Internode reactivated within a few hours!

Internet

My MacBook Pro works again!

For the first time in weeks I now have a home internet connection and a working MacBook Pro upon which to use it! It's true you don't know what you've got until you lose it!

So here's what happened. On Friday last week I contacted Telstra and finally managed to get our home phone line reconnected; why it was disconnected is a long and boring story that I'm in too much of a good mood to relay. Despite having a working telephone line, our Internode home ADSL connection we signed up for in August last year still wasn't working, but an Internode tech support guy got back to me fairly quickly explaining why:

Hi Ruben,

Your ADSL connection was disconnected along with your phone service. It is best to contact our Sales team on Monday to look at having this done.

If you have any further questions regarding this matter, please reply to this email or contact our Helpdesk by phone.

Kind regards,
Andrew

I admit I my heart sank at the prospect of having to wait over the weekend, then go into the city on Monday, get the account reactivated and wait for a further 2-7 business days to have it put through. Despite only going into their Sales office this morning though, as of early this afternoon we had home internet again!

Kudos to the Internode team for their ridiculously fast service :).


Sudoku for 2009-09-28

Annexe

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

Sudoku puzzle for 2009-09-28


I don’t need no stinkin FormSpring

Internet

Broken footpath

It seems both the Adelaide proprietors of The ZombieSkittleness and The Vanilla Silenceness have been drawn to this newfangled FormSpring site which allows people to ask questions anonymously and get replies, and to presumably populate their forms with springs. Why you would want to do that is beyond the scope of this post, and beyond me entirely.

I for one don't need a site like that to get people to ask me random questions, for some reason I get asked questions by complete strangers often enough as it is. I was asked this by a very overweight man while waiting for the traffic lights to change this morning:

I suppose you think you look good in that stupid jumper, am I right?

To which I replied with "Purple monkey dishwasher" and a string of Singapore Hokkien swear words, by which time the lights had changed! He had no idea what I was saying, but then again I'm used to that even when I'm talking normally. I talk normally?

Another question I was posed a few weeks ago while standing in line at the Boatdeck Cafe for my morning coffee:

Could you hold my position for a sec?

Why, is it in pain?

And finally this gem:

Daijoubu?

Ugh, not so good. For what it's worth though I did end up having a great cup of coffee at the Boatdeck Cafe and I crossed the street safely ^_^.


The new MacBook Pro inverter worked!

Hardware

The culprit!

Without home internet and the huge difficulties I've already eluded to with publishing blog posts from the university computer pools I didn't think I could be bothered going through the rigmarole (sounds like a dip), but this warranted the effort. This entire post summarised in one line: the new MacBook Pro inverter I ordered arrived, and it fixed the dead screen problem! I have my travel companion back!

Inverter for the Introvert, sounds like a sitcom title

After worrying that it might not work after I ordered it all the way from the States, I finally had some time yesterday evening to install the new display inverter in my discrete construction MacBook Pro. It took well over an hour to deconstruct the machine and the display assembly, but when I plugged it all back in again and turned it on the screen lit up again for the first time in weeks! Success!

It seems the Snow Leopard MacBook Pro black screen issue some people have had was a complete coincidence, for my machine it was a hardware problem that stuck around after rebooting and installing other OSs. If you've had the same problem with your MacBook Pro where the screen backlight refuses to turn on, you could have a shot inverter too.

I ordered my replacement inverter (Apple ID 922-7191) from PowerbookMedic.com and could not have been happier with their service.

Thoughts

The culprit!This was the very first portable Intel Mac model ever shipped back in 2006, it has a 32bit Core Duo CPU with a maximum of 2GiB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM. It was starting to feel its age with Leopard, but with Snow Leopard its felt much "snappier" while executing regular desktop tasks and I thought I could perhaps extend the life of it a bit longer. When the screen died I had started to think planned obsolescence was kicking in!

