Due to the fact that I like Linux and open source software in general, it has been a bit of an adjustment to transition to a place where almost every tool or technology I use is provided by Microsoft (Sonoma Partners is a Microsoft partner which sells, customizes, and provides consulting services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM software). Some might say that I have sold out to the man (in fact, several people already have), but I figure that as long as I am not paying for Microsoft software, I have no problem using it.

At least, that’s what I was thinking when I accepted the position. For the most part I still feel that way, but lately it seems like I’ve been spending a ridiculous amount of time troubleshooting installation/configuration errors and not very much time actually doing useful stuff. It’s not even the errors that I’ve been getting that I really have a problem with – it’s the error messages. If my software messes up, I would like it to at least tell me what happened that made things go wrong.

Here is an example of an error message that I got (after searching through the log – the original message just told me that my login failed) using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 yesterday:

Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 11.
Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\user'. Reason: Token-based server access validation failed with an infrastructure error. Check for previous errors. [CLIENT: ]

Now, that seems straightforward enough, except that it says something about an infrastructure error, which made me think that something with the actual application went wrong, not just that I have the wrong login. Furthermore, when I checked on that “State: 11″ business, I found that it means “Valid login but server access failure” (see here for reference). That made me think that something was wrong with my attempts to access the server, as well.

After a bunch of troubleshooting, I finally found out that it wasn’t any sort of strange problem, but rather a case of my Windows Authentication account not being a user in the database instance. All I had to do to fix my problem was start the database instance in single-user mode (by adding “-m” to the start-up parameters, see here for details), make sure that there were no other programs running that were connecting to the database instance, and add myself as a user.

So yeah, Microsoft, I’d like to see some better error messages. Why can’t you tell me that that user doesn’t exist in the database? That would be fantastic – please don’t give me this crap about it being for security reasons.

To see the forum thread that finally got me on the right track, go here.

This week we talked about why Apple is looking at purchasing ARM, the iPad and some questions we have about Ubuntu’s user experience research.

• Apple to purchase ARM  (appleinsider.com)
• Ubuntu and notification area elimination (design.canonical.com)
• Ubuntu and making my freaking network settings disappear, disabling alt-tab, and disabling my task-bar when I tried to fix it…
• iPad hmmmm

Now that’s interesting, AMD has been in Intel’s shadow for a long time and it would be great to see them get something good going again. It would be huge if Apple decided to use AMD processors in their computers. AMD has ATI which has been making great budget graphics cards.  AMD also has a really decent platform for their CPUs right now. While both Intel and AMD are screaming about hex-a-cores there appear to be some differences between the platforms that Apple could indulge in. For example, AMD’s processors appear to use less power. This would be huge for laptops and cooling issues.

So here is what I think…

Apple should buy AMD.

I think it would just make sense and be a benefit to both companies. Apple could then have in-house CPU and GPU production and they wouldn’t have to worry about production delays. They would also have the ability to have their hand in the development of new CPU/GPU platforms which they have already  expressed an interest in by purchasing P.A. Semi for the development of the A4 chip in the iPad.

Apple would have the ability to really open up their creativity for a bargain price!

AMD’s market cap is $6 Billion…that’s just 1 quarter’s revenue for Apple ($223 Billion market cap).  Of course, I’m using these numbers wrong, but I just want to put into scale the difference in the sizes of the companies.

So these thoughts have really made me wonder, “What was AMD really doing at the ApplePlex?”

Ok, let’s be real here. Windows Mobile hasn’t really seen an update since PC2000 back in April of the year 2000(Wikipedia). That’s a decade of not really putting money into this OS and it dominated the phone OS market for a long time.

Microsoft made what I believe to be a good decision when they decided to no longer support Windows Mobil 5/6 applications.  Some people may be upset by this but let’s be honest, all your windows mobile 5/6 applications are not that good.   The applications have been driving the leading mobile OS’s for the last few years.  The iPhone lead the way with their very large and hyped app store and then Google’s Android followed suit.  I mean really, what’s the point of having a powerful and awesome phone if there’s nothing you can do with it?  Which leads me to the next question…

What applications are going to be available for Microsoft new mobile OS? Or will Microsoft leave the ability to use their shiny new operating system behind?

