Category: Geekery

Epic rant company is epic!

A little while ago, an epic rant from the co-founder of Liberty Bottle Works went viral. You can see stories about it here and here. Now, I like a company that puts their employees family time above the “Me Generation”‘s whiny entitlement, and I thought I could use a new water bottle, so I ordered one.

It arrived a few days ago, and it’s really nice bottle. But the valve that lets air into the bottle when you suck on it makes a funny little squeaking sound. So I wrote to the company, making it clear that I wasn’t complaining, just asking if they had any strategies to mitigate the noise. The response I got has a formatting change in the middle that makes me think this is a semi-canned response, but it’s still pretty awesome:

First off thank you for your support, it really means a lot to us.

I am sorry for the noise you are getting from the straw, here are a few tips to try and help that:
Regarding the cap. We have found that a few caps (when fresh off the line) may make a signature “Liberty” noise. There has been some debate as to which spirit animal this noise is indicative of. Some folks believe it to be the illusive “purr” of the Sasquatch, however for more practical reasons we believe it to be more closely related to the majestic dolphin (who knows what sound a Tuna makes). Albeit, as cute as it is, I agree that the call of the majestic dolphin should be reserved for the ocean as it can be a little disruptive in class, at the office, the gym, or during ones morning Yoga. FYI, Sasquatches are really into Yoga.

Although the most likely cause of this unique audible phenomenon is rare and unintended, it is however by design. The noise may be due to our precision molding along with the strategic placement of the umbrella “flutter” valve as well as the assembly process of our sport caps, each individually built by hand. On the underside of your cap, you’ll see a flat rubber upside down “umbrella” that is about 1cm wide. When using the bottle in “sippa” mode via the spout, air must go through the umbrella valve into the bottle to replace the volume of water leaving the otherwise sealed container. The passage of air through the umbrella valve in association with the inherent back pressure of fluid may cause the tightly placed (hand installed) umbrella valve to flutter and vibrate thus creating the majestic acoustic sounds of the dolphin.

> How can I make it stop?
So, what can be done? First I would try opening the cap and running warm water (please be careful) directly onto both sides of the umbrella valve. Then, while the rubber is softened, use your finger on the top of the opened cap to push the little rubber “bead” (that holds the umbrella valve in place) down through the cap. What we are trying to do is create just the slightest amount of space between the underside of the molded cap and the rubber umbrella valve. That should do the trick. Replace the cap and test to see if we’ve set the dolphin free.

In most of these cases the sound will also go away once the valve relaxes with normal use. However, if your dolphin is stubborn and refuses to swim off into the ocean blue, I’ll be happy to send you a replacement cap of your choice at no charge. After all, we stand behind or products 100%.

Thank you for your support and for the opportunity to provide you with a better product, made by friends right here in Washington State.

If there are any other questions I can answer please let me know!

Thanks,

Denise Fischer
Customer Service Manager

I must say, I love these guys. If you’re in the market for a metal water bottle, you could do a lot worse.

Technical obsolescence? Nah…

So a few years ago I was kind of despairing that all the new languages and frameworks came with utterly huge learning curves. It used to be easy to learn a new language – you’d sit down with the manual, read it over a weekend, and by Tuesday at the latest you’d be an expert. At least that’s how it was for me when a language manual was the size of K&R – 228 pages. These days a language manual is more like this one – 1632 pages, and that doesn’t even get into the web development frameworks, the IDEs, the debuggers, the various Object Relation Models, the continuous integration stuff, the virtual environments, etc etc etc. It’s very daunting. And because of that, I was beginning to think I was going to be stuck in a rut called “Java” until I retired. I believe I used the phrase “I’m too old for this shit” more than once.

But that’s changed now. In the last 3 or 4 years I’ve

  • Become moderately proficient at XSLT
  • Become really proficient at DOM manipulation and AJAX code using Javascript and jQuery (and lately with Coffeescript) – haven’t felt the need to learn much about object oriented prototype based stuff yet.
  • Learned Perl::Mason and made a website using it which makes extensive use of AJAX
  • Learned Python and Django and made a website using them which make extensive use of AJAX
  • Used the Bootstrap Framework to make the front end of the Django website.
  • This week I started a side project where I’m writing a plugin for WordPress using PHP, another language I’ve never used before.

