Following Edge

While I continue to think hard about how and whether I can continue to publish anything here on followingedge.com, John Gruber at Daring Fireball has decided to do his blog in a serious way and has quit his "day job" to do so.

I don't have any desire to make a living off of blogging and I'm even still resigning myself to whether I'm publishing for you or publishing for me. But, I do appreciate Daring Fireball, a blog about technical things and specifically web and Macintosh technical things that I sometimes care about, and I know that if good writing and content are a good thing, then sincerity and dedication makes it even better. I joined Daring Fireball to help him find success. If you're a technical person and love Macs (which you should, or eventually will, of course), why don't you check it out and even join up. Joining couldn't be any easier since all it takes is buying one of the three cool t-shirts offered on the site.

Good luck, John Gruber. Hopefully, I'll soon have a similar moment of clarity about Following Edge, so that it doesn't just continue to languish.

This is the funniest thing! Taking a walk today, I spotted this "ad" on a pole across the street from my office. I can't imagine whether this is real or a joke. I can't find anything online about "Marceau". I'm scared it might be real. If I were him, I'd be cautious about performing at parties with much drinking... there might be violence!

Rent-A-Mime

For your next party!

Patrick "Marceau" Harrison

Call today: 683-3686

"He's the life of the party!" (Eugene Weekly)

Watch him...

• Get stuck in a glass box!
• Pull himself with a rope!
• Be inside a 'real' tornado!

Only $10 (Plus food)

Call today

Yes, Following Edge is back after a weeklong hiatus. Don't ask. It's sufficient to say that the time I usually spend writing had to be used to get the blog in shape to be online again. In case you missed my non-blog post this week:

Check out this article at Wired describing how to explain your suspicious web searches when the government gets access to records of your web searches. Funniest thing I've seen all week.

More will follow shortly. Thanks for sticking with Following Edge.

I've been hearing for a couple of weeks about a Windows computer virus called "Blackworm" or "CME-24". It's concerning for many because it erases many kinds of file (unimportant things like Word, Excel, etc documents). There was so much urgent talk about it 10 to 14 days ago that I thought it was going to do the erasing last Friday, but I eventually figured out that it's happening on the 3rd, this Friday.

Anne Marie naively said she expected news reports about it. I reminded her that, back at the time of the Code Red worm, I had been dealing with its affects on the network for weeks before the local news finally reported on it.

Humorously, the local news did get the news out before the event this time. Our local news reported on it this evening, and, while they can say that they reported the news before it happened, 6 hours of notice doesn't give most non-technical people much of a chance to figure out what to do about it. Hopefully, they already have up-to-date virus software, are skeptical enough not to open email files claiming to be Karma Sutra porn, or have a Macintosh, but competent reports claim that 300,000 computers are infected and will suffer major data loss tomorrow (or today, depending where you are).

I suppose I'm no better in my timing than the local news. I'm reporting this here when the damage is already starting, but anyone would be foolish to depend on this blog for timely, relevant, and accurate information. Many still cling to that expectation for newspapers and the evening news.

So glad today, as many days, that we don't run Windows in our company. It's sad that Windows is so frequently infected with viruses and that the local news waits to late to report on the issue when most of the affected people probably don't read the crazy high-tech news that I do. Hope none of you get hit by this, but, if so, there are some great deals on Macs right now with new models having just been released.

This is hilarious! I've been getting lots of calls and emails about our house for rent, but this one knocked me off my seat:

DEAR SIR/MADAM
MY NAME IS MICHEAL MORGAN I
AM WORKING FOR THE CANADIAN EMBASSY IN NIGERIA. MY
ORGANISATION, THE CANADIAN EMBASSY IS SENDING ME TO A
TRAINING COURSE SCHEDULED TO HOLD FOR SIX MONTHS, SO
THEREFORE, I HAVE CHOOSED TO RENT YOUR ACCOMODATION
FOR THIS PERIOD OF MY STAY IN THE PROCESS OF THE
COURSE DURATION
I WOULD WANT TO KNOW THE
TOTAL COST, BOTH THE SECURITY, AND FOR ALL NECCESSARY
REQUIREMENTS. I WOULD LIKE TO PAY VIA INTERNATIONAL
MONEY ORDER/CHEQUE . I EXPECT TO HEAR FROM YOU SOON.

