Rants and Musings

My Ugly Betty Connection...

2008-08-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

I learned an interesting piece of trivia today. I sometimes have coffee with Henry Grubstick's daughter at Has Beans

I'm sure I'll get comments from fellow Ugly Betty fans saying

"First of all, Henry doesn't have a daughter, but he has a son named Nathan!. Second of all, he's just a baby and you can't be having coffee with him!"

See WikiPedia entry for the full scoop.

Actually, the characther is named after a real person (one of the writer's, David Grubstick's, grandfather). So, yes, today I had coffee with David's mom, Sandra. She brought in a special edition Mode Magazine that she received (with interviews with characters, etc). Very cool!.

And, no, David, your mom didn't give away anything about season 3 (although I was interested... thank goodnes for Wikipedia to get that fix).

Blackberry Connection Specific Error

2008-08-03T13:21:00.000-07:00

Well, I just encountered yet another issue with my blackberry that lost me several hours and data related to synching between my Blackberry and my PC. Over the past week, I kept getting a "Connection Specific Error" when synching with the Blackberry Desktop Manager (which means that my calendar entries were not being synched between outlook and my device). I looked at the log, which just gave me an "Internal Error #4238" message just before cancelling the transaction at the bottom of the log (not very useful)

So, I went to google to find out what the problem might be and how to work around it. Although much of what was out there was close to being right (there seems to be data in one of the calendars that is causing it to crash), much of the focus was on how to delete calendar items in outlook. Unfortunately, my issue happened to be with one of the calendar entries on my device (and not on my PC). I finally figured that out by trial and error (but I could have seen in the progress of the synch that the crash was occuring when reading the device calendar and not the outlook calendar).

So, I ended up deleting all of my future entries in outlook after printing them out to manually enter later (which didn't fix the issue and ended up adding a lot of work).

So, how did you fix it

Well, I ended up having to figure out how to delete everything from my device calendar (which is fine, because I can just re-synch it from outlook). To do this, you will need to go to Desktop Manger on your PC (yes, you have to use your PC to clear your device's calendar!). From there, you double click on Backup and Restore (yes, not where you would expect it to be). Click on the advanced button to see the list of databases on the device. Scroll down to Calenar (in the right hand list) and select it. The clear button will ungray and you can clear the database by clicking on that. You can then re-synch if the problem is the same as mine.

Arrgh

The folks at RIM could have saved me a lot of time by any of the following:

Putting more information in the log about what stage of the synch it was on (device), and even what calendar entry that was causing the error.
Providing an option to turn on detailed logging from desktop manager
Making it easier to clear the database on the device (such as providing the option inside the calendar)
Providing better information on the web (most of the links in posts related to my issue had been removed from the RIM support site

Lotus Notes Haters Day

2008-05-14T00:06:00.000-07:00

Looks like yesterday was the "First International Lotus Notes Hater Day". I didn't really hate Lotus Notes, but I definitely don't miss it :-)

Oracle still has to have a few instances of Lotus Notes floating around because PeopleSoft had soooo much stuff in Lotus Notes. You just know that they're not too happy about that.

Separate, but related : I was looking for a link to best describe PeopleSoft dependency on Lotus Notes and found this old press release about the release of PeopleTools 5 with workflow integration with Lotus Notes. Hee hee. That brings back some old memories...

Things to watch out for with HP All-inOne printers

2008-03-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

I lost half of the day today, dealing with my HP C6150 all-in-one printer. I purchased a computer running Vista (and this is yet another thing that worked great on XP, but doesn't work well on Vista).

Networked Printer Uninstalling itself on Vista

Every once in a while, the printer just disappeared on the machine. You can see this both by going to the HP Solutions Center software (where it throws a dialog saying "No HP devices detected" and closes), or by going to the list of printers in control panel, and finding it missing. I searched all over, not finding any information to help me on this, so I ended up giving up and contacting HP technical support. I literally described the problem as my having to re-install the printer periodically.

Before I describe the wild-goose chase I was sent down (which by following them, caused my scanner not to work), let me send you the link to the critical update that fixes it. If you're running the C6150 All-in-One and accessing it through the network from a vista machine, download and run the patch linked to this page.

Here is what I was told to do:

Perform a level-3 uninstall (which didn't follow the standard windows uninstall from control panel)
Re-install the HP Software, but connecting using the USB port
Finally, connect to the network and add a device using their software to do the network configuration

This required a at least one re-boot at each step.

Although I was finally able to print, I couldn't scan from the device (and the HP Software said that there was no network printer).

Second Issue that prevented scanning

So, the step of instlling the printer first as USB and then as network was the root of my next set of issues. I'm not sure why they had me do it (must be some other bug). However, the fact that there was both a USB and an ethernet print connection for the same printer and that the first connection was USB was causing the scanning software to not even try using the ethernet one. After much wrangling, I ended up going to the printers in Control Panel. THere I discovered the two entries: "HP Photosmart 6100 series" and "HP Photosmart 6100 series (copy 1)". By deleting the "HP Photosmart 6100 series" printer, and renaming the "HP Photosmart series (copy 1)" to "HP Photosmart series", I was able to scan from my machine.

