Joel's Mundane Life

A while back I acquired a dirt-cheap secondhand pair of SoundLAB Gyroscan units (G017X) for use on-stage as spotlights in combination with my ENTTEC DMX-IS computer-controlled DMX interface. The idea being that I can set them up for each song, mark a cross on the stage and that's where the singers stand - cheap computer-controlled spotlights, yay.

There's a couple of gotchas with this:

First, the Gyroscan DMX interface is inverted - that is to say, hot/cold are the wrong way round on the DMX pinout. While professional establishments tend to have DMX inverters to sort this stuff out I didn't have any and it seemed to be a simple matter of popping the back off the unit and swapping the cables around. Ten minutes with a soldering iron and we're in business.

Second, there's no DMXIS fixture file which will deal with them properly. The Prosound Smart Scan II file comes close but wastes a few (possibly precious) channels which makes it unsuitable if you want everything on one screen. Thus I've put a DMXIS fixture 'macro' together which if you're using Windows you can save in C:\Program Files\ENTTEC\DMXIS\DmxLibrary\Soundlab and it'll automatically find it:

Pan
V,0,255,
Tilt
V,0,255,
Gobo
S,0,24,Black
S,25,49,White
S,50,74,Pink
S,75,99,Cyan
S,100,124,Yellow
S,125,149,Green
S,150,174,Orange
S,175,197,WhDots
S,198,226,Rotating
S,227,255,Strobe
Rotation
V,0,255,

This seems to work fine for me and also makes the positioning trackpad work in the bottom left corner of the DMXIS control panel.

The only real comment I have on the Gyroscan units (bear in mind here I'm still an amateur at this) is that they're a bit slow to cue up a gobo. Other than that they seem fine!

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I've got a new MacBook Pro - one of the Intel i7 ones, 17", nice piece of kit. I've also re-evaluated my external disk requirements on my desktop and bought a dual eSATA/USB RAID0+1 array for storing my Lightroom library.

Sick of running it on USB (and I'm running out of USB ports anyway) I purchased a LaCie SATA II ExpressCard 34 adaptor via Amazon. Today's been the first chance I've had to switch it over as I'm working from home, and installed the drivers as per the instructions. I plugged the card in... instant kernel panic on Snow Leopard. Oops.

No problems, reboot. Except it won't - not at all. A reboot of the machine hit a kernel panic within a few seconds, not even enough for it to bring up the OS tail. The error is: "thread wants credential but has no BSD process" - a completely unusable system.

I eventually got it down to out-of-date drivers supplied with the CD accompanying the card. The correct drivers are here, and you will not be able to boot your system unless you do the following:

1. Reboot holiding down the shift key, so you enter 'safe boot mode'. This will take a while to boot so you might want to make a cuppa.
2. Download the drivers from here.
3. Install the drivers and immediately reboot.

I haven't had any problems since.

(Apparently this is to do with the SIS chipset not addressing 64-bit memory space correctly, but booting into 32-bit compatibility mode doesn't work either.)

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Given my recent post on IPv4 exhaustion, I read with interest that 1.0.0.0/8 has been reallocated (to APNIC) as part of the efforts to debogon and reuse address space.

Previously there's been discussion on which /8 should be allocated. A good read, and covers issues I'd expect to become more important as the IPv4 space is depleted. IANA keep a document on /8 RIR assignments here.

I don't do much networks stuff nowadays, but what's important from my programmatic point-of-view is IP address validation within user interfaces - I know at least two systems I've been involved in developing have IP address input validation; consequently I think you can probably expect to see older (poorly programmed) routers thinking erroneously 'oh, that IP address is invalid!'.

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According to iNetCore (via Trefor Davies' blog) the IPv4 address space will finally be exhausted on 5th September 2011.

Available IPv4 address space dropped below 10% yesterday 19th January 2010 as announced by the Number Resource Organization. So, everyone ready to take IPv6 seriously now? :P

(To be honest it sounds like a good excuse for an 'end of the world' type of party - anyone in Hollywood fancy making a disaster movie out of it?!)

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I posted last week about Hotmail breaking email headers - it's starting to be noticed a little more, and unfortunately there isn't a solution yet. I've looked at rewriting the headers on my own (exim-based) mailservers but frankly it's a pain in the arse and I don't really want to frig something when it's Hotmail that should be fixing it.

