What's it all about, Alfie?

Touchscreen iPod sourced, dated for August?: "Apple has chosen Wintek to supply touchscreen panels for an upcoming video-capable iPod, say sources in the Taiwan supply chain. The local electronics maker, which produces small LCDs for cameras and other handhelds, is reportedly set to ship capacitive touchscreens without specific software controls or integrated circuits to accompany them, allow..."

(Via MacNN.)

All I can say is Wow! This is the iPod I've waited for. If they let loose on this one, and it's got at least the storage of the current models, then I'm going to be getting one the first weekend they come out. Far, far, too cool to pass up.

Well... it had to happen, but I have to say that I'm more than a little surprised at the problem. This morning I had my first HostMonster problem - I could not upload an 81kb JPG image. It was a simple Google Maps image of the house, and I was just updating the web site with a more recent satellite picture of the place, when this hit. The changed HTML file uploaded just fine... there was plenty of disk space... the scp command appeared to work, but just never returned control to the shell. I was able to transfer the same file to my iMac G5 at home, so it's not the networks here, or the box. So it's got to be something with HostMonster.

I sent in a trouble tick to them and we'll see how quickly they get around to answering my ticket email. I'm hoping it's nothing serious. I know the SSH is working because I can get an ssh shell on the box, so that's not it. And part of the file transfers fine. But just not all of it.

I hope they figure out the issue soon.

UPDATE [10:00am]: I don't know if this matters, but I put in a ticket with HostMonster under my email address, but I think I needed to make an email/support account with them. So I did that, added in the ticket again, and now it shows up as a valid, open, ticket with them. I would have sworn that I'd have done this already for getting the SSH access, but maybe not. Anyway, it's set up now and the ticket should not have any reason not to be processed now.

UPDATE [12:30pm]: I have tried using straight ftp, CyberDuck(sftp), straight scp, and scp from within Coda, which is basically Transmit. They all do the exact same thing - the transfer appears to work because the sending client says it's done, but then it hangs there and the connection times out. There's been no action on the ticket yet, so I'm going to give them a little more time and then I'm going to call and ask that they look into it.

UPDATE [3:15pm]: I have tried different combinations and settings based on the Googling I did with this problem. I can send it with scp from my iMac G5 at home, and that's what I did in a pinch to get the file up to the site. However, sending it home to send it up to HostMonster is not the real solution. I have asked about the port filtering here at work, and there is none, so that's not an issue. I've tried the WiFi versus wired ethernet and that didn't make a difference. I've tried large text files versus smaller JPG files, and that doesn't matter - nor does the size. It's as if most of the file gets transferred, but the last chunk of it doesn't because of what seems to be a failing handshake at the end of the transfer. So I can transfer 80kb - as long as it's a 180kb text file, but a 30kb image will not get sent completely because of the failing handshake. Very odd. Still no word from HostMonster on the ticket. I'm going to call them.

UPDATE [4:00pm]: I called HostMonster and talked to a Tech Support guy there. He tried using FileZilla to upload a file and it worked just fine. Not surprising. I got FileZilla for Mac OS X, tried it and found that it accurately reported the transferred byte count, but it timed out at 12288 bytes of a 71kb file. Then it tried again, timed out again, and repeated. I cancelled it after three tries. I added this to the ticket at HostMonster, so they'd know what I tried, and that not all the data was getting up there in this particular instance. The Tech Support guy said that they try to get to all tickets within 24 hrs., so I'll give them a day. Who knows, I'm guessing it's going to work from home, and it may work from here tomorrow. I'll have to check.

UPDATE [7:00pm]: I checked when I got home to see if I could scp the file from home on my laptop. I know it worked for my iMac G5, but I wanted to make sure it was going to work for my MacBook Pro. It did. There's got to be something about the link at work and HostMonster. Very very odd that this is the problem, but I can send from home to HostMonster, I can send from work to home, but I can't send from work to HostMonster. Very odd.

It's been a quiet day - got word on a bug fix I'll incorporate tomorrow, fixed a few issues with some data, but it's been a nice and quiet day. So I spent a little time trying to see if I could get iChat to work from my MacBook Pro to my kids' MacBooks. I know that they can video chat to one another, but when I tried to chat with each one I got the 'Error -8' problem that seems to be pretty common to a lot of folks.

