Andreas Wacker

I am developing some exciting new features for INTERDUBS. I made the mistake of not testing the code I wrote for 3 days in Internet Explorer. When I check it again I realize that this cock-sucker of a browser just quits. So I had to roll through three days of changes to find out what exactly made this piece of shit simply quit. No warning, no indication. Nothing. Just fucking ended displaying the page. 6 other browsers were fine, and had been during those three days of development. There were no warnings, no hints of something causing a problem. Nothing. Turns out that a simple

Finally I canceled my TWC cable modem connection. About the only thing that is good about Time Warner Cable is that you can cancel it at any time. When the connection worked it was pretty decent. Problem was, that I had regularly a ping loss of 10-20% during the evening and on the weekend. Which makes the connecion useless. In the last weeks I went along with everything that TWC suggested. They swapped the cable modem. Which was pointless since the packages were were dropped inside of their network. Basically they were unable to address the issue within 6 weeks. Their support knows a couple of routines and motions they can go through. Anything that falls outside of that will not be addressed it seems. No escallation. Overall their “Level 3″ support gave me the impression, and the evidence of the problem not getting addresses within 6 weeks supports that, that they do not understand the network that they are responsible for. Getting rid of the connection was the only option. Too bad, since during the 20 hours a day that it usually worked it was actually fine.

where the two biggest commerical airlines are right now: there is a website for that as well

“Do you run OS 8, 9 or 10?”

Original quote from Timewarner Cable support yesterday after trying to troubleshoot a connection issue for 40 minutes.

Bonus points when dealing with an institution as stupid as that: Figuring out the pattern of the special “access PIN” numbers for the Level 3 phone support after having received a couple of those. Let me know if you need one. And make sure to know if you run that OS that is obsolete since 1999.

In 2007 GM lost $4,589 on each car they sold, in 2008 $4,670. Imagine any GM car, then remove things from it that cost four and a half grand*. This is the car you would get when would try not to loose money on making them. What do you care? Well you should, since next week you will probably own GM. And their losses will (continue to) come out of our (tax) pocket.

* OK, I got those numbers from the Internet and did the division myself, so all sorts of things could be wrong here. And you can also put back about one thousand dollar worth of parts into your imaginary Escalade: That’s what gets spend on marketing to convince you to buy the thing. How about a spare tire, seatbelts, a radio and a fan on the passenger side?

This is a nice visualisation of how the world developed.

A while back I watched Insomnia, I think I found it by some lateral IMDB connection of its director Chris Nolan. It was not bad for most parts. Watching the DVD extras I found out ,that this was actually a remake of a swedish movie with the same title. Since that was the only choice I got the stupidly overpriced criterion disc.

Watching the US remake and original revealed some american movie codes that -looking at them in the light of these films- are just plain stupid. Essential story points got bent. It was not that horrible to watch Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank act in the 2002 version. The original rarely reveals the thesping. People, surroundings and the issues suggested simply feel more reel. All the style, sound design, fog, acting and writing in serpentines to avoid a dog being shot make the US version feel dense, crafted and inept compared to the original.

The swedish film is certainly not without its flaws. But Insomnia is a remake that makes you wonder why there is such as thing a remake.

five point six appears to be a good guess for the number of Cheops pyramids that could have been built in the time that people spent trying to work around Internet Explorer.

An interesting collection of more or less vague ‘cloud sizes’. My guess is that most of these machines are no longer specialized hardware or workstations. Explains why Sun -for instance- is having such a hard time. Once you scale well in software and do handle hardware failures in that layer too there is really no need for expensive irons. I wonder how many of those large footprint installs run Windows like operating systems.

The main purpose of the API for INTERDUBS was to let my clients use it programmatically. Their system control INTERDUBS in a way that fits best into their workflow. That is what the API was made for, and it works. Every day.

Interestingly there are other, somewhat more surprisingly, benefits to having an Application Programmable Interface to a system too. This week I had a discussion with a client where they outlined specific needs in respect to their data that they have in INTERDUBS. They could have updated things manually, but that would have taken a very long time. By using the API myself it actually took me not that long to implement their needs. I spent only slightly more time on it than the actual discussion took that we had about their needs. This was very nice to see. And actually quiet unexpected. If the next client needs something similar I will be able to solve this in five minutes.

