Ian J Cottee

I hate Dell

2009-06-30T21:23:00.001+01:00

I have only had to shout down the phone twice in my life. Once was in 2005’ish I believe. The other time was this week. Both times were to Dell, although the first time was to technical support and this time was to sales support. It’s somewhat encouraging to know that their sales support is as bad as their technical support. I assume their presales support is better otherwise they wouldn’t sell anything.

So here’s the story.

One of the perks of my life is hardware. I have one old client from my pre Blue Fountain days and every now and again they fit me up with a new laptop. Due to some confusion, the first order, placed on the 24th was rejected. On the 26th (having mulled some more and upgraded some of the specs (including lighting on the keyboard and bluetooth), I tried to place the order again rejected again.

Approximately three hours later I suggested I use a different one of their company credit cards and I’d put in all the details myself. I also made the delivery address the same as the invoice address which I know can cause issues otherwise. I also added a digital camera to the order. To my joy, about thirty minutes late I got an order confirmation. Hoorah. Or so I thought. The confirmation page doesn’t mention the original order number but if I’d looked at the specs on the PDF it would have told me that they had issued an order for a laptop, the first spec laptop. I would have also noticed that it had no camera with it.

But at 18:39 on the 26th I got a Dell order check. They gave me two internet receipt numbers. One for the first order I’d placed on the 24th and one for the last order that I actually wanted, placed a few hours earlier. Those clever Dell people. They’d realised the issue and were asking me to confirm which one I wanted. at 19:03 I replied that it was ONLY the last order I wanted. And I felt happy with the world. Sad deluded fool I am.

At 21:31 on the 26th, I got another confirmation email. Odd – this was just for the camera. The order screen was still showing as the first order processing, the third order was for a camera only. The order screen for the laptop was showing the previous spec.

OK, I thought, I’ll ring Dell in the morning. Oh no you won’t matey. Once you’ve placed your orders Dell will not answer their phones apart from during working hours. Worrying. Still, I’d get it sorted Monday.

Sunday brought interesting news. My laptop was in production. Worrying. Even more worrying was another potential duplicate order message. This time the first order reference was for the second order I’d placed! The second order reference was a number I’ve never seen in my life and to this day I don’t know what it is. Entering it into the system gives me “We’re unable to give you an update at the moment”. I replied to this confirmation mail saying ‘DO NOT PROCESS ANYTHING, UNTIL i SPEAK TO YOU IN THE MORNING’.

The next day dawned and I prepared for the joy of customer support. Lady 1. Listened patiently and explained to me that the laptop was on the first order and the camera was on the second order. OK … but the first laptop is wrong – I replied to your confirmation mail which says I have three working days to reply. I replied in 30 minutes.

“Ah so sorry”, she says, but it is in production and can’t be stopped.

“Sorry? Can’t be stopped!? I replied in 30 minutes!”.

“So sorry sir.”

What should I be doing then.

“When it’s delivered you can return to us with an explanation and you can have your money refunded.”

Splutter. Er, you want to make a laptop – I don’t want. Send it to me. Let me send it back to you. Then you give me the money back. And then I order the right one again!? Did I get that right?

“Sorry sir, there’s nothing that can be done. “

Well yes – we can do something. We can refuse to take this ridiculous situation and tell them where to put their laptops. I am not sure how long I was on the phone but by the end of it I’d been promised her senior would be calling me to see what could be done. And I was exhausted. Having somebody just repeating to you something nonsensical regardless of what you said back was exhausting. I am told my voice was clear across the breadth and depth of the Liverpool office.

Man 1 phoned me back. He helpfully explained that the order was too late to be cancelled and that there was nothing that could be done. Back to the order check email I went. No budging. Why did they then process PART of the third order? He didn’t know but there was nothing that could be done. I told him that a) I would reporting them to the credit card company b) I would not be accepting anything they tried to deliver to me and c) I would then turn this over to the company solicitor.

This resulted in a 10% discount offer. Which threw me a bit off balance. But the fact remained. It wasn’t what I ordered, they’d asked me for a confirmation which they now claimed was pointless as it was too late AND they’d tampered with the third order. Somebody had seen that order, cut the laptop off it and just gone ahead with the digital camera. That was not automated. He even had the affront to tell me that I’d placed the third order for camera only. I vented.

“I’m sorry sir, can you tell me what you actually want.”

“I want the items on the third order. That’s all I want. Nothing else. Nothing more. Nothing less.

“The third order was for a laptop as well sir!?”.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhh.

He said he’d talk to somebody and call me back.

After that call (Monday 29th, about 13:00), I realised that the prices had changed between the orders as well. I was being offered a discount but the revised order had only added a tenner to the total price, so the whole unit cost must have gone down. So it was a discount on the old price. No wonder they were so desperate to flog me the original laptop.

