Author: Paul Tomblin

Don’t worry, it won’t affect anything

Before upgrading to Lion, I checked the compatibility of the apps I use, and discovered that Quicken doesn’t work on Lion. Intuit hasn’t actually updated the Mac version or Quicken for nearly 5 years, instead bringing out something called “Quicken Essentials For Mac” which didn’t have the one thing I used most in Quicken, which was bill paying. So I decided to bite the bullet and start using my bank’s ancient and creaky web interface to pay my bills. In a wonderful bit of synchronicity, my bank started offering a web product called “FinanceWorks” which did the other thing I used Quicken for, which was showing me what expenses were coming up, which helps me decide how much money I have to transfer into savings or back out of savings and the like. It even allowed me to combine information on my bank accounts, my credit card, my retirement accounts and my mortgage all in one place. Very nice. It’s an Intuit product, looking very similar to their mint.com web site, but it’s integrated into the bank’s web site so once I log into the bank’s web site I can bring it up without any further logging in.

Flash forward to 7 days ago. My bank phoned me up and said they had to change my account from “Foo checking” to “Bar checking”, but the account number would stay the same and all my web payments would be unaffected. I said ok, and within minutes, the bank’s web interface showed the change.

But it turns out they lied. There was one thing that changed – FinanceWorks can’t update any of my bank accounts. It’s still updating my third party accounts, it just won’t update my primary accounts.

And that has lead me into the hell that is Intuit technical support. The way you start a support request in this case is you just click a button and it shows you some details (like your customer id, financial institution, account that’s not refreshing, error code, etc) and sends it to Intuit. That information should be more than sufficient for Intuit to see that the accounts that aren’t refreshing are the ones on my primary bank, ie. the one that I didn’t (and couldn’t) enter login details into FinanceWorks, they’re included automatically. And yet the first couple of responses from Intuit are along the lines of “make sure you can log into the bank’s web site?” and “did you enter your details correctly?”. I kept responding and telling them that it was my primary institution. So those responses started tapering off (but not ending) and I started getting a different response, saying to use this particular option to reset my account. Except I couldn’t find this option anywhere on their site. And so I’d respond saying that I can’t find this option, and they’d respond with another demand that I use this option. (I should mention at this point that the “Help” in FinanceWorks is just a simple FAQ, not searchable and not very detailed or complete – also, there is no search to find options on the site, so it is possible that there are menu items I can’t find).

It’s been 7 days now, and I still can’t get FinanceWorks to update after this supposedly innocuous change. And as of 5 minutes ago they just sent me another “Go to the account details screen and change your login information”.

A long boat on a short car

One of the problems with my car is that the gap between the roof rack bars is so short. I bought a v-rack so that I wouldn’t be supporting the boat at two points near the middle and having it flexing all over the place, but the fact that such a long object is supported by two bars very close together means that the v-rack itself bounces up and down, or more accurately pivots forward and back, and places a lot of stress on the bars of the rack. It makes a lot of noise as it flexes, and I’m continually worried that the rack is just going to tear out as I go over a bump.

So today I took some action. I bought a couple of Seattle Sports “Hood Loops”, which are little nylon loops with a grommet on the end that you can attach using one of the quarter panel bolts under the hood of your car. I also bought a couple of “Quick Loops” from the same company. They’re a similar idea except instead of bolting them to the car, you just close them in the rear hatch and a soft but strong piece of plastic tubing prevents the loops from coming back out. Those are more experimental – once I figure out exactly where I want them, I might replace them with something bolted or otherwise more permanently attached. I ran a rope from one Hood Loop over the v-rack and down to the other Hood Loop, and did the same in the back with the Quick Loops. I then put the boat on the rack and went for a short drive. The difference in stability is incredible. It’s so much more stable, and quieter. Also, when I take the rack off for the winter, I can flip the Hood Loops inside the hood out of the way, and take out the Quick Loops, and take the car to the car wash.




Progress

For the last several months I’ve been trying to slowly build myself back up after the surgery. I paddle once or twice a week, and generally I do one “long” (for values of long that seem ridiculously short to me) continuous go at first, and then continue for as long as I can doing paddle/rest/paddle/rest. Sometimes I have to stop because my shoulder is sore, sometimes because my muscles are tired, sometimes because my aerobic system is worn out, and sometimes it’s all three. Up until last week, my maximum “long” stretch was about 1.25 miles, and my total distance was generally around 3 to 4 miles with a lot of stops.

