GibbonsR.net

The final day is almost upon us. Stacey and I are about to close on our First house. We are both so excited. Closing was originally set up for the 31 Oct, but because of some weird issues with our interest rate, we are having to close on the 30th. Not too big of a deal, just a bit of a hassle. But that means on Thursday evening, we are going to be new home owners.

I will have to work on getting pictures up, which means I need to start looking into photo galleries, but that will came later in time. Right now we have to finish packing for the movers coming out 7 Nov, I can’t wait!

Yep, you read the title right, and no this blog isn’t becoming an advertising site, just so happens this post and the last are right after one another.

Codeweavers has created a challenge and that challenge has been met. Gas in the Twin Cities as returned to where it was a year ago, at $2.79 per gallon, after being up to $3.79. I guess I will tell them that the avg gas here in Ft. Worth, TX is $2.25 right now, with some suburbs having gas wars between Exxon and QT and seeing the price below $1.95 per gallon. But that is another story I guess.

So for today only, you can go to http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ and get your free serial number for their software. You have to register it before it is any good, and because of the increase of traffic today, their servers have died. Not literally, but they are done, and all their sites are now just plain text. You can get your serial number today only, but they are allow you to register it tomorrow also because of the down time.

For those that don’t know CodeWeavers Crossover Office is a product based on the open source application Wine. You aren’t paying for Wine itself, but yet the support and tweaks CodeWeaver’s has done to the package to help it run your favorite Windows applications. It can run Quicken, Powerpoint, Excel, even some version of Access. With CrossOver Games, you can run your favorite games also. This product isn’t just for Linux, but for the Mac also.

So go get, try it out, and hell, if you like it this publicity stunt might of paid of big time as you will likely want upgrades after your subscription is out.

Just found a a contest site with a chance to win $1000 cash. They are calling it Project No Name. The site says that two companies are coming together and are wanting a new name. So they are holding a contest, and if they select your name, you win .. that simple.

It’s pretty cool to see companies using the internet for things like this. I had to Dig it http://digg.com/design/Project_No_Name_Wants_You !

Lately I’ve been getting a ton of spam on my MSN Instant Messenger account. It is quit annoying. I could of just modified my privacy settings in my client (on pidgin Tools .. Privacy, select MSN and block only users on buddy list). But I do a lot of work with open source and communities, and would like to have people who need to contact , actually be able to contact me.

I found a few solutions. First was logging into account.live.com and modify my shared profile. Under social, I changed the permissions to just me. Hopefully that helps a bit. My news step will be using a pidgin plug-in called Bot Sentry. Which will ask users not in your buddy list or approved list to answer simple questions before the message goes through. Ex. Please spell out the number 5. So it should stop all that automated spam.

If I have to go that route, then I will be sure and post a follow up.

We take a lot of things for granted, and we don’t really think about how much we actually have. I take computers for granted a lot, and don’t think about how I use them in my everyday life, or how convenient they have made things. Actually I do think about how convenient they make things, when I get those e-mails at about 11:30 at night and I end up working :/ But that isn’t the point of this story.

The other day I was driving down the highway when it hit me, I never finished setting up that users FTP account into their website. I was waiting for the DNS changes to propagate so I could test everything at once, well that was 12 hours ago, so everything should be good to go. I’m not at my laptop so I pull out my Treo and check the website. It doesn’t load, instead I get my servers default home page .. oops, I must not have the virtual host setup. So still with my Palm Treo, I log into my servers and reboot apache thinking I had already setup the config files. Nope, still wrong, the default page loads again. So I log back into my server with pssh, and then setup a config file with vim, and restart Apache .. Woohoo everything works. So I go back in and add run the commands commands with pure-pw to setup a basic FTP account and we are done, it only took me about 15 – 20 minutes.

I was pretty stoked that I could do all of this from my cell phone, but what, that isn’t the best part. I was able to do all of this while driving down the highway. Yes I know that isn’t safe, but Hell, how many people can say they setup an Apache vhost and ftp account while driving down the highway, let alone in a bash shell! It’s the small things in life that make you smile.

So apparently Linus Torvald now has a blog, as seen on Reddit Hell as frozen over. But I am glad, I enjoy reading into some of the innovative minds of our age. One of his articles is raving over Intel’s new SSD. So much so, he has me excited waiting for it to come out.

I know there has been some anti solid state disk articles out there, but I think they are the future. Soon CD / DVD drives will be a think of the past and machines will have no moving parts (one day even the fans will be gone). But I’ve been eye-balling SSD’s for about a year now, watching and waiting. Knowing the performance and pricing will collide into such a beautiful package that I won’t be able to resist any more. From what I can find out know, the X25-M from Intel will be 80GB and cast around 650 bucks. Price per GB that is still pretty high, but that is almost to the point I can’t wait. And come Christmas, I won’t be able to wait much longer. AnandTech has some pretty amazing numbers on this drive. I find myself getting giddy every time I read a new article on this drive, or when I see specs published about it. I really can’t wait.

Right now I have a WD 300GB, and it is fast, and has plenty of storage, but I am barely using 50GB and that is with several DVD iso’s on it. I could easily budget my laptop storage to under 80GB, which is another plus, is the drive won’t slow down the fuller it gets. Oh I can’t wait!