What Microsoft is offering is “SkyMarket”.  I couldn’t find a ton about SkyMarket but it appears that Microsoft is going to have an app store!

So the next question of course is, how good is their SDK?

Well you can download it here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=71deb800-c591-4f97-a900-bea146e4fae1&displaylang=en

I guess you’ll have to play with the SDK your self.

Overall I think Microsoft is heading in a better direction than they have in the past but I  don’t see any innovation or excitement around this release, which leads me to believe that it will not be nearly as successful as the current leaders in mobile operating systems.

Microsoft had a real chance to come out with guns blazing but I think they missed their chance again.  I guess we’ll see on April 12th when Microsoft unveils their shiny new mobile operating system.

I am critiquing the iPad in this post even though I have not used one and I probably will not get the chance just like I’ve never had the chance to use a Newton.

Now Apple has some great ideas and their products push not only technology but also many other industries. I think this may be the only thing that the iPad has any chance of accomplishing.

The hope that I noticed, seemingly being the agenda of Apple in this product release, is the hope of helping, if not solving the plight of the publishing companies in this digital age.

Bringing magazines and newspapers to a device isn’t a new thing(note: Amazon Kindle) but bringing the shiny,glossy look of a high class magazine or other published work doesn’t work so well on an e-ink screen. This fancy GQ, Vogue published material venue is, I believe, what the iPad is trying to shoehorn into.

A noble ambition and one with some potential for profit however it is a very risky one.

Firstly you have to get publishers on-board, and Apple has been working with them to get things started. They have not fully succeeded yet. Amazon and Barns and Noble have quite a lead in this arena.

Secondly, you have to get these published works into the hands of many. I’ve had a subscription to Wired for 3 years…and I only paid $30! The iPad is not cheap($499), but Apple says “oh, but you can use the iPad for so much more! Like work documents and…some websites”.   I could, or with the time I’d save using a real keyboard I could go watch a 2 hour movie each week.

Apple’s stock was on a great rebound from all this insane recession business, especially noted during the time leading up to the keynote announcing a new product that Apple was going to show off! However after the keynote…the stock dropped considerably.  Now I don’t think that the stock market is some kind of oracle but when you release a product and afterwards people think your company is worth less money than before…there might be a potential problem.

Apple hasn’t had a serious blunder in quite a while but I think this might be one.

The good stuff…

I want to be positive at first here, while there are some glaring mistakes I would like to focus on the good parts.

The first thing I noticed, and I mean the first, was the text for the prices (reference #5) in the list of products that you’re browsing. This I really like a lot. It’s cleaner and easier to read. Which I think is why I noticed it first, along with people always want to view the prices of the products they’re interested in. Bravo!

Another thing I noticed, probably the second thing was that the “Compare” section had changed (reference #4). This is very nice now as well. I can see and remove the products I want to compare from this point and they carry over to the next page of products.  Very cool in my opinion. The compare page itself was cleaned up a little as well.

The page turner is kind of middle ground (reference #3). I like it but I guess it didn’t really change enough for me to think it’s stellar like the previous two features. One thing that did change drastically with that work flow is the “Loading…” message you get when turning pages.  I’m kind of indifferent about that as well.

Ok, now for the critique part…

Ok, first off I have to say…that if you run newegg.com through validator.w3.org the site is quite flawed with 551 errors and 26 warnings. Now that said, I’m impressed that the page seems to display properly in my browser (ubuntu firefox 3.5).  I am kind of curious how well it looks in other browsers but I don’t think I’m going to probe it that deeply.  Part of their problem here is the DOCTYPE they chose, which happens to be

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">

So while part of their problem is that they are trying to write XHTML code, they’re trying to validate it against a HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE. I attempted to switch the DOCTYPE in the validator and found that there were more than double the number of errors, so at that point I gave up giving them the benefit of doubt. Seriously guys, step up your game! I know you can!

