Rubénerd!

I think Google Reader is punishing me for perennially having (1000+) unread items! I like that word, perennially. Not really appropriate for this discussion as blog feeds don't grow. Or do they?

This morning the site reported I had unread items, even when I went through and read them all. This means I'm seeing the same stories being reported as new, despite having already read them!

Has anyone else been having this problem? Given this is Google I'm fairly confident it'd be fixed in a few hours, knowing me I'm just an anomaly in their database that's wrecking havoc or something. I have that effect on people, you see.

Everyone hates splash screen advertisements that take up your entire browser window, so why do site owners still employ them?

Dear ZDNet Australia,

Because you have some of the best reporters in the Aussie IT industry, I put up with your universally derided splash screen advertisements. I suppose your market research demonstrates that people who immediately leave a site because they employ full screen advertisements before showing the pages people actually want are monetarily insignificant. Fair enough, it's your site, do with it as you wish.

One thing I will comment on though, I'd suggest you take a look at your links to figure out why some people like me haven't been able to get further than these splash screens over the last week; when we attempt to click the otherwise cheerful "Thanks for waiting, continue on to ZDNet Australia!" link, we're redirected back to another splash screen instead. You can understand my frustration!

I suspect it's due to my use of the NoScript extension for Firefox, but I can't help but think one could create a hyperlink to an originating page without needing JavaScript in the first place. I suppose NoScript users are also statistically insignificant ;).

Most super-duperly graciously yours,
Ruben

Update

Since posting this entry, a tab I had left open at one of the ZDNet Australia splash screens finally redirected me to something else. Something tells me I'd better go somewhere else to find this information ;).

Just a quick post about a FreeBSD problem I solved, for what it may be worth.

After adding a new FireWire 800 PCI card that also draws power from a small floppy drive Molex connector, the older Athlon XP 2800+ host started hanging on boot with the following error:

hptrr: no controller detected

A quick Google search showed it was a hard drive related problem, which was strange considering the drive had been operating just fine.

After much head scratching, I determined the relatively crappy PSU simply couldn't take one more peripheral, so I upgraded it from a 350W to a 450W. FreeBSD now detects and boots from the hard drive just fine, and my FireWire PCI card works.

Lesson learned: if you encounter the above error it's most likely the result of a recent hardware addition, and that even though a hard drive error may be a symptom, it may not be the cause. That counts as that whole Lateral Thinking thing, right?

I've been running Fedora 13 Goddard on my ThinkPad X40 for the last few days. Aside from some rendering and install issues, things are pretty smooth sailing.

Fedora 13 is the latest version of the Fedora operating system sponsored by Red Hat that I switched over to from Slackware as my Linux of choice last year. On the whole I prefer it to Ubuntu because they keep more of the original Gnome interface in tact, and I've grown to like YUM for installing packages. Pkgsrc works great on Slackware, but being able to simply enter "yum update" is a real boon.

Installation

Since toying with Red Hat Linux 5.0 in the bad old days, for some reason the Anaconda installer and my computer hardware have generally not played nicely. I remember wanting to use Red Hat's then-new Bluecurve theme back in the day but I couldn't get past the timezone screen without it crashing, despite the BSDs and Mandrake Linux installing without any issues.

Fortunately Anaconda has worked reasonably well for me since Fedora 12, and aside from the internal ThinkPad TrackPoint mouse not being detected throughout the entire install process (necessitating a ton of [TAB]-ing) things went fairly smoothly.

Of note, I like to configure my own partition layout but for those who just want it installed fresh or to have it overwrite an existing Linux install, Anaconda's new layout was very slick. I also noticed Joe was available as a pre-installed editor option on the software screen; not sure whether that's always been there but throwing that out there for what it's worth :).

Interface nastyness

A fresh install and a yum update later, Fedora 13 was booting just fine on my ThinkPad X40, the mouse had even been detected which Anaconda couldn't do. The document icons look suspiciously Mac-like, but that's okay because I'm also a Mac user and find them rather fetching!