So I awaited the call back. And waited. Today, Tuesday 30th – I phoned Dell at 17:30. “The person you wish to speak to is not available at the moment, can I ask him to call you back?”. Yes, I replied calmly. That would be nice. He has not done so yet.

Watch this space.

Update 1. Tuesday 30th, 22:28 - They’ve changed the status screen for order 1 to ‘shipped’. Looks like I’ve been totally ignored so far. Will be making another call tomorrow morning unless they phone me first.

Update 2. Wednesday 1st July, 16:15 – The man I need to speak to is on another line. He will call back in 20 minutes. ‘Are you sure?’. Yes sir. No call back.

It's coming back!!

2009-06-15T10:28:00.001+01:00

My machines

2009-05-21T05:31:00.001+01:00

Hello. I’m not dead yet, although the current quantity of phlegm etc must suggest otherwise. As I can’t sleep and as I have just reinstalled one of my laptops AGAIN I thought I’d take the opportunity to offer some comparisons of the different machines I’m running and how they compare.

There are currently five machines I use daily. Three of them are portable (yes, I've been carrying them all backwards and forwards to the office) and two of them are desktops – one at home and one at the office. Here’s what they do and what they’re running:

Quad Core Custom PC (nickname, the beast)

I built this in March for approximately 700 quid. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping (2.4GHz 1066MHz) Socket 775 L2 8MB Cache Processor, Asus P5Q PRO P45 Socket 775 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard, 1TB Drive, 4GB of fast RAM, Nvidea 9800 GTX 512MB Video card. It’s got dual monitors connected to it.

This dual boots Vista 64 Bit and Ubuntu 9.04. It’s an excellent gaming PC although I have little time to play on it and actually use it mostly for just multiple terminal sessions ssh’d to client machines when working from home! Having said that, when (WHEN) I have some serious time, it’s awesome for developing on.

The config is also great for overclocking although on this particular machine I haven’t spent any time doing so. I’m planning on sticking Windows 7 64 Bit on here at some point in the not too near future as I do have some problems with the Vista install. On the whole though – it’s a great (and currently underutilised) machine.

Oh, the cooling fans give off a lovely blue glow as well ;)

MacBook Pro (nickname, mbp – yawn)

As detailed here, this is my main machine. Awesome machine, dualboots between OS X and XP although 99% of the time is just spent in OS X. At work it’s dual monitor and handles all my web browsing, itunes, emacs, textmate, mail. Everything. Also has vmware on with Ubuntu and XP virtual machines when needed. A thing of beauty – if only the form factor was a little smaller.

Asus Aspire 2920 (nickname Bongo)

My second main machine in reality. This laptop is a little gem. Yes – it does look like a fisher price toy (especially when open) BUT it’s just a great machine for running VMWare workstation on (I had a 12 system Ubuntu VPN config simulated on it once). The keyboard is big enough to make typing easy (I’m typing on it now) but the whole form factor is great. 2GB of RAM and a Core Duo processor T5750.

Until yesterday it was dual booting XP and Ubuntu 9.04. Mostly used for XP and VMWare workstation, yesterday I wiped it and stuck Windows 7 on it. Yes, yes I know. But it runs like a DREAM. It’s far more responsive than either of the other two OS’s were on it (even installed from new), every driver worked from the beginning, hibernation/suspend JUST works, all the special function keys JUST WORK. I’m not a Microsoft fan by any means and Windows 7 is hardly a revolution but I’m impressed (it’s the main reason I’m typing this up).

Because of the size of this machine, it’s the main machine I just pick up when I need some portability (the MBP is just too big for that).

Samsung NC10 (nickname pig)

A new addition to the family. Came with XP, now has CrunchBang Linux (Ubuntu based) installed as dual boot. I’ve been coveting one of these for a while as I’ve always wanted a NetBook with good keyboard and good battery life that can run Linux. Specifically for just undisturbed coding within Emacs. This little baby does it all. I love it – and I’m about to remove XP from it completely and make it CrunchBang only. The battery life on these is superb (6 hours) and CrunchBang is a great distribution to run on it. I must resist the temptation to put Windows 7 on here as well. Although, mmmm – it’s a nice thought.

Apple iMac G4 (nickname bob)

The oldest computer I still use, the classic ‘tablelamp’ look still has something about it. 512MB of memory, PPC processor running at 1Ghz, 17” screen. I confess – I really only use this for terminal sessions, iTunes and more recently Spotify – but it’s a great little machine and for a complete audio pleb like me – I like the sound the little speakers give out.