Another thing that seems strange is that the top navigation area that has dropdowns (reference #1), now seems to be very sluggish in responding to mouse movement. When you hover over them they are supposed to drop down with categories of products but this seems to take over 1.0 seconds now which is kind of aggravating to use. I don’t think this is a result of my computer being slow as a few others have mentioned this to me.

Also on this note, the title links for products in the listing page used to be underlined but that has now been removed (reference #2). This I found to be quite disturbing.  Even though I’ve used this site for at least 4 years, I found my self hesitating to click on this text since there was no indication that it was a link. A slight color alteration here would have made some sense in my mind, but to take away all indication that this is a clickable link just doesn’t add up to me.

All in all I was honestly disapointed by this update. The only really good thing I can say about it is the pricing text. I’m sure they spent thousands of dollars on this update and you would think you would at least get valid code. I don’t mean to be harsh on the developers but it’s really not impossible to write good XHTML markup. This problem of poor markup is pretty rampant on the internet and it’s a shame to take all the work that the W3C has done and throw it away. I hope Newegg.com’s next update has valid code even if that means cutting features.

The Specs:

1.6 Ghz N270 Intel Atom
512MB of Ram
8gb SSD drive

This is a pretty standard setup and I’ll get more into some of the other hardware in a second.

The laptop is pretty powerful, the only thing lacking in my case is the RAM but that’s fairly easy to upgrade.

It’s keyboard is a little cramped but not nearly as bad as some that I’ve played with at the local Buy More

As soon as I got it I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it and that was a really good decision. The 1010NR runs it fast even with only 512MB of RAM and it detected all the hardware flawlessly. The webcam worked out of the box, the sound, even my USB headset was detected correctly by the Pulse audio server.

There is a strange button by the tack pad that disabled it when you press the button. I think this is because HP assumed the the Mini’s layout is so cramped that you might accidentally hit the mouse when you’re typing but I leave the track pad enabled all the time and I haven’t run into this issue yet.

Ubuntu Remix also seems to work ok with the sleep and hibernate functions but sometimes when you open the lid from a suspend it will shut off or resuspend for some reason. Not a huge deal, as you just resume it with the power button and things are normal again. This happens about 20% of the time.

My biggest gripe at the moment is the wifi card.  The card is a Broadcom BCM4312b/g now most people won’t care about this but this card does not seem to support monitor mode. So if you expect to use the HP Mini 1010NR for wifi network diagnostics or war driving you’re probably out of luck for a little bit.

Some people might be able to get it working. I’ve read that it might be possible. I believe there are two versions of the BCM4312, one that is a/b/g and one that is b/g. My HP Mini 1010NR came with the b/g version so I think it has limited support for some features. If you can get Monitor mode working with this card let me know how you did it!

The battery life is par with other laptops and netbooks. I get about 2-3 hours depending on usage.  The screen can be very bright which is nice to look at but it drains the battery fast if it’s all the way up.

Over all this is a pretty decent netbook if you can get it for super cheap. There are some things I would like to see like an illuminated keyboard and bluetooth(option mine doesn’t have).

Some of them are pretty elementary to linux gurus but I’ve been using linux almost exclusively for 2 years and some of these were new to me. This is probably because I’ve been using mostly gnome and am not fully dependant on the CLI.

1. $ sudo !!
What this does is run whatever the last command you typed with sudo in front of it. Very cool, I know I’ve typed some long command before and forgot to add sudo to it. This makes those mistakes a lot easier to deal with. (I got this from hak5.org…good web show).

2. $ route -n
I felt ashamed for not knowing this one but it will help you find what your gateway ip is.

3. $ nmap -v -O ipaddress
Ok this isn’t really a build in command but if you have nmap installed this gives you a port scan and OS information from an IP address.

Iterate!

(Not to be confused with irritate…)

In software development there is a lot of emphasis on iteration. Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!

