BOSS logic

Iceland

I miss Iceland. I was there for less than a week—maybe it’s my distant Viking heritage trying to call me home.

Actually, I’m a bit surprised, given that my first impression of Iceland was “barren.” The landscape along my ride from the airport to Reykjavik was about forty-five minutes, a long winding road with a stunningly beautiful ocean on one side, and broken, volcanic, treeless landscape on the other. After about twenty or thirty minutes, my impression had been modified from simply “barren” to “barren, stark, and dramatically beautiful.” The day is windy, enough so that the waves are being whipped up into whitecaps in stark contrast with the deep blue ocean and sky. It’s a clean, crisp and cold day, invigoratingly so. There is no pollution—I feel like I can see forever, right up to the glacial mountains in the distance.

Near to Reykjavik, the landscape changes. The hillsides become fissured, covered with moss and grasses still brown from winter. Curious stone monoliths dot the landscape, and I wonder if these have something to do with the legends of elves I’ve been cautioned not to bring up too much. A few lonely outposts along the oceanside soon turn into a city, modern but still quaint in many regards. The buildings are charming, colorful. The roads are clear and wide with lighting every hundred feet or so. I can’t help notice that most of the taxis seem to be Mercedes.

So what am I doing on a volcanic island midway between Greenland and Europe? Well, it’s about my kids, and finding a better lifestyle. I’m visiting CCP, an Icelandic company best described as a builder of the hands-down largest virtual world in existence today—although, if you’ve heard of them, odds are you identify CCP with EVE Online. CCP has bigger plans than EVE, and those plans are intriguing.

Moving to Iceland is an exciting prospect, but, alas, over the past year or so I haven’t been able to bring it to fruition. It’s far away, and the economic differences between the U.S. (and the complexity of owning real estate in the U.S.) make it a tough nut to crack.

As a U.S. citizen, I’ve always felt terribly dismayed at how insular the United States is. Very few of us travel internationally, and only marginally more seem to have any knowledge of the world at large. Most of our students can’t draw a map of the world or even a reasonably accurate map of Europe. In fact, I recently saw a video clip in which confused interviewees claimed they would support Bush’s plans to start a war with Australia, which had been incorrectly labeled as “Serbia” on a world map. On the whole, as a people the United States is not a part of the world. There is nothing beyond our borders worth talking about, unless perhaps it has some financial impact on our future.

There’s also the matter of the horrible state of education in this country. Granted, we still have good colleges, presuming you can pay for them. But pre-collegiate education is suffering—continuing a steady decline that began in the 1970’s. Bush’s “no child left behind” is, in fact, making sure that we leave nobody behind—at the cost of our nation’s future.

This is not the environment I would like my children to grow up in. And according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Iceland—for that matter, just about all of Europe, New Zealand and Australia—would be an immense improvement. The prospect of my children gaining a European eduction is irresistible… and yet, at least for the time being, out of reach.

…Sorry, my phone crashed

I still think it’s funny that we actually say things like “sorry, my phone crashed.” When did this happen? When did our phones become complicated mobile computing devices that actually require customer support and drive us crazy with endless fiddling? I suppose this particular rant is more about how awful AT&T is at customer support. But whether it’s AT&T or the “Genius Bar” folks, it seems “do it yourself” is the theme of the day.

Over the past couple of week’s I spent at least two, probably three hours trying to figure out why my girlfriend’s iPhone apps all crash. They would start up, display a splash page for a second or so, and then drop back to the main iPhone screen. This happened to every app we tried to install.

After hours of reading other people’s accounts of the problem — apparently it’s pretty common, unfortunately — and trying out numerous solutions I finally stumbled on a fix. At least, a fix for this particular issue — based on the different threads, this problem manifests itself in different ways.

Some iPhone users have found a relatively simple solution: Delete all the iPhone apps from the phone and from iTunes, then download the apps again from the iTunes store and re-sync their phone. Alas, this is not a cure-all, and only works for some people.