Now for the bad news. I'm not sure whether it's the new open intel X11 video drivers (with otherwise work beautifully), but unfortunately the interface looks terrible. Icons displayed in menus and toolbars are either poorly rendered with jaggered, ill defined edges or in some cases not even existent. All the default Gnome icon sets and icon sets I've installed myself (I like Nimbus and Tango) look this way.

On a Windows machine I would diagnose this problem as being caused by a low colour depth, but photos and Metacity render gradients and colour just fine, so I'm thinking it must be a GTK issue. Lending support to this theory is that icons in Firefox look the way they should too, which means (I'm assuming) Cairo is okay but plain GTK isn't.

These visual artefacts are not present on the FreeBSD 8.0 partition on this machine, nor were they there in Fedora 12. To make sure the installer didn't do anything funky or forget to install a package, I reinstalled Fedora 13 from a DVD and a USB key from different sources with the same results.

Oh yeah, and Metacity still can't handle double width characters in window titles. I suppose this is an issue with the Gnome folks and not Fedora though, so I'll leave it at that.

The compliment sandwich

As Stewie Griffin would do, I thought I'd structure this review as a compliment sandwich, with positive things on the outside and the negative things in the middle so we end on a high note :).

Firstly, kudos to the Fedora team for continuing to reduce their dependency on Mono! Fedora 12 implemented the beautiful Gnote in place of Tomboy, and with 13 they replaced F-Spot with Shotwell. I have to admit I'd never heard of the Vala language until I read up about Shotwell, it looks really interesting and the perfect antidote to Mono which has always made me feel uneasy. Could Gnome finally be able to compete with KDE and Qt in this regard now?

And of course I'm delighted that a fully featured Python 3.0 stack is now available in the default install! Granted my primary Python haunt is Django, but my personal scripts have been running on 3.0 on my Mac for a long while now, so it'll be great to port them over.

Conclusions

Overall aside from a couple of glitches on my specific hardware, Fedora 13 looks like a solid release.

When registering for Wireless@SG a few years ago, I chose Qmax as my provider because they worked well with outlets supplied by SingTel and StarHub. Unfortunately, both Starbucks at Ion Orchard and the Coffee Bean at Bishan Junction 8 have inexplicably adopted M1 over SingTel, and Qmax is no longer listed as a provider.

My mum had a phone with M1, and the experience taught us to never use them for anything serious again. I suppose this is their way of seeking revenge :P.

In late April, my webhost SegPub informed me the specific webserver causing problems for my site and the sites of many other people was in the process of being fixed. It's now almost June and the problems are still persisiting for all of us, if the newsgroups are anything to go by.

Some small comments:

"Could you *please* keep us in the loop as things progress. The silence on this issue has added to the misery of having sites that are so often unreachable (certainly more than 0.5% of the month)."

"I have 2 site on Chewie and have had endless problems, not the least being NO response to any support ticket ( I've lost count how many I have sent). Hopefully things improve sooner rather than later."

"Alas, the problems seem to be persisting. Once again, [my site] is down, while all of my other SegPub-hosted sites are up."

"Same here, sites constantly go-slow or time out."

Peter wrote the best summary:

"Yes, I'm still seeing persistent slow response from [our server] too. This appears to have started around February 2010.

I opened a support ticket a month ago, sent a reminder after two weeks without a human response, then received the answer "In regards to the speed issues, we were having some issues with bots flooding [our server] with traffic at sporadic times of the day. We believe we've resolved this and you should be seeing the site load at acceptable speeds."

I sent copies of my monitor reports, which show that performance is till poor when compared with a site on another host's shared server.

I have just received a monitor report that the site on [the server] was down for three hours.

Altogether disappointing."

And as another cruel twist, this post has taken an hour to go live because the site keeps timing out whenever I hit the Publish button. I've decided to give them a couple more weeks before I start looking for alternatives to their service.