Conclusion

So in conclusion I think I can safely say, I use far too many computers in my day to day life. Which reminds me of one other thing. I always find there are certain files I want on all five machines and keeping them in sync has always been a nightmare – UNTIL. Dropbox. Works fine on everything. You won’t know it’s there. Perfect.

Now god help me if Apple ever release a 12” MBP.

MacBook Pro

2008-10-25T18:34:00.001+01:00

This is a little embarrassing.

You may remember this. Well, I now have one of the new model MacBook Pro's.

2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 1066Mz DDR3 SDRM-2x2GB
320GB Serial ATA @ 7200
SuperDrive 8X DL
Mini DisplayPort - DVI Adapter
N0 VGA Adapter
No Modem
No Remote
No iWork Preinstalled
No Final Cut Exp Preinstalled
No Aperture Preinstalled
No Logic Exp Preinstalled
KYBD/User's Guide -B
Country Kit-GBR

What happened to the old one? Well there was an ... er ... accident. It's going to be repaired and rerouted to somebody else. So I get a new MBP. Yes, I'm a lucky man.

It's really nice. The screen/audio/keyboard are better. It has the better graphics card. I went for the 7200 disk to eek some better performance out of it.

I've been on Vista for the last couple of weeks whilst this was sorted out. I can cope with Vista but it's good to be home.

Calvados Lamppost III

2008-10-25T18:20:00.000+01:00

We have a cat.

For people who know us this may be a surprise. I love cats and Akemi doesn't. I also am/was allergic to cats. But we now have one. We had a holiday in Normandy in August and I noticed then I wasn't sneezing when playing with the landlady's cat. So far I've not sneezed once since Calvados came home (or even when I visited the cat home). Alisa loved playing with the cat in Normandy and as the other two are still a bit wary about animals we thought it was time to take the plunge. Hugo and Selina both seem very happy with the new arrival.

We found her through Mid Cheshire Animal Welfare. She's not a kitten - she's a beautiful young cat - between 1 and 2 years old. She's been with us since the end of August and is pretty settled down now.

Why the name? Calvados as that's the region we were staying. Lamppost as I always had a dream of getting some pure breed cat for showing and exhibiting them under the name of Lamppost. Calvados isn't pure breed but she still gets the name. And with a name like Calvados Lamppost, the III adds a little gravitas. She's known affectionally as Calvy. She'd been in the sanctuary since May so when I let her out for the first time in four months she went wild. Here she tackles a tree.

This cartoon wrote a sweary word on your toilet wall

2008-07-16T08:08:00.001+01:00

I don't normally blog cartoons but this one made me pause for thought and laugh.

Django - Named URLS Gotcha

2008-07-05T11:07:00.003+01:00

A post in two parts.

First of all - thanks to Magus on #django for pointing out one of my errors to me. I've been working through Practical Django Projects over the last couple of days and it talks about having named urls. Take a look at these three one liners:


# from urls.links.py 

    (r'^$', 'archive_index',link_info_dict, 'coltrane_link_archive_index'), 

# from urls.py

    (r'^weblog/links/', include('coltrane.urls.links')),

# In my template I get the url using 

  {% url coltrane_link_archive_index  %}

We give our view a name (coltrane_link_archive_index), then we call that view with urls.py so it's context will be /weblog/links - and then in our template we can just use the url tag to call that named url. If the url gets moved, your templates will still work - and of course it saves a lot of tedious typing. Great.

So working through the book, the blog application requires a lot of templates and views and stuff. So I thought I'd just do the main one and get the minor ones working later. But I did check to make sure that links to those views were working and they were not.

Written like this, the problem is obvious, a named view won't work if the view it's pointing to doesn't work. So if your url tag's don't function - make sure what they should be taking you to are ok.

But there's more. Because when I wrote the underlying views it still wasn't working. And I discovered something interesting. I had a problem last night after restarting the web server - The first time I'd go to a page I'd get


ImproperlyConfigured: Error while importing URLconf 'coltrane.urls.tags': name 'Link' is not defined

For some reason I couldn't work out why that was happening last night. I have no idea why I could not - it's blatantly obvious. I wasn't doing an import of the Link model for my tags url file. But I was ignoring it yesterday because I found that if you just asked for the page again it then displays (not the tags page, I hadn't written that, but the rest of the site seemed to be working. I put it down to some strange 'glitch'. It wasn't.

I'm guessing here somewhat but I think what happens is the first time you load your site up, Django precompiles the regular expressions used for your urls. During that compile if it hits an error you'll have some urls working (up to where it failed) and some not. The second time you hit the site that doesn't happen (it thinks the regular expression compilation has completed) and doesn't raise the error again. But of course all the urls that failed won't be working (hence why url tag wasn't working).