More links (including info on Roundcube and Thunderbird):

• The original Windows Help post.
• Another Hotmail bug report with not very helpful info.
• Someone using Roundcube noticed it as far back as September 25th (there's a proper Roundcube bug report here together with a link to a patch to read it).
• It also affects Eudora and Courier IMAP

It's bloody annoying, and tedious Microsoft won't actually fix it. Do they not have a QA dept?

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It's been a month or so since release, there's a .1 version out and the wounds of being an early adopter have healed somewhat so (gulp) I've taken the plunge and installed Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro 2.33GHz Core II Duo laptop.

Oh alright, I confess I've not been brave enough to splat the install - instead I acquired a 500GB laptop drive and I've been running it on a USB adaptor. That way I haven't blasted my 10.5 install, and can run away if need be; in short, I'm playing the safe option given all the reports of incompatibility and weirdness.

So, quick bullet points on verdict:

• Install seemed to go OK, although I mis-remembered my .Me account name/password and it wouldn't give me an opportunity to skip that bit of the installer. I don't want a .me account, so please don't force me to have one Mr Jobs.
• It does seem a little faster (certainly when fiddling with Lightroom).
• Adobe CS3, Lightroom 2, all the usual stuff looks to work just dandy.
• Largely seems to work OK although there's been an odd incident where my second display didn't come back after a screensaver (it looked like OS X had put a big black window over the screen, you could just about see the windows behind it in a 2-pixel bleed either side).
• Some oddness with 'Save As' dialogs having black blocks and the odd bit of screen corruption too.

So not so bad yet, although I've only given it a day of hammer.

What else? I updated Logic Pro 9 and my copy of the B4 plugin has stopped working; also Novation's V-station thinks it's unlicensed if you don't update to version 1.5.1 - this threw me for ten minutes until I googled a solution. I've not found a solution to the B4 issue yet. Logic 9 itself seems stable enough and the CPU load is noticeably smaller when playing complex songs (I tested with one which had 97 tracks, lots of audio and software instruments).

I've also dumped Parallels after nightmares with their support in the past and turned to VMware Fusion. If all goes according to plan I'll register the copy come payday.

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I have spent a substantial amount of spare time over the past few days trying to track down why any replied email from a Hotmail user shows as a blank email in my webmail (using Roundcube), and corrupted in Mulberry (regardless of platform).

The symptoms are quite simple:

• Emails sent from a Hotmail account as anything except text/plain are either corrupted, or blank.
• Further investigation shows the header is corrupted, usually with the 'X-OriginalArrivalTime:' header inserted at random places (although usually in the 'References:' block) followed by two CRs (signifying end-of-header). This now means that the header forms part of the body which on a multipart email will render it corrupt and useless.
• Use of Spamassassin, etc. compounds the problem when it inserts its own headers, giving an erroneous impression of what's wrong.

This means if you are using Hotmail to send email, there's a good chance the recipient won't be able to read it unless they are using a Microsoft mail reader (eg. Outlook) or Hotmail itself.

You can see a typical header here (sensitive information redacted for confidentiality):

References: <BLU140-W710CB868557ABFA6D8D1FD2D20@phx.gbl>
 <BLU140-W32A851FEAF0116DA3A6A60D2D20@phx.gbl>
 <BLU140-W34301DB9B838BAA94D69F1D2CC0@phx.gbl>
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 13 Oct 2009 13:42:21.0449 (UTC) FILETIME=[FD2D9F90:01CA4C0A]
X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: 65.55.116.100
X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: xxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com
X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on foxy.wrenthorpe.net); SAEximRunCond expanded to false

 <e17ccddd5d6dc4267f8d309ae6314529@wrenthorpe.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0


--_2d718c5a-9b8c-4761-8b42-54e91ed44fd8_
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


Hi Joel=2C

What's important to note here is the corruption of the 'References' line. I was fooled into thinking it was a SpamAssassin issue by the presence of the 'X-SA-Exim' lines, however these are a byproduct of the corruption itself. What has actually happened is that Hotmail has inserted an 'X-OriginalArrivalTime' line followed by two CRs, SpamAssassin has then thought 'oh this is the end of the header' and appended its own lines, effectively chopping up the header before the 'MIME-Version' line is reached.

The end result of all this is that standards-compliant mailers such as Roundcube, Squirrelmail and Mulberry show the message as corrupted, and this is exacerbated when anything at all touches the headers en-route. Outlook and Exchange both show the message OK, so I can see how this might have got past the Hotmail guys (who presumably have to solely use Windows nowadays).

Microsoft themselves seem to have acknowledged the problem in this support ticket from Windows Live, although goodness knows when there'll be a fix. If it continues past a few days I'll see if I can craft a rule to mangle the email back into a sensible format because it's causing no end of fun issues for maillists I participate in.

