It Rains In Triplicate

I have a reasonably old airport extreme base station in the house, which sits in the living room. I had the great idea of moving it to the basement to replace the netgear router (not modem, just the router) that I suspect is getting flakey.

So, after a quick factory reset and putting it through the motions of connecting to the modem, including the power cycling and battery yanking required, it won’t get a DHCP address. I suspect comcast is using MAC address provisioning, so I restored the network to what it was and factory reset the airport and redid the setup so that it would act as the wireless bridge again.

Except it no longer gets a DHCP address from the router.

To be clear, every other piece of equipment, wireless and otherwise still gets an IP address from the DHCP server on the router.

Further, if I set a manual IP address on the airport extreme, it works fine. The only thing not working is that the airport extreme cannot obtain a DHCP address.

Back to square one, I still have a (mostly) working airport and I still have a flakey cable router.

I hate computers.

Walt Mossberg is going out on a limb and claiming that the new iphone may have a faster operating speed than the current model.

My sources disagree, I’ve been told that, contrary to what the industry and apple has done over the past 30 years, apple will actually put an old school 286 processor in the new iphone, reducing speed significantly!

SlingPlayer for iPhone apparently only supports WiFi, not 3G. The freak out is that SlingPlayer for the BlackBerry supports the 3G network.

So, is it that AT&T hates everyone? Is it that SlingPlayer doesn’t like you and wants to kill your dog?

My take, two straightforward reasons:

1. AT&T does not have any say on whether or not a user downloads a BlackBerry application
2. The number of iPhone users that may install a given application is much, much larger than the potential blackberry install base

Ultimately, there is a real argument that AT&T cannot support the potential install base. The fact that there is a blackberry app that is unrestricted is a red herring, we’re not talking about the same set of users or same potential usage patterns.

Edit: Duh

I heard rumors that apple will come out with a new version of its iphone software and a new model iphone in June. I had to do some real digging to figure that out, including my own inside source (meaning, apple’s own press releases and public senior level interviews which tout the new version of the software and state that they intend to release new iphone models in the June timeframe)

Not that discussions about the features and the like isn’t interesting, but the rumor community is almost always either an order of magnitude overly optimistic or blazingly obviously.

Somedays I like the flexibility that unix provides, somedays I hate the convoluted ways that unix uses to provide said flexibility, and other days it is a mix. I think today is one of those days.

The problem I was trying to solve is that dreamhost installs subversion 1.4.x and my tools, increasingly, are looking for subversion 1.6 features. Instead of working around the incompatibility, I wanted to see if I could get a local 1.6 installation working under a shell account. Short answer is that it works, but requires some … interesting fiddling.

Steps:

1. Create a new dreamhost shell account to store SVN repos, we’ll call this account “repoacct”
2. Log into repoacct and download and compile subversion 1.6.1 as per http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Subversion_Installation with the minor correction that –with-zlib in the configuration command line should be –with-zlib=/usr/lib
3. Create an ssh key and put install it in the repoacct authorized keys, as per http://wiki.dreamhost.com/SSH#Passwordless_Login (if you don’t want to be password-less, set a password on the public key, but the next step needs the public key installed)
4. (convoluted step) modify authorized_keys as per http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/ssh-tricks. Specifically, I modified my key’s line to read:

command=”/path/t/svn-install/bin/svnserve -t -r /path/to/repo/directory” ssh-rsa <my key> seth@machine.name

The dirty simple installation, where I just install subversion and add it to my local path does not set svnserve, so it still ends up using the 1.4.x binaries when I try to work with the repo. This method ensures my new svnserve binary is being used.

I have a full drobo in my basement that is really being used as dead storage, storage for files that I do not want to lose, but do not need to access any more than, say, once a year. Ideally, I’d burn this stuff on tape or optical media and throw it in storage or a safe deposit box, instead of keeping it in a RAID or RAID-like box.

Tape is way too expensive, on the order of thousands to get a good setup, and current optical is too small. Individual drives are too unreliable. You’d think dead storage would be easier or cheaper than live storage …

So instead of being productive today, I played with improving my OmniFocus setup. I make heavy (and unfortunate) use of a neat AppleScript called Defer, which is a button I press when I don’t get something done when scheduled.

I wanted the opposite of Defer. When I go through my ToDo list in the morning, I want a button I press that says “do this task today”. So, based on the Defer script, I wrote the Today script, which can be found Here. This script will change the due dates of selected tasks to “today”.

The only major issue I see is the definition of “today”. So OmniFocus schedules on a per-minute granularity, so if you mark an item as due at 12 noon, at 12:01pm, that task is overdue. Further, OmniFocus (and AppleScript current date object) defaults to midnight, so marking an item as due “today” will automatically mark it as overdue.

OmniFocus lets you change the default time for due dates, which I have set to 11:59pm, which works for me. However, this value is not (as far as I can tell) exposed to AppleScript. So, I use the heuristic:

1. If the item selected has a due date, just change the year / month / day values to today
2. Otherwise, set the due date to today at 11:59pm, with that time being configurable in the script

… has a single button interface (like the iphone), but depending on how many times or how long you hold the button it does different things.

Somewhere, Tog is readying an air strike on Cupertino.

There is, I think, a fundamental disconnect between IDEs and source control systems. Each IDE has a set of ever-changing documents that litter the filesystem for each project.

Further, too often these project files are not relatively rooted, meaning that another developer may not be able to use my well crafted project files unless that user has the same directory structure as I.

Finally, all too often, just opening a project in my IDE results in several project files being changed, and a root-based checkin will break the build for any other developer.

So, ultimately, what is the best practice for dealing with project files? The only really viable option I see is to ignore project files complete, but that inevitably means that booting up a project on someone else’s machine or environment is expensive. My experiences with a complex J2EE project under eclipse requires at least an hour or two of build / tweak / rebuild on a new machine.

I’m convinced that my office is a reasonable argument for wireless USB. I count 5 hubs and 19 used USB ports.