If I had to guess it's in the ports, but it's possible that it's the NAT on the Netgear wireless router. I'm going to have to do some tests when I'm at home to see if I can chat them when I'm on the same network, and if that works, can I chat them when I'm on the primary network in the house. This will test the Netgear router as the kids' machines are on the 'downlink' side of the router, and the internal network is on the 'uplink' side. If that fails, then I know it's in the Netgear router and I need to deal with that. If not, then it could be the router at work, or blocked ports.

What's really amazing to me is that Apple hasn't put this out in a FAQ or something to address this directly. It's almost like a simple software update would say "Hey, I can't Video chat because I can't connect to port x on the other machine." Then you'd have some URL to go to and see what the problem was. This would be incredibly simple, but they haven't done it. I suppose it's not a high priority as for most people is just works, but when there's a problem, it's always better to give an error message with as much information as possible.

So I'm hoping it's something with the Netgear setup. The Apple web site mentioned turning off UPnP on some routers, but there wasn't a lot of real detailed information other than the port numbers that needed to be open. Since none of the machines has the firewall turned on, I think it's got to be in the router at home - or here at work. If it's here at work there might be a chance I can get the ports opened, but we'll have to see. I might not be able to. In any case, this is a puzzler that didn't need to be as puzzling. Apple just needs to have better error messages.

UPDATE: turns out it was the available bandwidth at work. There are 200 users on the one 1.5Mbps DSL line and that's not leaving any real bandwidth for the iChat AV connection. Problem solved, but oh how I wish they'd have real bandwidth for these lines - that, or a really fast WiFi in the Chicago area so that I could use that and not have to hassle with this either.

Today was my first day back from the long Macalicious weekend where I got the two MacBooks for my oldest kids. My son (13) loves the games and is saving up for some game he saw in the Apple store. He's playing DVDs and surfing and loving it. My daughter (11) is having a blast with iLife (iWeb, iMovie, iTunes, and iDVD) and ready to publish a new web site with movies and pictures any day now.

Work is a little tough getting back into it. Lots of emails to catch up on... needed to spend an hour or so with a new guy to bring him up to speed on the components of the system I've been working on for the last 6 years - he's a new second-shift Ops, and will be needing this information as soon as he can get it. Then there was a bug to file with the vendor of our reporting framework, and a few other things to play catch-up on.

But probably the most interesting thing that happened today was the Slashdot article about the Google Maps image of the prototype Chinese nuclear sub. This is incredible, and at the same time shows once again that the cost of destruction of weapon is far far less than the cost of it's construction.

I think the first real point of this was the Falklands Islands War where a missile took out a large British warship. The British won, but the cost of the loss of the warship far outstripped the cost of the missile it took to take it out. This lopsided equation is now even more clear with the Google Maps realization. There have always been spy satellites, and yet the problem with having them is that you can't really tell people what you see as then they know the capabilities you have. But with this, Google plays a somewhat disinterested third-party and "outs" the Chinese sub without the western powers having to leak that the sub exists. Amazing. Just like that, the western governments can bring up the boat as a "problem" without having to expend any of their intelligence in the bargain.

The web and companies like Google are going to change the way people look, act, respond, and are governed. Wild.

Well, it's going to be a big Mac weekend this weekend. First, I'm going to enjoy the rest of the week at home as July 4^th falls on a Wednesday and so I'm going to make a nice 5-day weekend out of it. Ahhh... But that's not all. Oh no.

Yesterday my daughter accidentally dropped her Gateway laptop and really fractured the display - it's kind of neat, in an artistic way. It's an accident, and it gives me the opportunity to move her off Windows onto a MacBook. This is great as I had more than a few problems with the WiFi card in her laptop. The drivers were more than 3 years old and no newer drivers existed and the ones that were on the box weren't very good. If she shut the lid it would not reconnect to the access point when she opened it again. She got good at manually reconnecting it, but there's a better way, I know.

Also, my wife is using a little nicer Gateway laptop that she's comfortable with but it's still more maintenance than I would like - face it, I have to do this all day long, I shouldn't have to deal with it when I go home. That's no reason to replace it, but my son really deserves a laptop for all his hard work on grades this year, so we're going to hand down this guy to him and get my wife a new MacBook.