In fact this machine does something that the current generation 15" MacBook Pro can't: accept ExpressCards. Given how critical they are to my workflow (added FireWire 800 and eSATA ports, wireless modems, 8 in 1 card readers, a super fast solid state drive) I'm hoping Apple reimplements them in their next hardware refresh for the 15" line, then I'll upgrade. In the meantime, this machine is once again performing its duties well :).

In the meantime I'll be looking into upgrading the internal hard drive to a 500GB one and perhaps even swap out the optical drive for another internal hard drive. Having 1TB of internal storage in a notebook would be fantabulous. Fantabulous sounds like a brand of grilled cheese sandwiches. Wait, no it doesn't.

I have my venerable MacBook Pro back, and I'm so happy ^_^.


Sudoku for 2009-09-27

Annexe

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

Sudoku puzzle for 2009-09-27


Twitter is Google Reader with editors

Internet

Super detailed diagram

It's killing me that I don't remember where I heard this, but someone made the comment that many of us online are almost welcoming the demise of newspapers because we think they're outdated dinosaurs, yet at the same time we complain about being overwhelmed by all the content streaming in from web feeds we subscribe to!

While web feeds in Google Reader and Twitter give us many of the same stories a newspaper would have shown us on the following day, one thing they haven't replicated is the newspaper or magazine editor. We've become our own editors for stories we want to see which gives us unlimited power, but then the burden is on us to filter through thousands of new stories a day to find what's interesting and reliable.

The ironic thing is I've toyed with the idea of giving up on services like Google Reader entirely because frankly I just don't have the time to sit down and skim thousands of stories each day let alone read them all, and if you don't it shows you that nonsensical unread items counter. Even Dave Winer has repeatedly made the observation that we don't get a counter on a newspaper or magazine letting us know how many stories we haven't read, because such a number is meaningless and doesn't reflect how we read them.

Lots of reading ahead of me!

This is where I think Twitter has had a profound impact on me beyond just reading what someone ate for breakfast (the stereotypical use that keeps getting used for some reason). I follow a few hundred friends on Twitter who comment and link to stories which I then read, and I comment on stories and link to them. In a way I've chosen a few hundred editors who have similar tastes and views (and sometimes beneficially wildly different) as me. In this way, the burden of filtering through all the billions of news stories and blog posts a day is distributed over far more people, and I actually end up reading more as a result. Google Reader has a shared items feature, and sites like Digg let you rate stories, but just as a newspaper feels slow compared to Google Reader and Digg, neither Google Reader nor Digg have the immediacy that Twitter has.

I have no doubt none of us will be using Twitter in several years, we would have moved onto the next collaborative microblog platform or whatever it is (Identi.ca perhaps?), but when you start seeing newspapers and TV shows quoting Twitter you know it's really changing something.

Now I'm off to post a comment on Twitter about an Israeli settlement that's causing problems (no, really?), our PM's latest trip and what type of coffee I'm having at the Boatdeck Cafe. It's not what I ate for breakfast, but it's what I'm drinking. Hope nobody minds ^_^.


Sudoku for 2009-09-26

Annexe

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

Sudoku puzzle for 2009-09-26


Telstra, Optus, Internode killed my study break!

Internet

Screenshot taken on the iPhone 3G in Safari after using the Crucial RAM upgrade site

So here's the problem, our home internet has now been down all week and I haven't been able to blog much at all during that time, and the timing could not have been worse! Consider this a whinging blog entry to end all whinging blog entries!

We live down the street from the Mawson Lakes campus but I can't easily use their internet for blogging because I configured WordPress in a few specialised ways (tokens, specially crafted cookies etc), and I can't upload any material because their firewall blocks SFTP and SSH connections. I can continue to blog from my iTelephone and publish directly, but by another stroke of terrible luck for some reason my data plan has been so slow its almost been unusable. I've hit the Publish button here nine times and each time it tells me the connection failed. It's not the iTelephone's fault of course, its the darn Optus and their less than stellar coverage.

