he warned me that if I send in the iPod and they test it and it’s not less than half the advertised battery life, they’ll just ship it back and charge me for the shipping. So suddenly I was worried that my one test wasn’t good enough. So I charged it all the way up, and at 5:00pm I unplugged it, turned off shuffle play, hit Play, and left it. Two hours and 20 minutes later, I looked and it was dead. Ok, I guess that qualifies.

I figure this battery replacement will get me another year out of this iPod, and then I’ll buy a photo-iPod. Or by then, maybe a video-iPod.

I got my iPod a year and four months ago. This one was a replacement for a replacement for a replacement, the whole sorry story of which can be read here. However, when I got the one that this is a replacement for, I got AppleCare. But that one died in a matter of a few days, and they fixed it by sending another one with a different serial number. So the serial number isn’t the same as the one on the AppleCare registration.

And here’s why suddenly I care about this: Most of the time when I listen to my iPod, it’s plugged into the wall charger (and I have a very long headset cord so I can leave it there while I roll my chair around in my cube, but every now and then I disconnect it from the wall and wear it downstairs to the lab). But this Friday, I took it with me in the car. It had been plugged in right up to that point, and so it was fully charged, but I only got three hours of it before it died. This is really bad. Apple claims a 10 hour battery life for a new iPod, and I know I’ve seen at least 8 hours in the past. Apple also says that if your iPod’s battery life is less than half the advertised value, and it’s still under AppleCare, then you get a free battery replacement.

So either I find out whether I wasted my money on the AppleCare, or I say to hell with it, it’s not broken, just live with it.

The annoying thump that I’ve ranted about several times in the past is about three times as loud and twice as frequent today. And it’s not just shaking the pictures on my cube wall, it’s making my monitor shake. Arggh!