Tag Archives: technology

FitBit

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My FitBit failed yesterday. The poor thing no longer wants to work and when I plugged it into the charging base it just started to flicker with half the display actually showing. It was just another nail in the coffin that was yesterday and I was only half-expecting FitBit to honor their warranty because I doubted I had my receipt.

As it turns out, I started rolling up my receipts and storing them in a little collection box in my kitchen. I opened the drawer last night and rooted around for it, not expecting to find it. Not only did I find it, but I also discovered to my chagrin that when I purchased the FitBit I also purchased the “Performance Guarantee” with Best Buy for $15, which covers the device for two years and expires on 8/28/2014. So not only do I not have to muck about with the warranty procedure and wait for shipping and processing, but I can get a new unit as soon as I can get myself down to Best Buy.

Now I know what I’m doing for lunch. :)

Help Yourself

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I have to admit to really enjoying the web service IFTTT. The service stands for If This, Then That. It allows you to create recipes from a menu of popular services where there is a public API available and move data back and forth not according to anyones design but your own, with IFTTT’s help, of course.

A great practical example is Twitter. On Twitter there is an account, MichiganDOT that is the public twitter mouthpiece for Michigan’s Department of Transportation, those folks responsible for the roads and rails and such. This twitter resource is valuable for many reasons the least of which is that MichiganDOT tweets about road hazard conditions and the presence of crashes or construction that would otherwise hamper movement within the Mitten. On its own Twitter is something that you have to grope for, you’ve got to start an app and page around to find what you are after and it’s all very manual — and annoying. I hate annoying. So how can you beat MichiganDOT, for example, into a service that sends you alerts? IFTTT.

The recipe in IFTTT to make this work is clever if you know the way to run around the back-end of Twitter. Several months ago Twitter closed their API to IFTTT making it difficult to create any new IFTTT recipes that use Twitter data to do automatic things. Twitter left a back door open, in that every Twitter account has an undocumented RSS feed associated with it, and all you need to know is the trick to get at it. IFTTT can consume RSS data, Twitter produces RSS data, so it’s kismet. The code you start with is this:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=michigandot

This plugs into IFTTT’s Feed source, then you connect that to IFTTT’s SMS destination, set it to your mobile phone number and the recipe is done! Just like that. Really easy and straightforward and now the very moment that anyone who staffs the MichiganDOT twitter account posts ANYTHING the RSS link lights up, IFTTT notices, copies it over to an SMS message and ships it out to my phone.

With the undocumented API backdoor from Twitter, MichiganDOT, and IFTTT I am able to recast the MichiganDOT twitter account as a “Michigan Road Conditions Alert Line” and I don’t need to sign up for anything or ask anyone for anything or cajole some developer to make something to make it work for me. In many ways, it is a clever way to have my cake and eat it too. I don’t have to schlep around in Twitter missing things, I get alerts, bam, as they happen.

The nice thing about IFTTT is it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can send any channel data anywhere you want. Twitter to Evernote, Twitter to Pocket, Facebook to Evernote, Facebook to Pocket… there are about 20 channels you can fiddle around with and you can shop around for other people’s recipes and adopt them and make them work for you. If you don’t have IFTTT, then you are missing out on a huge potential of DIY convenience. The best part is, nobody is the wiser. MichiganDOT has no notion, Twitter doesn’t care, so why not use what’s out there and make it work for you?

Biff! Bam! Bash!

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At work I’m trying to automate how I do some of my regular office tasks. So far everything is going swimmingly. Part of the deal is finding the most recent file in a list of files, because they are all named very similarly and only really differ by date, and I want the most recent one. At first I started looking at perl to do this, but then a few seconds later I realized I was over thinking it and I could use bash instead, since that’s the shell I’m using on my Mac anyhow. So with that figured out next I had to move on to mounting Samba filesystems to my Mac using bash. I’m used to the bash shell command-line so I knew what I needed from memory.

