joelgibby.net

-- Sharp guy with cool glasses

My glasses are pitiful. Deep gashes in the lenses, discolored anti-reflective coating (from rubbing them with my shirt - hey they can’t get any worse, right?), flaking “titanium” paint, and one of the bridge thingies that sits on your nose fell off a few months ago. I was in need of new glasses.  I had read a bit about getting cheap eyeglasses online at http://glassyeyes.com/ and was set to do it.  

I went to my local optometry clinic, got my exam ($5 copay), looked at all the way overpriced frames (anywhere from $102 to $300), and asked for my prescription, asking them to include my Pupillary Distance (needed for ordering glasses online). Just because I was curious, I asked if they had any bargain-basement frames that would be anywhere close to my covered insurance level. The nice lady said theyhad received a whole box of new Nike frames in bulk recently and that she would price them at my covered amount (all the other Nike frames on the shelf were $160 and up) 

Here’s the frames I got: http://www.theyedoctor.com/products/_cid_10001-mid_10484-pid_166528__product.aspx

Listed there at 107.99 – She priced them at or below $85  (that’s my insurance coverage, so I had no out of pocket). Lenses will be $5 copay, and I *did* get the polycarbonate material ($50, but less than the ultra-high index at $115), but I figured the anti-reflective is a waste (108$) as it rubs off after a year, looks “green” and even though it has a 2 year warranty, who seriously warranties out their lenses? So for $55 I got glasses that I used to pay 2-300 dollars for just by asking for a deal. I’m still going to get a pair online for a backup, but thought it might be good informatio to share.

Our office participates in the Dell Warranty Parts Direct service program. Basically it allows us to be “self-maintainers” and order our own warranty parts as needed rather than having to wait on hold with support to go through the same troubleshooting steps we’ve already completed. It’s usually an efficient way to get bad parts replaced under warranty. One of my coworkers ordered a motherboard last week. Today when he opened the antistatic bag he got an unwelcome surprise:

The Intel ICH7 chip and surrounding components were heat damaged and filthy. There was also what looked like burned thermal grease all over the chip (suggesting that a heat sink may have been installed, though the original failed board in our system had no heat sink and the chip was as clean as it was from the factory). Click the image to get a larger view. 

Flipping the board over revealed additional damage to the contacts for the various components installed around the chip:

As a disclaimer, we’ve never seen damage like this before in warranty parts sent to us. In fact, most parts are in great shape and some even have that “factory new” smell to them. This instance though, seems like either laziness or incompetence. I don’t know how something this bad could have made it through any quality control process. Visual inspection should have been the first clue. It’s not like it’s just dusty. IT’S SCORCHED. I also don’t know how much difference blogging about it will make, but at least it’s documented out there now. Dell, what’s up?

We will be seeing some (hopefully positive) changes in the way Comcast manages their network; specifically Peer to Peer traffic to and from their customers.

On August 1st, the FCC released a press statement skewering Comcast’s practice of throttling or dropping altogether traffic bound for or coming from their customers that is classified as “Peer to Peer.” The statement starts off by detailing how Comcast first lied about shaping this type of traffic altogether:

When first confronted with press reports about these difficulties, Comcast disclaimed any responsibility for its customers’ problems. However, after tests conducted by the Associated Press and Electronic Frontier foundation suggested that Comcast was selectively interfering with attempts by customers to share files online using peer-to-peer applications, Comcast changed its story and admitted that it did target its subscribers’ peer-to-peer traffic for interference. The company initially claimed that it did so only during periods of peak network congestion and of heavy network traffic. Later, confronted with yet more evidence suggesting that interference was not limited in this manner, Comcast recast its position yet again and admitted that it interferes with peer-to-peer traffic regardless of the level of overall network congestion at the time and regardless of the time of day.

The article goes on to use language that historians may recall someday:

The Commission concluded that Comcast’s network management practices discriminate among applications rather than treating all equally and are inconsistent with the concept of an open and accessible Internet.  

It also looks at why Comcast may REALLY be trying to stop or least interfere with P2P traffic on their network:

Indeed, the Commission noted that Comcast has an anticompetitive motive to interfere with customers’ use of peer-to-peer applications. Such applications, including those relying on BitTorrent, provide Internet users with the opportunity to view highquality video that they might otherwise watch (and pay for) on cable television. Such video distribution poses a potential competitive threat to Comcast’s video-on-demand (“VOD”)service.

…

Because Comcast did not provide its customers with notice of the fact that it interfered with customers’ use of peer-to-peer applications, customers had no way of knowing when Comcast was interfering with their connections. As a result, the Commission found that many consumers experiencing difficulty using only certain applications would not place blame on Comcast, where it belonged, but rather on the applications themselves, thus further disadvantaging those applications in the competitive marketplace.

And finally, the prescription:

Under the plan, within 30 days of release of the Order Comcast must:

• Disclose the details of its discriminatory network management practices to the Commission.
• Submit a compliance plan describing how it intends to stop these discriminatory management practices by the end of the year.
• Disclose to customers and the Commission the network management practices that will replace current practices

I can already feel the bandwidth. Let’s hope the FCC keeps up this precedent-setting style.

Came across Johnny Lee’s work on using the Wiimote as a low-cost IR camera for interacting with displays. He’s got a couple of really neat applications demo’d on his site: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ 

The one that really caught my eye was one that could turn any surface into a multitouch display interface using only a Wiimote and a projecter or LCD panel. Check it out:

Here’s something I completely missed, probably because it was eclipsed by the rabid praise of the iPhone and manufactured hype of MS Surface:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfFwgPuEdSk

It would be nice to see real innovation be rewarded and reported rather than advertising dollars deflect our attention.Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places.