Of course, it's a classic "Nigerian" 419 fraud scheme, where they send you a money order and then get you to send back some real money before you realize the money order is worthless.

I've seen this scam used with eBay auctions, domain names, and job offers, but I think trying it with a house rental is a bit rediculous. Of course, the normal interview/application/reference process for renting a house wouldn't include renting to unknown Canadian diplomats in Nigeria. I hate to say that anyone who would fall for this might deserve to lose a bit of cash.

Anne Marie pointed out that the email doesn't work on so many other levels: Why does a Canadian diplomat need to come to Elmira for a class? Redneck studies? Front-yard auto repair 101? Instructions from Nokie Edwards on playing "Hawaii 5-O"?

Hopefully, we'll have slightly more credible applicants show up to see the house today, but, given that it's Elmira, maybe not.

Just after my last post at about 8:00 last night, I did head off to Portland to fix our broken accounting system (IMACS). By the time I'd made it to Eugene to pick up parts, I knew from my friend and co-worker Chris (who was able to go in to the office) that the system's power supply was the problem.

When I made it to Portland at 11:00, it took me a short while to get the power supply replaced, because, for some reason, the spare part was a different type than the original. Just as I was actually getting it installed, the building's evacuation alarm sounded and I had to head out of the building while a crew of firemen determined why some construction workers had activated the fire alarm. You can see the fire engine outside the office building above. It was very strange.

Having fixed the problem, and knowing that I wouldn't be home before 4:00am anyhow, I replaced the batteries in the UPS system that had been causing me so much grief last month and set up some new redundant hard drives, knowing that the string of recent disasters may not yet be over.

Then, with the help of an energy drink, a convenience store bologna sandwich, and NerdTV episodes featuring Brewster Kahle, Tim O'Reilly, and Dave Winer, I got myself back home between 6 and 7 this morning, just as Lauren was getting up. Happily, Anne Marie was able to take Lauren in to school, giving me a few hours to relax before having to catch up on my regular work and pick Lauren up from school.

It was strange that, as I interacted with co-workers today, no one knew that I had worked through the night to resurrect the main computer system for the company. My effort is not something that usually needs to come to people's attention.

As I was putting Lauren to bed last night, she knew something was up with IMACS, even though I didn't tell her I was heading to Portland. She said, "No one knows that the man who takes care of IMACS has a daughter", which, though not truely correct, I felt accurately described the relation of the urgency of my work to the importance of my family life.

Tossing aside my usual "Following Edge" mindset, I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 less than a week after it was released. Of course, I am a member of the Wordpress "testers" mailing list, so I've known about some of the issues and concerns about the new version. I was also very careful in comparing the upgrade to the old (1.5) version.

Even as careful and informed as I was, my impression is that most people could switch to WordPress 2.0 using the simple upgrade instructions, without my careful methodology, and have no trouble at all. In fact, despite people's concerns and talk of unresolved bugs, I think this upgrade from 1.5 to 2.0 was not as significant and difficult as the upgrade from 1.2 to 1.5.

You'll probably notice that things look identical, which I think is a good thing. The "behind the scenes" stuff is quite a bit fancier, with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, easier image uploading, etc. I don't know if that's a good thing, since I didn't mind the old way. I know that a number of local Eugene bloggers use WordPress (even though my friend David has long forsaken WordPress for TypePad). I suppose the upgrade could be fodder for real blogging discussion at an upcoming Eugene Weblogger Get-together.

I didn't really upgrade for myself. First, I wanted to be sure that my Efficient Recently Commented posts plug-in appears to work fine with WordPress 2.0. In fact, all of the plug-ins I use seem to be having no trouble.