On a final note, you'd think by now that I would have learnt that when you have a 'strange glitch' there's something bigger lurking there that you really need to understand.

NewForms Admin - Flatpages

2008-07-03T13:54:00.001+01:00

Practical Django Projects (Chapter three), talks about defining an admin interface which is all well and good unless you're using the NewForms Admin branch (which is intended to become part of Release 1.0). So if you're an early adopter or reading this after the big change, you'll be needing to do the following.

The reason I bothered writing this was I couldn't work out how to override the fact that FlatPage had already registered a ModelAdmin (try to register yours throws an error). A pointer from #django on irc and a look at the source code revealed that unregister was the baby you wanted.

from django.contrib import admin
from search.models import SearchKeyword
from django.contrib.flatpages.models import FlatPage

class SearchKeywordInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = SearchKeyword
    
class FlatPageAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    inlines = [
        SearchKeywordInline,
        ]

# We have to unregister it, and then reregister
admin.site.unregister(FlatPage)
admin.site.register(FlatPage, FlatPageAdmin)

Postgres - Converting Encodings

2008-06-18T10:55:00.001+01:00

I've run into a number of problems recently with dealing with old databases of ours which are encoded with LATIN1. Now, with postgres 8.3 (maybe before) you'll get a message if you try to create LATIN1 saying something like

createdb: database creation failed: ERROR:  encoding LATIN1 does not match server's locale en_US.UTF-8
DETAIL:  The server's LC_CTYPE setting requires encoding UTF8.

I got bored trying to work out why - it seems to be that postgres now prevents what it shouldn't have allowed in the past but did. But if you do want to convert from the old to the new locale - how do you do it? Remarkably simple it turns out.

Do a pg_dump of your existing database. Then take the dump file and run it through iconv - something like this.

 
	iconv -f latin1 -t utf8 original.sql > converted.sql

It's pretty obvious what the options mean (-f = from, -t = to). iconv comes as standard on Mac and should be available for most linux distos (seems to be installed on ubuntu server by default).

However, before you get too excited - you should ensure that whatever apps are using that database will cope with the new encoding for input and output. That may be 'non-trivial' ;)

Fuel strike: 100 petrol stations reported to have run dry

2008-06-15T18:02:00.001+01:00

The Guardian reports "Fuel strike: 100 petrol stations reported to have run dry". I'm not sure if that is supposed to make us worried. Doesn't sound very high to me.

According to Wikipedia we have 9,271 petrol stations in the UK. So that's ... er ... just over 1%.

Come on - we need HEADLINES!

Rhino on OS X Leopard

2008-06-15T17:53:00.001+01:00

When I was using Ubuntu as my main development environment I used rhino to try and learn Javascript in a bit more detail.

Coming back to OS X means that I wanted rhino but had no idea how to install. This is how I did it. If you come across this page and it's wrong please let me know. I just wanted to get something running.

1. Get the source file and extract it. I used ftp://ftp.mozilla.org:21/pub/mozilla.org/js/rhino1_7R1.zip. Use unzip rhino_7R1.zip if it doesn't extract.

2. In the top level you'll see a js.jar file - copy that to /usr/share/java (sudo cp js.jar /usr/share/java)

3. Create the following script in /usr/local/bin/rhino (this is copied from the rhino install on Ubuntu Hardy)

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/java -jar /usr/share/java/js.jar $@

4. Make it executable (chmod +x /usr/local/bin/rhino)

Now if you type rhino you can do the following

mbp:java icottee$ rhino 
Rhino 1.7 release 1 2008 03 06
js> x = 23 * 44
1012
js> y = 'fish'
fish
js> x
1012
js> y
fish
js>

Truely you are a javascript god.

8 Things We Hate About IT

2008-06-05T14:08:00.001+01:00

I just read this and noticed one of the comments at the end of it.

Did you write the first draft of this article in crayon? The only point made here that even approaches a fundamental understanding with the current reality of actual IT experience is the fact that 75% of the guys are approaching 40 years of age and haven't the slightest bit of motivation to learn new things.

I find the idea that as you approach 40 you lose motivation to learn new things to be boggling. My big problem at the moment is my motivation to learn new things is stronger than ever but the time I have to sit and focus on such things is pretty minimal.

I head back to the UK tomorrow morning and of the books I brought here to read I've managed to complete about 0.25% (if I'm feeling generous).

Unit Testing

2008-05-30T13:34:00.001+01:00

With apologies to The Monkeys

I thought unit tests were just for fairy tales
Never had the time to do things right
Going live was frantic
Development a drag
Changing all my code got real bad

Then I wrote my tests, now I'm a believer
Without a trace of doubt in my mind
I'm in love - mmmmmmm
I'm a believer, best thing I've ever tried

Ahem. Or something. I've just made substantial changes to two of our production systems over the last couple of weeks, but thanks to Andy and some stuff we did months ago in a pub, I have tests. They rock. Not saying they've nailed everything but certainly they've made a big difference.