All I can say is I sincerely hope this posting helps somebody doing a google search on this issue.

Talking to my 8-year-old about Osama Bin Laden

2007-09-07T00:23:00.000-07:00

Today, I had a long converstaion about Osama Bin Laden with my 8 year old daughter. I hadn't planned on doing this at any specific point in time. You see, when the September 11 attacks occurred, my daughter was only 2 years old (ironically the same age as me when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon). However, the following picture happened to be on the CNN homepage at the time she walked in the room.

"Daddy, who's that man?"

"Osama Bin Laden. He was responsible for killing lots of people. Even women and children."

"Really? He looks nice in that picture."

That's how the conversation got started. Interestigly, each answer kept prompting a new question from her to try to understand something that is in many ways not understandable.

Explaining What Happened

I decided that showing her a video from September 11 and explaining what is happening would help her understand better what happened (and how not nice this person really is). Here is what I showed her.

What I didn't anticipate was my own reaction to this video. At 2:55 into the clip, the director timed a cell phone conversation of a victim with the footage of the building he was in collapsing. Hearing him cry "Oh God" right as the building started collapsing had a profound affect on me and really got my tears rolling (I'm starting to tear up right now even as I write this). My daughter was surprised that I was crying (mainly because she'd never seen me cry before), but I told her it made me sad to know that we just heard this man die, and that he would never see his family again, and that I remembered going to the top of that building with her mommy a few times before she was born.

Explaining Why it happened

The next thing she wanted to know was why. Actually, that's not quite accurate. What she really wanted to do was to understand what would cause Osama Bin Laden to want to kill so many people. I realized that this was not the time to give a simple answer. I was not going to say "He was an evil man," or "It was because of his religion," or even "I don't know."

My response focused more on the fact that he had certain beliefs and that he didn't like people who didn't believe the same things as him. Of course, she wanted to understand more about those beliefs, so I started by talking about his beliefs about how women should live their lives and went on to talk about TV and other things that he believe are evil. I continued by telling her that one of the reasons why we live in such a great country is that we accept people who think, act, and look different from ourselves.

She also wanted to understand why people would kill themselves to try to kill other people. I had to think about the answer to this one for a minute. I told her that sometimes people are told that God wants them to do something. When they believe that God wants them to do it, they don't need to question what they're doing and can believe that doing even the most horrible things is the right thing to do. Because nobody can understand God or God's intentions, there's no use in questioning what he wants us to do, even if it seems wrong. I told her that Osama Bin Laden said that God wanted them kill all those people.

I told her that Bin Laden was wrong and that I believed that God loves all people, regardless of whether they watched TV, wore the right clothes, or went to a church. I also told her that I believed that one of the most important things taught by Jesus is how people should treat other people, especially people who have wronged us. That because God loves everybody, what is most important to him is how we treat each other and that anthing we're told that contradicts this is wrong.

Reflecting...

Ever since first becoming a father, I realized how important it was to come to terms with my views on religion and morality. When a child asks her first questions about these things, it's easy to provide an answer that doesn't require you to do this. Eventially they will start asking deeper questions -- Where it becomes important to them to take those abstract concepts and understand how they apply to something real (other than wishing for things or wanting to know what happens when people die). That wasn't the original intention of the discussion ("Daddy, who is that man?"), but by answering what she wanted to know and understanding my feelings on the matter, I was able to handle difficult questions and hopefully help to raise a compassionate, caring person.

A problem occurred while trying to render the page

2007-07-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

I've been happily using my new Blackberry 8830 for the past month, and all of a sudden, I kept getting the following error message from the Blackberry browser:

A problem occurred while trying to render the page

This started on one site, and then quickly spread to all the sites I used.

I knew it couldn't be something in any of the sites themselves, because the browser never got past the "requesting" step (whicn means it didn't connect to the site yet). I searched the forums and google with no luck.

Eventually Brian suggested I find the cache for the browser and delete it. This did the trick. So, if you ever encounter this error, you may want to try to do that. When in the browser, select the Options menu. Then select Cache Operations. Clear only the Content Cache. If things start working at that point, you had the same problem I did.

My take on Allergen-free Peanuts...

2007-07-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, I watched a news report that discussed work that's been done to make allergen-free peanuts. Although I think the research is important and valuable, I'm extremely concerned about the way the work has been positioned. Words like "rest easy", "thing of the past", "may soon be history" are associated with this finding, which is dangerous.

For those not familiar with this development, here is the UPI article on it. Here's another article that has even more information.

Looks exciting... So, what's the problem?
It is exciting. However, the research does not cure the allergy, but tries to eliminate the compounds that trigger the allergic reaction. In other words, people who are allergic to peanuts will continue to be allergic to peanuts what aren't treated to remove the allergens.

