Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

Just checked out the Eclipse SVN site and apparently the issue with dashes in new PHP filenames has been resolved. I upgraded my work copy to the latest nightly build and things seem to be going well. (The October 1st integration build might be better stability-wise, but I’ve had good luck with the nightly builds.)

For the record, after the upgrade, loading my workspace took about five minutes (Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz, 1GB RAM) with no discernable progress bar or CPU activity. Eclipse effectively looks like it’s frozen. Be patient; it’ll load eventually.

PDT, though, is about the single most useful tool I find for PHP development at work. The next front-runner is WinSCP, which has a really neat feature, Keep remote directory up to date:

This feature lets you have complete synchronization between a remote SFTP server and your local Eclipse workspace. It also supports private key encryption.

As a pair to WinSCP, I also use PuTTY, with anywhere from one to five sessions open at a time. PuTTY offers a neat tunnelling option, which I’ve mentioned before.

You can also access internal servers using one of these tunnels; for example, if I want to connect to a remote desktop session on host 192.168.1.101:3389 on my internal network, I’d use the following syntax:

Source port: 127.0.0.2:3389
Destination: 192.168.1.101:3389

Then, after establishing the SSH connection, using the 127.0.0.2 alias in Remote Desktop lets me connect to the machine behind the NAT traversal firewall.

Notepad++ is another program I highly recommend as a replacement for Notepad. If you can’t use TextMate because you’re not on a Mac, Notepad++ is an acceptable substitute. It offers some neat syntax highlighting features, and saves session history even when you exit.

Paint.NET is also a decent image editor, allowing you to verify hex values for colours and perform some minor tweaks to images without incurring the load time and aggravations in Photoshop.

My music selection lately has turned around from illScarlett’s latest album to the Warped Tour 2007 compilation. Usually there’s a few choice artists on the list, and this year there are a few decent tracks if you can get into the whole emo/punk genre. Here’s the ones I’ve found to jump out at me immediately. Admittedly, I can’t say a whole lot of them have insightful or inspiring lyrics.

• Killswitch Engage - The Arms of Sorrow. Very listenable with a decent chorus. I’m not a huge Killswitch fan, and the punk/screamo verses aren’t entirely my thing, but it’s a very anthemic in the chorus and bridge sections.
• Amber Pacific - Summer (In B). Punk-ish, almost power pop. Could go very well as a “surfer dude”, high energy summer movie track.
• Escape the Fate - Reverse This Curse. Escape the Fate has a style that I’d consider screamo. The vocals have a very distinct, recognizable sound, but the lyrics sound like typical RIAA-produced teenage rebellion material. Nothing’s really outstanding about this song - I’d personally recommend listening to “Ransom”, which isn’t on this album, for a better idea of the band’s sound.
• My American Heart - The Shake (Awful Feeling). I actually heard about this band in the UW Imprint a few years ago, and had no idea they had a new album out. This song in particular has radio single material and is much less whiny than their previous work. Another track with this style is “Hiding Inside the Horrible Weather”, which happens to also be the name of their 2007 album. The album itself has been on my playlist for a few days in the illustrious “crap emo that I can’t stop listening to” position.
  

  Don’t you get it?
  I made an attempt / to piece it all together
  And I’ve found your love lost in the sky
  Hiding inside / the horrible weather
  We’ll watch it all come down

  Hiding Inside The Horrible Weather - My American Heart (lyrics)

• Mayday Parade - Black Cat. I only mention this one because the intro sounds incredibly similar to some Panic! at the Disco tracks, and I couldn’t place it at first. I might still have some musical taste remaining.
• The Used - The Ripper. If you’ve heard The Used, this won’t really be anything new. They have several better (and several much, much worse) tracks on Lies for the Liars.
• Aiden - We Sleep Forever. A significant departure from what other work I’ve heard, and again, it’s a pop-style anthem executed fairly well. Listening to the lyrics, though, it’s really just another emo kid song, although the instrumental arrangement wouldn’t suggest it. Similar to the Gin Blossoms’ “Follow You Down”, which fancies up the act of stalking, Aiden puts a bright spin on wrist-slitting:
  

  She cuts a vein although it’s much too dull
  I say she’s all alone
  Fighting for redemption
  I know little pain, a little lust
  I lose myself at night to feel the rush
  Of tearing my skin apart
  Now take this sadness and close your eyes love

  Hey, call the angels. This razor blade was meant for me
  Hey, call the angels. We’ll mutilate insanity

  Go deeper, I feel it
  I see your ghost appear
  Go deeper, I see it
  I feel your ghost appear
  I will say goodbye tonight (We’ll sleep forever)
  Hold on, hold on tonight love
  We’ll sleep forever
  Hold on, hold on tonight love
  We’ll sleep forever
  Hold on, hold on tonight love
  Close your eyes

  (lyrics)

There are still a few other reasonably interesting tracks on the album that I didn’t mention, so I’d suggest checking it out if you’re not totally offput by the occasional power pop song.