The second reason is that there's a new project afoot at work that will probably use WordPress 2.0 for managing articles and other content published on our various web sites. I had previously started the project with the older version, but put the project on the back burner after the person that was going to use it left the company. Now, there's renewed interest, so if someone new is assigned to use it, I'll probably get it set up for the company in the next month.

After working all-nighters last week, getting through the installation of our new store in Redmond and returning after 11:00pm Thursday, I almost got to "relax" and catch up on work Friday, except that I was still working after 8:00pm getting an Internet circuit fixed for Redmond, then our company's entire computer room was taken offline again both Saturday and Sunday mornings by a so-called-uninterruptible power supply. Now, I'm waiting for a call to start the process of replacing the expensive uninterruptible power supply with a plugstrip, which I think will be more reliable in the short term.

I was waiting to be in a good mood and post some nice, cute pictures and optimistic holiday thoughts... but it may take a long while to get there. So here's your griping instead!

I'm tired of doing the work of 3 people and working all hours of every day. I don't want to feel at my wits end about my job and angry at everything 70% of the time. Anne Marie wondered if I was ready to ask for a raise. I told her I hadn't decided on asking for a raise because, for one, it's be a fight to get since our company is too cheap, and, even so, I don't want to get paid more to do something I'm not enjoying. I am prepared to think creatively and find a way to work at something I enjoy.

I think that's the way start getting my life in better shape. Feeling less unhappy about work should make more room in my psyche for dealing with personal things as well.

Keith and I drove to Redmond, Washington yesterday to set up the company's new store here. Many people will think of Microsoft when they think of Redmond, and, in fact, our hotel is one of the extended stay hotels immediately on the edge of the Microsoft campus. (Happily, Keith's room doesn't face Microsoft, otherwise I'm sure he would make good on his promise to moon them.)

I felt tremendously unprepared for this installation, given all the work I've had to devote to other projects instead of preparations. I didn't have any of the routers or the phone system set up or configured. Nonetheless, things went very well today. Keith was a tremendous asset as we got most of the network connections, phone systems and printers set up. Usually, after the first day of setting up a new store, I'm exhausted and way behind schedule. Today, I'm feeling tired, but human, and our list of tasks to finish tomorrow is pretty light. Barring any disasters, of course.

So far, Redmond has seemed to be just a collection of office parks and strip malls. Of course, there hasn't been that much exploring, aside from getting lost for a half hour in the fog last night. Mostly it's working, sleeping and watching the cartoon network and drinking beer with Keith before bed.

With luck, we'll begin the long drive back home early tomorrow afternoon. It'll be nice to get back to the family, and lots of work I'm behind on... but mostly the family.

So what has been keeping me so occupied, doing all-nighters half of the last week? A customer database.

A customer database, you say? Doesn't every database software out there come with a customer database as a sample. No big deal. However, there are two complications to this database. First, it is being designed to be used as a shared database by other applications (especially on that I discovered just last Friday that we'd be installing to a larger audience this Tuesday). That makes for some tricky concerns, but the other complication is something that no technology professional likes to hear:

Legacy System

Scary, huh? If you didn't just cringe, you must not be in technology. A legacy system is a large computer program (and often its computer hardware) that becomes so important to a company's operations and integral to its procedures that it is not financial sensible to try and build a more modern system that performs the same functions while working out the bugs of a new system and retraining users and rebuilding procedures that were based on the old (legacy) system. We have one of these that I have become the maintainer of. It currently has information on over 320,000 customers, but the system is not modern enough to easily share that information with more modern web-based or standardized database systems. It's a real problem.

So, since we need to use this information from modern systems and since we cannot give up access to using it on the old system, I had to build a new customer database with all the correct information from the legacy system and all of the information that the modern systems needed, and then make a way to bi-directionally synchronize them. If you're a technical person, you now realize that I've stepped from fearful to plain scary.

I did build the system. It required me to program in 4 languages: Perl, Javascript, BASIC, and PL/PgSQL. It works great and I finally slept 9 hours last night, which, coincidentally, was what I had slept the previous 3 nights combined.