The difference is that these days I don’t let the enormity of the task get me down. Instead of trying to absorb the whole thing in one weekend, I go incrementally. I cargo-cult some code, write some more, google up the pieces I’m missing, and keep writing code. I don’t have to learn new IDEs because gvim still rocks, and I know how to use print statements to debug the way I’ve been doing for 30 odd years, so why get bogged down learning a million new things? Learn a few as you need them, and worry about the other stuff when you have time. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I became proficient at Unix, C, C++, Java, etc.

As an aside, I find it scary that StackOverflow’s SEO is so much better than everybody else’s so if you ask Google “set timezone in PHP” the first couple of results will be StackOverflow, and you have to look further down the page to find the official documentation. Especially since the StackOverflow hits will all have been closed as duplicates of each other. Much as I love StackOverflow as a resource, it’s usually better to find the official references if you can.

No such thing as a smooth upgrade.

My colo box has started exhibiting this strange behaviour:

  1. My “guest” (aka domU) OS will stop talking to the network. I can still log into it by going to the “host” (dom0) OS and issuing the xm console xen1 command.
  2. The guest still thinks it’s connected to the network. ifdown eth0; ifup eth0 doesn’t accomplish anything.
  3. If I reboot the guest, using shutdown -r now "", reboot, or, from the host, xm shutdown xen1; xm create xen1.cfg doesn’t come back up. xm gives an error about being unable to reserve enough memory.
  4. If I reboot the host, it doesn’t come back, and I have to either go into the colo or put in a trouble ticket, wait a few hours and then phone them up to ask why they’re ignoring my trouble ticket. They always respond that they’re really swamped right now and they must have missed it in the rush. When I go in, they’re always bored out of their minds and playing games. Oh, and good fucking luck finding a phone number anywhere on their web site. I only found one because I had it in my phone from before they were taken over by Earthlink.

When it was happening every 4 or 5 months, I wasn’t worried. When it happened twice in one month, I got worried. When it happened again 3 days after that “twice in one month”, I’m really worried.

Thinking that this might be a Xen problem, I decided to upgrade the host OS from Debian 6 to Debian 7. Mostly, it worked just fine except for two “small” problems:

  1. I couldn’t figure out how to make it boot the Xen stuff automatically and
  2. When I manually booted the Xen stuff, the network wouldn’t come up

The first problem is due to the way they re-arranged the grub menu – all the Xen stuff is under a submenu. The recommendation I found was to use dpkg-divert --divert /etc/grub.d/08_linux_xen --rename /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen to put the Xen stuff ahead of the non-Xen stuff in the Grub menu. That seems like a cheezy hack, but I’ll take it for now.

The second problem appears to be because of changes in the way Xen does bridging – evidently they bring up eth0 before /etc/network/interfaces brings it up, or something like that, and everybody gets all confused. The extremely dubious hack I found on-line to fix that is to add a pre-up ip addr del xx.xxx.xxx.xxx/255.255.244.0 dev eth0 || true to the definition of eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces. I suspect a better long term answer will be to figure out how to set up the proper bridging for the Xen stuff.

Now that’s all hacked together to work, fingers crossed that it actually reduces the freeze-up problem. Meanwhile, all the guest OSes are still running a 2.6.32-5-xen-amd64 kernel and I’d like to switch to a 3.2.0-4-amd64 kernel. Hopefully I can do that without another long night of standing in a hot colo facility.

What a day so far

First off, our power went out. A quick survey of the neighborhood showed it was out all up and down the street, and a call to RG&E revealed that it was a tree down over a power line.

