IBM and Microsoft you say? That’s interesting.

An Apple employee makes an interesting statement… their biggest purchaser of Apple systems is Microsoft.

We were at the Apple store purchasing more stuff… go figure.

During checkout we were asked, “Student?”

“No.”

“Government employee?”

“No.”

“IBM?”

“No.”

“Microsoft?”

“No. What’s with the questions?”

“Well, if you had answered yes,” (and could prove it), “you’d get a discount.”

“Wait… IBM and Microsoft? Using Apple?”

“Oh yes. Microsoft is one of our biggest purchasers. They don’t make it that public, but they are avid Apple users. Honestly, we don’t get it either.” She smiled. “You’d think we’d charge more for them.” We all laughed.

I guess this is expected. Her comments brought back memories of when I placed a MSDN support call and their crypto guys explained to me that they used Linux and SSLeay behind the scenes (they gave me a copy their Linux script); apparently they love Linux, but aren’t allowed to publically admit it, he explained — they had hundreds of Linux systems. Apparently it’s standard practice to use other systems and open source in order to development Microsoft products. Very interesting.

FYI, if you are a Home School Student / Teacher, the Apple Store says they honor those credentials for discounts.

Conspiracy or Coincidence

Within 48 hours I got five support incidents for Windows crashing hard… and by people who knew what they were doing. This is too much for coincidence in my mind. Oh, and do we remember, Walt doesn’t support Microsoft anymore. UPDATE: More weekend crashes reported. UPDATE: The problem appears to be real, and it’s getting ugly for users everywhere.

On Friday, I get a call from a friend — Microsoft has invalidated his server license without warning. He bought it from Dell, Dell installed the software, he has the paperwork, the receipt, and the hologram on the side of the machine.

Sunday, Tamara turns on her XP box and it blue screens at boot. She’s furious, and I know first hand she also has a legal copy from Dell. She has been nothing but diligent with anti-virus and spyware.

Monday, as we were repairing it, I got a call from my sister. Apparently her system rebooted and blue screened. As it’s a 2000 machine, and Microsoft isn’t supporting that anymore, this raises new problems. XP Home, of course, ends support at the end of this year. And Vista requires far more computing power than she can afford. We’re not sure what she’s going to do.

As that phone call was ending, I got a call from someone I used to do support for. Her system just locked up and won’t boot now.

While that was happening, and I swear I’m not making this up, my friend’s sister (she does IT for the government) called his cell phone — her XP system at home just crashed.

This is all on the heels of my dad’s machine blowing up so that he got a Macbook Pro.

…so five machines in 48 hours… something’s up. Has anyone else had a problem?

UPDATE 27-Jun-2006 6:36pm: So just as I’m talking myself out of tin-foil hat conspirancy, this hit the news wire: A Windows Kill Switch. Ok, now you’re forced into submission. But if Microsoft can pull the trigger, can a malicious hacker? I’d love to see MS’s response to someone else shutting off machines all over the world. :shudder:

UPDATE 28-Jun-2006 11:05am: Came into work, unprompted, my co-worker reported that his Windows box at home was blue screening at the login screen. It started doing it this weekend.

UPDATE 30-JUN-2006 2:18pm: TechDirt reports users are having problems, and Microsoft is being sued over WGA. GrokLaw explains.

UPDATE 26-JUL-2006 10:07am: Seems the WGA and Activation issues are real, and it’s getting out of hand. Microsoft’s response falls flat, assuming people are indeed pirates (or will put up with it), which is sending the technically savvy users off to switch desktops to Mac OS X or Linux.

UPDATE 28-JUL-2006 2:54am: More public outcry; there are now two lawsuits against Microsoft.

Yum: Cannot find a valid baseurl (solved)

The yum software package, used for upgrading software on Linux, can sometimes report a mysterious “Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras” error message. Common wisdom says to twiddle config files or reinstall yum. Don’t. Here’s the solution…

Ran into a problem using Fedora Core 4 that went like this:

I was signed on doing a yum upgrade, and during the download my connection dropped. When I got back on line and tried to do it again, I kept getting an error that the baseurl could not be found.

$ sudo yum upgrade
Setting up Upgrade Process
Setting up repositories
Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras
Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras

No amount of searching seemed to resolve my problem or tell me what to do next, though a handful of people had experienced the same problem. The common recommendation was to go to the /etc directory and twiddle the yum configuration files (or even reinstall yum). Hint: don’t.

What you’re seeing is actually actually a DNS failure. Bind is having problem resolving host names. A little bit of poking around with dig, and sure enough, it was clear that something wasn’t right.

In fact, while trying to ssh to the system in the first place, I recall it took a while for the login prompt to appear, yet another sign that reverse name lookups weren’t happening right.

The solution was to make sure that the DNS servers listed in /etc/resolv.conf were indeed serving correctly, and bouncing the named process with the /sbin/service named restart command as root.

Yum still didn’t work right, but that was because it had a dirty cache. So, I cleaned up everthing.

$ sudo yum clean all
Cleaning up Everything
25 headers removed
24 packages removed
12 metadata files removed
0 cache files removed
4 cache files removed

Then I tried the yum upgrade again, and with the cache cleared out, and the bind name service resolving DNS correctly, it worked like a champ. Yum was fixed, and I didn’t have to change a single configuration file for it.

Mom Uses A Mac?