Not that things are going to settle down. We are opening a new retail store next week, so I have to get together and install a network, routers, VPN, printers, and a phone system by then. Oh, and I have another major new program, an online time clock, that needs to be mostly completed this week. I think I'd better not plan on much more sleep.

As much as I'm not sleeping, I'm still spending time with Lauren on my regular days with her. That's more important than technology, I think. Also, my dad will be in town from Chicago for the weekend, so I'll have to take a little more off-time in the coming days. Therefore, you should get to see some nice photos in the next few days instead of this long technical, stuff. Stay tuned.

In the 8 days since writing about the crash, things have been a constant challenge. I've been silent because it's not very entertaining to write about one bad thing after another and I hadn't been feeling positive enough to care about writing.

On Monday evening, the APC Uninteruptable Power Supply that runs the computer room I manage failed a scheduled battery test and turned off the power to all the equipment, including all of our network connections, accounting servers, calendar, email and web servers. The electricity to the room never went off, so it shouldn't have happened. I guess the word "Uninteruptable" was a serious overstatement. Talking to APC, they simply informed me, "No, that shouldn't happen". Thanks.

On Tuesday, I stayed up very late assembling a new server, "nhi", so that I could install it during my trip to Portland on Wednesday. I went to Portland mainly to meet a Covad DSL Installer. After driving over 2 hours and waiting 4 hours, I discovered that the installer determined he hadn't brought the correct paperwork, so wouldn't do the work that day. Since he didn't call me to let me know or enter any information for the company to call me, I wasted hours sitting and waiting, then more hours waiting in rush-hour traffic, arriving home late in the evening. Calling someone if you're unable to make an appointment is a pretty minimal courtesy. I am going to do the installer some serious verbal harm when I do see him. At least, though, I got the new server all assembled and beautifully installed. But...

The next day, Thanksgiving, I enjoyed visiting with friends and family, letting the weeks worries slip away. Ha! Not even! In actuality, our most important server, "trac", went down before 10:00am and my friend Chris and I spent hours of our holiday time until 7:00pm getting things fixed. It turns out that both the server's logic board and power supply went out. To get things running, we had to tear apart the new server I'd installed the previous day, copy all of the data on this massive server to new drives, and do a scary upgrade from Linux 2.2 to Linux 2.4. The good news is that I did get to take an hour off to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with the family at Judith and Chris' house. It was as wonderful as it could have been, given the chaos and frenzy going on around me.

On Friday, and even now, I am terrifically behind on work due to the backlog from all those distractions and the work to get everything repaired and back in good condition.

Thankfully, I was able to recover my sensibilities and get in a good mood in the last few days. Basically assisted by all of Ian Dury's favorite things, but substituting Vince Guaraldi for Rock and Roll.

The picture shown here is the destruction of the Rite Aid at 29th and Willamette Street in Eugene. (The other picture is the destruction of Thanksgiving dinner, of course.) They're tearing this huge building down to, evidently, build an even bigger one for the PC Market of Choice. Since my parents (both pharmacists) worked there for decades, it's a significant event for me. Lauren and I enjoyed watching the destruction.

Things feeling better now, I hope to write again in just a couple of days.

I was happy this morning to see that Scooter Libby's indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice made front page news. After Tuesday's revelation that Libby's own notes contradicted his testimony, I was dismayed that the story only appeared on page 4 of the Wednesday newspaper. When the top aide to the Vice-President is lying under oath, I would expect that to be very important news, even before criminal charges are brought against him. The more sincere coverage today seemed appropriate, but I do notice that the article has slipped way down on The Register-Guard's web site to allow more prominent coverage of river otters. Almost unbelievable.

