proba tive org archives

It took a few minutes this morning for me to convince myself it was really Thursday already. But it is. That's what coding does for me.

Experience made me write a debug message script first. And yesterday I got my login/logout script working. I think I've almost figured out sessions and would have reached this level of understanding even faster had I not gone looking on the web for 'information'. It's starting to look like a good book is worth the investment. Few of the reputedly reliable sources I've found on the web are moderated. Instead they seem to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to post 'illuminations', 'corrections'. contradictions and debates that do nothing for the newbie.

Not to mention the PHP guys themselves. Maybe it's just me, but if I was developing a platform/framework and had existing users I'd be very careful and upfront about changing interfaces and behaviour of functions. In fact there's no reason functions should change behaviour. New behaviour means new function. At least in my world it would.

Why do users (developers in this case) put up with this nonsense? Is the 'cost' of Open Source software necessarily offset by the predictable effort of rewriting your applications at the whim of the platform developers? Isn't this one of the sins for which Mr. Gates has been criticized and condemned by (members of) this same community? (Meaning Open Source, not PHP. I have no knowledge of their opinion on this.)

In other news: The post office has managed to deliver two bills and my new health card to my mailbox this week. My brother has called me and made me laugh twice. My son is ignoring my emails (but that won't stop me sending them!). I know, I know, he's busy. Maybe I should send him another calendar? Or install a web cam in his office? It's been done before...

I attended a gathering of the Ottawa chapter of the UW Alumni this week (see, I've been doing more than just coding after all!). One of the speakers presented some interesting data comparing the average returns on venture capital between, you guessed it, Canada and the US. (He is a Canadian VC looking for money in the US) VC invested in Canadian companies averaged 2-3% return in the first few years while the US average was 22%. He presented these (and other) figures as a basis for his belief that Canada needs to concentrate on quality over quantity in the entrepreneurial sector. Canada creates more new companies than the US apparently, but only one star (RIM - interestingly not VC backed) to compare to the constellation attributable to US innovations.

To me, though, the data could also be interpreted as support for choosing the US market both as an entrepreneur and an employee.

November has brought winter to Ottawa. Not very picturesque at the moment. Just windy, cold and sloppy. Half rain, half snow = slush storm.

Coincidentally, this incredible fire has been doused.

... the price of gas fell below the discount offered as an incentive to buy a car? Not likely, but - would you get the extra cash? Granted it would be odd to be paid to buy gas, but it would be a nice change.

This strange train of thought led me to wondering how gas prices across the border compare these days. So I investigated and found that the average price in Ontario is 82 ¢ per litre. The average US price: $2.00 per gallon which works out to about 53 ¢ per litre. And, no, I didn't do any exchange rate calculations because I wanted to compare the costs for residents, not visitors.

[ Update - entry made visible Nov 8 ]

On Saturday I was out for a stroll in the Glebe (a great place for strolling) when I was taken aback by the National Post's front page story, stopping to glance at what was readable through the front of the box. Convinced I had possibly misunderstood the article, I looked it up online and found that I had not.

From their web site today (with link to the original article):

Bra burns with social significance

It will no doubt be dismissed by some as "a tempest in a B-cup," but when the women's volleyball team from the University of Alberta began their fight for the right to briefly doff their shirts this past week, they were joining a long-established tradition of feminist activity using the most sexualized and complicated symbol of womanhood there is: The bra.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that this probably doesn't qualify as front page worthy "news", it is disconcerting to think that women have come so far and yet much has not changed.

Yes, we have been declared "persons" and have a monument or two now celebrating the women who made the fuss that got that little oversight amended. (Seems England didn't have a problem with the word persons including women, just some folks in Canada.) We got the vote (not that long ago, either). We gained admission to higher education and finally have insinuated ourselves into almost every profession and trade. We still (as a group) make less than our male counterparts, so equal pay for equal work is yet to be realized. And we still do an inordinate amount of devalued and 'volunteer' labour.

This must be the 80/20 rule at work.

Sensational and ridiculous reactions to female body parts during this century create a bit of cognitive dissonance. A brief flash of breast during the Superbowl was cause for a fine. Penalties now for the female athletes who dare to be seen in a gym wearing sports bras.

So, um, we're all equal over here now, except for unfathomable dress rules. And that pay equity thing. The Goddess is not amused BTW.

Postings may become less frequent here for a while due to the huge increase in fun that has come my way. I'm now involved in the starting of yet another software company here in Ottawa.

We haven't gotten to the fun part just yet, but pretty soon I'll be putting my money where my mouth has been for many years. Meaning I'll be setting up R&D the way I always knew it should be.

Next stop - crazy fun!

The cozy room that is my home office - cozy in the real estate listing sense - is doing a great imitation of a hurricane disaster area. All three systems are Dells and I think I have been on the phone with them or visiting their less than intuitive (why'd they change it anyway?) web spot almost constantly for the past two days.

