Category: Technology

What Google App Engine Needs is Version Control…

I’m very impressed by what the guys at Google have released so far. They’ve already addressed several obvious issues that made it an intriguing development platform in development, if you’ll pardon the expression, but useless for me. The biggest one is image resizing and manipulation.

Hearing this, I revisited it and am quite impressed. For ajax-based work (like custom coding an editor) it’s more complicated than straightforward PHP/Javascript development for small sites. This is mostly because of the need to tell at least two sets of files what’s handling a request for a web page before you even get to wiring up the python code to the template. What it gives you in return though is an absolutely stunning level of scalability, as well as a very rapid method for prototyping all of your changes.

The remaining headache is the need for some form of version control. You can have different “versions” of an app posted, and roll back to a prior version, but there’s no integrated access to a common file repository where people can independently work on different files and see the combined changes before deploying them to the server. Guess I’ll have to figure out how to set up my own repository and how to make it so my fellow developers and I can work on it, along with a workflow that won’t cause headaches in deploying to the Google apps site.

Yup. People Really Love Vista. Really.

I’ve seen this several places now but the best summary is at Ars Technica. I’ve heard plenty of people say the naysaying was just as bad when XP was introduced. Well, it was pretty bad, but not this bad. Not “We’re trying to figure out ways to sell Windows 2000 with new computers because people just want to avoid Vista and many of the businesses with custom-built apps won’t certify them on Vista without a lot more time stomping bugs” bad.

Modern Home Theaters Need Work…

I’ll admit. Some of my home stereo gear is old. As in better than fifteen years old. So?

It works.

It also makes no difference to what I’m about to discuss, which is: It is wayyyy too complicated for normal people (non-technical adults who are not gadget-geeks of some sort) to work their TV / home theater setup.

Case in point: Our widescreen gets cable piped directly in. It also gets the DVD player and VCR piped directly in, and echoes the sound out to the surround sound receiver.

So far so good. Unless I really want to listen to my iTunes library I never, ever change my stereo inputs. Turn on the TV and select the right input and *bam* there ya are. TV goodness.

But, we stumble into the first conceptual obstacle. You see, the TV remote, like many remotes supplied these days, is a universal remote. This means it’s universally useless for anything except perhaps the TV because the one critical feature you need for any other device (separate play-pause buttons, forex), are just not included on the remote surface, and the TV is complicated enough that little widdy biddy buttons require you to squint through bleary eyes.

The conceptual problem comes when Unsuspecting Normal Average Person with a Life picks up the remote, and, following your instructions turns on the TV and the stereo and cannot get it to change from the TV tuner.

Someone, recently handling the remote, must have hit the “dvd” button, and so neither the remote nor the TV care that you are mashing down the “source” button to change the input. The geeks response, knowing that the remote has multiple modes, will be to switch the remote back to TV mode.

This is NOT intuitively obvious to the normal average person. I’ll have to look at getting one of the programmable Logitech remotes because I’ve been told they actually really work – and divide up the settings by what you’re doing rather than by what device you need to control at the moment. The upshot is if you’re “watching a DVD” it controls the stereo volume via the volume buttons, sets the TV to the input designated as “DVD”, and the play controls manage the DVD player – all without you constantly switching modes.

The next common bugaboo, and one I’ll fix at my house with a little piece of RCA patch cable, is the famous “why is there no sound?” Receivers and pre-amps have many input selections. When my Onkyo was made, equalizers were common, and commonly hooked up at the in and out ports for “tape 2” (in case you actually bought two separate tape decks). For the EQ to do it’s job the receiver had to route sound back out from its selected input via the tape 2 “record/out” jacks, and listen to the tape 2 input no matter what the original source was.

Needless to say, if you don’t have an EQ or a second tape deck there are probably no cables there. The secondary consequence is that accidentally turning on “Tape 2” effectively mutes your stereo, with very little indication that it’s even in Tape 2 mode as you’ll still see the input for “Tape 1” or “Video 1”, etc.

More Signs of a Trend

For a while now it’s been obvious that the Mac and Apple have been picking up more and more mindshare and steam. Yet another example comes to light today in this article at Ars Technica, a site that was formerly very MS-centric, and has gradually shifted to a more platform agnostic atmosphere.

One quote on the second page is one that’s interesting to hear from a self-professed die-hard Windows user. It’s something I’ve long felt, and a point that many mac users had made even in less popular years about quantity vs. quality when it came to available software:

…and there’s a real sense that their developers care that they don’t suck.

Windows software has never struck me as being like that. The third-party software ecosystem for Windows is big, no doubt about that. But it’s also incredibly shoddy. Most Windows applications from both major software companies and minor ones alike are ugly, poorly-thought-out, clunky pieces of crap. While there are a few artisan developers for Windows, most Windows devs just don’t care.

If you have time, there are a lot of in-depth articles and reviews of the various OSX releases that are perhaps the most comprehensive and best-written reviews you will find anywhere in one place.

Basic Filtering for Normal People…

Earlier I posted about my “tanstaafl” related issues in getting filtering and proxy services set up.