I picked up my copy of BioShock at EBGames in Conestoga Mall this evening, and even after having played the demo, the experience was no less dulled. I’m taking my time through the first round of the game, because the artwork and plotline is really something to be appreciated.

And the sound. What an experience. The creepy, ambient noise is fully enjoyed with the volume maxed out.

Definite recommendation for an Xbox 360 purchase, right here. I’ve heard the PC version’s good… but the 360 version, on a widescreen HDTV with a 5.1 system, is absolutely incredible.

It’s Monday, and I’m back from a weekend excursion to the States. While some of my esteemed associates were doing pub crawls and partaking in other local festivities, my entire family opted to head down to an outlet mall in Grove City, PA to acquire some inexpensive American merchandise. As Dave’s Canadian retailers post mentions, there is really no excuse for some of the pricing disparities between Ontario and a comparable state.

And yes, the title of this post is accurate: On most clothing, there is no state sales tax, which is otherwise 6%. When you buy a ridiculously overpriced (yet trendy) sweater from, say, Hollister - the exorbitant price on the tag is the exorbitant price on the receipt, and nothing else goes to the government.

I speak specifically about a retailer like Hollister as I had the opportunity to go into one of these stores (this is in a different mall, not the Grove City outlets) while in the States. For those unfamiliar with them, the store is constructed like a beachfront cabin:

The entire store’s construction is an overabundant exercise in target marketing to the 12-25 year old demographic. As soon as you walk on to the “deck”, there are two sides to the store - one for guys, one for girls. There’s also an immediate assault of their in-house scents, as well as overly obnoxious “surfer dude”-style music. If you’ve heard any pop/rock from Warped Tour - basically any new music produced by RIAA labels that isn’t screamo - that’s about what you’d hear. From memory - I heard songs from Halifax, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and some group with a surfer-style remix of “Message in a Bottle”.

From a technical perspective, the music is customer-controllable by a touchscreen beside the cash register area, which would make an interesting programming project (think managed queues, plus audio output.) They also have the relevant CD’s for sale at the register, which is a good way to push merchandise from other categories. Hey, if you’ve heard the song in the store, why not pick up the entire album?

After nearly dropping my jaw at the prices of some of the shorts and jeans available there, I went to the clearance section (at the back of the store, obviously) and managed to pick up some decently priced items. I now own a new bathing suit, plus a few shirts that I haven’t gotten for free from software companies!

Next on the list of stores in the mall was a place called Steve & Barry’s, who specialize in incredibly inexpensive clothing, as well as hilariously inappropriate shirts. I purchased several of these items, which you will see in person over the next few weeks. Unfortunately one of the best shirts in the store wasn’t in stock at all: it was a map of the state, overlaid with an Amish buggy and a marker for the town of Intercourse. The caption on the shirt? “Intercourse, PA. Come again!”

The Grove City outlet mall is a haven for decent and cheap merchandise. The trick to the experience is shopping at stores that have “Outlet” or “Factory Store” in the title, and immediately going towards the back of the building towards the deals.

Possibly one of the best deals in the place, besides the ubiquitous clothing, was the Sony outlet store. A set of MDR-EX71SL earbuds that go for $60CDN are available, refurbished, for $19.99 US. The next model up (MDR-EX81SL) goes for $29.99 US. I’ve had the 71SL’s since last year’s trip, and the 81’s available this year are even better. I’d highly recommend these for anyone wanting a high-quality set of earbuds for their MP3 player.

I’ve moaned and whined about the half-baked operating system Microsoft imbued upon the world earlier this year, and how its only real significant plus, for me, is the upgraded edition of Media Center. For the record, MCE has always seemed like beta software to me, and there’s no exception with Vista’s edition. About once a day on the media center box, Data Execution Prevention kicks in and restarts the Media Center shell. It takes about five seconds to do, but it’s distinctively pre-release candidate material.