Iterating on a project is one of the aspects that allows agile to work so well. So in the beginning we tried 4 week iterations, thinking that longer sprints would ease the transition from our previous development process, which was a scrum hybrid environment, and already in a 4 week cycle. What we discovered after about two iterations(two months) was that these longer iterations didn’t seem to be working as well as we had hoped. They seemed to help with the transition somewhat, but as time went on a lot of us wanted to switch to the shorter sprint. One reason was that we realized that a lot can happen in four weeks when it comes to requirements, direction guided by business needs and critical defects. So in our particular case the biggest advantage to one week sprints was the tremendous increase in…

Flexibility!

Flexibility is the name of the game for a lot of companies, which is probably why they were even looking at agile in the first place. It’s also very useful in an environment with a lot of legacy software that needs to be supported. The flexibility is that if there is a product used inhouse in which a defect crops up then it’s only 5 days(max) until the defect will be addressed. That’s assuming that the defect isn’t a show stopper.

Sometimes business priorities change more often than once a month, especially in the software world. Sometimes these changes in direction can greatly alter the course of the project, even possibly rendering some portion of the project obsolete. With short iterations you can absorb these changes and change course with less wasted time and development on the project.

With one week sprints you also have an advantage of packing four retrospectives into the a space where we originally only had one. Doing this allowed us to critique our process more quickly and implement changes to improve performance.
This leads me to my next opinion based advantage of short sprints…

Reflection!

Reflection in agile is very important so that you can look back over the previous sprint and discover information that you can use to improve the following sprint.

In contrast to what I was explaining above, another thing that is very useful in short sprints is the ability to revert a change that you’ve made in the process promptly and wisely. If at the beginning of a sprint your team has decided to change a process based on feedback from a retrospective and you discover that the change actually turns out to be a detriment to the process then you can drop it and re-evaluate the change in a few days. So while you are iterating on your software, you are also iterating on the process too.

So to condense my thoughts here, I’m going to tell you something that you’ve probably heard over and over again…

Three Do’s!

1. Do…iterate!
2. Do…be flexible! AKA iterate often and be open to changes. (I know “do” doesn’t fit here..give me a break
3. D0…reflect! So you can make your process better!

So from that point there is another question that must be asked and that is, who would know the information I’m looking for, other than Twitter?

So first I google’d around a little and I found this article on TechCrunch which had some excellent information on the subject.  Information about how user ID numbers on Twitter do not reflect the number of users that are on Twitter.

So who would know this information I seek? What company, organization or hacker would be able to tell me how many users Twitter has?? I would need to talk to someone that catalogs information, someone that knows nearly everything that’s on the web…oh yeah search engines!

Yeah I know this has probably been done already and that I’m totally over playing this but I thought it was cool ok!

I took searches for both “www.twitter.com” and “twitter.com” and started gathering numbers.

Google’s results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Awww.twitter.com

Yahoo’s results:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com&bwmf=d&bwms=p&fr=yfp-t-701&fr2=seo-rd-se

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.twitter.com&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp

Bing’s results:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Awww.twitter.com

http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com

Here’s a breakdown of the information I gathered:

So to do some dirty math here we can take all the numbers there and add them together then divide them by six which gives us….

100,405,050

Then if we divide that by 6 ( the number of result sets we gathered) we get…

16,734,175

So my guess at how many twitter users there are is……

About 16 million!

This is interesting when you put into perspective that there are about 300 million Facebook users and about 100 million on Myspace I estimate.

Here’s a good link on some information and how I’m guessing the number of Myspace users…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/social-networking-will-facebook-overtake-myspace-in-the-us-in-2009

If anyone has credible information on the number of Twitter users please comment! I think there’s a lot of people that would like to know that information.

Take a simple search in bing.com

http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford

This will give you page saying there are 160,000,000 results and you’re being shown 1-20 of them. That’s all fine and dandy but let’s say I want to just flip through the pages a little and see what’s new with Ford.