Others reported success in re-authorizing their computer with the iTunes store. I tried both of these approaches, with mixed results. Even though my computer was already authorized, and iTunes told me so when I re-authorized it, some apps started to work. Unfortunately, though, not all — which was completely baffling and very frustrating. (Imagine me dancing around thinking I’d found the solution, only to find that after several hours of work I had merely reduced the problem from “completely reproducible” to “finicky and unpredictable.”)

In the end, I had a strange mix of some applications that worked on my girlfriend’s iPhone, and some that didn’t. My final last-straw solution was to delete the misbehaving apps from her iPhone, and download them directly to the iPhone (not through iTunes). This, finally, seemed to work — but now I’m afraid to touch the phone… or, more precisely, afraid to sync again. I’ve turned off application syncing, so hopefully it won’t break again. In the meantime though, Apple, I hope you are listening to tdavis312 in his Apple discussion post:

This problem continually occurs on my iPhone (along with the dropped call problem). All of the solutions presented here are for fiddlers. A phone is an appliance. Apple sold it to zillions because it is carefree. Download a sexy app and use it. Not go to a GENIUS BAR (puke) or reload, or reset, or fiddle, or or or. Some people have lives, responsibilities, and interests. This is not 1980. We have moved on beyond the Apple II. Apple needs to email us all an official workaround and apology. THEN FIX THE **** THING.

I couldn’t agree more — unfortunately, I’m afraid Apple may just not be listening. They marked the post as “archived,” and any further responses are… not allowed. (”Maybe if we ignore the problem it’ll just go away.”)

Antiprivacy policy

According to AT&T (via Wired Threat Level) AT&T has the protection of your privacy in mind. No really, despite their record (there was that little thing with the unwarranted wire tapping, after all), you can trust them. I mean, their new policy says they’re listening. Yes, it says that: “We’re listening.” Hmm.

The Force is not with them

Another Washington Post article goes into how the Republican party has not only lost their base, but won’t recover it for many decades to come:

For the past few months, political analysts and demographers have been poring over the results of the 2008 election and comparing them with presidential results from the past two decades. From whatever angle of their approach — age, race, economic status, geography — they have come to a remarkably similar conclusion. Almost all indicators are pressing the Republicans into minority status.

The author goes on to say that the study “offered conclusions that would alarm any Republican hopeful of a quick turnaround in the party’s fortunes.” It’s being borne out in personal and anecdotal experience, as demonstrated by the Star’s forum on the topic, as one poster writes:

I was having a long-distance phone conversation with my oldest brother just yesterday. He and (especially) his wife are very conservative and ALWAYS voted Republican. They voted for Obama. I couldn’t believe some of the stuff he was saying about Republicans and how disgusted he is with them. “The more they talk the more stupid and foolish they look” is the line that most sticks in my mind.

All I can say is… it’s about time. But is it too late to make a difference? Our educational system has been gutted, the country is feared not respected, and our economy is in a mess. Last time I looked, China was buying up our real estate. Without a doubt, the U.S. we all grew up with is gone for good. How realistic is it that we can turn the country around, when we’ve discovered that yes, you can fool some of the people all of the time. Recent poll results by Gallup still show 27% of our country believe Bush did a good job. Yes, yes, it’s close to a new all-time low for the Presidency (beat out only by Nixon and Truman), but really, about 1 in 4 people actually think Bush was a positive influence on this country? (I’m going to be watching my coworkers very closely).

No real ID?

I’m happy to notice the Real ID Law looks like it’s getting more and more opposition and may be scaling back (or dare we hope, dying?). According to the Washington Post the Obama administration has moved to reduce the scope of the law — passed after the September 11 terrorist attacks — that was designed to tighten security. Janet Napolitano (Homeland Security) wants to repeal and replace the expensive $4 billion initiative. The original intent was to put a new form of ID into the hands of most U.S. citizens. Personally, I have nothing against better security around out ID system, but the Real ID initiative became plagued with unintended consequences (such as a move to require voters to have a Real ID… and hence blocking an estimated 50 million individuals from legitimate voting). Just as long as it doesn’t become an obstacle to today’s accepted forms of ID (particularly where voter’s rights are concerned).

Backwards

Oh my god, I can’t help but read articles like this and be amazed at how incredibly backward much of the world is… and that we will find complete morons everywhere we go.