Much, much closer to home, I completed both of the outstanding personal chores that David had suggested I might need to outsource. I repaired the TV, which turned out to be crippled by bad spots on the hard drive (which took out such unimportant-sounding, yet critical, files as /dev/mem and /var/spool/). I also have sent the "kicking you out" letter to our renters. I gave them until December 4 to vacate. It's sad to do, but it's not as if I haven't given them lots of chances over the last 3 or 4 months. I've heard a lot about people having trouble kicking renters out in less than 3 months, but I haven't found any indication of that in the law. If you know something about that, let me know.

And, so far as David's suggestion of outsourcing goes, I suggest he keep his mind on which of his own projects he can outsource. I don't think it's possible to build any part of your chimney inside your house, then move it to your roof. Even if it was possible, it still wouldn't be wise. Go review the situation and let him know if you think he needs some help.

It's been a difficult week, at least from the perspective of work.

On one hand, I have made the progress I had hoped to, including rolling out the new instant messaging (chat) service to our whole company. Keith has also made some really great progress on the "big project" and, on a personal level, I'm feeling less isolated from Anne Marie and both getting time with Lauren and away from her.

On the other hand, through some cosmic prank, whenever I start to check things off my list, twice as many things as usual start to jump onto my to-do list. As much work as I've been able to do this week, it feels like there's now more work to do.

Even worse, there was a major meltdown. After Wednesday's announcement from Apple about new super-powerful G5 PowerMacs, we posted a page of nice, high-quality images of the guts of the machine on one of our web sites. The page got linked from dozens of Mac news and rumor sites and we had over 25,000 hits to this page in less than a day. Between the traffic and the size of the images, our computer room network was brought to a crawl and the servers were running out of memory. Even though I was able to keep everything running for the most part and arrange a mid-day hardware upgrade, the adrenaline has sapped me for the rest of the week.

Finally, I discovered that the chat server I had just set up had a critical problem communicating with .Mac chat accounts. Given that our company is like the largest Apple reseller and Apple heavily uses .Mac chat accounts, this was a major blow. The open source software we were using for this connection is a perfect example of open-source software... poor documentation, incomplete features, and unusable newest versions. Gak!

In the middle of the night, I was able to find and get working a slightly better-behaved open source software to solve the problem, but I couldn't find anyone to chat with to test it. After a quick web search, I found out about "Zola on AOL", a "chat robot" at AOL that some people have had strange luck with. Sure enough, I connected up to "ZolaOnAOL" on the AIM service and chatted with Zola for a while, finishing my testing. Anyone familiar with the artificial intelligence programs Eliza or Alice will not be surprised by Zola's responses.

However, I was amused by the response she gave me (graphic above) to a testosterone-induced middle-of-the-night question. Maybe she was just telling me what I wanted to hear.

Even after this week, there may be little rest this weekend as Lauren will be with us, instead of with her grandmother and David may want help getting a ton or two of wood pellets to his house. Oh well, I'll rest when I'm old.

I've been having trouble writing here due to a profound depression over the last week or so. It may be just something that comes up every now and then for me, but, on the other hand, there's plenty of causes as well: having a 11-day sore throat; feeling hopeless about promoting the Eugene Weblogger Meetup; having continuing conflicts with our renters to the point of needing to write an eviction notice; and feeling disconnected from Anne Marie as she works very hard to catch up on her school work.

Work hasn't been so satisfying lately, either, but I feel like I do have a chance to get some satisfaction there. In the last month, I've been "growing projects", with things starting, but never finishing, leading to a bit of overload. Lots of things: getting my check-authorization-system software certified has taken over a month due to delays beyond my control; important changes to our online sales system had derailed my project to set up a company chat server (resulting in neither project being finished); the big project with Keith making painfully slow progress due to illness and (thankfully) better input from the users.

The good news in that bad news is that there's plenty of opportunity to complete work. Crossing something off your to-do list is always mood-lifting. So, this weekend, I completed the half of the online sales system upgrade that I have control over. Today, we put the check approval system into use company-wide. And, today I wrote over half of the documentation for the chat server system.