Here are a few facts that are important to this discussion:

The vast majority (upwards of 80%) of deaths due to food allergy occur when the person ingests a food they didn't know contained the substance to which they were allergic.
Unless parents of children with severe food allergies imprison them in their own home, those children will be put in positions where they will be offered food and will have to make their own decisions as to whether the food is safe for them to eat.

Here's a pretty chilling CNN article that shows the tragic ramifications of both of these facts working together. I contend that deaths due to accidental exposure to peanuts will increase, not decrease if the benefits of the allergy-free peanuts are over-hyped.

What do you mean?
Managing food allergies is similar to being a security guard. There are many ways that bad guys can get in to do bad things. Similarly, there are many ways that children can get exposed to their allergens. If you don't remain vigilant with respect to the contents of the food and don't keep an epipen on hand, you're just asking for trouble.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

A child is given allergy-free peanut butter and believes that he's cured of his allergy.
A child is at a friend's house who's parents don't take the time to check the ingredients of a cookie they feed him (after he asks what's in it), because they believe peanut allergies have gone away (or that all cookies contain allergen-free peanuts).
A child (or parent) diligently checks ingredients, but the labeling is confusing to them (it says peanuts, but is it the safe ones)?

And, if you think that you can guarantee that the world's food supply will be rid of peanuts that aren't treated to remove the allergens, you're kidding yourself. The allergens occur naturally in the food, which means that they will always be somewhere where your child will be exposed to it.

Our experience with food allergies
For those who haven't read my posting that describes the food allergies that my son has and what we've had to do to manage it, here's a link to it. The Cliff's Notes version of it is that our son has peanut-type food allergies to many foods, including dairy, beef, and pork. Because those allergies are life threatening and are to so many foods, we're always thinking about it. This means that we always look at the ingredients of foods and we always carry our emergency kit with us (a pack with benedryl, an epipen, and an inhaler). Because we're always on high alert, we're also always prepared.

If our son was only allergic to one food, I think it would be a lot harder to keep him safe in the long-run. We wouldn't be as diligent looking at food, and we'd be more lax about the emergency kit.

So, what do I think of this new development
I think it's a really good thing, but I also don't think that we should change our behavior based on it. In other words, we should go ahead and wherever possible treat peanuts that are in our food supply. This will reduce the number of accidental exposures.

We should continue to discourage people with peanut allergies from eating products with treated peanuts in them. The treatment of peanuts should be done as a defensive step only. Incorporating peanuts (even treated peanuts) into the diet of an allergic persion is asking for trouble:

Children will be confused as to whether it's safe to eat peanuts in general or not. Keep in mind, that young children look at things as black-and-white. If they safely ate peanuts once, then they believe they can always eat them. Unless untreated peanuts are removed from the food supply, this confusion will prove to be fatal in many circumstances.
Any lapse in the treatment process can also prove fatal. Remember in February, when people died from salmonella-tainted peanut butter? Can we really guarantee that similar lapses don't occur in the treatment process (because if it does occur, it could be even more tragic).

I also believe that anything we can learn about what goes on in the body (and what can be done to affect it) with respect to allergies is also a good thing. I'm hoping that we can take what we learned about removing the allergens from peanuts use it in other ways.

Take the technology and find a way to turn off or remove the allergens inside the body (perhaps a pill that is taken either daily or just prior to a meal). Again, this isn't a cure for the allergy, but it is a safer way to ensure the allergen does not cause an allergic reaction. Instead of worrying about whether a food was treated, the allergic persion can take control of the situation. They would know when they're safe and know when they aren't.
Find a way where lay people can treat their food before they eat it. Even if it's not something that a person can bring with them, if a restaraunt (or your microwave oven) could have an "allergen-zapper", you could make it safer by knowing that the food preparation removed the allergens (of course if the "allergen-zapper" isn't working properly, one could still get exposed).

More loving/hating of my Printer/Scanner/Fax

2007-06-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

After spending the past 3-4 hours troubleshooting a problem with the scanner, I'm deciding that although I like my Printer/Scanner/Fax, I really, really, really don't like the software developers and the people who put together the online help.

For those who haven't read the following post, you should at this time (because although I never intended to write af follow-on posting, circumstances compelled me to do so)

So, here I am, trying to scan something into my computer, and I am getting all sorts of errors that the computer can't find the device. I think "okay... I know I can print to this device, so why can't it find it?" I print a test page to make sure, and it prints fine (hmmm....)

Take 1:

So, I wonder if the problem is that I changed the hostname of the device from the factory defaults (I remembered doing it through the embedded web server in the device, but I didn't do anything locally).

So, I start looking for how I can set the hostname on the software installed on my computer. After going through the documentation and all the menus on the programs installed on my computer, I realized that there was no way to do this without getting really deep and dirty (such as looking for registry settings).

So, Idecide to try a different tack. I realized that during the installation process, the program was smart enough to find the device on the network to configure it. Perhaps if I reinstall the software and have it find the device already configured, it would pick up the appropriate host name. So, I run the uninstaller and reboot my machine. I then re-install the software, and in hangs halfway through (it does such a good job of hanging the machine that I couldn't even get task manager to come up). So, I wonder if my antivirus software is causing an issue (not sure why it didn't cause the issue the first time, but it was worth a try). I disable the antivirus and am finally able to get the software installed again (one reboot later).