RootBSD look like a great FreeBSD VPS service, or for the greenie hippie in me there's always Green Geeks that Marco recommended here a while ago :). I tend to get a bit nervous with sites that oversell though, but I'll check them out.

Okay everybody, calm down. CALM DOWN I SAID! Everything is going to be okay, just CALM DOWN!!! Repressed memories from 2007/08 flooding back! CALM DOWN EVERYONE! But I don't think I can sir. AAAARGH!

Finally some good news from Segpub regarding the timeouts and slow response times (3 minutes, 38 seconds for a plain HTML file?!) that have been sporadically plaguing my poor sites for months. From a mailing list email addressed to folks on my server:

The issues with [your server] unfortunately are related to search bots and a mix of other nasty traffic. We're working really hard to get ontop [sic] of these and are pretty close to having everything resolved and back to normal.

Nasty traffic? That's not a nice thing to call my Nonsense section! ;).

The problem is, because my sites slowed down to a crawl but still eventually loaded, they don't count these problems as downtime which means they won't be providing me any free months as stipulated in their uptime guarantee. Sneaky.

In our efforts to clean out our apartment here, we decided to put a bunch of old home entertainment equipment up on eBay. I'd forgotten just how maddeningly frustrating it could be!

I've been using eBay to buy things for many years and have only had a small number of negative experiences, but assuming the role of a seller is another thing entirely. For people who make their livelihoods off the service and have thousands of items for sale, I'm sure its just fine but for the person looking to only put a few items up it's a quick trip to the loony bin.

My biggest gripe isn't even the ridiculous little charges they impose on everything from the gallery images to the way text is presented, or the slow and crappy 1999-era interface to enter item details, it just doesn't work.

Steps can be found on staircases

1. Upon painstakingly entering in all the details for our first item, I was informed I wasn't allowed to sell in Singapore because I have an Aussie eBay account. I don't know what they hope to accomplish with such a restriction, but I played along and used my dad's eBay account instead.

2. Upon painstakingly re-entering in all the details for our first item, I was informed I would need to convert my dad's account to a seller.

3. I re-entered the login credentials and was asked whether I wanted to pay the fees with PayPal, a credit card or a bank account. I opted to go with PayPal seeing as my dad has used it many, many times on eBay before and clearly had it linked up already. Before going any further, we got a terse error message.

4. After trying this a dozen more times on Windows, Mac and FreeBSD machines around the house, we gave up attempting to use PayPal for the fees. Upon painstakingly re-entering in all the details for our first item (again) we chose credit card instead. It worked, and we became a seller.

5. We clicked the List This Item button and were given another error message claiming we needed to be verified before listing the item. The only way to do this? With a PayPal account. If it had worked we would have used PayPal, but we had to use a credit card instead! And this despite the account already being linked to a verified PayPal account.

So far I haven't got any comments back from my support emails, but they could surprise my any minute now ;).

Three random and entirely pointless error messages for your consideration.

The first, pictured above, is the eloquent Neal O'Carroll from the aaaaaaaah Into Your Head podcast letting people know his site hasn't gone off the deep end. I would never be caught making a grammar mistake or typo on my own site, and I'd certainly never instruct people to "click here" but then put the link somewhere else. Looking forward to that pie though, it's going to be schweet. Wonder if I can ask him to pick mine up from the Hairy Lemon?

The second error, pictured above, is Neal O'Carroll stalling my file transfer application. I thought his error message was overly cryptic and suspicious, and it turns out I was right. He clearly planted malware on the page so when I took a screenshot it attached itself to the file. It even survived processing and file conversion in The Gimp. He's a crafty one.

The second error, wait, third error, pictured above, is from TweetDeck while I'm using the public WiFi hotspot here. Don't panic!? That's easy enough for you to say, you're not addicted to Twitter through a Twitter client, you are the Twitter client! And who do you think you are, Douglas Adams?! Yeesh.