Tools for people to create content of any kind are widely available since a long time. Still it feels rare when there is something like this.

the new new new thing

I found this to be interesting with a great list of sources that illustrate the history of bubbles. Bubble History by Caslon Analytics

Let’s see if people are interested in getting updates about INTERDUBS via twitter:


http://twitter.com/interdubs


Having seen meme’s come and go together with their tools I am extremely neutral on any new technology that comes up. Does not stop me from seeing if it could be useful.

As usual I try and then see what happens. Easier to ‘do’ and then see instead of having endless evaluations and discussions about something.

Four days of intense work for less than a percent of improvement sounds not like a great use of my time. But I am actually very happy about the outcome: I was able to increase the success rate of clip meta data detection in INTERDUBS by 0.8%. This is great since it went up from 98.8% to 99.6%. Or looking at it from the other end: two third of all flawed detections were and will be corrected with the improved code. One of the benefits of having 100,000s of clips online is to be able run simulations and stats while improving the code. There is a wide variety in what people like to use as their encoding and file format. I’d rather do some more -invsible- work on the backend than to lecture my clients on how exactly they should encode their files. There are recommendations. Sure. But why fail if you don’t have to?

Even though this application of Grubers Broken Windows is seemingly invisible, in the end it certainly is not: A well running system just needs less support per client. Actually so far I was able to decrease the total time spent on support. Despite the fact that the client based tripled last year.

Couldn’t read the keyboard under the current lighting conditions. And manual controls for changing it did not work. Enter: Lab Tick.

45 seconds later it’s all good again. Very nice when stuff just works.

INTERDUBS supported the iPhone 40 days after it came out. Last week Wiredrive came out with their iPhone support. Graphically that looks like:

I don’t think that much can be gained by not acting quickly. At this point my clients have already solid experience with their clients in how to use the iPhone, and how not to. We could make good use of those twenty months.

In an act of ‘active procrastination’ (aka as coding things that nobody needs / wants in order to avoid real work) I wrote a view on my database that would sum up the number of INTERDUBS clients over time.

I was very suprised to find the (somewhat smoothed) result to identify so clearly both growth phases that INTERDUBS had so far. In the beginning I did have only a very very rudimentary public website and growth was only word of mouth. This was intended so that I could spend enough time on the needs of everybody that came on board.

Once what people needed was pretty well covered I made the public site a bit more meaningful and growth increased. Nicely enough support efforts have remained on a constant level: New users need a hand here or there. Often enough it is possible to avoid issues from being repeated by adjusting the code to what the users do expect.

In server admin after I had turned on the NFS service I still found a status like:


nfs service is: running
nfsd is: stopped
portmap is: stopped
rpc.lockd is: stopped
rpc.statd is: stopped


Turns out that the other daemons spring into action once you share the first Volume.

shells keep a history. The default seems to be to keep 1000 lines. I have not found a reason to make this huge. And while at it time stamp it as well:


HISTFILESIZE=2000000
HISTSIZE=100000
HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
export HISTTIMEFORMAT HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE


in your .bashrc will keep 100,000 lines (2MB “omg” ) of history around and will also time stamp it nicely. That and the grep command make for some nice shortcuts on memory lane.

When I wanted to build php with imap it did complain about:


configure: error: Kerberos libraries not found.


Turns out that this some fallout from lib64 vs. lib differences. So I found
this blog explaining exactly what was going on. Very helpful. Especially the


sh -x ./configure ...options go here...


trick can be very very helpful in the future.

an OS X server got unhappy and seemingly did hang on bootup on the gray screen with the rotating ‘progress’ indicating.

Booting it with text mode enabled (holding command V) revealed that the machine would loop with the following error message snippets:


posix_spawnp ... /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder ... no such file or directory

ls -lsd /
0 drwxrwxr-t 43 root admin 1530 Dec 20 03:57 /

Booting into single mode (command -s) and then doing the suggested fsck and mount -uw / revealed that the permissions actually were set to:


drwwrx---


Meaning that others have not even read permissions. This makes the mDNSresponder seemingly unhappy. I would guess that it quickly gives away its root privileges after launch for security reason. Running what the internet suggested


chmod 775 /


did fix the issue.