The first system I changed it was remarkably painless and I felt remarkably confident. The second system was a bit more rushed but the go live had no major issues. The one issue that did crop up I changed on my test system here, ran the unit tests, watched them fail, fixed the code again, ran the tests again, watched them past, svn updated the live system and all was fine. Never felt in much panic and making the fixes was a much more pleasurable experience.

The only problem is - I can now see all the areas I don't have tests for ...

pg_top on Ubuntu Hardy - Postgres top utility

2008-05-30T09:21:00.001+01:00

This morning I got pgtop working but had some questions which I forwarded to the author Cosimo Streppone. In his very polite reply he pointed out I should really be using pg_top (note the hyphen) so I then set to getting that to work on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Download the latest release from the site above (I downloaded pg_top-3.6.2.tar.gz) and then


tar -zxpvf pg_top-3.6.2.tar.gz 
cd pg_top-3.6.2
./configure 
make

It's very possible you might get some errors during this. The three I had were

configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

You don't have the basic build tools installed. Do.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Also during config

configure: error: pg_config not found

Get the postgres dev libs - do

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

During make I got a heap of errors - starting with

gcc  -Wall -g -L/usr/lib -lpq  -o pg_top color.o commands.o display.o getopt.o screen.o sprompt.o pg.o pg_top.o username.o utils.o version.o m_linux.o -ldl -lm 
display.o: In function `display_move':
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:257: undefined reference to `tgoto'
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:257: undefined reference to `tputs'
display.o: In function `display_write':
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:387: undefined reference to `tgoto'
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:387: undefined reference to `tputs'

The solution I found was to

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

Then rerun config AGAIN and do a make.

Now I could

pg_top --help

And all was good. Read the web page for info about what you can do with it. But in short you can see all running postgres processes, see what they are doing, examine their query plan, what locks they have and examine table and index statistics of the relevant tables. Full info and screenshots can be found here.

Old rails, rake - running on Hardy

2008-05-29T02:03:00.001+01:00

From my own benefit ... to help with installing and maintaining our old ruby apps, do this

sudo apt-get install rails rubygems irb ruby
sudo gem install -y rails --version=1.2.3
sudo gem install -y rake --version=0.7.3
sudo gem install -y postgres-pr

The problem with this is that it's not sitting in your path and Ubuntu will keep asking you to install rails via apt. So

sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rails /usr/local/bin/rails
sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rake /usr/local/bin/rake

Apple are slick

2008-05-26T08:40:00.001+01:00

Email from Apple to me after I registered my new purchase

Thanks for registering your new Mac. We have the following on record in your name:
[[IREG_PRODUCT_TEXT]]

Strange Shinto Days

2008-05-25T17:07:00.001+01:00

There was some kind of meeting in the shrine today. I have no idea what it was about and would not bother to ask. It didn't sound like the most interesting event in the history of Shinto but seemed to involve a lot of priests and study and talking.

Strange that I should view such a thing as strange. It's a religion, people have views, I guess things need to be discussed. When I came back from the park with the kids I smiled and bowed to the people outside just in case I knew them. No reaction at all. A lot of strangers.

So a lot of people came to the shrine today to discuss 'Shinto things'. It's a religion - that's what people do.

This evening I had some wine and some beers, went to bed late. Not long after I fell asleep Akemi woke me up. The alarm that triggers when somebody had come into the shrine had sounded (I didn't hear, I was totally asleep) and Akemi said she thought there was a candle outside the shrine. I looked out the window at the candle. Looked like a light bulb to me - in a strange place. I went into the shrine and nothing human or supernatural jumped on top of me. When I came back upstairs Akemi thought the light might be a reflection from the illumination of one of the 'things' outside. She's probably right.

There's a story about that alarm but I'll tell it another time.

And I'm lying in bed now, wondering why I call the 'thing' outside a 'thing'. Why the hell don't I know what it is?

I'm also thinking I love superstition even though I don't "believe" in it. Makes life a little spicier.

Doug Stanhope - Would You Believe ?

2008-05-25T15:14:00.002+01:00

Yeah I like this guy.

Welcome from the MacBook Pro

2008-05-25T12:12:00.003+01:00

It arrived a day late and is looking pretty cool so far.

So I'm typing this with MarsEdit first of all to see how I get on what that.