When you click on the pagination below the URL’s that your going to look something like this…

Page 2: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=6&FORM=PERE

Page 3: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE1

Page 4: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=26&FORM=PERE2

Page 5: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=36&FORM=PERE3

You’ll notice a couple things changing in these urls.  The first should be the “first” GET variable in the URL which appears to be some kind of page offset for the results.

The next is that FORM=PERE business which I’m not sure exactly what it does and it didn’t seem to matter if I removed it from the URL anyway.

The key thing I found was that if you click through the pages until you get to around page 21 or 22 the screen goes completely blank and the magic variable value is changing “?first” to a value that’s greater than or equal to 200.  This seems to only be an issue in Firefox as far as I can tell.

I checked the headers with this and there doesn’t seem to be any significant differences.

$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE4

$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=206&FORM=PERE4

Comment if you have any ideas?

Can you say “give me a raise”…if you work for AMD that is.

They say that 1.25B was “a small multiple” of what they may have had to pay in court.  Now my question is, what kind of position does this put AMD in for the future? Their stock jumped 16% on the news and their market cap is only 4.38B, so 1.25B is over 25% of what they may be worth.  The down side is that AMD hasn’t posted a profit in a while.

The interesting part is that AMD doesn’t just make desktop processors anymore right? They also have ATI and a few other irons in the fire. So my question is “what is AMD going to do with their 1.25 billion?”

AMD’s processors have kind of let people down in the last few years but they’re starting to turn things around by doing things like making a processor that is capable of breaking the 7Ghz barrier(Gizmodo).

We’ve heard a lot in the past of AMD’s grand plans for new processor platforms and their crazy modular ideas but what is really feasible and what would be generally accepted and bought by people?

I think it could be time to start watching AMD again because there should be some crazy stuff coming down the pipes from them.  I mean heck what could you do with 1.25 billion?

So you might be wondering, “Is there ANY good news??”

The Good:

Yes there is. Technology has come a long way and so has the internet, which has allowed visually impaired people access to a lot more of the web than in the past.  There are also a lot more people that actually care about making their websites accessible.

The Bad:

This technology comes at quite a high price.   Some of the gizmos that were shown had a price tag of over $6000 once you buy the software that goes with them. Even screen reading software is quite pricey, reaching up past the $1000 mark. Even spending a lot of money on the latest and greatest screen readers and gizmos will still only get you as far as the markup on the page will let you.

Flash objects, buttons without the proper attributes filled out, images with no text describing what’s on them and CAPTCHAS are all semi-evil for accessibility right now. Things are getting better but there is a along way to go.

I think anyone that develops on the web should, before they write any code, watch a visually impaired person surf the web. This will change your outlook on how you develop, I promise!

I will not buy another Zune until Microsoft supports the Zune software on linux(or through wine).

It’s just too much hassle.  I bought a Sansa Clip and that has served me extremely well, even without video support. Also, for the sake of contrast, Apple’s iPod is supposedly supported through Rythmbox on Ubuntu 9.10.  But I won’t be getting an ipod anytime soon either(well unless I switch to Macs…).

Bottom line I think hardware and software need to come together and play nice.  This is something that soooo many vendors and big software companies have struggled with since the dawn of the circuit board.  Hardware is pretty useless without software and software is just an idea without hardware, so why hasn’t there been a stronger movement over the years to bring the two together?

Apple sort of solved this issue by only supporting “some” hardware and working on quality(sometimes successful, sometimes not).  Microsoft gained market share by supporting tons of hardware(…I didn’t say they support it well..that’s a different post) and let’s be honest…left quality behind on a napkin somewhere.

Somewhere between the $100 bills and the middle aged man crying because his computer system turns on but is totally useless, I’d like to think there is a happier place.  I could say that the happier place I’m talking about is open source or linux or whatever but that wouldn’t really be fair.  Open source isn’t perfect and linux by far isn’t perfect but I really truly think that the “happy trail” lies with these groups.

In what environment could there possibly be a merge between hardware and software that is not an open environment?  Apple constrained hardware to maintain quality, Microsoft constrained nothing to maintain market share and I’m running linux.