Take 2:

So, I print my test page. Try to scan (or access the embedded web browser), and the software still cannot find the device on the network. So, I look a little farther in the company's online support pages. It then tells me that perhaps the programs and ports are blocked by my computer's firewall software. I go through the recommended steps, which took me close to an hour. I try to scan again... No luck.

Take 3:

So, I'm back to square 1. I decide to see if changing the hostname on the device back to the factory settings would make a difference. The fact that the scanning software on the computer was part of a larger package that used the embedded web page on the printer to do advanced configuration (and that it couldn't find the page) told me that perhaps that was still the root of the problem. So, I hit the IP address of the web page (versus the hostname) and reconfigure the hostname back to the factory setting, and viola! I could scan.

Okay. Now I'm really mad. I wasted all this time due to sloppy software development, poor diagnostics, and poor support. There were many opportunities for the software team to do small things that didn't either waste my time or limit the product unecessarily (you see, it ended up taking me 4 hours to learn that I cannot put more than 1 of these devices on my network, because I'm stuck with the factory-delivered hostname, which will be the same for every device).

Probably the easiest solution from a development perspective is to allow me to configure the hostname in the software on my PC. This would still limit me to 1 device (but would at least give me control over how it shows up on my network). Better yet would be to have it periodically look for devices and if there's more than one, to ask me which one I want to use.

Another option is to address it at installation time. The installer could already look on the network for the device and find it, even after I had changed the hostname. It should have been able to do one of the following:

Keep track of the hostname, MAC address, or IP Address of the device it found (it does this for printing)
Keep track of a change to the hostname when the user made it (although the change was made by the embedded web server in the device, due to the automatic navigation, it would take a pretty savvy user to even know what was being done where).

This comes down to a failure in both organization and process

The fact that the device allows you to make a setting that cannot be used by a computer that uses the device is probably an artifact that one group of folks wrote the firmware on the device and another wrote the software on the PC (and yet another wrote the installation programs).

The fact that networking works differently for printing than for scanning or faxing also illustrates a breakdown in the design and development process. Ever heard of Encapsulation? There really is no need to write the same thing twice.

The lack of documentation of this setting also illustrates a breakdown (if there was more thought given to it, there would have been more for the doc writer to include). That should have been my cue from the start, I guess.

Finally, the online help and support had both misleading and incorrect information with respect to this problem (which wasted my time, and ended up being the source of most of my frustration).

Lesson for configuring devices from this manufacturer: DON'T CHANGE FROM THE FACTORY DEFAULT SETTINGS. THEY DON'T TEST THEM.

Okay... Enough on the Hate side...

On a positive note, once I did get the scanning to work, it did a great job of capturing exactly what I wanted to capture and make it easy for me to do so. It has lots of nice features for saving the file in different formats as well as setting the scan settings as well.

So far I haven't tried the device-driven scanning (in other words, pressing a button on the device and having it pick which PC the scan results would show up at), but the PC-driven scanning seems to work well (again, once you get it set up properly).

I love/hate my new printer

2007-05-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

One of my pet peevs is when somebody puts together something that does exactly what I want, and then decides to cut one feature that kills much of the value of it. It really drives me nuts, and this is a story of exactly that.

So, I just got a brand new multi-function printer to replace the photo printer that died recently. It's got a lot of cool features that I really like.

Photo capabilities (with 7 separate ink cartridges, so I have a good breadth of color and only need to replace the colors I run out of).
Decent printing speed
Ethernet capabilities, so I can connect it directly to the network and have several machines print to it without having to turn on a main print server machine.
Fax and Scanning (I already had a scanner, but it's nice to be able to fax out when needed)

So, you think all would be perfect with the world. I unpacked the box, put it all together and hooked it up to the network. I had one machine I was going to use to administer the printer, so I took the CD and installed the required software and then configured it. I was impressed. Smooth sailing up until this point.

So, now I wanted to take my laptop and set it up to use the printer. The instructions said you had to use the CD to do this, but I simply could not believe that they would require me to install all sorts of software on it, when all I needed was a network identifier for the printer to connect to it. I ended up spending the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to do it (I was even able to telnet to the host name and port 9100, type in a few items, and then cause it to show up on the printer). To no avail. In their infinite wisdom, the printer manufacturer decided to create a proprietary print server. I'm sure that it has something to do with the fact that it also does scanning. I can just see the design discussions that went on:

Well, we've already built this thing that the administrator uses to configure the printer on the network. Instead of using standard protocols for sharing the printing, fax, and scanning features, let's just use what we already built. Sure, the people would have to install the administrator tool on any machine that wants to use the printer through the print server. Since this printer isn't part of our business product family, they should feel lucky this printer even has the ethernet functionality."