I have no idea why, and it os most likely me. But traveling with the same user to another laptop .exrc stopped being looked at for vi. Strange. .vimrc still works. So I put my settings in there and continued to work. Not sure what’s going on. Not time to investigate.

So now I am on laptop number 5 ( Titanium, 12″ G4, 15″ G4, iBook G4, 15″ first gen Macbook Pro) and I am considering to get a second one to put it away so that I can keep on using this kind of machine once I have worn this one out. Storing a computer for 4 years before you use it for the first time is a stupid thing. I still consider it. Apple might have peaked with this machine.

I got a refurb Al 17″ (pre unibody) and it works like a dream. It’s non glossy 1920×1200 screen is gorgeous. Hey even the trackpad works, and the keyboard is a match to the fingers. All things I didn’t like about the unibody flavor. And the price is pretty sweet for a 4GB Ram (nice one) 300GB drive machine I paid $2100.

Being able to drive a 30″ screen and the better sound of the built in speakers are other benefits that I did not consider but certainly appreciate. And the thing is cool. The 15″ was heating my fingers. But only when it was cold. I hope this gfx card lasts longer than the one in the machine before.

If your ftp client reports

500 OOPS: bad bool value in config file for: config_name_here


then that might mean that you have a “YES ” or “NO ” with a trailing space in your config file. Easy enough to fix. I got lucky and found it quickly. Just in case somebody needs to google for this.

Downtime happens. And it is not pretty. But science can help. And all science starts with data. That is why I monitor how sites like INTERDUBS are availabe to their users. A company that shall remain unnamed was down for four hours this morning, which made me wonder how everybody is doing. I also wanted to play with Google Charts a bit more.

Accumulated downtime since April 2008. Less is better:

Congratulations to Adbeast for being clearly better. I am happy about the second place in this case. It is hard to derive the user experience of outages just based on this one measure. It very well mayb be that the customers of Competitor A - C are also happy with how things are going for them.

In anyway I also feel good in light of thise data about offering 99.999% uptime guarantees with a full months money back.

Update March 2009:
It turned out that I probed a static page for Adbeast. So the praise that I would have loved to give is somewhat unjustified. At this point it is early to tell how the real content pages rank. So far they are much less stable INTERDUBS though. Which is almost a shame: Nobody beliefs a statistic that makes the author of the statistic the clear winner …

I have no freaking clue what I am doing. So be careful just following this blindly.
When I initially googled for this issue I did not find this specific solution:

When tried to install vsftpd.2.0.7 from source on a centos 5.2 64 bit machine I get the error:

sysdeputil.c:162: error: expected declaration specifiers or '...' before 'capset'


yum install libcap-devel.x86_64


At which point the linker complained:

/lib/libcap.so.1: could not read symbols: File in wrong format


I had to actually commend out the line

locate_library /lib/libcap.so.1 && echo "/lib/libcap.so.1";


in vsf_findlibs.sh. After that it compiled and seemed work.

Since I don’t watch TV just some DVDs I was quiet happy with the decent Sony Tube thing making the pictures. Yesterday I wandered over to the the going out of business sale public viewing of Circuit City. Which I can not recommend: 10% off all items that have not been marked down already. And the staff is as motivated as it was in the last year when it’s own purpose seemed to have been to avoid customers.

Standing in front of a panasonic 50″ with 720p and 1080p I was wondering if I should spend $1100 or $1500. I did do the right thing: Not getting either. Of course the store feeds the screens crappy std-def TV signals. But it made me curious. This week I also had another look on a specific 65″ 720p panasonic plasma from 2005. And subjectively a blue-ray DVD looked great.

I collected a couple of resolutions of devices and aligned with viewing distances. My conclusion is that a 50″ with 720p is more than enough: In order to be able to experience the higher resolution of the 1080p device I would need to sit ridiculously close to it. Even a 65″/1080p would have move me much closer than I usually watch in order to match resolutions that I am accustomed to and experience subjectively as a good picture. That -of course- will not stop vendors to make 1080p 42″ devices. And people will buy them as much as they bought cameras based on their megapixels years after more megapixels actually meant better images.