I was about to do my usual round of reinstallations when I noticed that Windows Home Server had gone into RC1 stage (effectively, a usable beta from Microsoft.) It’s heavily based on Windows Server 2003, which I use as my primary OS at work. I read some details about WHS on Something Awful’s SH/SC forum, and decided to give it a go.

Drive spanning? Works.
Automatic backup of other PC’s? Works.
Seems to work with all my stuff? Yep.

I guess I’ll see how it performs under load in the next few days, then…

Apple’s huge WWDC was today, and the Steve Jobs speech, while devoid of any new hardware, was fairly interesting in that it heralded the announcements of two huge features for OS X 10.5.

A new Desktop was nice to see, considering Apple’s effectively had the same Desktop UI since OS X 10.0. The improvements to the Dock look pretty interesting, although I’m unsure if I like the “curved” Stacks feature so far.

The new Finder, though, is a welcome item. There are a few minor performance problems with the current iteration browsing network drives and navigating folders. Ideally this will be fixed with the new sidebar implementation.

I also had the chance to try out the Safari 3 beta on my PC today. The download size was decently small, and it seems to use a similar amount of RAM to Firefox. The page rendering speed, though, is like Apple claimed - blisteringly fast. Memory usage always seems to be a problem with several of the “OS X on Windows” applications, but as long as the program doesn’t persistently chew up more over time, I’d rather have snappy performance when the browser is the active window at the expense of some system resources.

Speaking of RAM, I’ve already hit the hardware limit for my MacBook of 2GB, and I’m eyeing the new Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro systems because they can go up to 4GB. I’ve also hit the 2GB sweet spot for my main PC workstation, and while I’d love to go to 4GB and see what happens for performance, Windows is only going to allocate 3.5GB of that at most. My typical usage is generally under 1GB, but I haven’t been firing up Eclipse on my home system lately.

I also installed the newest iteration of the WRT54G (revision 8.0) since my existing WRT54GS v1.1 decided to drop a port. When Linksys routers lose a LAN port, generally it means that their time routing packets is over with. The new model has less onboard memory and apparently is less tolerant of third-party firmware, but the official stuff seems to do 90% of what I want. The LED blink rate is also slightly faster. I’ll have to run a few further tests with BitTorrent and some other network intensive applications and compare performance.

As a result of the new router, I’m going to try and get my FTP and HTTP servers up and running again. It’s useful to point people to e98.homeip.net/files in case there’s an image, MP3 file or ZIP archive needing to be transferred without incurring the wrath of MSN/Windows Live Messenger’s god-awful file transfer system.

I also intend to write a post sometime this week about my new consulting venture with Dave and Warren called EdgeLink Consulting. We’re just in the initial stages of setting things up, but basically it’ll give any computer repairs I do more of an official standing.

In any event, rebooting for Safari 3 on the Mac… why is this needed on the Mac and not on the PC?

I am either about to become one of the hardcore neckbeard-wielding Linux supporters, or do something drastic to Microsoft’s programmers. Why is it that an operating system like Vista, put together after five years of effort, is actually WORSE than its predecessor?

Just this week I’ve experienced the following issues with my legitimate, genuine MSDNAA Vista Business installation:

• Random nVidia kernel driver crashes. I don’t actually see the crashes themselves, only the tray tooltips that follow them indicating that “nvkdtm” or some similarly-named file has caused my display device to stop working. I could theoretically pin this on nVidia, but the drivers I’m using are WHQL certified.
• My user profile refuses to log in with my preferences. My desktop wallpaper, Start menu customizations, etc… are all gone, and I’m told to check the Event Log to find out what’s wrong. There is nothing useful in the Event Log.
• SMB file sharing just randomly crashed, interrupting a download and halting my music. I go to investigate this and Windows indicates that everything is fine. Except it’s not.
• Remote Desktop can take up to two minutes to log in, where XP would accomplish the same task in two seconds.
• Windows Explorer duplicates folders on the root of the drive. I have two entries of the same “Users” folder present when I look at the C drive.

This has all been just this week.

What am I doing then? I’m reinstalling XP Pro from the latest newsgroup build - the pirates build an ISO every month with the latest Windows Update fixes, giving a better installation source than my pre-SP1 media.

I’m also refusing to touch the OS with a ten foot pole until I can verify that all this crap has been fixed. It’s not like I’m running exotic hardware (Asus board, Intel Core 2 Duo chip, OCZ RAM, nVidia graphics) and I haven’t actually touched the box since two weeks ago - all it’s been used for is web browsing and SMB serving.