Despite slaving over making the chat server documentation as useful and readable as possible, it's dubious that anyone will read more than a few paragraphs of it. No one reads documentation, especially Mac users. But, that is of no consequence. The real reason for the hard work on it is that it's the last step before finishing the project. Oh, and it will give me great pleasure to smugly point people to the documentation for the next 3 years as they ask questions before reading it. Hah!

Here's hoping that you get something off of your to-do list today!

Last week, I wrote a WordPress plug-in (PHP software) to help out Ampersand (aka Barry) at Alas (a blog). Yes, this is the same Barry that's drawing the banner for this site.

"Alas" frequently focuses on feminism, same-sex marriage and liberal (even ultra-liberal) topics. The blog's accurate focus on these issues, and its open and thoughtful nature, have led to it being a platform for lengthy discussions amongst readers. In order to support this discussion, Ampersand had provided a "Recently Commented Posts" list on the side-bar so that readers could easily follow where new discussion was happening. Unfortunately, the plug-in he was using wasn't written with the mindfulness to efficiency that is required when your site has more than 42,000 comments, as "Alas" does. As a result, his web hosting service had to take the site off-line a few times, ultimately resulting in the total removal of the list.

The problem was really right up my alley since I have some experience with WordPress on this blog and an almost ridiculous focus on efficiency when I write software. After waiting a while to see if other volunteers would be able to write the plug-in, I wrote the "Efficient Recently Commented posts" plug-in last week and helped Ampersand get it set up on "Alas". You can see it on the right side of every page at "Alas" or under "Posts with Recent Comments" in the side-bar here.

I felt very good about my work on the plug-in and wanted to share it with others. Normally, I release my non-work projects like this under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which has gotten a lot of press in the last few years and which gives anyone the right to use the software, and gives anyone the right to modify or enhance it so long as they only distribute the modified (derived) work under the GPL license. It's a very generous license that ensures access to the software and ensures access to improvements to the software.

But, I haven't released the plug-in under the GPL, because the WordPress folks say that I must release it under a GPL-compatible license. I know that they're wrong. The GPL FAQ says that plug-ins must be licensed under the same license as the program, unless the plug-in links dynamically. Without even getting into whether a PHP script links dynamically, the issue of the program's GPL license is only at issue if I modify or distribute the original program under its GPL license, combining the new code and the old as part of a "combined work".

For something like my plug-in, where I am the only copyright holder (since it is a 100% original work with no part of it written by anyone else), there is no connection to the GPL that can require me to license the plug-in under the GPL, or any other license. It upsets me that they want to use their misunderstanding of the license to require people to be generous, instead of just asking people to be generous with their plug-ins. It's as if you made something for someone and planned to give it to them, but when they saw it they say "You have to give me that, because you owe me". It changes one's perception of the situation, perhaps.

I suspect that I'll eventually get over being pedantic and childishly irked at their demand, and license the plug-in under the GPL. For now, I'm festering and licensing it for free on a very restrictive basis, just because I can.

Andrea (another great feminist, liberal (oops) progressive blogger) added the plug-in to Shrub.com as well. It's really rewarding to see software I wrote helping people use these sites.

The last few days have seemed full of crisis. Happily, the picture here of Lauren climbing a rock wall on her own shows something worrisome that, thankfully, did not involve any crisis.

One major concern is that I started getting failure reports from one of the hard disk drives in the server that principally runs all of our retail stores. Happily, I plan ahead and the server has an identical mirrored drive that took over automatically. I ordered a replacement drive and got help from my friend Chris to replace it (him with the system in Portland and me in Elmira running the software).

Just as we got the drive replaced, the power supply for the system had a failure, bringing the system down unexpectedly and preventing it from starting back up. And this was at 11:30pm, which you might think would be a safe time. But, this happened to be the last day of the month, when the controller (that is, the company's supreme master of accounting) works part of the night to prepare the system for the coming month. Crisis!