Then while I was taking a break in the back yard, unable to work because of the lack of power (although in retrospect I probably should have mowed the grass since I’m going to have to work tomorrow to make up lost time), I got an email from a member of the flying club asking why my email address (and a non-functioning email address at that) was listed as a technical contact for their domain, and can I help them transfer the domain over to their control. Doing what googling I could do on my phone showed that the current registrar are notorious domain hijackers. Oh oh.

Once the power came on, the main router was flashing a green “power light” and not connecting. Again, doing what limited web searching I can do on a tiny smartphone screen shows that this means the firmware is corrupt, and it can happen if the router loses power (which seems like a pretty shitty failure mode – you’d think the firmware could only be corrupted if it were in the process of updating the firmware, otherwise it’s not exactly what you’d call “firm”, now is it?) The solution is to download the latest firmware and reflash the ROMs, which is difficult if you don’t have an internet connection. Fortunately I have two of these routers, one at the other end of the house to act as a wireless repeater. So I grabbed that one and did a factory reset, and then reconfigured it as best I can. That was a bit of a hassle because at some time in the past I changed the name of our wifi from either Robinson_Tomblin to Tomblin_Robinson or vice versa, and I couldn’t recall which, and so when I got it wrong the iPad and iPhone happily connected to it, but the printer, the TiVos and the Nexus 7 wouldn’t.

With network connections re-established (sort of – every router configuration change seemed to involve losing it again for a time up to a minute or so), it was time to download the new firmware, enable tftp in the Windows laptop, and flash it. Amazingly enough, it actually worked. Then I reconfigured that router, and everything was back in business.

Except now my security camera isn’t working. Down to the basement to unplug the POE cable, plug it back in, and it’s working.

Now it’s time to look into the flying club business. Thank goodness for searchable mail archives – the club asked me to transfer the domain to them in February 2011, and I did. And they were using that infamous domain thief as their registrar. And at the time I pointed out that they’d need to reset all the various contact email addresses. I also gave them a list of email forwards I had set up for their domain, and they decided to turn them all off. So phew, it’s not my problem and not my fault and if they can’t remember how to log into their registrar account and change the email address, too bad for them. I feel sorry for them, and I don’t wish them ill will, but the relief of it not being something I have to help fix is overpowering all that.

Why I want to punch Microsoft in the face

Ok, not the company, just anybody who was ever involved in their web browsers.

I’m writing a web application. I’m trying to make it modern with good UX (User Experience). Sometimes my boss’s decisions go against that desire, but I do what I can. Real world requirements aren’t always as straight forwards as the stuff you read in “Design For Hackers”.

So this week, I did a new part of the app. It was finally working the way I wanted to on real browsers, so then I turned to IE testing. It didn’t work right on anything older than IE 10. After two days of screwing around, I had a workaround that worked ok on IE 8 and 9 – it didn’t look too much worse than it does on real browsers, just different. That’s good, because the boss says that IE 8, because it comes on Windows 7, is the corporate standard and I don’t have to support IE 6 or IE 7. So I upload my test code to their server and clicked on the link, and it looked like a dog’s breakfast. Turns out that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that when something is on your intranet, should run in “compatibility mode”, which basically means it acts like IE 7.

IE is supposed to recognize a header, “X-UA-Compatible”, which is there so the web developer can tell the browser which version of IE it’s written for, but because Microsoft are a bunch of idiots, they decided that the “use compatibility mode on the intranet” setting should override this. I can’t think of a single reason for this, other than sheer idiocy.

On StackOverflow, a user offered up a “simple” workaround – all you need to do is get every web server on the corporate intranet except yours to change to serve up a “X-UA-Compatible” that specifies compatibility mode, and then the sysadmins to change the default setting on the Active Directory servers (and probably Citrix as well) to make sure people’s logins allow the setting from the web server to take precedence over their login settings. That of course pre-supposes that you can even find every web server on the corporate intranet. And find their owners. And get those owners to sign anything without 12 years of running around making business cases and getting manager approvals. And then get the web servers actually configured that way.

I think it would just be faster to wait for every computer in the company to be replaced by one running a better OS. Or the heat death of the universe.

So off I go to try to find a work-around that works on IE 7 as well.