What have I noticed about the new machine. Some random comments made in no particular order. Here's the low down on the specs of the Machine.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro4,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz

Number Of Processors: 1

Total Number Of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Bus Speed: 800 MHz

It has a 250GB hard drive, 5400 RPM

I've been through a number of laptops in the last couple of years. I had the MacBook which replaced my old iBook and died a horrible death. Which was replaced by a Sony Vaio VGN-FE41Z. And I've also been running the Dell Inspiron 630m which I think become my second favorite laptop ever, just behind the 12" iBook before it too popped it's clogs. So maybe over three years I've had five major laptops - running a mixture of OS X, Linux and Windows (XP and Vista).

I had a bit of a epiphany regarding laptops a short time ago. Because even though I was loving Hardy Heron on the Dell I realised that linux laptop compatibility is a lottery - unless you get one with Ubuntu preinstalled which limits somewhat your choice of machines, trying to get all your laptop features running can become something of a fulltime job. Even on the Dell resume/suspend didn't work (although it did under Gutsy 95% of the time - I suspect I tweaked something in the past which I've since forgotten). So upgrades are exciting times with new treats and old ones sometimes taken from you. The Dell 630m was great but even it was showing it's age. I was plotting what to replace it with and was thinking of something like my last week's Vista setup but on a much nicer spec machine. You have all the drivers provided, suspend works, you can buy some crappy bargain bit of hardware not wondering if you'll ever be able to use it. So if the "X Server, VMWare" trick works and you can use Ubuntu easily within a windows environment it makes sense to go the Windows route.

Because the only other option is the Apple route and I swore to the gods I wouldn't give them my money again until they sorted out their production process ... i.e. I won't buy a MacBook until they start making them reliable and resilient. We've bought so many of them and had so many problems and the Apple Care they provided wasn't much use either because you have to sit there arguing that, no, you didn't crack the front casing of it and this is a problem that thousands of others have suffered from. And they still don't believe you. And why don't we just buy Dell's instead because you can get cheap accidental damage cover with that. And actually Vista is not that ugly. It's quite nice. But it's slow. And not very reliable. And 3GB of RAM is about your max. Oh and Steve Balmer.

Apple are evil. Microsoft are evil. Ubuntu are not evil (or at least, if they are, they're keeping it quiet so we don't feel bad about using an evil os). But we have to use evil hardware with the good software and maybe something won't work properly. Hmmm ... Apple.

Am I rambling?

Anyway, on the spur of a moment decision I went back to Apple. I bought a MacBook Pro because I was not aware of them suffering the same monumental build quality issues as the MacBook. It's a Unix based laptop. It has a great screen and a great keyboard. It has good battery life. It's fast. I was in Japan when the other laptop died and I could easily get a US keyboard and a worldwide warranty. I love OS X.

I'll blog a bit shortly when I have my same Ubuntu VMWare setup up and running. I'll blog a little bit later, maybe in a couple of months, when I've worked out whether this is really changing my life. If it can and I can reduce my laptops to one again, I'll be a happy man.

The Horror of Coding

2008-05-23T21:27:00.003+01:00

Preach it brother.

These sorts of things that could broadly be classified as unexpected work are coming up with some regularity these days and I was complaining about it, as you do, while me and several folks from the crew I'm on were heading out to lunch at an entirely mediocre deli. The root of the complaint was, "Why?". "Why are we seeing an increasing rate of unexpected work?". Dark matter. Call it what you will, it sucks. It sucks your will to live. This tree search way of working gets tiring in a hurry. If you've been doing this for even a short while you know what I mean. How absolutely draining and demoralizing it is. How much it makes life, inside and outside of work, truly suck.
You know, you hit another problem you weren't expecting, you traverse back up the tree, sit back in your chair, maybe take a deep breath, and stare at the screen for a few minutes because, now, with so many traversals these days, it takes a real act of will to go deal with whatever it is that's suddently, annoyingily, in your way. This despite the fact that you're going to fall behind in your current task, which is already behind because of unexpected work during your previous task and you should get on this right now. And, if you love coding, really dig putting things together, you take that sighing resignation home with you when you stop typing for the day. How could you not?

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=231225

And they they'll ask when x,y and z are not done yet.

Ubuntu / Vista / VMware / Xming

2008-05-22T22:00:00.002+01:00

OK, I've been using this setup for over a week. I'm a developer /sys admin who needs a Linux environment and who is stuck with just a Vista laptop. So here's my solution. Certainly not a perfect solution but a lot better than some I've used in the past.

The idea is that we run Ubuntu (or any Linux disto) within a VMware machine (I assume the free VMware player would work for this, but i'm using VMware workstation). We then install the free X server Xming and use that to start X applications from the Ubuntu machine. In reality I use this for two main reasons - running Emacs with a Linux backend and controlling ssh tunnels. I can do both of these things natively in Windows or using Cygwin but both are painful in real life. And if all your live deployments have Ubuntu at the backend, you really want the same for your development environment.

