random neuron misfires

Apparently the Thinkpad T23 is the biggest flop they’ve made, architecturally. I’m on my second physical unit, the third system board and third bios revision, and they still can’t stop it from locking up (in any OS, including while changing settings in the bios), randomly powering off (on AC and battery), and spontaneously rebooting (in any OS on any drive, including while it’s booting up counting memory).

This last unit they’ve sent me, which included a new system board and bios revision, managed to take out the brand new 48gb drive that it was shipped with. Now it’s DMA write and read errors all over the place (the familiar { DriveSeekComplete } “time-to-get-a-new-drive” error).

Is this the shape of things to come? Expensive hardware that dies 3 months after initial use?

Does anyone know where I can find a cheap (or free?) 22U or 42U rack? If so, please contact me with pointers (it’s for not-for-profit work).

Things are picking up around here, need to scale up fast.

My T23 is being shipped back to IBM for the 4th time in less than 35 days. More hard-lockups. Here’s how to cause it to happen:

1. Pull out IDE drive, leaving only laptop + RAM
2. Power up on AC or Battery power
3. Hit F1 to enter BIOS Configuration Screen
4. Select Config->Parallel Port
5. Hit enter on Enable/Disable option
6. Hard-lockup

The same happens on Serial, USB, PCI configuration options, and also happens with or without a drive in the laptop, and with two different sets of SODIMMs.

How many times do I have to send this back to them before I get a 100% functional unit?

DNS Expiring

At the suggestion of rasmus last year, I signed up for EasyDNS and grabbed a 25-domain block. They’ve been nothing short of stellar with their service, both in actively stopping spam coming through their backup MX, and DNS configuration issues.

Now that I haven’t successfully found gainful employment, and the renewal bill came in at $349.00, I can no longer afford to use them. I decided to learn bind, get DNS set up on a master and slave, and found out that EasyDNS doesn’t let me cut them off as my primary nameserver. Not cool, so I went to NSI and tried to change my entries there, and now NSI decides that it doesn’t know who I am.

I have 4 days, lest 18 of my important domains fall off the net.

Beach Assault

The caveman that jumped me at the beach on 6/30 and broke my nose in front of about 200 witnesses has plead guilty in his pre-trial, and has been ordered by the court to pay all of my medical expenses.

Since I don’t have a job, and hence no medical insurance, the broken nose healed before he was ordered to pay. Ideally it’s good to get the nose fixed within 2-3 days after the initial break, or it’s harder to work on. Since that 2-3 days was over the July 4th weekend/holiday, I couldn’t get in to see the ENT. Now it looks like there’ll have to be some very expensive surgery/reconstruction to go in and fix the breathing passageways.

Two attorneys I spoke with both assured me that the civil case is a “slam dunk”, and that the bidding starts at $50k for such an unprovoked brutal attack. Lucky for me just before I got headsmashed by this caveman, I took my sunglasses off, otherwise I’d have lost an eye, and that would have gotten him 20 years in prison and a $20,000 fine in Rhode Island.

pilot-link 0.11.0, 0.11.1, 0.11.2

Three releases of pilot-link in less than a month’s time. It’s good to see lots of contributions, patches, bugs reported. Thanks go out to everyone that has helped.

It definately helps to have good active facilities backing a project. I’ve set up HOWTOs, irc, the mailing lists, a search engine across the past 5 years of pilot-related lists, an active public CVS, and the bugtracker. They’re not as tightly integrated as I’d like them to be right now, but that’s going to change pretty quickly. Many users now are finding solutions to their problems without having to even resort to posting on the lists and irc services.

It’s a healthy metamorphosis from what I’m used to seeing in the newer linux and community contributors. I highly recommend it for those who are managing or maintaining projects that may involve community testers or contributors.

I should be releasing 0.11.2 on Wednesday if nothing else breaks in the meantime. This’ll be the first cut with native USB support for FreeBSD users. I still need people to help port the USB calls over to OSX, Win32 and OS/2, but if nobody steps up, that’ll stagnate for now.