Last week, I was off work, so I actually managed to get out 3 times. I also started getting much more diligent about doing the stretches and exercises my physiotherapist prescribed back when I was still doing that. And I went to see the massage therapist I was seeing a couple of years ago about my shoulder and neck.

On Wednesday, I managed to paddle 1.5 miles, take a quick drink of water, and keep paddling to a total of 2.5 miles, and then do stop/start paddling for a total of 4 miles. That’s the first time all year I’ve seen two miles in less than 11 minutes per mile. (Oh yeah, did I mention that my speed compared to last year also sucks?) So that was pretty good.

Today, I did even more. I managed to paddle 2 miles, take a quick drink of water, and continue to a total of 3.2 miles, and then do stop/start paddling for a total of 4 miles. That’s 3 miles in a row at less than 11 minutes per mile! That’s real progress!

Ok, granted both times my shoulder was pretty damn sore afterwards, but I’m so tired of waiting for the pain to go away before I start getting fit again. I have an appointment with the surgeon next week to see why it’s taking so long, but I suspect he’s going to tell me to stop paddling.

I’m making progress, and I’ve got the erg so I can keep going all winter. Here’s hoping I can bring the endurance up to the old level and then start bringing up the speed.

Jealous, much?

So less than a week after I start using my new upgraded Linux box for lots of stuff, my laptop suddenly decides not to wake up out of sleep, and when you reboot it the light comes on and you can hear some minor activity inside, but you never get the start up chime and the usual special keys to boot in diagnostics mode or single user mode didn’t work. I think it’s jealous because I haven’t been using it as much. Or maybe it’s just under more stress because I’m opening and closing the lid and moving it around instead of leaving it tethered on my desk all the time.

Vicki has been talking for a while about getting a new laptop because her old MacBookPro with only 3Gb of RAM keeps freezing up, especially when she’s doing Second Life, and especially since she “upgraded” to Lion. So we went off to the Apple store, her to get a new MacBookPro, and me to get some help from the Genius Bar.

The Genius poked around, tried a few things I’d already tried and a few things I hadn’t, all to no avail. It wouldn’t stir. So he said “well, it looks like it needs a new logic board. We had a few problems with nVidia chipsets back around that time, so I’m going to write it up as one of those even though I can’t boot it far enough to run the graphics system diagnostic.” The upshot is that I’m going to be without my laptop for a week or more, and I’m going to get a new $500 logic board for free. Not too bad, I guess. Although if they’d tried to charge me for it, I probably would have just bought a Macbook Air instead. So maybe that’s a mixed blessing.

My new system

Back in 2007, I build a new box, mostly to act as my home server. It’s been a pretty decent home server, and I hadn’t really seen the need to upgrade it. But recently, my laptop, which has been my “everything desktop” machine was showing signs of not having enough RAM for everything I do with it. Mostly because every few days I’ll notice that Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client (RDC) is grabbing absurd amounts of RAM – I’ll notice things getting slow, see that RDC is using 1 Gb of RAM, then look back in 2 minutes and see it’s up to 1.2 Gb. Since the laptop is topped out at 4Gb of RAM, there’s nothing more I can do about the lack of RAM, except stop trying to use it for my work and my personal stuff.

So I hit on the idea of using my home server as a home desktop. I’d used it once before when my laptop was in the shop, and so I knew I could open a VPN and remote desktop into work. There were only two problems with it – it had less RAM than my laptop, and it couldn’t support 2 monitors. So I had a few choices:

  • Max out its RAM (I think it could support 8Gb) and buy a new video card
  • Replace motherboard/RAM/CPU/Video card with something more modern
  • Buy an entirely new Linux computer
  • Buy a Mac Pro

Unfortunately, the Mac Pro is *way* expensive. A new Linux computer would cost a hair over $1000, but an equivalent Mac Pro would be over $2500. I decided to re-use the old box’s case, power supply (more on that later) and disks, and just replace the motherboard, RAM, CPU and video card. I spec’ed out a bundle from my go-to supplier, J & N Computer Services:

I also bought a second LCD monitor, this one a 24″ ViewSonic to go with my 24″ Dell. The bundle from JNCS was about $745 and the monitor was about $170.