First thing you need to do is install Linux on your Vmware machine. I use the Hardy Heron server install as it's a lot lighter than the desktop and we don't want to run a linux desktop anyway. Yes, a desktop inside a desktop could be construed as cool for the first day or so if you have never done it before but it soon becomes a pain in the arse. There are some other versions of Ubuntu which are even more stripped down but we use Ubuntu Server for our normal server installs so I went with that.

My Vista laptop has 2GB of RAM and is dual core. In the VM I assign both processors and 512MB of memory. I also preallocated the disk to try and eek some more performance out of it (60GB in this case). See my comments later on performance. For networking I used Host. If you are moving your laptop around a lot this may be a small pain as you'll need to keep an eye on the ip address your VM is given each time. Probably better solutions for this.

Make sure you install the ssh server. On Gutsy and Hardy it's an option you get at the end of the install process. Otherwise "apt-get install openssh-server".

On Hardy Heron default server install, once it's up and running, the important setting to change is

   /etc/ssh/sshd_config

add the entry

   X11UserLocalhost yes

and then do

   apt-get install xauth

Now install Xming and Putty. We'll use Putty to ssh into VMware and launch our apps. The settings you need in Putty are wonderfully described here along with other useful troubleshooting tips which may be of use if you are not going the Ubuntu route. On Ubuntu I just needed to do what I've described above.

Start up Xming. Now, using Putty, log into your VM. The first time you log in, if you've done what I've outlined, you'll see a message saying words to the effect that .Xauthority is being created. Now launch an X app. You might want to "apt-get install x11-apps" and launch xclock as a test. Revel in it's minimalistic glory. If you don't see xclock appear then check if Xming is trying to tell you something - check if the Xming window is flashing at the bottom of the screen for example.

If that doesn't work, check out the Xming web site or post a question here.

Now you can install anything you want to run. In practice, for me, that's meant

emacs
Firefox
gSTM

I have Firefox installed, as I sometimes need to browse sites through the tunnels I create with gSTM. gSTM is a Gnome app. Here it is running, on my Vista desktop. On the right hand screen you can see the obligatory x apps running which are of little use at all. The putty session on the right screen lower is running top on the VM. The upper putty session is connected to a remote system behind a remote system via the tunnel manager.

Problems.
It's not without it's problems. The screen shot at the start of this post shows me running Emacs and running some unit tests within Emacs which are doing a lot of python and postgres processing. Check out the cpu and RAM usage in the sidebar widget at the right. At that stage the machine was somewhat sluggish although useable. Certainly after a day of heavy development I found a good reboot of the whole setup (from Vista downwards) would help. Having more RAM in the laptop would also benefit although having a 3GB limit with 32bit Vista sucks. In short, you're using a VM and you'll be taking a slice (maybe I should say 'a chunk') off your performance compared to just running Linux directly.

Two other issues. Not major but to be kept in mind. I find that over the course of a day I end up with a lot of Putty sessions open. I might be able to manage these better if I spent some time looking at it - and it doesn't help that I launch my X apps from Putty as well. Xming goes with a launcher program which I haven't tried yet. That might be useful.

Final issue is copying and pasting. Sometimes this seems hit and miss but frankly that's not a lot different from what I experience in native Ubuntu. Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert sometimes had to be done a few times before something would wake up to what I was doing. This is something I could improve if I had the time (so you can see it wasn't that big a deal).

Benefits
I've been laughed at once already today for saying this, but I'll say it again. I like the look of Vista and I've grown really attached to that sidebar (can somebody recommend a Mac solution to give me similar functionality). But Ubuntu is damn pretty as well. More importantly, if you're running Vista natively then you don't have to sit there for HOURS on end loading up drivers to get your audio working with your webcam and - oh - that makes the wireless drop out. Hang on, I'll recompile the wireless module - that's better. Oh, the webcam's gone again - and where did the memory card support go to? And don't even BEGIN to talk to me about hibernation. God that drives me mad. Dual boot is a pain in the arse as well. I just want to sit in one environment working.

So if I need native Vista to get the most out of my laptop my two current options are Cygwin and this. Cygwin is great if all the stuff you need is available in it. It sucks like a hoover if you start having to compile stuff natively under cygwin. Does for me anyway.

Having the VM as your development environment also makes it a lot easier to move it around to new machines. We'll see how that pans out later today when the new MacBook Pro is due to arrive.

Conclusion
This time last week I was wondering whether I could make this environment my full time environment. I nearly can. In the end the problems are not so much with the solution as with the laptop. It needs a bit more power and it needs more RAM (and I can only go up one more GB easily). Also (this is a Sony Vaio VGN-FE41Z) the fan is bloody loud. I usually sleep with the laptop next to my head. The noise is getting annoying.