Employment

Status: None, 253 days.

my $line="";
my @unwrappeddata;
foreach (@body) { 
        chomp $_;
        if (m/^[^s=]+s+=s*/ || m/^[.*]$/) {
                $line .= " ";
                push @unwrappeddata, $line;
                $line = $_;
        } else {
                $line .= $_;
        }
        last if /[end_template]/;
}
$line .= " ";
push @unwrappeddata, $line;

The new Plucker site is coming along very well. The code above is part of some of the trickery behind one of the tools I’ve written to add more interactivity to it — an email-only interface to Plucker for those without web, away from home, or on machines without a configured Plucker installation. The new site will also have quite a few new toys to play with as well.

So much work to do, so much learning. Many things I’ve never implemented in perl before.

Employment Status

None (244 days)

My IBM Thinkpad T23 is being shipped back to IBM for service for the third time this month. I’m not happy about this.

They’ve already replaced the system board, fan, and apparently the keyboard and outer shell to resolve issues found the last two times I’ve sent it to them in the past two weeks.

Now it just hard-locks randomly. Sometimes while counting memory at boot, sometimes while in Linux, sometimes while in Windows2000 (native IBM build drive). Completely random.

This has become very frustrating and unproductive.

Well, well, well…

“One issue we have now, a unique competitor, is Linux. We haven’t figured out how to be lower priced than Linux. For us as a company, we’re going through a whole new world of thinking.”
– Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

I turn 31 today.

Status: still unemployed, 8 months.

Laptop arrived today from IBM repair in Memphis.

Put in my production Linux drive, powered it up, logged in, and it powered off on me again without warning about 8 minutes later.

Closer inspection of the included notes with the returned unit show a mention of:

“Unit was sent back as ‘No problem found’..”

The random power-off happens while exclusivly using AC (No battery) as well as exclusive DC (not plugged in). Problem doesn’t appear to be adapter or battery-related.

It’s going back to IBM tomorrow.

This is putting a serious dent in my productivity.

1. The United States Postal Service lost a package I sent on 6/8/2002 which contained legal US Copyright documents awaiting 8 signatures from our team dispersed around the globe.

   I specifically sent it Certified and Registered with all the bells and whistles. When I sent it, I specifically asked them what I needed to do so that it was trackable and to make sure it didn’t get lost in the ocean somewhere.

   Now they can’t track it, and can’t tell me where it is.

2. My laptop was sent to IBM service, under warantee for a repeated random power-off problem. The technician I spoke with when I reported it said it’s a rare, but reported problem. He also recommended I “upgrade my Win98 APM drivers first”. I calmly mentioned I didn’t run Windows and that it happens even when I hit F1 and leave it in the BIOS screen. He told me to install Windows and upgrade the APM drivers anyway. Uhm..

   The laptop arrived safely, and they now tell me that they can’t reproduce the problem and are going to send it back to me.

.oO(Why do I always get the idiots?)

The GPL case continues

“If we end up in court, I will bankrupt these guys.”

That’s the latest we’ve heard from James Fisher at $COMPANY. It was the first of two official threats from them. Apparently because they have “investor money”, they think they can just ignore US Copyright Law and the GPL. I can’t say more on this right now, pending our investigation. Lawyers and the community is involved, backing us up 100%.

Laptop Death

After all that mess with eBay and my shiny new laptop, now it’s dead and needs to be serviced. Luckily for me (so far), in the absence of a receipt, the warantee is still valid for 3 more years.

Plucker News

The new Plucker site is coming along very well, now that I realized I needed to manually load Apache::Table. Without it, Apache::Request and mod_perl would randomly “forget” %vars, and cache data between requests. Now it’s all working well. Version 1.2 is being beta’d now, the new site launch should be soon before the official announcement of the 1.2 Plucker release.

We will be selling some shwag from the site soon to show our support of the community, and in the hopes that they can show their support of us. We may also need the funds to help fund attorneys in our defense of the GPL violations we’ve been dealing with.

Employment

Status: None.

Triathlon Training

Training goes well, but deadlines have slowed this down a bit. I need to get back on the road, with a road bike soon. I’m addicted to the mileage now. I feel the years of mileage coming back, legs and lungs feel more powerful than ever.

I’m very impressed with how much E has taken onto the sport, having never bicycled competitively before. It’s going to be my turn soon.. competitive running. Ug.