Frankly, the extra CPU is probably not all that important, since I’ve never been CPU bound before and I didn’t see that becoming a problem. But you can never have too much RAM, and 16Gb has me thinking that I might be able to run my development environment, Websphere and Oracle here instead of RDC into work. Maybe I can even run a VirtualBox or two.

Anyway, I got all that home and was setting it up, and discovered that the “connector conspiracy” has been at work again. The old power supply had a 20 pin, two 4 pin and one 6 pin power connector. The smaller ones are all pairs of +12VDC and ground. The new motherboard required the 20 pin and one of the 4 pins in the main socket, and then an 8 pin connector in the auxiliary socket. The 6 pin connector was keyed so I couldn’t use it in the 8 pin socket, and there were dire warnings about not running it with just the 4 pin. So I ran down the road to FrozenCPU and got a PC Power and Cooling “Silencer Mk II” 650W supply to replace the CoolerMaster 500 that probably would have been perfectly adequate for the job if the connectors lined up.

Anyway, as is my custom, here’s a comparison:

Old Machine New Machine
Processor 1 64 bit dual core Intel Core2 Duo E6320 1.82GHz 4MB cache 1 64 bit Quad Core Intel i7-2600K LGA-1155 3.4GHz 8MB cache
RAM 2 1Gb DDR2-800 RAM 4 4Gb DDR3-1333 Kingston RAM
Disks 2x500Gb SATA-II, 2x1Tb SATA-II 2x500Gb SATA-II, 2x1Tb SATA-II
Ports 6xUSB 2.0, 2 Firewire, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Serial, Parallel, 6xSATA-II, Audio, Video 2xUSB 3.0, 12xUSB 2.0, 2 Firewire, GigE Ethernet, PS/2, 2xSATA 6Gb/s, 4xSATA 3Gb/s, Audio, Video, DVI, Display Port, HDMI, etc.
Fans 2 12mm case fans, 1 7mm heat sink fan, 1 12mm power supply fan 2 12mm case fans, 1 7mm heat sink fan, 1 12mm power supply fan

After I got it set up, I discovered a couple of problems.

The first problem was trying to get the second monitor set up. The “non-free” drivers in Ubuntu didn’t support this video card. I had a hell of a time getting the binary drivers from the nVidia web site to load – basically instead of just running the “.run” file that you download, I had to extract it with “–extract-only” and then run it and run it again with the “-K” option, or something like that. Whatever I did, it was a mixture of black magic and cargo culting, and it eventually worked. I had to borrow the HDMI cable off the DVD player, but we use the DVD player so infrequently that we hadn’t noticed that the cable had fallen off and had cobwebs on it.

The second problem I discovered is that a /tmp partition sized for server use isn’t big enough for interactive use – especially when you watch youtube videos (it appears to cache them in /tmp). Fortunately I used lvm, so it was possible to resize the partition. The only problem was figuring out how to boot in single user mode so I could do it without /tmp being in use.

I’m still trying to figure out how to set up the VPN tunnel to work. I copied the config files I use on the MacBook, and I copied the setup I used back when I used the Linux box to VPN into our old location in Genoa, but I couldn’t get it to work. Eventually I got it so I can open a VPN using the command line “sudo openvpn –config ~/ovpn/dmr.ovpn”. What I need to do next is figure out how I can simultaneously open a second VPN to Genoa, because our SVN server lives there and I want to be able to check stuff from there.

I also had a bit of a problem with the remote desktop client. When I first set up things, I’d open the remote desktop client “full screen”, and it would only take up one of my two screens. But I made a few minor changes (or so I thought) to my configuration, and now when I specify “full screen”, it covers both screens, which I don’t want. Fullscreen other apps only takes up one screen. So again, I resort to the command line.
rdesktop -g '1920x1080' -D -r sound:local:driver:oss -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD 10.255.120.119
Unfortunately that usually ends up on screen 1 instead of screen 2, so I have to do some tricks to make it work. Also, every now and then cut and paste stops working in the session, even within Windows. In that case, I have to use the Task Manager, find the “rdpclip.exe” process and kill it. That gets cut and paste working within Windows, but unfortunately kills cut and paste between Linux and Windows.

Last night I upgraded Ubuntu from 10.04LTS to 11.04 to see if it would help the rdesktop and some other minor issues. We’ll see.