Then there's the Mac Mini that's going to be fixed in a few days that we'll be picking up from the Apple Store. Add to that a big external drive and a couple of cron jobs to the laptops and we have a reasonable back-up plan that means that we're not going to loose anything. Whew! What a massive Mac weekend!

I've got to get all my daughter's stuff of her Windows laptop and converted to the Mac, but then she can use iMovie/iDVD to put her movies together which she now has to do on the Mac Mini. Also, the web building software on her Windows box is OK, but iWeb is as good or better and that will publish to a web server in my office and so she can convert her stuff as she has time and energy and get moved to iWeb. Other than that, it's Firefox and Gimp - which I'll move her to Photoshop Elements. In the end, she'll be much happier and I'll be free from the support that I've had to do up until now.

My wife's machine will be the most difficult because she gets things like Word and Excel docs, and there's no viewers for the Mac, so it'll probably have to mean that we get Office. Could be worse. But she's got years of email in Outlook Express and I need to convert every single email for her - plus contacts. It's got to be done right or she's going to be very upset. After that, I think it'll be easy because other than web, email, and Office, she's pretty easy to keep going.

My son will want to get some PC games, and that's OK as he wasn't as keen on the Mac as a PC simply because of the games. Now that he knows about Boot Camp he wants a MacBook, but he's going to have to wait a bit. This windows laptop will be fine for him for a while.

So, between all the machines that need to be set-up, accounts moved, data shifted around, backup scripts written and scheduled, connectivity checked... it's going to be a Big Mac Weekend. I can't wait.

UPDATE: turns out, my wife wanted to get a 15-inch Black MacBook, but since those aren't made, she decided that the 13-inch screen on the MacBooks was just too small for her. So she decided to keep her Gateway laptop - for now. But we got two white MacBooks for the older kids and I spent the time getting them set up and going with their iTunes files and accounts on the new machines. They love them, and the only thing I really need to do is to get some backup solution written. Nothing fancy - maybe rdist from the laptops to the Mini and then a complete nightly backup of the Mini to the external HD. Don't know, but I'll work it out.

There are days when things work out nicely. You're able to clean up a lot of little things that have been sitting around waiting patiently for you to have to the time to get around to them. You hope you do, but many times it'll be weeks if not months before you can really get the kind of time you need to finish off these things.

And then you have a day like today.

Calm... no production problems... plenty of time to go through all those little Post-It notes and put the documentation about building or setting up this app... clear up the comments on this class... make sure the latest versions are available for the docs. It's nothing that's going to make or break a deal, but by taking the time to do it, it's going to make it easier for someone coming in later to pick things up.

Not quite sure if there's another day or two of this, but it's nice to have a little break from the action to get caught up on these things so that I can point people to them and not have to answer their questions in person all the time. Plus, it's there now, and it's not on my To Do list.

Last week my son told me that the Mac Mini's keyboard wasn't working. It's the kid's computer, and it's used a lot by everyone in the house. It probably should be upgraded to a nice iMac, but that's a different story. I went to look at the machine and it was in major trouble. Light, Fan, but no start-up chime. Yikes. So today we took it to the Genius Bar at the Schaumburg Apple Store.

I knew the warranty was close - it'd been a year, give or take a bit, and just needed to get everything off the computer hoping it was not the hard drive. So I expected to pay - I just really needed it to be fixed. Knowing that this weekend was the launch of the iPhone, I decided to wait for Sunday and let all that excitement die down.

We made the Genius Bar appointment Saturday afternoon for 1:30 pm the next day. Good enough - we're in line.

We show up at 1:25 pm and we're #2 in line for the Mac services. Not bad. We have to wait a little while to have someone get around to us. I explain the problem, he checks it out with a monitor, keyboard, and power supply. The first test is that it's still not working, and it's not the power supply. That's some relief, anyway. Next, so takes it in the back to reseat the RAM. I've already done this and it didn't help, but I'm not going to get in his face about this, so I let him take his own path in the debugging cycle.

He comes back and that's not it. He looks at his laptop - which I'm guessing has the decision tree for debugging Mini problems, and then comes to the decision that it's the main logic board. This was one of the two things I had found would be the problem from my Googling - the other was the power supply, and we'd already ruled that out. So it's the logic board. Now what?