I've managed to replace the video adapter on one system in an attempt to eliminate the shadows that made the monitor painful to use. The card works great. But the screen still sucks far too much, so now it is sharing the monitor that the other desktop system uses. This dual boot system can only boot one OS, so I will be starting from scratch - ha ha. It's been this way for a while and didn't really bother me, but now I'd like to use both operating systems.

I have a wireless router but the notebook it was put in place to service is without joy. Won't boot and doesn't have a CD rom. An external drive was ordered but arrived without cables. Now I'm debating whether it's worth the trouble.

The third system is just plain slow (a pseudo OS - Win98) but is for the moment up and running and affording access to the web and email and printer. I'm sure it will all look better in the morning or some such thing.

Tomorrow I'd like to get the boxes of manuals and discs sorted and unpacked so I can actually find things I'm certain I have before any more chaos develops.

In the good news department, a VOIP phone line will soon be part of my life. The company cell that I've been using is on Fido's network. This part of Ottawa (my office) is not well covered it seems and I am constantly losing bits of sentences. This doesn't happen with my personal cell on the Rogers network. And frankly, I don't think sending a text message to tell me that a voice mail has arrived or a call was missed really cuts it. Who thought of that?

Oh look, I'm out of ranting time...darn.

I have arrived at solution to the monitor problem that is simply marvelous: a KVM switch! The earlier situation had the disadvantage of a shared monitor with separate keyboards and mice. Sure to drive me bonkers I was afraid. For much less than the cost of a monitor, I have recouped desk space and made my life easier at the same time. An unexpected advantage is that the machines themselves can now be located a fair distance from the desk.

The rest of the chaos has not been addressed due to time spent on other more pressing activities. But soon, very soon. Just not tonight - I've spent more energy than anticipated and need to rest.

It took all day because I kept trying to find a less drastic solution, but when your MBR is screwed up, you have to get drastic. FDISK'd it and Formatted the whole damn thing.

Three versions of Windows now boot when requested during startup: 98, NT 4.0 (SP6a) and XP. Now I just have to get RedHat in working order and the fun really starts.

I'm sort of tempted to give it a whirl, but I know if it messes up part of my head will be trying to figure it all out while it should be sleeping.

Yeah, well... talk about losing ground. Today I merrily booted my triple boot system into NT and some things weren't kosher. Like services not starting and dll's that the OS seemed not to know where they were (I found them with the file browser). Hmmmm.

I figured since XP was the last one added last night, perhaps some things were messed with. Tried to repair NT and now it won't do nuthin'. Can't even detect the hardware on boot now....Ha Ha. It "suggests" that my disk is damaged or corrupt. Right. And why would that be?

Glad I didn't tell anyone else about my supposed coup.

While pondering the absolute (IMO at the time) inanity of DOS telling me there wasn't enough room on my 40G drive to install it. I finally realized that I'd been missing something in the process yesterday and most of today. All my fault for installing all these windows OS's on the same drive. Right. Even though MS says you can, I shoulda been smarter than that.

Now that the rust has been removed from my head gear and the dust has settled, I'm giving it another shot. And this time each OS gets its very own space on the disk. DUH.

Okay. I've given up on Windows 98, but now have DOS, WinNT, WinXP and RH9 installed each on their very own partition. One more RH install (server instead of workstation) and then... and then... I'll install a boot manager to handle them.

Oh yes I will!

I just had to get RH installed today (night?) in order to feel like anything remotely resembling progress had been achieved.

Sometime in the not too distant future, I want to add memory to both systems. Might be soon, too if there's not enough to run the application I've been setting all this up to play with... someone predicted that would be the case, but I just need to give it a shot. You know?

International Express shipping log. I guess I shouldn't complain TOO much... it DID make it to Canada from the US, but WTF is happening to it now? I heard somewhere that there's a UPS strike on, so maybe couriers everywhere are overloaded.

Still this seems incredible. Maybe I should ask for the truck's license plate number and find it myself!

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Well, I don't "got it", but it's at the office services place for me to pick up tomorrow. I should rant more often about things I'm waiting for ... maybe? Would that it was that simple to eradicate inefficiency and bumbling.

Stress was catching up with me and I had a couple of issues to take care of so I took today off from the chaos, picked up my VoIP terminal, got it all set up and it is totally awesome. I love Vonage. They have saved me from eating my "never again" statement to Bell. I should send them a thank you card or something.

Had to see my GP to get some referrals set up and more pain killers, and then had dinner with a friend.

Got back here just now and the snow is flying. Big fat flakes, too. Luckily I found my winter extremity gear earlier today while looking for something else in the boxes.

Didn't get any more done on the multiboot project. Maybe on the weekend.