And that’s my pointless rant.

Have you ever seen this?

$ svn commit
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Could not use external editor to fetch
log message; consider setting the
$SVN_EDITOR environment variable or using
the --message (-m) or --file (-F) options
svn: None of the environment variables
SVN_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR is set,
and no 'editor-cmd' run-time configuration
option was found


Answer:
$ export SVN_EDITOR="/usr/bin/nano"

Problem:

I need to know what the changes I’ve made on my local copy?

Answer:
$ svn diff

Problem:

You want to know what the differences are between your local copy and the repository?

Answer:
$ svn status --show-updates

Problem:

I don’t understand merges!

Answer:

Ok, simplest way I know how to break it down…
If you want to bring changes into your branch from the trunk, like if other people have been committing to trunk and you want their changes, simply change directories into your branch and type:

$ svn merge http://the-address-or-path-or-ssh+svn-or-svn/repositoryname


This will bring in the new changes from trunk and show you what the conflicts are, but it will not commit these updates to your branch.
Make sure that once you resolve any conflicts you do an “svn commit”.

Problem:

I have conflicts!

Answer:

Well…good luck! haha jk.

First, you should notice that there is a “C” next to the list of files on the merge command that you ran.
These files should look something like filename.mine, filename.r234…etc

Step 1. What you want to do is find out which of these files has the changes that you want.
Step 2. Then, copy that file, let’s say the changes we want to keep in our branch are in filename.mine, the commands would look something like…

$ cp filename.mine filename.php  (your's might not be php of course)
$ svn resolved filename.php
$ svn commit

There you’ve just resolved a conflict!

Problem:

I want to merge my awesome changes into the trunk!

Answer:

Step 1. “svn update” in your branch
Step 2. What you want to do is make sure that you’ve committed all your changes in your branch!
Step 3. Change to the trunk directory (you will need this checked out)
Step 4. “svn update” in the trunk
Step 5. “svn merge http://repository-address/repository/branches/yourbranch”
Step 6. Resolve conflicts
Step 7. “svn commit”

Ok, so I didn’t say anything about trunk policy and that you should be really really careful what you put in the trunk but I’m assuming you know that!

If you want to know more about that then check out http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-version-control

If you want to know all there is about subversion then you need to be reading http://svnbook.red-bean.com

1. I always have a lot of links open in FireFox that I haven’t looked at yet.
2. Blog traffic drops like mad on Fridays

These are just some sites or articles that I found interesting or helped me in some way this week.

So here’s what I have this week!  (other posters can add to this page as they wish)

1. http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-version-control
2. http://kenai.com
3. http://oauth.net
4. http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/DebuggingTechniques
5. http://blog.lowkster.com/2008/01/getting-to-pesky-foreign-key-data-in.html
6. http://www.box.net
7. http://beanstalkapp.com
8. http://www.ducea.com/2006/08/11/apache-tips-tricks-deny-access-to-some-folders
9. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz
10. http://www.sitepoint.com/article/build-to-do-list-30-minutes

http://www.hackersforcharity.org/340/owned-or-not-crap/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ihackstuff/status/3368594229

I have one of those Compaq Evo 610′s…pretty sweet laptop.  I would still use it except my sister has it But she just got a new macbook pro….hmmm….

Anyway, go Johnny! I really believe in giving people the tools they need to educate them selves.

UPDATE:

So it all worked out!

http://www.hackersforcharity.org/344/the-eagle-has-landed/

Python

>>> test = 123
>>> test2 = "ewfwef"
>>> test / test2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for /: 'int' and 'str'

PHP

$test = 123;
$test2 = "werwe";
echo $test/$test2;

Warning: Division by zero in Command line code on line 1

It’s nice that python tells you what is really wrong here, you can’t divide an integer by a string! PHP on the other hand implies that $test2 is equivalent to 0.
It should be noted that python is doing a trace and PHP is not. Doing a trace on the error in PHP would give more information but since PHP is very weak with types, you would probably have to notice the error on your own.