Good news: I finally got it all to start reliably. It’s still a bit quirky about restarts for log turnovers though.

Nevertheless, I stumbled into something else incredibly useful, and after a few weeks of trying it out I will be shutting down my own filtering.

The service is called openDNS. Their purpose is to replace the sometimes flaky DNS service that comes with your ISP (Hi, Comcast!) and provide an alternate means to look up addresses on the internet. This means that every time you try to look up www.apple.com, their computer takes the web address and sends back the numerical address, much like looking up phone numbers in a phonebook by name.

The side benefit of this is that you can also specify corrections of typos, define what kind of websites you don’t want visited from your household or office, and specify what exceptions you want to allow, because they control what computer you connect to when you ask for a website.

Specifying what you want to block follows the same categories used in DansGuardian, and the logs give you a nice list of sites that have been denied. What it doesn’t do is let you know who in your network made the request, give you a weight for how strict to be within a category, or let you see what sites have been visited that were not blocked.

I can deal with those weaknesses, as it simplifies my computer setup and makes it a little more difficult for the kids to work around the restraints (I still make sure I eyeball their activity and computers on a regular basis). It has one other “plus” – the instructions. They have excellent documentation that should go a long way in helping you set up your router or computer to use their DNS servers as well as tracking changes in the IP address your ISP hands you.

Best of all, it’s “free.”

Well, not completely. They make money by sending mistyped or flat-out wrong domain names to their own search and ad results. 

TANSTAAFL

One of the best known SF acronyms outside of Science Fiction is TANSTAAFL, from Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It means “There aint no such thing as a free lunch.” more to the point, it means that there is a price for everything in time, money, sweat, or effort.

This to me holds true in the Linux world, and with many of the often brilliant “free” programs that are available.

You can probably see where this is going.

I’ve been trying to set up proxy services on my G5 running Leopard, so I can get rid of the Suse box that currently has no purpose in life outside of acting as a network proxy server for controlling web access. Running one less computer is good, even if the toaster-box doesn’t add much to my electric bill, and the G5 is becoming less and less my primary workstation anyway – my MacBook Pro is.

Getting squid installed – the proxy software – was pretty simple. The problem? I wanted to run it in conjunction with some filtering software called Dansguardian. This is the part where you shake your head, tsk, and say “ahh… foolish mortal.”

OSX launches background programs in a whole new way from traditional Unix/linux methods. The package I installed was fairly up to date and had a proper startup entry in it. or so it seemed.

The long and the short of it is I have the proxy working, but not the filter, and I’m spending much time on this simply because I want to figure the puzzle out, not because it’s cost-effective.

It’s fun, in a way, but usually I spend too much time fixing other people’s computers to want to have “fun” tinkering.

Virus Scams

 

A client of mine recently received an email purporting to be from the Department of Justice (and another one from “the IRS” ) relating to claims made against their business. It had some official-looking language about case numbers and claims filed by so-and-so, and noted that a copy of the complaint was included “in the pdf below.” They were suspicious for several reasons, and asked me to check it out.

Even if you expect the IRS or DOJ to email you out of the blue with this kind of thing, addressing the recipient by the wrong gender is a big red flag. The other thing that made me immediately suspicious was the “pdf” file was zipped.

The ZIP format is an incredibly useful compression and archiving standard that was even more important back when internet access was typically via modem. The downside is that if the package is really a virus installer it will not only unpack the virus files but execute them, infecting your system. For this reason any decent virus scanner will search through .zip files as they come in, but some viruses still slip through, especially in email. Also, PDF files are already compressed so there is little benefit from further compressing them (technically speaking – the graphics are already compressed. You may save some space by compressing the text more). Someone legitimately sending a PDF – or any document small enough to reasonably email (a word DOC file, etc.) – will almost never go out of their way to zip it up. Laziness, if nothing else, practically guarantees this.

As a matter of nettiquette, never email someone a .zip file without warning them ahead of time, and if you receive one without a prior heads up from a known, trusted source, be very suspicious. One of the nastiest infections I cleaned out looked like it came from a trusted source so the client opened it up without checking with the sender.

To wrap the story up, I took a snapshot of my virtual Vista installation under VMWare Fusion so I could restore to that earlier point, and looked at the zip file.  As expected, the antivirus software immediately caught it and archived it.

Minor Recovery Issues.

I’ve been more a fan of the VMWare Fusion virtual windows solution than Parallels, usually because Fusion has had less stability issues (especially relating to one client’s Quickbooks needs) and was just a little more polished. Well, sometimes you find rough spots.

Apparently Fusion assumes the hard drive size never changes. After installing the new HD in my MacBook pro and recovering from backups, everything else worked great, but Fusion couldn’t run the Boot Camp parition. While the error told me it realized the partition map had changed, Fusion would not give me the option of pointing to the new drive.

It was not a difficult fix – I found where Fusion stored the virtual machine file that pointed to the Boot Camp partition and deleted it, allowing Fusion to create a new one.  Nevertheless, VMWare should not assume that people will never change disks or partition maps, and should have provided an option to reset where it should find the Boot Camp partition.