So there is a server I have at work, it’s been added to the Active Directory system here at Western and as such, it’s part of a domain. Classically I’ve always run my Windows Servers without mucking about in domains. Yes I know, there are management features I’ve missed out on, but the less complex a Windows Server is, the more reliable it is as well! So now I have to connect to a Samba share off a domain’ed Windows Server. I start with this command:

mount -t smbfs //domain;user:password@IP/mount /Volumes/mount

Which blows up in my face. The Mac can mount it using the GUI, but I don’t want to do that. The GUI would require human intervention and I don’t want that. And yes, for the pedants out there, storing the password in plaintext is a security problem, but frankly my dear, I’m not worried about it in this context, so fef. The error I got from bash was “No such file or directory” – gah! Nice and cryptic, thanks.

And then it hit me like a brick. It’s the stupid !@#$ semicolon! Come on guys! Why would you use THAT character to mean that!?! To bash, a semicolon is a statement terminator, it tells bash “We’re all done, move on to the next thing.” but it’s rarely ever used. Statements conclude on their own because the semicolon is optional. It’s optional, so nobody thinks about it, it’s still floating around in there, so now we have a condition where the mount_smbfs command, called by the mount wrapper command gets unacceptable input because bash is trying to follow it’s programming and being a right twat about it! I can’t really complain about bash, it’s been around since forever, so… right after I discovered the WTF semicolon and how it was upsetting bash I remembered that double-quotes come to the rescue. Yes, so now it’s:

mount -t smbfs “//domain;user:password@IP/mount” /Volumes/mount

Not too ugly. But this is a clear case of a bunch of human beings all working in parallel with each other but not really talking enough to each other. It’s not really a bug, but it is an annoyance. Why not use periods? Or underscores, or hyphens, or backtick symbols instead?

All’s well that ends well. The wrapped-in-quotes command worked, so hooray for that.

Google Drive Failure

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Google Drive is a failure.

Google Drive was released yesterday, and I clicked the button on the website letting Google know I was interested in their product. I received an email late last night informing me that my Google Drive was ready. This morning, on a lark really, I went to the Google Drive website and clicked on the download link for the sync application to add to my work iMac. I downloaded the DMG fie without a problem and opened it up. I copied the Google Drive app to my Applications folder, like you are supposed to with Macintosh, and then I sat back and marveled at it. Google Drive, finally.

I’ve been a loyal Dropbox customer for years and back in January I sprang for the $100 a year expansion of my Dropbox up to 50GB. Everything I use connects to my Dropbox via the Dropbox API and just for the record, I am totally in-love with Dropbox. There is no reason for me to leave them as a customer. But even if you are loyal, it doesn’t mean you can’t explore. I have a professional account with Box.com through my work, and we arranged that after drop.io was consumed by the wraiths at Facebook. I have a personal Box.net account with 50GB but I don’t use it because Box only allows sync with paid accounts, so it’s not worth my while. Google Drive was just along these lines, just another option to look into.

So I started Google Drive on my iMac and I was asked to authenticate, something I expected. Then nothing. I started the app again and nothing. I opened up the Console app and here is what I found:

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e2ba80 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e37440 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e332f0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e32600 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:45 AM [0x0–0x221c21a].com.google.GoogleDrive[22481] 2012–04–25 07:17:45.119 Google Drive Icon Helper[22488:903] Inject result: 0

So, it’s broken. This isn’t the first time a new app was built that failed horribly on my iMac. If anyone cares, and perhaps if anyone from Google is reading, this is a standard 2009–2010 iMac running Mac OSX 10.6.8. The only thing different about this particular Mac is that the account has it’s home on an AFP-connected OD-domain’ed Apple xServer. A network home. This causes headaches for Adobe Acrobat Reader so it’s probably the reason why Google Drive collapses on startup.