Thanks to Hotmail user ess-jay, who was very patient in trying lots of different things when I was attempting to track this down.

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ircnet.demon.co.uk - the first IRC server I used, which led to a major job and many friendships, acquaintances and the rest of it, is being shut down:

-BRd(~jamesr@127.0.0.1)- It is expected that ircnet.demon.co.uk will stop providing an IRCnet service very shortly (although an exact date is not confirmed). I would like to advise you that other IRCnet servers are available for users of demon's server. These include uk.ircnet.org, irc.xs4all.nl, irc.snt.utwente.nl, us.ircnet.org, ircnet.choopa.net and ircnet.eversible.com. Thanks you and thanks to demon for providing a service for all these years.

It being a server in a larger IRC network means of course it's not really that big news, but it's still the end of an era.

Not that I've been on #dl-bar and #uknot in a long time...

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As seen on IRC:

<@Menus> $colleague was supposed to be flying to .mx yesterday
<@Menus> i think they've only started not letting people go today
<@Menus> and those who are there are being brought back
<@sooB> Menus: can't he fly to a secondary mx instead?

*sigh*

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Once again I find myself cleaning up undefined variables referenced in PHP. Yet more bedroom coders who think they can write stuff, causing notices, errors and warnings to spew out just simply because they can't be arsed to learn to use isset().

THIS IS WRONG:

if ( ! $_REQUEST['blah'] ) {
echo "thingy isn't set";
}

THIS IS RIGHT:

if ( ! isset($_REQUEST['blah']) ) {
echo "thingy isn't set";
}

For crying out loud, is it any fucking wonder PHP gets such a bad rap when you bloody idiots are making vague assumptions about undefined values being FALSE? I should set fire to every bastard one of you.

(Next week's rant: !== vs !=).

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As seen on Facebook:

'Thirteen die after C. diff outbreak at hospital' - sounds like one seriously extreme kernel-patching meetup.

(Thanks Christo :))

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Only a short post but one I felt of note since I come across developers and media designers who still don't employ code version control, wipe out each others' changes, and lose days of work regularly. Worse still they don't understand the paradigm, or throw a perfectly good svn/cvs regime away because they can't be arsed.

So, head over to Smashing Magazine's round-up on Subversion and learn to do code control properly - trust me, it'll save your ass when you have more than one developer or when you make cock-ups you only discover months later.

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I gave up on Safari yonks ago on my Mac and I've been a bit of a Firefox bitch for years, although I've heard good things about the Safari 4 Beta which came out the other day. It's hardly going to ride roughshod over an installation I already use so I thought I'd give it a go.

Installation nice and smooth, although really why did I need to reboot? Am I running Windows on this thing? No. There is no need. Come on, Apple - stop being daft.

Truthful verdict on the app itself? It's quite nifty. Blindingly fast on my Macbook, at least in comparison to Firefox; the really very fast Javascript engine will help a lot with my $dayjob work on webapps too. Rendering seems OK but I've not tried to do any of the more interesting stuff yet (book hotel rooms, upload content, all that foo).

One big annoyance - the positioning of the tabs right at the top. Thanks to Hitch, this can be sorted on the command line with:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

...which will shift them back below the location bar after an app restart. More undocumented UI fiddles here.

One minor annoyance - because of the preinstalled RSS feeds, it fills your "popular sites" shizzle with CNet, Youtube, Amazon et al. Easily sorted tho.

So far so good - I'll try it in preference to Firefox for a few days (although probably longer if I can find a way of importing my stored security stuff, bookmarks, and stuff).

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Gooroo (one of my current clients) have set up a blog for their software-as-a-service thingy. If you're interested in SaaS and cloud computing it's one to pop in your RSS feed (although it will probably be a bit buzzword-tastic at times).

Link here. I'm sure they'd appreciate comments and discussion!

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Ben forwarded me this article, which explains how much damn pain us IT nerds/geeks go through (and probably why we drink so much).

My favourite quote: "See, you're never going to get them to stop sticking the fork in their eyes. Never. Stop trying, it's fantasy. Along those lines, they're never going to treat you like more than a glorified janicopter, where your only useful function is to STFU and bail them out of that jail they worked so hard to get themselves into."

I can probably apply this analogy to supporting end-users on web apps right this very second, and in fact most of the customer-facing jobs I've been in; they'll never stop sticking the fork in their eyes, so give up trying to stop them...

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