This is really frustrating, because the manufacturer took away a lot of the value of the print server functionality with this decision, and there really isn't a good reason for it. Whenever somebody wants to use this printer, they have to have the CD and install the software on their machine. Additionally, anybody who spends any time administering computers knows that bloatware is a problem. I don't want to install a bunch of extra crap, just to send something to the printer

With all the cool things this printer does, it's really frustrating that they overlooked such a simple requirement that has a big impact on the value of it (although not such a big impact that it would cause me to return it... in some ways, I guess that's the point regardless of my frustration, isn't it?).

P.S. I'd tell you the model number in question, but the manufacturer is a potential customer of ours (and I see this sort of thing going on with other manufacturers, so I don't necessarily want to single them out).

More on Has Beans

2007-05-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

Now that I mentioned a couple of folks I have coffee with, I figure I should discuss why I like Has Beans so much.

Has Beans is an unpretentious and charming coffee shop in San Ramon in the shopping center at San Ramon Valley Blvd and Crow Canyon Road. They've been there for years and years, and the proprietors, Gene and Chris run it all by themselves.

Although Has Beans has great coffee, it's charm is that it's one of the few places left where you can meet and chat with the most interesting people around. My first version of this posting described some of the regulars, but found that I couldn't do them justice in something this size. In lieu of that, here is a sampling of backgrounds of some of the regulars.

FBI and local law enforcement
Multi-generation local Ranchers and Farmers
Small business owners in retail, technology, home improvement, finance, manufacturing, and entertainment
Environmental consultanting
Retired Military
Medical
Journalism

Chris and Gene have created a great place where people just love to go. It may sound corny, but its feel is similar what was portrayed in "Cheers"; because people really do know your name and the different personalities of the regulars makes for very interesting and stimulating conversation.

Suffice to say that going to Has Beans is th highlight of my day.

I got to hold an Emmy Today...

2007-05-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

It was very cool. Sasha Gurevich did an investigative series on the Unabomber for KPIX (CBS Channel 5 in San Francisco), and won an Emmy on Saturday for it. Here's a picture of Sasha receiving the Bill Stout Award for this same piece earlier this year.

He brought it into the coffee shop I frequent (Has Beans in San Ramon) and shared it with us.

One of the other folks I have coffee with, Max Noel, was a former FBI agent and was the person who actually tracked down and arrested the Unabomber. He worked with Sasha on this piece. Here's a (much too serious) picture of Max.

It's a shame that I couldn't find anything about the Emmy, the piece that earned it, or even information on Sasha on the KPIX website, since their name is on the Emmy, too. However, KPIX recently decided to cut costs by letting all their freelance folks go (and I guess it wouldn't look good on their part to recognize an emmy that went to somebody you just sacked).

So, it looks like there's a very good Award Winning Investigative Producer available. I have his contact information if you're interested

Usability screwups

2007-05-09T01:49:00.000-07:00

Out of the box VMWare has confirmation dialogs that pop up when you want to do something destructive, like reverting your environment back to a previous state.

At some point in the past I managed to turn off this setting (it's a checkbox in the dialog that comes up) by accident, but there's nothing in the UI that makes it easy to turn this setting back on. I remember being mildly annoyed by that before and thinking that I needed to look up how to do that.

I guess I should have looked harder for the setting to turn that back on because I've just managed to revert an environment that had a bunch of important stuff on it by accidentally clicking revert. This was due to the top portion of the VMWare window doing the hide/unhide thing from being in it's mostly fullscreen view. So instead of clicking in the top of the window to change focus out of VMWare, I managed to click the Revert button and POOF!. Gone. Instant outburst of extremely choice words (the kids are asleep though - just the dog to hear me)

Thankfully most of what I blew away is in my head (the rest was already in version control), so it's not the end of the world. But, it's definitely the end of my tomorrow to try reproduce it all. Ugh.

I know, I know - I'm the one the did it, but why, oh why did someone make it so friggin easy to do?

Disallow Vista

2007-02-05T20:16:00.000-08:00

I Just saw the John Hodgman Vista commercial (PC with Vista Security) on The Daily Show and I must say, Vista scares me.

Blogger FTP publishing NOT WORKING!!

2007-01-10T10:58:00.000-08:00

Since we've switched to using the new Blogger for our main blog, we've been unable to republish the blog to our ISP website. This is very frustrating. I've tried to look at the help, but alas I get a SERVER error (way to go Google!).

I'm not sure why this is happening, but it seems to be something with trying to open too many concurrent FTP sessions with the ISP (Yahoo in this case). Perhaps this should have stayed in BETA!

Blogger, please fix it!

iTunes 7 sucks period

2006-09-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

I installed iTunes 7 on XP Professional (that is an oxymoron, I know) and it worked fine for a few minutes.

That's when I tried to use it via Remote Desktop (I play music from a server in another room). Then it crashed with the dreaded "Unknown error 0x666D743F". This was an evil omen (note the 666 in the error code). A couple of quick Google searches and I then realized my error, iTunes 7 wasn't really tested to play MUSIC!!!