Since I can’t run the application, and since it wasn’t designed elegantly to take into account those people who have network-based computers like mine – unlike Box.com’s sync app or Dropboxes sync app, I can only state that Google Drive is not ready for prime time. Google Drive is not ready to compete in the marketplace and Google has to go back to the drawing board and try again.

Abandoning Google Plus

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Yesterday I opened my Google Plus page and discovered to my surprise and initial pleasure that Google had brought a new interface to their social network system. As I started to explore this new interface I started to immediately notice that things had changed not for the better, but rather for the worse. Google had unilaterally included their chat system on the right side of my browser window, it’s something I rarely ever use so that system is all wasted space. I noticed that the stories in my circles, the things I really care about are now shuffled off to the left in a column that lost 10% of space on the leftmost and 50% on the rightmost, being moved over for some controls at the very top of the page that now occupy this dreaded whitespace region on my Google Plus page.

It’s this whitespace, and the meaningless chat talker system that I can’t stand. Facebook attempted a similar move by presenting me with a chat-talker screen on the left side as well months ago, when I still used Facebook. When they made the changes to their interface, along with privacy concerns and workplace issues with social networking I left Facebook. Now it just languishes as an identity marker, if content gets on my Facebook page it’s wholly accidental. Twitter’s web page also underwent this columnar approach, as they reconfigured the entire interface out from underneath their users. For Twitter, I stopped using that because it was more noisy than useful, the people I wanted to engage with were just human billboards, and the interface changes were really the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So what is there to do? Complaints about the interface changes are really the only channel you have to express how much you dislike when a service does this to you – but you have no real power. Just complaining is one easily ignored tiny little voice in the darkness and doesn’t amount to anything at all. The only real power that any single user has is the power of choice. In the end, the only choice I have to make is, do I want to still use the system? It’s actually a matter of abandonment. I abandoned Facebook. I abandoned Twitter. Because they changed the interface and made it less useful to me, I am facing the idea of abandoning Google Plus. I don’t need these social network systems to give my life meaning. They need me, or rather, they need aggregate me’s, lots of people, to give what they do meaning. The less people use a socially networked system the less appealing that system is to everyone else. Facebook is only compelling because everyone uses it. There is no real value inherent in Facebook itself. This is a lesson that the classic business models these companies use can’t take into account – that their popularity defines their success. If they make a grossly unpopular change to the interface, then people will flee and their success will go tits up.

I don’t care to encourage other people to abandon these systems if they like them. Each of us has to make these kinds of decisions on a wholly personal level. I find it obnoxious that Google, and Facebook, and Twitter for that matter all force interface changes on users without giving the user any control whatsoever. It would be more elegant if there were a batch of controls we could select from and build our own interface. Put the bits and pieces where we want, opt out of things we don’t care for and make the interface work best for us, as the users. None of these sites have done that, they all behave as if they have global fiat to make changes willy-nilly. The end user who has to contend with these changes can’t do anything really except make that singular choice surrounding the issue of abandonment.

So where do I go now? It’s comic, but in many ways I am looking forward to going backwards. There is one system that I’ve used, mostly as a category but the people behind what I currently use I regard as being the platonic form of that category, and that is WordPress. Going back to blogging. What does the WordPress infrastructure have that attracts me? It’s got stable themes, the site looks very much like it always has. There are changes, but they aren’t as gross in scope as these other systems have perpetrated. I can share links on WordPress, I can write long posts, short status updates, and WordPress has a competent comment system already in place.

So I will give Google Plus until May 1st to do something better with their interface, to recognize the value in the stream and give us users the choice of what systems we want to see on our Google Plus page. Google should give us the ability to turn off the whitespace region, we should be able to turn off the chat talker region, so that we can maximize the stream region. If they fail to correct these glaring human interface deficits I will do to Google Plus what I did to Facebook. I will abandon Google Plus. I will keep the account running but I will no longer actively use it. Things that end up on Google Plus will end up being the same sort of things that end up washing up on Twitter, specifically links to content on my WordPress blog. Google’s loss will be WordPress’ gain. WordPress has always done right by me, and I respect them. I do not respect Twitter, nor do I respect Facebook. My respect for Google is quixotic at best. I used to believe in their “Do No Evil” company mantra, but that has been shed as Google has done some very evil acts, they aren’t what they once were and this sullying of their image makes the pending abandonment easy.