One [Mujahideen] fighter climbed into the lion enclosure but was immediately killed by Marjan, the zoo’s most famous inhabitant. The man’s brother returned the next day and lobbed a hand grenade at the lion leaving him toothless and blind.

This is funny

No really, it’s funny — but true, too. Enjoy your PC Frank.

Samsung SSD awesomeness

Alright I’m rarely sucked in by this much geekery, but in this case… I appreciate the work! These guys took 24 256GB SSD drives and assembled them into a massive, memory-based RAID array. Flash forward maybe 10 years and we’ll all have this in our laptops!

Open source testing

We use HP’s QuickTest Pro (formerly Mercury QTP) for much of our automated regression testing. Unfortunately, QTP is a pricey piece of software, with a cost in the vicinity of $7,500 per user license. While it is a state-of-the-art automation system, at this price tag it comes with quite a barrier to entry — at least, for any large-scale configuration.

Open source to the rescue, at least so it seems. This article offers a look at how Hudson and Selenium can provide a powerful and fully automated regression testing platform. In fact, working together these two systems provide more automation than QTP alone can hope to achieve.

There is a cost though: As is often the nature of open source projects, setup and configuration is more involved than QTP installation. While the latter is a Windows program that you can have up-and-running within minutes, a Hudson/Selenium platform will involve programming resources and a stronger technical know-how. Personally, I favor using both: QTP provides an excellent, traditional “point-and-click” regression testing platform, while Hudson/Selenium can augment that process dramatically with integrated, build-level regression testing.

It’s solid!

I’m impressed. The day of the purely solid state consumer laptop is rapidly approaching:

Toshiba on Thursday announced another big step in the industry-wide adoption of solid state drives—the first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD. The drive will make its public debut at CES in January.
The company will also be debuting a number of different capacity SSD drives—64-, 128, and 256GB drives, available in either 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch form factors. The drives feature MLC controllers, read speeds of 240 Mbytes/s, and write speeds of 200 Mbytes/s.

I’m sure the price is going to be staggering—for a while. But in five to ten years, we’ll probably be looking back at mechanical drives and wondering how the heck we survived with spinning pieces of metal in our computers.

And while we’re at it, I’ll mention Truphone too. I haven’t given this a try yet—and to be sure, reviews on the net range from wildly positive to abysmal—but it’s surely a sign of things to come.

Too much social networking

Gah. How am I ever supposed to keep up with flickr, facebook, myspace, linkedin and whatever else comes along? I just don’t have time for this — even if I just try to keep one or two going. You know, there would be a fantastic market for some little application that synchronizes all of them… I’m sure there are at least a few million users that would pay, say, $5 for some gizmo that keeps everything up to date.

Parallels 4.0 printing problems

For those of you thinking of upgrading to Parallels 4.0, you might want to wait a bit yet. At least, if you are, like me, hoping that Parallels 4.0 solves its long-standing printing problems. Unfortunately, it appears to be worse than in 3.0, although the problem may not be entirely the fault of Parallels.

The “old problem” that Parallels printing fails to properly identify printers is still present. That is, in attempting to set up a printer port for my laserjet, Parallels will only print to the correct printer intermittently. It is possible to make Parallels print to the correct printer, but only if you delete every other printer profile from the Mac. This becomes tedious, as I use four different printers — so, when I absolutely must print from Windows, I have to delete all of my Mac printer profiles except for the one I want to print to, print from Windows, and then put my printers back. Hideous. This has been a problem from Parallels 2.0 and I had hoped they’d fix it in 4.0 but, no luck.

Now, the bad news is that in 3.0 you could work around this problem using Bonjour. Unfortunately, Bonjour no longer seems to work in Parallels 4.0 with Windows XP SP3. I have heard some reports that Bonjour is broken in XP SP3, although this is unconfirmed — there is an Apple forum thread on it. Either way, I can’t get Bonjour to work — and, I have downloaded the latest Bonjour, installed it and set up printers. It appears to print, but nothing arrives at the printer… is Parallels somehow blocking the printer communication? Is Bonjour broken? I don’t know, but for now… no printing in Parallels 4.0.