"Yeah, it's the logic board, and it's about a month out of warranty - but we're going to cover it for you. We have to order the replacement, it'll be here on Wednesday and it'll be a very fast replacement. We'll call you."

Simple as that, it's going to get fixed. I am completely overjoyed. I can't believe my luck. I'd heard that the guys working at the Genius Bar had a lot of leeway with the warranty work, and they didn't like people getting in their faces, so I had played it very cool for this reason. Now that it was looking like it was going to get fixed, it was dancing in the streets time. I could not believe it.

This experience, in addition to all the others I've had with Macs and Apple, in general, makes me a customer for life. I know there are some that have bad experiences... bad products... but I'm not one of them. I feel good every time I'm in that store. I know that just about anything I get will be top quality and will work wonderfully, and if it doesn't, the guys at the Genius Bar are going to give me a fair shake. You can't beat that.

So... all we have to do is wait for a couple of days for the call and then go pick it up. I'll make sure to pick up a big drive as well to make automated backups with. I'll put the same crontab I have on frosty on the Mini, squirt, so that the kids won't need to worry about losing anything should this happen again.

Certainly one of the nicer graphing packages I've used is the VantagePoint graphing library from Visualize Inc. It's 100% Java, it's fast, well designed, and very feature-complete. Sure, there are a few things I'd like to see them put into the product, but it's very few, and that's impressive. What I've been looking for is an Objective-C/Cocoa version of the same kind of thing so that the code that I'm working on in OS X can have stellar graphing as well. Specifically, right now, I'm looking at the heat/contour graphs in VantagePoint and wishing I had something like that in Obj-C for my Poission's Equation solver code - Potentials.

Potentials is meant to be a very simple solver of Poission's equation in 2D - and as such - be very fast. Once we have the solution in 2D, there's always the time factor which could yield interesting capacitance calculations if that was where we wanted to go, or maybe put in a little fluid and see charge distributed over time. It's something that might be very interesting to play with, but the first step is to be able to see the results in the code without having to run a stand-alone plotting package.

I came across Visual Data Tools, Inc. and their two products DataTank and DataGraph. While DataTank looks to be certainly more than I need, it's also much more expensive, and at $1195 for a license, that's a for a hobby project. And DataGraph looks pretty nice, but is lacking a few of the graph types that VantagePoint has - specifically, the 3D and 3D-mapped-to-2D like the heat and contour graphs. These are the ones that I wanted to use in Potentials, so it's bit of a bind. I wrote the developers to ask if there were these plot types in DataGraph and they mentioned that they were thinking of putting out a new version, targeted somewhere between DataGraph and DataTank, and that the new Bar graph would be in DataGraph soon. While this is good news, I had to write back and ask what the new product would have - I really need the different graph types.

I hope there's something coming that's reasonably priced and has the features I need and integrates well with Xcode. It'd be great to get this code to the next level and have the plotting contained within it. We'll just have to hope that they come back with good news.

UPDATE: it looks like the DataGraph developer is going to keep the low-end product without the two plot types I need for Potentials. I can respect that, but there's no way I can see dropping $1195 for this code... not without some proof that it'll make money, and I don't expect to sell it, so that's especially hard. So I sent an email to the Red Rock Software guys - they make DeltaGraph which has all kinds of nice graphs in it, asking if they had anything that would allow me to incorporate their graphs into my code. I didn't see anything on their site, but it's possible they are thinking about it - or have it. Who knows. It's priced as a nice, graphing package - $300+, but it's not the $1000+ of DataTank. We'll see what they come back with, but I'm not holding out a great deal of hope. I also looked at the VVI Vvidgets and while they seem to have the bases covered, it's more low level, and not nearly as clear-cut as the DataGraph or DeltaGraph tools.

Today has been an interesting day. Things have been rough at times in the past few weeks, certainly seem to be going through a slump. And like any slump you have to try to keep an eye on the horizon for you know that someday soon your luck is going to change and things will turn around and once again life will be good. But making it through a tough slump is no fun, and one lasting a few weeks to a few months is certainly something you look to get out of as soon as possible.