Will my abandonment hurt Google? No, of course not. I’m not so full of myself as to think that me leaving will change anything about the service, that Google will even notice my absence. However if I can inspire other people to give another look at WordPress, maybe see that progress forward can be achieved by regressing to earlier systems may be a worthy pursuit if what you get in the trade is interface stability. That this single raindrop encourages others to fall. The raindrop doesn’t believe it is responsible for the flood. I can only hope that I help the flood along. These massive changes that these social network sites perpetrate on their usership should be punished! We want it all, we want to use the service and we want to control it as well. We want the interface to be regular, logical, useful and static. When we want to make a change, we want to be the ones making it. We do not want to be victims of someones good intentions, Google! I would say this for Facebook as well, but that’s a lost cause.

So time is ticking away. If Google does not act, then the stream on that service is terminal. If that comes to pass, I will be migrating to my WordPress blog.

I hope to see some of you there.

Flashback Trojan on Mac OSX

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Apple makes some marvelous products. In this case, I’m talking about Apple Remote Desktop. With ARD I was able to scan every single one of my client Macs to check to see if any of them were infected with the Flashback Trojan Horse. Before my scan I would have sworn on whatever-you-like that none of my systems that I manage here at WMU were infected. Turns out I was right.

Macs really aren’t susceptible to viruses and the biggest threat comes from Trojan Horses. To scan a mac for infection you just open up Terminal and run these two commands:

  • defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
  • defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

If you get an error from both of those commands, you are in the clear. It’s quite easy to do, mostly just opening up Terminal and copying and pasting and getting the errors and being satisfied. The removal instructions are straightforward to follow, so even removal of an active infection should be a snap.

If you try these commands and don’t get errors, don’t panic. Just let me know and I’ll find a way to help you out.

Tearing Down

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While doing the usual weekend chores last Sunday I bumped the vacuum cleaner into the table where my old computer and desktop used to be. Ever since my iPad and iPhone the location and nature of much of my computing tasks at home have radically shifted. I no longer spend such long hours sitting in front of a huge machine playing online games. Now I just use my phone to tend to email and read for the most part.

This change in how I use technology isn’t reflected in this room upstairs in my house that has for the most part been neglected. So there needs to be a reckoning. I need to sort through this area and pitch what has to be removed and generally de-clutter that part of my house. It feels a lot like a callus that has built up over time and it’s a kind of clutter that you don’t really see any more except when you run the vacuum cleaner into it. There is a general sense of simplification that appeals to me and this table full of wasted technology needs to be figured out.

Along with this I have five closet areas that need to be generally gunged. There is a coat closet on the ground floor that needs to be seriously organized, the guest room closet needs to be exhumed and dealt with, then all the upstairs closets need to be gone through. There are things I no longer need, want, or can use. Clothing, knick-knacks, and various orders of past debris that all need to be evaluated and sorted and organized.

This weekend I think will be a fantastic opportunity to address these situations, at least for as much as I can do on my own. We’ll see just how much progress I can make.

Spinning Governor

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I’ve come up with ways to cope with the network connection throttle that I recently discovered was behind a lot of my network woes here at work. In my regularly scheduled workaday use of the Internet I usually find myself consuming at least 150 connections if not more because everything I use was built with the assumption that establishing multiple connections is free and easy. There is no parsimony when it comes to using the network, and you see this exemplified most of all in the design of browsers like Firefox. When you fetch a page, most modern browsers will attempt to also-fetch possible pages you may want so that they can appear faster. This is fine if you have an unlimited number of connections that you can make to the network. That isn’t the case here.

