WaveCradle: Passive iPhone amplification
I just bought a blue WaveCradle. It passively amplifies the iPhone’s speaker. What it really does is look cool and redirect the sound output. Whatever. It works, I like it, so there you go.
iTunes Genius Playlist creation comes and goes
Since upgrading my iPhone to iOS 5 and subscribing to iMatch, I’ve noticed that Playlists | Genius Playlist sometimes disappears from the Music app. Sometimes the menu item is there, and sometimes it’s not. Has anyone else seen this?
Rackspace changed Ubuntu bits without telling users
tl;dr
Rackspace changed their Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) server image without telling their customers. Our installation scripts unexpectedly broke. In the cloud, the rug can be pulled out from underneath you without warning, even in a very simple setup.
The Story
My employer is a small shop, and we use Rackspace Cloud Servers for our QA and Production systems. We use unmanaged VMs, from 256 MB to 16 GB in size, running Ubuntu.
Rackspace has generally been a very good hosting provider. My only significant complaint is with their cloud administrative dashboard — it’s slow, clunky, and often hangs. But we’ve learned to live with it.
When we upgraded from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04, we had some typical upgrade pain with our Operations scripts. We had to remove some 10.10 package workarounds, and we switched some software from source builds to packages, because the 11.04 repository’s version was now acceptable.
We got past all that, and moved our systems to 11.04. Since then, re-building servers meant selecting Ubuntu 11.04 as the server image, running our Fabric scripts, and everything working predictably without surprises.
Until November 21…
Rackspace Ubuntu 11.04 servers broken without a network
I’ve got an odd problem. I create a 4 GB VM in the Rackspace Cloud with an Ubuntu 11.04 server image. After it’s created, I can’t ssh to it, and ping returns zero bytes.
I can get to it from the Rackspace dashboard console. But it’s not on the network. Creating a VM without a network is kind of useless.
I first alerted Rackspace to this over a week ago. It’s still present in our VMs, and now impacts our company in a very serious way. Rackspace says their Operations team has to check the host machine to fix this. You’d think this would be easy to isolate and resolve, but….nope.
Does anybody else have this problem?
———
Update: Rackspace confirmed this is a system-wide problem! Until it’s fixed, after I rebuild a VM I have to ask their customer support to goose the underlying host machine before it’ll respond to the network. Yikes.
Approving new Twitter followers from an iPhone
I protected my tweets on Twitter.
When you protect your tweets, you have to approve any new follower request.
This is easy if you use a desktop or laptop browser. But if you use a Twitter client application, or a mobile browser on Android or iPhone, you can’t approve new followers. In fact, you won’t even know about them. You’ll see new follower requests only if you view Twitter with a desktop browser. (I’m crawling slightly out on a limb here. I’ve tried a few iPhone apps, and none have let me approve follower requests. I can’t find references to Android apps that let you do this, either.)
This irks me.
Integrity is all There is
Personal and professional integrity matter. They’re the most important gifts you can give yourself.
I’m reminded of this by an article I read today about a firm. I know a lot about this particular company. The article was, essentially, a marketing puff-piece, the kind of thing you read in a rag like the Puget Sound Business Journal. The news is always positive, everything’s great, and the future is so bright they have to wear shades. (Companies that go ventral fin up from poor strategy, execution, business models, marketing strategy, malfeasance, or outright stupidity never get written up.)
I expect spin from such articles. It’s OK. There’s a time and place for everything, including positioning a corporate brand or reputation, and spreading news about business opportunities.
But there’s a line you don’t cross. You don’t claim something that is not true. Period. Once you’ve done that, your credibility evaporates. Losing credibility is like losing privacy — once it happens, it’s awfully hard to restore. I have a long memory for negative-credibility moves, as do many (most?) others.
I counted three statements in this article that I know are false. A couple of others were borderline. I also know the company spokespeople interviewed in the article know they were false.
Such behavior is pathetic. Yeah, this is a hot button of mine.
Principles only mean something when you stick to them when it’s inconvenient.
- Laine Hanson, “The Contender”
Here’s a rule: Never lie. Never say something that’s not true. If you’d rather not talk about it, say that and move on.
Max is gone
We said goodbye to Max today. I thought I’d be able to go in to work afterward, but I had to take a PTO day.
The rest of the week will be WIPO application importing and parsing, and entity naming heuristics. Today I didn’t want to deal with any of it.
Bad dependencies
Pro tip: When you rely on Fabric to provision your servers, and your fabfile installs packages from the Cheeseshop, and package D (which you specify) depends on package C, and the Cheeseshop’s dependency rule is wrong, and it causes the wrong version of package C to be downloaded and installed, and the version number it should be is visually similar to the one it installed (say, 2.3.1 vs. 2.4.1), and it quickly scrolls up your terminal window, and package C version 2.4.1 is in fact incompatible with package D, and you’re tired, you can waste a lot of time chasing your tail.
Life
We still haven’t upgraded our iPhone 3GS to a 4S. We’re now less then two months until the end of that phone’s contract, so I’ll take another run at them this week.
This week, I suddenly got a hankering to dive into GNU Emacs customization. Every 10 years I go berserk with it, like a recurring fever. ::cracks knuckles::
The WIPO patent work in my job hit a speed bump. It was of the, “walk into a dead-end, turn around and back up,” variety. There were some challenges with Kind Codes, but now I’m past them, a little older and wiser for the experience. This next week will see me fold it into the trunk, try the code in a staging system, and perhaps start inventing new name extraction heuristics. Neato.
We have three cats. Two of them are pushing 19 years of age, and one of those, Max, is on the way out. He’s losing nearly 4 oz each week. There’s no specific illness…his intestines have just shut down and he’s not absorbing nutrition anymore.
Life
What’s shaking down on the farm…
Whilst dealing with many interruptions, the PCT/IPC improvements to my company’s product are nearly ready to go live. Sometime this week, we’ll start storing international patents in our datastore, with fully hooked-up classifications. It’ll be flippin’ neat-o! With the back-end (importing, deciphering, parsing, storing) improvements done, next comes the front-end enhancements. (“Oh! A publication number can now have that format?”) Then everything magically falls into place. That’s the plan. 
At work, I monitor our codebase’s size using cloc. I take monthly snapshots. I like how our LOC have remained roughly the same, while we add new features and fix bugs. I visualize the codebase becoming tighter and firmer, as we weed out and replace bad code with code doing more work with fewer lines. I enjoy the visualization, and there are grains of truth within. I’ve come across code I wrote months ago, and I say, “Gah! I could use a list comprehension there and save three statements!” Or something similar. All things being equal, fewer lines of code and/or fewer source code statements equals fewer bugs.
Long time no post
I’ve been remiss. I can hear your wailing and gnashing of teeth from here.
Lots going on in my personal and work lives. Lots of fun at work. My current task is parsing XML International Patent Classification (IPC) data. Oodles of goodness.
More later!
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