So the MacBook Pro is arriving today. I'll gain more power, illuminated keyboard, Mac loveliness and maybe (maybe) a quieter fan. We'll see. But I'm intending on trying a similar setup on the Mac as well. I'll let you know how I get on. If anybody else is running a similar setup as this on their Windows system let me know how I can improve performance.

Cyrus IMAP on Hardy Heron #2

2008-05-20T03:04:00.004+01:00

See the previous post to this for the first steps. Note, I posted the following on the Ubuntu forums here and there may end up being feedback there to read.

Please note I am just trying to get a simple cyrus install working so I can test some python code that wants a cyrus server. This is probably insecure, toxic, illegal in most countries and prone to spontaneous combustion.

I just want to create some mailboxes (I'm not even sending mail to them!). I've changed my permissions as per the previous post and I'm trying to use cyradm to administer my server. cyradm doesn't seem to want to administrate anything. It wants a password and nothing seems to work. This is what I did.

apt-get install sasl2-bin

Then edit /etc/default/saslauthd as it suggests and set START=yes

/etc/init.d/saslauthd start

edit /etc/imap.conf and make sure that the following two settings are uncommented and with these values

admins: cyrus
...
sasl_pwcheck_method: saslauthd

restart cyrus and log in with

cyradm -u cyrus --auth login localhost

Oh, you may need to set the cyrus user passwd first. Just become root and set it with passwd. Now you can login and create a mailbox.

localhost> cm ijc
createmailbox: System I/O error

Or maybe not - another permissions error it turns out.

chown -R cyrus /var/spool/cyrus

Log back in again and ... weeeeeeee

localhost> cm ijc
localhost> lm
ijc (\HasNoChildren)
localhost>

There, nice and simple. Cough.

Cyrus IMAP on Hardy Heron

2008-05-20T02:12:00.004+01:00

So you've just installed cyrus imap on Hardy Heron and you can't seem to connect. You try a test telnet session and get


   icottee@ijcdev:~$ telnet localhost 143
   Trying 127.0.0.1...
   Connected to localhost.
   Escape character is '^]'.
   * BYE Fatal error: can't write proc file
   Connection closed by foreign host.

Take a look in /var/log/mail.err and you'll see stuff like


   May 19 22:13:15 ijcdev cyrus/imap[8316]: DBERROR: dbenv->open '/var/lib/cyrus/db' failed: Permission denied
   May 19 22:13:15 ijcdev cyrus/imap[8316]: DBERROR: init() on berkeley
   May 19 22:13:15 ijcdev cyrus/imap[8316]: DBERROR: reading /var/lib/cyrus/db/skipstamp, assuming the worst: Permission denied
   May 19 22:13:15 ijcdev cyrus/imap[8316]: locking disabled: couldn't open socket lockfile /var/lib/cyrus/socket/imap-1.lock: Permission denied
   May 19 22:13:15 ijcdev cyrus/imap[8316]: IOERROR: creating /var/lib/cyrus/proc/8316: Permission denied
   May 19 22:13:15 ijcdev cyrus/imap[8316]: Fatal error: can't write proc file
   May 19 22:13:15 ijcdev cyrus/master[8260]: process 8316 exited, signaled to death by 11

The solution is simple


   chown -R cyrus /var/lib/cyrus

I'd give cyrus a restart after that as well.

Magical Otters @ Misfits, Nagoya May 16th, 2008

2008-05-19T00:34:00.006+01:00

On Friday Brian Cullen and the Magical Otters got back together again to provide their usual brand of drunken inspirational shouting and yelling and banging things. Ah - sorry. No, that's what I do. The other, rather more accomplished musicians, struggle bravely on whilst I let out months of pent out aggression and drink copious amounts of beer. Although in my advancing years the amounts are slowly declining.

As always we prepare meticulously by turning up an hour beforehand and try to get the drums working. In this case I think I finally managed to get sounds from them about ten minutes before we were due to start and get them mostly working at the appointed time. Therefore our rehearsals started at the point of the first song in the set. I'm sure nobody noticed ;).

Anyway - here's just a taste of that night - a real life Otter's set right down to the high fidelity sounds and blurred vision. Yes, I know it says June 2008 but we can move in time you know ... see you at Shooters on the 6th of June 2008.

More Otter's stuff at Brian's site ... http://briancullen.blogspot.com/

Cloning/copying postgres databases

2008-05-15T10:14:00.002+01:00

createdb newdatabase -T olddatabase

always forget this and end up dumping the old database and loading it into the new one. It takes a lot of time that way. This way is quicker.