I can live with the throttle. I understand why it’s in place and knowing that it exists helps in that it keeps me from questioning my sanity when I didn’t know it existed and thought the problem was with me or my computer. It’s neither. So there are some ways to address my problem. Specifically the route to a better life is ironically through the same devices that are at the center of the entire ‘running out of IP space’ problem, iOS devices. My iPhone and iPad have apps that can bring me interfaces to Internet resources that I need to use, and they can free up my computer so that I can help avoid the connection quota throttle. For example, instead of opening up Toodledo in Safari I can open up the Toodledo app on my iPhone. Different device, different connection quota. My iPhone doesn’t make so many connections and if I did need that feature I could very easily drop wifi and use the 3G data circuit. I can do a lot of other things too, like manipulate Asana, run my eMail through my iPad, that sort of thing.

So, in a way, the connection throttle has shifted the load from one device to three. At first this was kind of a pain in the ass, but over time I’ve come to see that this could become more efficient. It frees my computer up for the heavier things, like Google Reader and such. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Mopping Up

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At work we have moved to a new “Engagement Platform” called iModules. Some of you already know something about this as I’ve shared stories about it with some of you before.

The system is up and running. I have to admit that I’m quite glad that the implementation phase of the project has reached a conclusion, as it took six months to get this wobbly-legged foal up on it’s feet and bouncing around.

This entire project still has some pieces to mop up, most notably the mopjob that I have to do surrounding our old platform, WordPress. Honestly I’m sad to see our use of WordPress in this regard come to a close as WordPress has been a wonderful platform and still is for my personal blog here as well as my “Captains Log” blog. I still maintain the “Captains Log” blog, but there have been lessons in using that as well. That particular one uses WordPress’s own P2 theme and for a time I opened it up and made it publicly available. This turned out to be a great mistake. I got heat from nearly every corner, mostly to do with keeping technical details private to non-maliciously violating an email clickwrap nonverbal unsigned unread agreement. I admit that the draw that the WordPress platform provides, free clouded hosting can’t be beat as far as I’m concerned. So for the “Captains Log” P2 blog, it’s gone private which makes all the previous gripers go silent as they can’t get past the “Please Login” barricade. So, once again thanks to WordPress I’ve found yet another way to “Have my cake and eat it too”.

We have moved the work stuff off to iModules and you all can see the efforts at our new site, MyWMU.com and thanks to our students and our staff who moved the contents off of our WordPress site and onto the new site, the speed of which was honestly shocking to me. Now the mopping up is all that remains. There were three blogs, Old WMYou, WMYou, and Western Express. The first and third have been backed up and purged from the system, but the middle one is stuck and I have a support ticket opened up with WordPress to help address it. We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to update my personal blog, of course, and I will continue to enrich the P2 “Captains Log” and I really think other organizations should make use of WordPress for this great feature. It’s a great way to keep information handy, and takes the onus off the staff to remember the past as the system does it for you, time and date stamps, tags, categories, and the commenting system – not that the last part is really used for our P2 blog, but still. Not having to worry about hosting, cost, security, not to mention the ubiquity of ways to access the WordPress system make it the most compelling way to manage the working log of any business or help desk.

The only thing that I would like from WordPress, but would likely start running into real money (which I would pay, mind you) would be a Help Desk CRM overlaid on top of their P2 theme system. Some way for people to email problems or browse to the site and enter issues and the system gives them a trouble ticket number for tracking and we can lurk in the dark, hovering over this blog. That would leverage the logging goodness of P2 and it’s great usability and I don’t think it would be all that hard to code. I know there are Help Desk solutions for WordPress.org, but I really REALLY prefer to use WordPress.com. Perhaps someday in the future WordPress.com will get around to something like this. Time will tell.

Too Much

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Anytime I walk into a library, a bookstore, or any other place where a lot of media is all concentrated together either for lending or sale or just browsing the same thought occurs to me: How can anyone have any hope of seeing what is to be seen?