On the downside, last night my son told me the keyboard on the kid's computer (a Mac mini) was messed up, so I went to look at it and see what the problem was. Well... it wasn't the keyboard - it was the mini! It would start to power up, I could hear the DVD engage, and the light on the front came on, but no chime, and that means bad news. I took it apart to see if it was a simple RAM seating problem - nope. Maybe the drive connector - nope. I was thinking that it was a bad drive and that would be horrible as all the kid's stuff is on the box. I have some backups, but nothing recent, and there's stuff there that is really nice.

So this morning, I did some googling and found out that it might be the power supply, or the system board, or maybe the battery, but it's something along those lines. Most likely not the hard drive. That was definitely on the upside. Tonight I have to go home and try out a few things, and if nothing works, it's time to go to the Apple store and see what they can do for me. Not ideal, but saving the data is now priority 1. As soon as it's set up, we're getting a nightly backup in place. Not going to let this happen again. Ever.

On the downside, I had another run in with the Rock Star and his own unique way of suggesting an idea. This time, he was saying that one of the methods on an object was not very strong. I looked at it, and it looked acceptable to me - certainly within the guidelines in the comments on the method. But he said how I should look at the code for a Java class and how it does the same thing the safe way. Well, I looked, and it did virtually the exact same thing. Nearly identical. When I pointed this out to him, he agreed, and then apologized - he'd not read the comments and formed a bad opinion. On top of that, the code he referenced was not what he thought - and it only bolstered my code. This is what's aggravating me about this guy - why not ask? Why accuse? Why not discuss the possibility? Why point out what's wrong and how to make it right - when in fact, all he did was show himself to be a lazy reader and have a poor memory.

So while that appears to be an upside, I talked to him and he doesn't see it as something to avoid. He didn't think there was anything wrong with his approach. This means that he's going to be doing it again, and again, and again... and after a while this is going to be really annoying. Maybe I'll just assume he doesn't know what he's talking about and force him to re-read the code, but my guess is he's going to be a pain in the neck for as long as he's here. That's too bad. Maybe when he learns enough of the systems he'll stop asking the questions. Hopefully.

Work is stressful even under the best of circumstances. The demands are high, the responsibilities for someone willing to accept them are high, and thankfully the rewards are high (otherwise it'd be a losing proposition). But there's got to be a way to get out of this slump and get back on top of the game. I know it's as much attitude as anything else, and getting that positive mental attitude is hard when you're in the slump. I just have to keep looking at the horizon. It'll come, I know it will.

I've spent a bunch of the day messing around with Java applets and jars and Firefox trying to get a page to work. Needless to say, I'm less than thrilled with Sun's Applet support in Firefox... or maybe it's Firefox's support of the Java Applet VM. Either way, it's a load of crud and needs to be worked on pretty seriously.

First, why on earth has Sun not yet made a 64-bit applet plugin for Firefox and other 64-bit operating systems. Even their own 64-bit Solaris doesn't have one. I've looked at the bug tracking for Sun's Java and there are requests as far back as 1.3.x-days for a 64-bit applet plugin. But nothing yet in 1.6 - you've got to wonder what their own developers are using - 32-bit Windows is the answer. Amazingly short-sighted. Thankfully, Leopard will be 64-bit and have a 64-bit Java applet plug-in for Safari, and I'm assuming Firefox. I am amazed to think it's going to be a Mac to bring this to a usable platform. Certainly puts Windows and Sun to shame.

Next, there is a limitation on the linux Java plug-in with regards to the line length of an applet PARAM tag. Don't know what the actual length is, but when I sent in the bug (with an example) to the Firefox bugzilla site, the guy that picked it up said that the problem was in the Java plug-in and that's all the further it got. On windows there's no such limitation, but I do a lot of my developing on linux (64-bit at that) and it'd be nice to be able to have the same page render on linux and windows the same.

So I'm trying to figure out why this page is bringing Firefox to a crawl and not IE. I'm now convinced that the interface to the Java plug-in in IE is significantly different than the one in Firefox, and the IE one is doing something to compensate for any limitations in the plugin. One such difference is that in IE there appears to be a static picture taken of the applet and then it's stopped. This makes for applets that simply display information (like graphs) quicker to load and less of a CPU hog. Since I can't get the Firefox team to look into it, I'll have to simply hope that the next release will implement the plugin interface better and some of these things will just work themselves out. I sure hope so.