When the final release Ubuntu 7.04 comes out in a few more days, I will seriously consider it for regular use.

When I get a bit more cash, I will seriously consider a Mac Pro instead.

On Wednesday, I ended up going to Sherway Gardens for the afternoon, where the main attraction is an actual Apple Store. Said store is also known as the Fruit Stand or Fruit Stall, similar to how the “Apple/Command” key on Mac keyboards is commonly called “Fruit.” A few points of interest:

• When you get in, you’re accosted by no less than five people. The initial object of my first trick was to look at iPod accessories, which are located about 2/3 of the way back in the store. Five salespeople asked if we required any assistance on the way there.
• All iPod accessories in the Fruit Stand are overpriced, and anyone buying a case for their freaking Shuffle needs to seriously reconsider what they’re doing with their disposable income.
• Those MacBook Pro systems are incredibly nice looking. Maybe next time a laptop purchase is needed…
• That Mac Pro system is also incredibly nice looking, especially paired with the 30″ Apple Cinema Display.
• You know, my 4th gen iPod/20GB is getting kind of scratched, not to mention it’s having syncing issues and freezes sometimes.
• Why yes, sir, I *would* like to purchase a new 80GB black iPod video right this minute!

So, after damning myself repeatedly because of my incredible consumer-whoreism tendencies, I walked out of there with a new device that will help kill time on the bus. I’m so conflicted, because on one hand the 20GB black and white unit still technically works for what I need it to… but on the other hand, it’s so shiny and will play videos of Jack Bauer gettin’ some terrorists and it’ll hold all my music and… stop it.

I’m going to have to put in some extra hours for work for this one, at least.

The other interesting expedition today was to the Sony Store. I am of the opinion that Sony makes a certain number of things with really decent quality:

1. Televisions
2. Camcorders
3. Headphones (as long as they’re more than $20)
4. Decent-looking PC displays (well, at least the Trinitrons)

Unfortunately, the company is currently on this huge “Full HD” or “True HD 1080″ kick, which basically means that their really expensive TV’s will support a native resolution of 1980×1020 running progressively (60fps.) This is due to their launch of the PS3, which doesn’t have an internal scaler, so your games run at either standard-def or 1080p; if your TV doesn’t support 1080p, guess what mode you’re running in?

What was mildly amusing that the TV shown in the front of their store had an infomercial going on about Full HD 1080p, blah blah blah… until I realized it was a 42″ Grand Wega LCD projection model, which has a native resolution of 720p and doesn’t support the Full HD variety.

I also took a look at the PS3 on display in the store, which failed to impress. (Hint: show the XMB interface and perhaps flOw; both of those things look pretty. I don’t want to see NBA ‘07.)

During my browsing of Something Awful’s coupons forum, I noticed an offer for a free “La Fonera” wireless router. The concept of this device is that it’s an 802.11b/g router with custom OpenWRT firmware, which creates two separate SSID’s:

• FON_(accesspoint), which is an open WLAN that allows anyone to connect
• MyPlace, a WPA or WPA2-encrypted WLAN that is “private use”

I figured it’d be a useful device to physically isolate my network from unknown PC’s, since the public WLAN doesn’t allow connection to other PC’s on the internal network by default.

Some pictures of the packaging and device follow, as well as my specific configuration changes:
Continue reading ‘La Fonera wireless router’ »

My new MacBook arrived yesterday, so I’ve been playing around with it since last night. It’s unbelievably snappy, likely due to the Core 2 Duo chip inside it. I also bumped the configuration up to 2GB of RAM when I ordered it, which is a good idea for pretty much any modern system.

I might have even gone to more, but the Intel chipset inside this system only supports 2GB. The MacBook Pro’s chipset will address 3GB, but to get that configuration you’d have to do 2×2GB sticks and lose 1GB. Anything over 3GB isn’t going to be accessible under a 32-bit operating system, and nobody I know wants to run a 64-bit OS on the desktop full time. OS X 10.5 will change this, because things will pretty much be transparent.

What’s more, the GMA950 card that I’ve previously panned for being slow and nearly worthless actually performs pretty well. I had both my 1680×1050 LCD monitor and the 1280×800 display on the MacBook running last night, and there was less GUI “lag” than my iMac had. (OS X, by nature of its accelerated graphics, tends to have a slower “immediate redraw” rate than WinXP when resizing windows.)

I’ve yet to try any games on it, but that’s not really what this system’s for. Primarily, I wanted something small and light, and the fact that it runs OS X natively is pretty damn cool.