I was lead to this post. This seems to indicate that my problem was that when you try to bring the audio to a local computer, iTunes (and Quicktime for that matter) barfs with the 0x666D743F error. After a further read it also indicates that 24-bit sound cards may exhibit the problem as well. A little more digging indicated that there is no repair coming soon (and/or Apple is more focused on the new video iPod) so the only fix was crystal clear. That's right, downgrade. This seems to be the only sensible thing to do.

To bad Apple, things were looking pretty good.

Zen and the Art of Remodeling your home

2006-05-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

For the last several years, my wife and I have been remodeling our house. Alas, as with all things in this life, there have been many more problems than we expected. So many in fact that we have just settled the litigation with our first contractor. Suffice it to say that I am not at liberty to mention the contractor's name (part of the standard settlement agreement) nor the outcome of the settlement (that really SUCKS OUT LOUD!).

Regardless of the experience with the first contractor (who was also the designer/architect), we must contiue forward and expect another 12-18 months of construction. We have been stuck in a this quasi-complete (about 75% complete if there wasn't a lot of damage that needs to be fixed) state of remodel for almost exactly two years. In that time my wife and I have strengthened our relationship (virtually unheard of I'm told) and have managed to not only create an outstanding garden, but have also started a company (Grey Sparling Solutions). All this while Miranda (my wife) has made not one, not two, but three job changes. Also, our cat came down with diabetes which requires me to give him shots twice a day for the rest of his life (another 5-10 years).

I'm not really complaining just venting. In the end my wife and I have become much closer, we've learned a lot about construction, we've made the time to build a wonderful garden (thanks to my in-laws Suzie and Doug!), have created a company that doesn't require me to leave the house too often, and will have a wonderful house to share with friends and family.

Thanks for losing most of my post Blogger!

2006-02-13T22:53:00.000-08:00

(update : I've now finally posted what I was originally going to write )

Ugh. Blogger, our current, but destined to soon be former, blogging tool around here has just eaten one of my posts. My sin was not closing a iframe tag. Blogger thoughtfully replaced everything after the iframe (a nice long explanation of the contents of said iframe), saved the entry, and then gave me an error telling me that I didn't actually close the iframe.

Double ugh.

Banned!

2006-01-17T12:28:00.000-08:00

(edit : an ITToolbox product manager contacted me about figuring out what happened - see the comments in this post)
(edit 2 : it looks like posts are going through again)
(edit 3 : once again, they're dropping my posts. I give up.)

It appears as though I've been banned from the ITToolbox PeopleTools forums.

I've responded to various interesting posts on their forums in the past and had them posted without problem. But a couple of responses to some posts at the end of October seem to have gotten me in trouble.

One was for this post where someone was asking about how to use the USER_PROFILE_CI component interface. Here's how I responded.

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 09:01 +0000, ERP_Nerd via peopletools-l wrote:

> I am trying to upload user profiles in Peopletools 8.42...

Not related to your question, but I'd really try to get on a later
PeopleTools version.

> I am not able to understand what I have to pass in :
>
> &oAttributes.Fieldname
> &oAttributes.Recname
> &oAttributes.AttributeValue
> &oAttributes.AttributeName
>

The code that gets generated loops through every single that can
possible be accessed, not just what is the minimum required. So you can safely delete the generated code that references the IDTypes collection if you are not using that.

--
Chris Heller
Grey Sparling Solutions, Inc.
http://www.greysparling.com/
http://blog.greysparling.com/

I received a message from the moderator saying my message was not published because I introduced a new question in an existing thread. Fair enough - the part about upgrading to a newer version of PeopleTools was general advice and not related to the original question. I even acknowledged as much when writing that. But I did at least answer his question.

A few days later I answered another question. This time related to testing subscription PeopleCode in Integration Broker. Here's how I responded.

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 03:42 +0000, bvsdata via peopletools-l wrote:

> I am writing one application message program to subscribe the data from peoplesoft SCM system to Peoplesoft CRM. I would like to test the subscription code is working properly or not.
> I didn't get the connection to write a publishing code in SCM. But i need to check whether my subscription code is firing or not.
>
>
> Please suggest me how to check my subsciption code is firing or not. I checked it in message monitor. But it is not there.
>
> Please help me if anybody knows.
>

There is a delivered tool as part of Integration Broker called SendMaster. You can use that for testing sending messages, which will help you see how your subscription PeopleCode is behaving.

--
Chris Heller
Grey Sparling Solutions, Inc.
http://www.greysparling.com/
http://blog.greysparling.com/

I was a bit surprised to receive another "You can't introduce new questions to an existing topic" message from the moderator. Especially since I was the manager person responsible for Integration Broker product strategy reported to me at the time that SendMaster was created :-)

It reminded me of a scene in the movie Back to School. Rodney Dangerfield has hired Kurt Vonnegut to ghostwrite a report for him on a (wait for it) Kurt Vonnegut novel for his college class. The professor gives Rodney an F and says "Whoever *did* write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!".