I’ve mused about this for a very long time. It strikes me that the entirety of the human oeuvre could be represented by Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. That thoughts and ideas occupy another sphere overlaid on the Earth, created by thinking creatures. This is very handy as it brings the idea of a sphere right in to the concept at the center of my writing. Is it possible anymore for any one of us to possibly see the entire sphere from one side to the other? I think there is a personal horizon that each of us is chained to, we can only see that part of the noosphere that we are either local to or interested in. Ultimately this question becomes a concern for answering the really big and important questions. The sense that we won’t cure cancer, we won’t stumble into room-temperature superconductivity, or practical fusion energy without some sort of broad synthesis across multiple disciplines. The way it feels to me, and I don’t have any proof of any of this, it’s all just intuition here, is that humanity has created a huge repository of ideas and that if the right person at the right time had access to the perfect constellation of ideas that some of the answers to the really big questions would pop out in a kind of ‘eureka’ rush of creativity and development.

I’ve spoken of these things with some friends especially when I’m in a pensive mood and the situation for such deep discussions are ripe. One thing that is a recent turn is the advent of social networking. We are relating more and more to each other, communicating more, writing more, talking more, sharing more. There are structures that have formed like Wikipedia which to me resembles a coral reef of information more than how it’s plainly stated, a free online encyclopedia that is crowdsourced. I suppose it’s the romantic in me that sees information not being added to Wikipedia as a matter of some dedicated purpose but rather that it’s information that washes up onto Wikipedia and builds over time. In Clive Barker’s Great and Secret Show the principal characters had something very much akin to how I consider Wikipedia (and other sites, really, that operate like it) in the dead-letter office. That little chunks of Art wash up over the years and collect like cruft in this office. That information created by all of us washes up on Wikipedia and collects like cruft on this site.

It is important to get back to the beginning again, that when I walk into my local Barnes & Nobles that I have the distinct feeling that I won’t be able to read and understand the contents of that building. That’s just the start. Then you expand it out to Waldo Library, and then the Kalamazoo Public Library, and it keeps on going all the way out to the Library of Congress and then kind of crashes upon the concept of the Internet as a whole. There is no time, there is not enough energy in my life to do any of that and that life demands so much else from you that even if you wanted to do anything of the sort there just isn’t any time, hope, or inclination for it. In a way, I posit that the content that humanity has created has defeated humanities hope to encompass it. So there may be the answers to life, the universe and everything out there, it’s just that none of us have hope to put the threads together and start drawing some of those big conclusions.

Perhaps however there is some hope in social networking and Wikipedia, structures where disparate information washes up and because it’s concentrated the threads are closer, easier to tie together and maybe we can move forward using those systems to help us. A lot of this is covered by Wolfram Alpha as well as some other artificial intelligence projects where information scientists have sensed this potential problem and maybe a machine could encompass human content and help us understand what it is that we’ve created.

This all may be the pressure behind the next stage of human evolution. First we took care of the needs of our genetics, making survival a triviality. Then we exploded with ideas, creating a noosphere too large for us to handle, and then the next pressure is based on encompassing and cultivating that noosphere. We need to get to the next stage of development which isn’t so much expanding as concentrating what we have already discovered about the world and about existence. In a way, perhaps the next stage of human evolution, the continued pursuit of ever more complicated cortexes in our brains will come in the generations to come. Children born with the tools needed to begin the pursuit of collection and concentration, eidetic memory, highly efficient relationship cognition. Children able to walk into a library and in an afternoon consume every ounce of information contained within the walls. It’s going to be those with those innate talents who may be able to bring what we imagine and what we dream about into reality.

How about the rest of us? In that perhaps technology will provide us a shortcut, perhaps a preview of what is to come for us all. That we can get peeks into what may be to come through things like Wolfram Alpha, through the AI projects, hell, even through something as quaint as Wikipedia. If nothing else, it is interesting to think about and engaging to talk about.