Now, when I said I plan ahead, I meant it. With adrenaline pumping, I loaded my complete set of replacement parts for the system (drives, boards, power supply, cables) into my car and began the two-hour drive to Portland in order to get the system back up by 2:30am. The good news is that the system recovered only a half hour into my drive and I was able to check the system and prepare the new drive using my cell phone and get back to bed by 1:30am.

Then today, Anne Marie and I were returning a opossum to the wild when I discovered that Lauren had at some point switched the gas tank switch and we were now out of gas without any warning. Happily, I had my bicycle in the back of the truck and I was able to ride back home to get my car and some gas. Not a huge crisis, but enough, since my adrenaline had already been used up the previous night.

But, that's not the biggie. The renters in our little house have 2 dogs that have been barking constantly. We talked to them about it previously, but it's just been getting worse and worse. So, I discover that they now have 4 dogs and have to go tell them that they have to get back down to 2 dogs and keep those dogs reasonably quiet. I don't like having to "babysit" them over this stuff.

So, I knock on their door and they say "Oh, I thought you were here about the electricity being out. Didn't you get the note with our rent?"... To which I reply "No, because I haven't gotten your rent". Evidently, they left a money order for the rent in our mailbox out on our rural road. I don't mail checks in our mailbox, much less cash or money orders. As Keith put it, "STOOOOPID!"

The good news (for me) is that the electrical problem was just that their own refrigerator was blowing the circuit, and nothing about the house or with the refrigerator that we provide. The bad news is that I have to worry about kicking them out if they can't come up with a second rent payment or if they can't control their dogs. Ayee!

The result of all this? I can't relax and my back and head hurt like crazy about half the time. I think it must be time to take up serious drinking or recreational drugs!

I've been very happy that since my last report of work frustrations, things have improved. The "pushing and cajoling" part of my project with Keith has now been taken over by the managers closer to the users. So, it now feels like we're all cooperating on moving the project to company-wide use, instead of feeling like I had to push a cantaloupe down people's throat. In fact, Keith and I were at the corporate office yesterday, and things seem to be really progressing. Not only has Keith completed work on 20 to 25 issues or feature requests since the beginning of last week, but the people who are supposed to be using it are actually using it. Brilliant.

But, of course there are frustrations elsewhere. If it wasn't frustrating, we wouldn't call it "work", would we?

The top of my "list" this week is Apple Computer. One issue is that our project is having trouble because the data we get from Apple is severely broken and they seem to never respond to our bug reports and requests for assistance. But, that's expected. The more frustrating issue has to do with their software.

I'm working right now on setting up an internal Jabber chat (instant messaging) server for our company. Ostensibly, we're setting this up to make it easier for our staff to find each other for online chat and to do it more securely. But, it also means that the "other shoe will drop" and, once we have our own chat server, access to outside chat services (AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, etc) will be cut off. I can totally understand this because many of our employees really abuse Internet chat and spend half their time chatting with people when they're (supposedly) working. But, no matter how much I can understand it, it won't be popular. But that's a different issue.

The gripe with Apple is that their built-in chat client, iChat, seems to have a built in way to look up people's chat address from an address book. Since we already have a networked address book, I figured I could add the chat addresses there and have iChat find them automatically. However, Apple has never documented how to do that, which is one mark against them. The bigger mark against them is that, once I went to the work of finding and reading LDAP schemas, hacking a custom directory server to figure out what iChat was doing, and poring over network dumps, I discovered that Apple probably didn't document it because it's broken. They ask the address book for "IMHandle" info, but publish "apple-imhandle" info (so it doesn't match) and (maybe due to that), no matter how you give the info to iChat in the address book, it can never use it. It seems that they wrote the software, determined that it was broken, then decided to simply not talk about it instead of fixing it. When you love Apple computers as much as I do, this kind of thing is a bit surprising and frustrating.

Anyhow, I should also note that both the improvement in the first work problem and the fact that Apple is on my good side due to a $53.20 stock price (525% profit for me!), my overall outlook is way ahead compared to a few weeks ago.

Now, I'm off to the Oregon Coast for the weekend. Hope everyone has a good one.