To ward off the jitters, cold sweats (and for some reason munchies) that result from not having an outlet to post ridiculous streams of consciousness, I've started blogging on a local Django install on my MacBook Pro which currently has to be plugged into an external display because the internal one crapped out (another stroke of good luck!) in the hopes I'll be able to publish them once home internet is restored. I've blogged some more anime episodes, some Ruby and Python observations compared to The Javas, receiving Esther Golton's Aurora Borelis CDs, the daily Sudoku puzzles I've finished, floss software on a ThinkPad X40, my inverter adventures on my MacBook Pro…

So far both Telstra and Internode claim nothing is wrong on their respective ends, and our modem is in the identical configuration it was in before The Internets died. I really hope this doesn't degenerate into a farce, I have too much work and too many assignments to put up with and deal with politics. Sometimes the Internode technical support team is quick to reply, but I've sent two messages today and have not got back a single response. Luck of the draw I suppose.

Okay, I'm pressing the darn Publish button again. If I were with SingTel Mobile in Singapore I wouldn't need luck, it would work instantly. The ironic part is of course that Optus here in Australia is a subsidiary now of SingTel.

And because this friggen internet trouble has wrecked this week, it means I'll have to spend all next week working and studying when I was supposed to be on week two of my mid semester break. Absolutely brilliant :(. Ah developed, first world problems!


Work struggle between SQLite over MySQL

Software

A Green Hummer. I take that to mean just the colour!

It seems as with many technologies, regardless of your own abilities or competency if you’re using the "wrong" implementation you’re perceived as an amateur, and vice versa.

For example, I've read so many disparaging remarks by rude people on forums saying that people who run Ubuntu and Fedora are amateurs, and while I admit to being a FreeBSD and Debian guy I still replied by asking them to prove the automatic connection they were alleging. The inventor of the Linux kernel uses Fedora, so clearly their blanket assumption was false!

Anyway I'm getting sidetracked, in this case I wanted to talk about databases. I was implementing a simple website for a client that only involved one editor and a limited number of pages, so I opted to use SQLite instead of MySQL (or PostgreSQL) because its far simpler to implement, doesn't require a client/server connection and under the limited loads they'd be experiencing it could be faster.

I was so impressed by how well it performed and how easy it was to use I've started looking at other situations where it may be useful instead of just assuming everything should use MySQL. My blog here for example only has one editor and a limited number of tables with very simple foreign key relationships and a few thousand tuples. WordPress doesn't support SQLite natively, but I've been writing some basic blogging software of my own in Django and Ruby for a long time and when I started using SQLite with them I was really impressed.

But back to the client I was talking about before, no sooner had I proposed the solution and had a working prototype than someone working on another part of the project informed everyone I wasn't taking the task seriously because I was using SQLite which isn't a proper database. I didn't want to start a fight so I heaved a heavy sigh and rewrote the system in MySQL which I still maintain is far too heavy and has features that will never be needed for a database with only three tables and less than a hundred tuples each, but at least now I've been told I've corrected my childish approach.

The person did have a point, SQLite does implement only a subset of the features and SQL commands of MySQL; for example it doesn't use static typing though it can be worked around by using constraints. I also concede the possibility that in the future their needs may necessitate a more feature complete SQL implementation. To me though that's akin to Microsoft claiming Vista was better than Mac OS X Leopard because it was more efficient when using nine trillion cores, or that a Hummer is better than a bicycle because you can haul drums of nuclear waste in it more easily.

I guess I just like elegant systems that have a comfortable ceiling for growth but that at the same time are simpler and therefore easier to maintain and use. Einstein said "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler", and then there's the adage of the "right tool for the job.". Perhaps I just need to get used to eating humble pie more often and accepting that I'm working with other people with their own needs and expectations. Still, it'd be nice if people would stop assuming things just because of the tools you use.

Aside: I’ve hacked together a way to post blog entries from the computer pools at the university, but it’s such a long and convoluted procedure I still won’t be doing many of them until I get our home internet connection fixed.


Sudoku for 2009-09-25

Annexe

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

Sudoku puzzle for 2009-09-25