Here I sit, 10:00PM on a weeknight formatting my harddrive after backing up all my important data. Looking over my shoulder I see the yellow progress bar of the XP setup telling me that the quick format is almost done. Soon setup will be copying the old files I know so well back to the system32 folder and I will begin my day tomorrow with the fresh feeling that reloading XP from scratch brings. Maybe I just wasn’t ready for the future. Maybe the future is broken. Maybe XP is just better.

I’ve been running Vista on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop for the past 4 months, enjoying some of the great new features such as the integrated search (Start, type “SMS” and you’ve got the SMS admin console at your fingertips), the live thumbnails (wow, I can see what my browsers and media players have open when I ALT+TAB!), and, um, hmm… what else was there? Well, I can’t remember right now. The only thing I can remember is that routinely I’ve had to suspend my computer just to get my wireless working, had to wait for what seemed like hours to copy files across a gigabit network, watched packet captures that showed my computer (while looking idle to an end user) pouring out megabyte after megabyte of unnecessary traffic onto the wire, and have had to hold down the power button to shut down my laptop more times than I can count just to try and get some work done. There is no way that Aero is worth this. A pretty UI does NOT make up for (so far) the most unstable and counterproductive OS I’ve come across (next to Windows ME).

I’ve seen XP / Vista performance comparisons that show that even if I wait for Vista SP1, I’m still going to have a crippled system. Granted, Vista SP1 is supposed to have some stability and reliability fixes in it (and boy does it need them), but just look at the charts, man. In another post, the team doing the comparison goes over what the test entailed. I can buy it. I’ve had enough of wasted time, lost data (powering off your PC after notepad freezes when it can’t connect wirelessly to your home folder to show a save dialog REALLY sucks), and all the frustrations that have gone along with my Vista experience. I didn’t really mind the UAC prompts so much, and I liked the look of the UI, but GIVE ME MY XP BACK NOW!

I’ll post an update once I have everything back to normal to verify that the issues were XP and not hardware.

Dell may have abandoned its Axim handhelds, but hackers haven’t. A new unofficial ROM puts Windows Mobile 6 on the Axim X50v and it runs far smoother than Windows Mobile 5.0.

read more | digg story

One of our sites has had numerous intermittent DHCP issues. The symptoms were varied and unpredictable. Normal Windows clients would sometimes fail to lease an IP address successfully, preventing users from logging onto the domain. Usually, the client would eventually get an address, but during times of high utilization this could sometimes take many minutes (if it worked at all). The issue came to a head when doing our summer deployments. Our imaging process consists of booting from a CD/floppy or PXE and joining a Ghost multicast session. Not getting an IP address from DHCP was comlpetely halting work Our technicians had to manually assign each client an IP address and remember which ones were already used. Needless to say tensions and blood pressure were high.

Previously I had tried troubleshooting the problem by updating to the latest firmware on our switches, checking their configs and trying to rule out any problems on the DHCP server. These were all dead ends. I couldn’t see anything strange in the packet traces, and was runnning out of ideas. One of our technicians however noticed that if he booted a system to Windows and let it get an IP address first, the BootCD would then grab the same address and everything would work. I decided to latch onto this and dig deeper. I compared traces from “cold” booted machines, and “warm” (boot to Windows first) booted machines. At first I couldn’t find anything. but that was because I was only looking at BootP messages.

To try and cut down on the amount of traffic I was capturing, I set my capture filter to only grab UDP. In doing this, I also saw ARP requests coming from the DHCP clients. The machines that booted fine followed a process like this:

1. (client) Discover
2. (server) Offer
3. (client) Request
4. (server) ACK
5. (client) ARP for offered IP
6. (client) ARP for offered IP
7. (client) No response to ARP - claim IP

They had no trouble getting an IP because Windows had already done all the hard work of collision detection. I unfortunately did not capture traffic from a Windows client in this environment. It would have been nice to see how windows handles this. The failing (cold booted) machines would proceed like this

1. (client) Discover
2. (server) Offer
3. (client) Request
4. (server) ACK
5. (client) ARP for offered IP
6. (other client) ARP Reply
7. (client) Broadcast ARP Reply
8. Repeat 1-7
9. (client) Blank DHCP Request
10. (server) NAK
11. Repeat 9-10 until client gives up (long time)

The difference occurs at step 6. In this case, a WYSE terminal (1200LE) replied to the gratuitous ARP request from the client. In seeing another device on the network, the client then rebroadcast the ARP reply so others would see it, and then proceeds to request another IP address. The server tries to assign the same address to the client, seeing that it already has leased it to that client. The client then tries to request again and is sent a NAK each time. This process repeats until the client gives up.

So - why would a DHCP server try to hand out an address still in use? Because the lease time was up and the device did not renew during the lease time. Normal server operation is to delete a lease when it expires. Why would a client not renew it’s lease? I’m not sure. I’ve contacted WYSE to find out why the device doesn’t just renew it’s address instead of requiring a restart when the lease is up. No response yet. There’s even an option in the WYSE config files to choose whether to restart or shut down the device when the lease expires. The restarting isn’t really the issue though. When the devices are left on, they seem to go into a standby mode until woken up by mouse, keyboard or pressing the power button. When the device wakes, it presents the prompt “The dhcp lease has expired. You must restart.” Unfortunately, when in the sleep state, the devices respond to ARP but not pings. Windows DHCP servers use ping to test for collisions.

So who is at fault here? I’m not sure. I am going to read the DHCP spec and try to figure it out. Mainly because I want to know who to blame. If you have any ideas please share.

 Joel

Apologies up front, but I can’t leave this alone:

• http://dredlawwww.ytmnd.com/
• http://itssweetyoulllikeit.ytmnd.com/
• http://berriezandcream.ytmnd.com/

Just click. You’ll thank me later. And no, none of them will get you Rick Roll’.