new blog place In all it's goodness, I finally moved my blog over to my own server... now to fix the archived stuff. linkie here

stupid people I've had two interesting sets of calls in the last few days. Scenario 1: customer buys an iMac from us, i believe a 1Ghz 17", which ships with Mac OS 10.2.3 installed. He calls us the next day, stating that he has bought some touch panel product that will only work with 10.2.1, no higher. We ask if he has called the developer/manufacturer of said product. He has, and they tell him in no uncertain terms that it will not work with any system higher than 10.2.1. So, we recommend that he call Apple customer relations, and see what they say about the matter. Nobody I work with knows if a 1Ghz iMac will even boot or run 10.2.1 without trouble. Personally, i doubt it. He calls back a few hours later. The gal he talked to at Apple apparently told him that 99% of the machines are shipping with 10.2, and you internet update them higher (this is bull, all of the current machines are shipping with 10.2.3 preinstalled, and the retail box of X is also 10.2.3), and to come in and trade us his 10.2.3 CDs for 10.2 CDs! We don't have a 10.2 retail CD around (we sold them all), don't have a product 10.2 install CD around, and we still don't think his iMac would work properly with a system lower than what it shipped with. I told him to call Apple back and try to get another c.r. rep. Sounds to me as if the first rep was just reading a script, and had no idea what she was talking about. If it were me, I would be returning the touch panel to the manufacturer. Absolutely no developer should make a product that will work with one version of the system, and not a minor revision of the system higher. That's ludicrous. Scenario 2: Customer calls with a very strange network sluggishness problem. He has NEVER bought a product from us, currently owns at least an Xserve, a G4 server, 3 or 4 G4 towers, and a few iMacs, but always expects us to drop everything to help him. Granted, he has always paid us for our service time and onsites to his location, but still acts like we have to help him right now. He's called Apple, and they told him to call Apple enterprise help. He calls Apple enterprise help, and they have an answering machine that says "leave a message, we'll call back later". Nice. After talking to him for a bit, it sounds like his main switch is going out. He'll randomly not get an IP from the DHCP server, and then a reboot will change that. Ping times across the network are fast, some file transfers are fast, everything else is slow. I recommended that he switch his main switch out with his smaller spare (non-gigabit), and see if that fixes it. We haven't heard back from him since then, so I'm hoping that really was the issue.

gaming and more Got a hair cut today, which took almost an hour by itself. My hair grows too damn long for how short I like it. My PC has decided it's not shutting off anymore. If I tell it to shut down, it restarts, just like it used to. I think it's the hacked unofficial driver for my logitech usb quickcam vc, as logitech does not actually support that camera in windows 2000 (or NT, or XP). I'll do some testing tomorrow to be sure, but that is the last thing I installed. I just spent the last few hours playing Ghost Recon online with some of the guys that were at the LAN party. Me, ben, jacob (at the end), dan, dusty, and dusty's brother were all playing. No lag at all, it was quite fun. We actually got to where we could kill shit on the elite setting without dying too much.

it boots I spent a few hours trying to get my PC to dual boot Win2k and Linux again. I had to end up using my Win2k CD to repair... err, rewrite the MBR with its own record. Considering I can boot linux with my linux boot floppy, I may leave it like this until I get brave again. No need to reinstall Windows again.

PC & LAN After reinstalling everything on my PC Friday evening, I decided to install RedHat 8 onto it. It wasn't such a good idea. I told it to use the GRUB boot loader, but on reboot, it gives me "GRUB read error", and stops. So, I reinstall redhat, and tell it to use LILO, reboot, and "LI". That's it, nothing else. So, now I'm hoping that either Norton for PC, or a repair install of Windows 2000 can fix it, or I am going to be royally pissed. The LAN party was good and fun last night. Watching the new Aliens vs. Predator players start in on a round of coop against the aliens was very funny. I told them it was fast, insane, and non-stop, and that the aliens won't stop coming at you even if you blow their legs off. It was a good laugh, but then they got good at it, and we had a good alien killing spree. We also played Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, and Ghost Recon. I've posted some pictures here.

yeah

ginsu It slices, it dices, it blogs, it surfs the web, it emails, it can telnet to mldonkey, and it can irc (if only i could figure out how to change ping setttings), it's my Newton! Pictures of the Newton surfing to freefall, and the default apache page are available here.

Newton
this is my first blog from my newton.

Microsoft Security Update 811493 for Windows 2000 appears to be the culprit. I just installed all of the updates except for that one in about an hour. I noticed that the last two times the updates stalled, including after a clean nuke and install of windows, this update was the one the updater was on. Leave it out of the set of updates, and everything runs smoothly. I'm tempted to try it now that all of the other updates are done, but I don't think I will. It resolves some issue where a person could take control of a computer remotely, but they have to be able to log in locally (have a local account) to do so. As my box is behind a big fat router and firewall, and it has no services running, I'm not to worried about it.

stupid pc I have no idea what my PC's problem is, other than the fact that it runs Windows. When I got up this morning, the updates were stopped at the very end of the install process, with none of them actually finished. The computer was responsive, but the install refused to finish. I tried doing just one update when I got home, but even it was taking it's time to install, longer than it should be. So, I nuked the PC again, reinstalled Win2k, installed all of the drivers for the components in the tower (ATA card, ethernet, sound, agp, video card), and am now running the online updates. Hopefully, they don't crawl.

Apple Store I applied for a genius bar position at an Apple Retail Store in Seattle, that isn't open yet. As usual, I'm being impatient and worried as to whether they will call me or not, as I want this job. Also, I filled out the online resume/application, and looking back at it, I don't know if I like my goal on it.

Sleep is for the Weak I just spent the last who knows how long nuking (quick) and reinstalling all of my custom stuff onto my Newton, using a 6500 that I had to nuke and reinstall, all using only a mouse, as I apparently sold my ADB keyboard some time ago. I've also spent the evening trying to reinstall Windows 2000 on my PC, as it was acting really strangely (wouldn't shut down or sleep, just restart, and i checked the settings), so I decided that it needed a good nuke and pave. Wipe and install went fine, but now the internet windows update is not behaving. Either it won't finish downloading, or it stops installing, or whatever. I hope I can get it past THIS set of updates, and then move to the next tomorrow. I found a telnet client for my Newton, and I'm hoping that I can use my PCMCIA to compactflash adapter without using the shareware ATA support driver. Actually, if it comes to that, I just won't use it, as the driver is nearly $50. I can't find an SSH client for it, and I still need to download the blogging app. Email works fine (always did), and I have yet to try web again. Now that I've gotten rid of what should have been the source of the thing crashing, maybe web will work properly. Ping and traceroute utilities would be nice, too. I do have the newton development kit, so I could probably write those myself, if I so desired, but they're really not THAT important to me to learn a new language and network stack stuff. If anyone knows where to find any of this stuff, let me know. You can contact me through freefall, via the link to the left.

I just realized another reason why the Newton rules. You can load software, drivers, whatever, and it doesn't care. It does not need to restart or reboot. You can suspend drivers on the fly, and bring them back up on the fly. Very cool.