I didn't actually write any code for SendMaster, but I sure remember lots of meetings with various PeopleSoft application development teams where they complained a lot about the difficulty of testing their integrations because of the challenges in coordinating multiple environments. This is exactly what led to us developing the SendMaster utility. Sure sounds like the original poster's issue to me :-)

So I sent off an email awhile ago to the moderator explaining this (leaving out the Back to School part of course :-), but haven't heard anything back. I've attempted to answer a few other posts, but the responses don't get posted nor do I get any message back from the moderator explaining why.

Which is too bad because amongst the large number of questions that really just deserve an "RTFM" answer, there are some good questions. One recent one was about how to setup different security based on where the person logged in from. I helped a customer doing that for a rollout of eBenefits awhile ago. I'll write up a blog entry on that (one of these days :-), but who knows whether the original poster will ever find it.

Oracle Open World Press

2005-09-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

Well, Chris told me this would happen; being misquoted in the the press. Actually, the problem is not actually misquoting, but information taken out of context. Here is an article where there is a quote is taken enough out of context just enough as to make it inflammatory. The basic sentiment is correct, but the quote is out of context. "The PeopleSoft customers seem to be upset by the lack of information about Fusion...", is what I actually said.

Regardless, press is press. Check out our other postings for more tips and techniques based on questions we're getting at Open World.

It's interesting how the brain works...

2005-08-24T00:32:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I included a reference to a presentation I saw that included a clip from a movie. However, I couldn't remember the name of the movie.

What really surprised me was how I eventually found it. I guess it's a working example as to how the brain works, and how some connections between neurons are stronger than others.

First, I knew that the movie was about work. I went to IMDB and did a search with the word "work" in the title. No luck.
I tried hard to remember the name of the main actor in it (or at least a movie he was in). I couldn't do it.
However, I did remember that there was a geeky character in the movie who was played by the boss in the TV show "News Radio" (for some reason, that association I did remember). I searched on "News Radio" and found the character played by the actor, and then clicked on the actor's name to see other things he was in. "Office Space" eventually showed up.

So, I couldn't remember the movie's name or the main characters in it. But I could remember a very minor character was from a different TV show and used that to find it out. Amazing!

More on Digital Rights Management

2005-08-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

I wonder if Sun will be successful in the following.

I completely agree with the following quote from the article.

"Today, they're based on the concept that you license content to a device,
but our belief is that if you're going to do any licensing, it should be based
on the identity of individuals," Edens says.

One issue that my friend, Chris Heller, points out is that DRM solutions are hacked pretty quickly. I think much of that is due to what's behind the quote above, especially knowing that the least common denominator is devices that aren't connected to the internet. In other words, there's a lot of incentive for cracking the DRM solution, because once you've cracked it, you've basically allowed yourself unrestricted access to everything out there.

Now, imagine if the concepts behind HTTPS and Encryption are used. You want a movie? Sign onto a web site and download it. As part of the download process, the file is encrypted using your user information (thus making it specific to you). When you use it your user information is used to decrypt the file. If somebody else takes that file and somehow figures out how to decrypt it, they have only cracked that single movie (and not all movies using that DRM solution). The economics of it are much less compelling to spend the time and energy for hacking the file.

If they can fix DRM in this way, then I think there are other opportunities for generating revenue that are too difficult to go after today. For example, imagine I'm creating a home movie and want to spice it up with a small clip of Arnold saying "I'll be back" in the terminator. If the rights were based on users, I could purchase the clip with a certain set of rights included in it (and potentially pay to have those rights upgraded for other uses). Pinnacle Studio has a rudimentary version of this with some of their effects and clips that you can include in a movie you're creating, and then unlock it.

Right now, it's merely too difficult for people to do it, but I'm sure there's a huge market for it. Another market potential is business presentations. I was present at a very compelling presentation on HR processes that used a clip from "Office Space" to illustrate potential problems (it really drove the point home). Instead of incorporating the clip into the presentation, she had the DVD at the right place on her laptop and unpaused it (not the most efficient means of doing this, but it worked for the presentation, but not when the presentation was distributed to customers).

I believe that if this issue can be solved, there will be an explosion of legally used media. Things are getting closer with the Tivo Desktop (which isn't supported by DirecTV... ARRGH), the trend toward using flat panel displays for both computers and video, and the Media Center Edition of Windows XP. The holy grail is to have a media computer that is your database of all media: TV shows, Music, DVDs, Pictures, Home movies. Using Ethernet, you can stream that content to any device at home (This works pretty well for my hacked DirecTivo... when I don't have access to the TV connected to the Tivo, I use my laptop or desktop machine to watch my recordings... works very well, except for one intermittent issue).

Here's a synopsis of what I would love to do with my media...

Put all my DVDs on my home computer and stream them as I want to any TV in my house. I'd like to be able to categorize them on my hard drive and navigate using a menu.
Allow me to watch media from either of my DVRs on any TV or computer in my house.
Allow me to copy or burn media from either of my DRVs so that I can watch programs when I'm on the road.
Allow me to better synchronize and share music across my devices (where my home computer is the primary repository). These devices include laptop computers, my home stereos, my MP3 player, and either of my cars.
Use media in home movies that I create. The media I create is relatively simple to share (especially since I have a media extender), but the media I've purchased is problematic (especially ON the media extender).