I must say I am pretty impressed with Microsoft on the speed of their support. It took about 3 – 4 days for me to receive the packaging material they provide. Then I sent it off on a Friday and I received back a new one Last night, the following Wednesday. I had to “test” it out, to make sure it wasn’t broken, so after about 5 hours of Madden, I concluded that this unit seems to be problem free.

Now it is time to go out and buy Maddon ’09!

Yep, the title pretty tells the story. I’m getting the damn RRoD of on system, I have it just short of 1 year and it is crapped out, freezing in the middle of play. I’m getting the general hardware failure lights, which luckily MS has extended the warranty for this failure out to 3 years. I am not sure if this is lucky or not, b/c of the extreme number of problems they have been having. Some people are speculating that the numbers are over 30%, but with some of the newer development on the 360′s the number has dropped to 10%, that is still a hell of a lot.

Oh well though, I signed up to http://service.xbox.com and had a service repair registered. They are shipping the the box and information to ship it back, they are paying for everything. I’ve read they say 2 – 3 weeks for a replacement, but some have reported getting one back within 10 days of the day they started the process.

It’s going to suck the next 3 weeks with no Madden :/

Just got down spending about 3 hours trying to get a simple gallery page to render the same across multiple browsers. It is crazy trying to get all browsers to work. I think we are dropping IE6 and FF2 from strict compatibility tests. As long as the data is rendered, we are calling that good. But that still leaves, FF3, IE7, Opera, Safari and Chrome. And we have IE8 around the corner, which will initialy just be a render data in a readable format.

The issue we are having is inside Webkit based browsers (Safari, Chrome, Midori, and many others). The have our CMS applying a wrapper to a basic php gallery page. This page uses jquery and galleria to handle the image transitions and such using ajax. Works great on the browsers by itself, and after a bit of CSS work for IE7 works great on that and FF3. But once done, Safari and Chrom wouldn’t display the ajax content when the page is loaded directly. Hitting refresh though, the ajax / javascript engine inside these browsers decides to work, and everything works great. It is the craziest shit I’ve ever seen. Nothing changing besides hitting refresh.

Which brings on to my biggest compliant, UI design sucks. It isn’t even for Web Design, but designing applications to work on a variety of interfaces is going to cause problems. Windows has done a decent job of not changing things too much between major backends, so apps developed for 2000 should look find in XP and Vista … should, but not always. But look at java apps, that share the same code for Mac OS X, Vista, XP, Linux (KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc, etc) and it has some small issues that araise, you got font issues, DPI, resolution, window decorations (or the lack there of). It is a huge issue. And people (end users) don’t look toward the person resonable for their platform (firefox, IE, Apple, Gnome) but instead to the individual developer to create special cases for all these different idiosyncrocies. And we, as the small developers, bend over, take it, and try to get all the wrinkles ironed out.

While choice is good for the consumer, it sucks for those trying to create things to work for the most amount of people. Next to writing a custom interface for every single option out there, there are going to be some that run in a degraded mode, ignored, and in the extremem cases not even work.

Okay Rant Over – back to work.

In a previous post about Redmine I mentioned that I was having problems with LDAP and 2003 Active Directory authentication. Now I considered myself to have a fair amount of LDAP and Active Directory experience. I have set up samba PD and set up PAM to auth against LDAP. Even to grab user credentials. I’ve written scripts to pull users from ldap for initial setups in other applications, etc, etc. But for the life of me I couldn’t get redmine to auth against AD.

I probalby spent about 5 hours debugging Redmien to find the error. I had logger.info lines all over the place (I’m a ruby newbie), I’m debugging the mysql queries, if statements, everything I can think of. After 1) understanding Redmine and 2) understanding ruby, I was able to start norrowing it down. The SQL queries were fine, the initial ldap bind was fine, but it was authenticating.

I ended up finding out that the problem was with the ldap_conn.search() fucntion. I wasn’t executing correcting. They seemed to using it as kind of an if statement, so I was trying to ouput the status, but wasn’t getting anything. I thought this was my lack of knowledge of ruby. I forced the ldap_bind to fail, so I know for a fact the ldap_conn.search would fail, and it did, but this time it would return false. But when everything else seemed to work find, ldap_conn.search would return nothing. I was stumped. I had no clue what to do. I went home that day feeling defeated. I talked to Brian and he made fun of me, like any good friend should, and told me it was user error. I laughed him off and went on my. Next day at work though ended up proving him right. I ended gettign the bright idea to cdump out all the variables being used. I read that when the ldap search function was giving a filter string that was the written out the way it wants, it silently fails. I looked through them all, and they all looked okay, fiddling with them for a bit didn’t do anything. Then I dumped them again , and it hit me, like a pallet of falling bricks .. yes it hurt as bad also.

My username field for the ldap search as set to sAMAccountName , what you can’t tell from this is that it was actually ‘sAMAccountName ‘, with a space at the end. So the filter ws being set to sAMAccountName =ryan.gibbons. While you would think this might work, it doesn’t, but whats worse is that redmine let this pass, and ruby-net-ldap didn’t doesn’t handle invalid filters at all. Hence my post below about Data Cleansing.

So hopefully this post will help others out there having similar issues. I’ve learned my lesson for the week, only question is how long will I remember it. Tomorrow I will go submit a bug to hopefully have this error fixed. Yes even computer nerds and programs fall victim to PEBKAC.