So I am roaming Craigslist now for 720p plasmas as big as possible. I will loose out on the improvements in plasma pixel technology (live, contrast ratio, coating). But I certainly don’t need to wast any money on a 1080p since they simply don’t make them big enough. Maybe I should get a projector after all …

Just a few weeks ago I bought iWork08. It would cost me another $100 to get the recent iWork09. That ‘Numbers’ is pointless I already realized. I hear keynote is alright, have not used it. I just tried to use Pages. Again. Making something as fancy as a ‘table’. Oh, boy! Annoying and stupid. But then I wanted to enter “99.999%”. The INTERDUBS uptime. Leaving the input focus of that field “Pages” decided to change that it to “100%”. No, really. Kid you not. Had to do it thrice to believe it. I am sure there might be some preference somewhere. But Pages has wasted enough of my time already. Amazon is shipping Mac office any day now. I can wait for that. Waiting happily to use a Microsoft software. What has the world come too!!

While trailing the log files this messages showed up:


Jan 12 16:49:13 andreaswacker vsftpd(pam_unix)[20094]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty= ruser= rhost=74.141.98.100


turns out some bot/script etc from 74.141.98.100 was trying to find an ftp user with a stupid name. Would have had no luck, but I don’t like my log files to be cluttered. So it turned out that a simple


iptables -I INPUT -s 74.141.98.100 -j DROP


blocks that IP address from now on. Nice. I think I will use that often now. There are lots of misconfigured systems out there. Like that Windows 98 computer in the philipines downloading the same file 5000 times yesterday. Thank you iptables.

Just too bad that Verzion isn’t. So I think I could use FiOS. The Verizon website however has a problem with the address that I happen to have. A message then claims that I could call to find out if Fios is available. Calling that number I just go through 5 menus only to be disconnected when the system tries to hand me over to the next station. On the internet that’s called a broken link. I am sure Verizon has spent some money on marketing to make me aware of Fios. They also have spent money to put the actual thing in place. Too bad that they are unable to make a sale since their sales tools just happen to be broken. I guess they need a bail out too pretty soon …

When a program crashes under OS X then it displays a dialog asking if the info should be sent to Apple. If you never do that then you can disable this dialog by typing:


defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType Server


in a terminal shell. So says the C’t.

The code management system I wrote for INTERDUBS happens to also count the number of updates that I publish to my clients. It just hit 1,000. Of those about 10-20% were cosmetic updates. Like typos or smaller changes in the html to make things more readable etc. Luckily less than 5% were bug fixes. I code in small chunks and those extensively. And maybe it is also a matter of routine. I hope I know what I am doing, and where changes would jeopardize the system. Of course stating this is inviting trouble. A thousand times I changed the running INTERDUBS. While it was in use by clients and admins. And: nobody ever noticed. Flying the airplane and fixing it. I really love this part of the project: Somebody has an idea. I look at it, and can tell them right away how doable it is, or in the best cases the reply email is as terse as “good idea! done”.

The fast majority of all the good things that came in those 1,000 updates were actually customer ideas. The people using the system know best what they need. It is really great being able to listen to them and to implement what they want.

Syntax coloring in vim is pretty awesome. Comments however are by default blue. A color that is hard to read if you have a black background on a LCD screen.

It turns out that this pretty easy to change. For perl you would simply do:


mkdir -p ~/.vim/after/syntax/
echo highlight perlComment ctermfg=DarkGreen guifg=DarkGreen >> ~/.vim/after/syntax/perl.vim


This worked right away after adopting the C example of the documentation. I am sure that php etc will work similar.

I am an casual office software user. I write things in vi or text edit. And yes, that’s how they sound. I never was that big in to spread sheets. But graphing solutions I need. I had written my own things for SGI, but even though OS X is OpenGL as well, it is just too much work to maintain.

Since my kids now start using office software I thought I’d get them iWork. Big mistake. Pages is ok (compared to vi and text edit). Numbers however is just outright lame. I hate the fact that Apple is able to pretend that this pile of junk is software that you can make an attempt to sell. Trying to graph anything in this turd of a bloatware reveals how 0.5 ass this thing is. The problem is that crappy software is worth negative money: It took me hours to figure out that it was actual this ’spreadsheet application’ that was just unable to do even simple tasks.
“Numbers” has no understanding of time. I will download now Mac Office 2008. Which is even reasonably priced these days. Looking forward to use Microsoft software. How weird is that!