Tivo's contribution to the new economy...

2005-08-11T22:52:00.000-07:00

More on the previous posting.

Tivo has made the exact same contribution to the entertainment economics. Prime Time is essentially the corresponding limitation in shelf space that a brick and mortar store has. Most people had limited time each day where they were available to watch something, and the television stations had to program to those time slots, which meant that there was limited choice in shows.

Although Cable and Satellite TV has increased the number of channels to choose from, Tivo has broken the time barrier. This means that a program's draw is not limited by the time in which it's aired. Instead of focusing on 18 hours of programming per week, a station has 168 hours of programming available. With Tivo, a show airing at 3am has the same opportunity to be watched as one airing at 9pm. This means that cable channels who want to steal market share can take risks that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to take.

I believe my own watching patterns bear this out. Now that I have Tivo, my watching patterns are completely different than they were before (in other words, now that I have more opportunities for choice, I watch a completely different set of shows).

What's even more interesting is that I've recently started watching very well written and well executed original programming on USA Network, TNT, the SciFi Channel, TLC, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.

With the exception of two shows (that are currently on summer break), the fiction I watch is on USA Network, SciFi, and TNT. I'm completely hooked on:

The 4400
Battlestar Galactica
The Closer
Alias
The West Wing

What's really surprising to me is that the first 2 were around last season and I missed out on both of them. Fortunately, USA ran all the original season of the 4400 prior to this season premier and I was able to get caught up (again a wonderful thing from Tivo). It's surprising to me that these 3 shows have enough funding (but I believe that Tivo and other DVRs had a big impact... otherwise, DreamWorks and the other large studios producing some of these shows wouldn't be able to make their money back).

On the Non-Fiction front, I'm currently hooked on the following:

MythBusters
American Chopper
Biography
Modern Marvels
Nanny 911
Extreme Makeover Home Edition

I used to be hooked on What not to Wear, but it's been pushed out by the other items on the list.

Now, as a parent, I could also talk about how Tivo has allowed me to (1) give my children more choice over what they watch, while at the same time (2) give me more control over what they watch. Can you guess whether Dragonball Z or SpongeBob is set to record on my Tivo???

More on the new economies shaping the Entertainment Industry

2005-08-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

The following Wired Article provides more background on the meaningless analysis discussed in this blog entry. It's a very well written analysis of the new economies driven by the internet (and provides an explanation as to why the analysis is limited).

Microsoft has done something right!

2005-08-02T21:44:00.000-07:00

I just checked out the IEBLOG. Although there are many things that drive me up the wall about Microsoft, this is extremely well done.

As a former product manager at PeopleSoft, I wish I had done what they're doing for my products. It's very powerful to be able to provide a view into what's going on with a product, and unfortunately, documentation simply doesn't cut it (especially a software company that warrants to its documentation... if you don't want to support it, then don't document it).

What do I mean? Well, there are lots of features that we added to our products that we didn't do a good enough job of educating people on (even internally, where there were over 3,000 developers using our features). A blog would have been a great way to get the word out to both customers and internal folks (Chris Heller set up a few rogue blogs including one for me where we provided tips and techniques, but it was never sanctioned).

What's also great about this blog is that it's extremely readable. When going there, I half expected it to be chock full of acronyms, code snippets, and other things that lay people won't be able to understand. I really like the explanation of RSS feeds. It's clear, concise, and doesn't assume that you're an expert.

Great Job, Guys!

The Dreaded API

2005-08-02T19:34:00.000-07:00

Application Progammatic Intefaces written by individual companies are a bit of a joke. I mean, think about it, in the cut-throat U.S. business market does it make sense to actually allow other companies to twiddle around with your application? Not really. However, companies usually get forced (by a large customer with lots of money to spend) to create some mechanism that seems to allow the big customer to "twist the knobs" themselves. In essence its a sales gimmick.

Don't get me wrong, I've written two ODBC drivers for different companies. But ODBC is a standardized API. That means more than one company had input into the design and specifications. Both sides of the API were discussed and agreed upon by companies that were actively persuing the needed integration. The implementing developer (that's me) just has to follow the conventions put forth in the API. The result is a somewhat smooth integration with another application that uses the said API (ODBC in this case).

In the case I'm ticked about, a company decides to add a marketing bullet point to the sales presentation and ends up creating a load of work for its development (maybe not, keep reading) and support organizations (definitely). The result is typically an API that either is extremely restricted in its usability (because of the narrow definitions imposed by the big customer) or the API is just a mirror of the internal structure of the original application without the glue that holds it together.

The API that really irks me is the latter, the big bloated beast that no sane developer in their right mind would attempt to use. In essence the company in question has had the development team save a lot of their precious time (because they are actually not charging for this feature) by exposing the internal data structures as the API. The result is a little like buying a Ferrari that comes completely disassembled and without instructions. You may only have wanted a means to tweak a single part of the application (font color) and you end up having to rebuild the whole application piece by piece.