Were I a customer of CIBC, this article in the Globe and Mail today would have me immediately putting my cash in my mattress.

Wade Peer says he has been overwhelmed since 2001 by internal CIBC fund transfer request forms containing the social insurance numbers, home addresses, phone numbers and detailed bank account data of several hundred bank customers.

Wade is in West Virginia. I hope he wins the lawsuit he's brought against them and I hope CIBC's customers get up the nerve to sue as well. In typical corporate defensive posturing, CIBC is maintaining that it's not their fault. I want some of what they're smoking.

Note to CIBC: To eliminate human error - eliminate the humans.

CIBC's soap opera continues. They'll be asking a US court to protect the information they shouldn't have allowed out.

Yeah, let's make sure Mr. Peer doesn't let this stuff get out. And let's not mention that he's been trying to get us to stop this loss of confidentiality for years.

Seems to me that seeking court protection makes an affected customer's legal action against them a slam dunk. It also seems unlikely that the misdirection of faxes has been limited to just one dialing pattern leading to Mr. Peer's business number. How many others haven't bothered to report the problem or did report it to CIBC but haven't been publicized?

After much tossing and stashing and organizing, I can see the top of my desk again and move around this little office without bumping into things. In the process I found the key to my small fire proof safe when I was looking for something else.

A few phone calls and emails, only two of which having been my doing, and voila! Family Christmas plans have been finalized this weekend. The fact that I now reside in Ottawa, which was mainly my doing, has simplified the logistics considerably.

Tech career stalling? Unmarried and male? Don't mind inheriting some bad PR? This sector is recruiting.

Every time I touch this system I end up starting (almost) from scratch again. Mr. Hoye asked why I was doing this a while back. The reasons haven't changed: I'm trying to set up a lab system for the exploration of the software product we're acquiring.

The only way I have of doing so at this time is to download a trial version from the current vendor's site. The only OS's that are common between us are WinNT, WinXP (sorta) and RedHat. The other folks in this new company have years of experience with the product and told me that to get a look at the code I should download the Linux demo. Yesterday I did just that after finally getting DOS, NT, XP and RH all on my drive. No boot manager, but that was okay - I had diskettes to boot into RH; NT & XP were bootable with the NT boot manager.

Got the demo downloaded and even though it wouldn't run and the available documentation was not helpful, I figured I could at least get a peek at the Java source. Eclipse had been recommended as a potential IDE for us and it's free, so it was downloaded. But of course lack of memory became an issue. That's when I decided to setup Eclipse on XP and copy the source there. Before I did that I thought a boot manager would be a good idea.

This endeavour is fraught with short term handicaps - no funds compounded by a lack of experience with IT administration. Making do with what is at hand means I have to have WinNT to use the version of PartitionMagic that I own and to install XP. To install XP without a CD rom working, one must create 6 (!) floppies just to get to the point that one can use the CD. I discovered this last night when I'd messed up the existing Windows partition, again due to lack of experience and access to manuals. (I now officially hate Windows installation.)

Wanting to have a way to recover in case I messed up the boot manager, I decided it was time to make a Rescue Disk for WinNT. Ha Ha Ha. I checked the Admin Tools installed with NT but there was no mention of a utility to do this. 'Help' didn't have anything to offer either. During the installation it had asked if I wanted to create one but since a Service Pack was also needed, I figured I'd do it a bit later. Later had become now.

I explored the installation CD. Nothing useable there. I decided to restart the installation, and create an RD that way. (IT folks are cringing now.) As I recall, once it became clear that I wasn't going to get that option, I exited the setup. Bad bad bad idea. A web search told me about the RDISK command. No problem. Made an RD while cursing MS for being so freaking stupid as to think RDISK should be a secret. But it was too late as the Sys Admins rolling on the floor can tell you.

My hard drive had been messed with by the aborted re-installation of NT. Up to that point, it had only told me it was putting some files on my drive - but not where. And when I decided to exit Setup, all it told me was that the installation was not completed and I'd have to run Setup again later - but not that my system had been rendered unuseable.

Booted PartitionMagic from diskette and found that the drive was a complete mess. First it repaired a couple of problems automatically. Once it got running, both of the NTFS partitions (NT and XP) were unknown. Couldn't reformat them either.

I've seen the demo of my new product running on XP, so I decided I'd simplify my life for the moment and give up on NT altogether. Removed the two formerly NTFS partitions and tried install XP from CD. Found out why that didn't work and tried to get around making way too many diskettes by booting into ME first. (ME installs from CD but XP doesn't. Sheesh!) When the XP install got running, it tried to put it on the tiny DOS partition where there was pretty obviously not enough room.

Today I am going to get XP up and running. I can just feel it.

UPDATE: I just located all my computer books. Not IT books, but still... I feel a bit more 'equipped' now. Just a smidge.