To undertand the significance of this post, you have to understand my parents. Dad has been using Windows for quite some time, and getting him to move from DOS to Windows to NT to XP has been a painful, painful, painful journey. For whatever reason, Windows could never survive under his watch — the machine would slow to a crawl, mysterious things would happen, meanwhile virus checks and spyware would show the system clean. Mom, meanwhile, had no interest in computers and would call me up to look up something for her and read it to her; attempts to put her in front of a machine didn’t go well at all.

A few days ago, dad announced he was done with Windows. He wanted a Mac, and so we sat down together and figured out what he needed and ordered him a nice mid-range Macbook Pro. The instructions, I thought, were fairly simple: when it arrives, don’t do anything with it until we get together and I can show you around.

Well, I’m writing this post because that didn’t happen. And the story doesn’t go in the direction you think it might. Without assistance, not so much as a call to me, he fires up the Mac and configures the operating system, without incident. Though he reports he “lost his Mac” — and where I took this to be some code that something went wrong, it turned out it was code that something went terribly right.

He showed my mother the laptop. Remember, she can’t use Windows to save her life. She’s near retirement age, which provides more context, and goes to bed around 7pm. Apparently she stayed up until 2am playing with it and surfing the web… something she’s never been able to do before.

In my mind, that says a lot. It says that Apple’s got it right. That a complete computerphobe can acclimate to be functional in less than an evening, and enjoy it.

Back to dad: clearly someone who’s never used a Mac before is going to encounter problems and confusion, especially if they have precanned expectations that things ought to work like Windows. My intent is to catalog his issues, and the solutions, so that others making the switch will have some help from someone who’s been in the same shoes.

Look for a link here in coming days.

I’ve heard this lie before…

MS claims Vista will be the most secure OS ever… haven’t we fallen for this marketing hype enough? By 2008, how many exploits will there be? Check back here a year after it’s released for the update.

On the heals of concerns about the insane released Vista hardware requirements, I was reading yesterday that Microsoft is claiming that Vista will be the most secure OS ever.

Wasn’t that what XP, 2003, 2000, NT 4.0, NT 3.51, … were supposed to be? Maybe they mean for them, because historically they have never gotten security right.

I’ve heard this lie before, along with the “trust me this time we’ll get it right”.

Can you think of any others? I can.


  • Boyfriend: “I promise, I’ll use a condom.”
  • Girlfriend: “We can make this work, I’ll change.”
  • Doctor: “This won’t hurt a bit.”
  • Car Mechanic: “I’ll just check your oil.”
  • Fast Food Drive-In: “Your order’s correct, I checked personally.”
  • RIAA: “No, seriously, it’s about the artists.”

Mylex DAC960PTL1 RAID Controller

Technobabble pertaining to using the Mylex DAC960PTL1 raid controller; useful for people who can’t seem to find a firmware update and are trapped, unable to delete volumes and arrays.

I’m working with some old equipment, specifically a P3 server that has a Mylex DAC960PTL1 raid controller in it running a 1999 version of EzAssist off firmware. I ran into a problem where I couldn’t delete a disk array nor a logical volume once created.

According to the manual, entitled RAID ExAssist Configuration Utility, User Reference Guide, DB13-000047-00 First Edition, 08P5519, by LSI Logic, there were delete menus, but I just wasn’t seeing them.

A little research showed that LSI Logic now owned the Mylex DAC960PTL1, and their download page, while showing plenty of DAC960 variations, did not have the PTL1 suffix. Turns out this is now called the AcceleRAID 250 controller, and drivers and firmware are available.

Turns out the problem was that I needed to upgrade the BIOS, EzAssist, Firmware, and Bootblock by using the latest Software Kit v4.04-02, dated December 20, 2001.

So I grabbed a copy of ez_assist404.zip, unpacked it to a floppy, and followed the directions in the readme, which consisted of booting, holding down Alt-R to bring up the existing EzAssist setup utility, and flashing the files off the diskette one by one.

Once I did that, I was able to manage the existing raid drives, both logical and physical, without incident.

For those curious, you set up the physical drives first, add them to a pool of storage called an array, and from there make logical volumes, which are then exposed to any operating system with a device driver for the raid card, such as Fedora Core 4 (/dev/rd/… which then has a controller/disk/partition notation for device names).

It took over a full day to locate this information and make use of it. Hopefully, documenting this save someone else the trouble.

Forest Comic: First Fan Mail

The comic Forest, published on restaurant drink napkins, received its first fan mail today. Unlike other comics, one actually converses with the characters in the comic, and the result can be a custom comic strip.

Today was a surpring joy, Forest received his first email today.

Unlike other comics, where you contact the author directly, Forest actually lets you email the characters directly. The result is usually a custom comic strip.

Mail #1
Forest: Click Here

Bug In Google’s GMail Text Editor

Found a problem with GMail’s online editor.

I love GMail, but it has a nasty problem with its text editor when composing a message. Perhaps I should be more specific. When I write a complex email with lots of formatting, it can sometimes mess up the format during composition, and worse cause text insertions to happen at the wrong place unexpectedly.

Up until this point, I hadn’t taken the time to figure out a simple case to illustrate this. Now I have.

Here’s the simple steps you can do, starting with a blank message body:

  1. Type the letters ABC
  2. Press RETURN (cursor goes to the next line)
  3. Click the INDENT button (cursor indents as expected)
  4. Press SHIFT-RETURN (cursor goes to the next line, still indented)
  5. Type the letters DEF (which are now indented)
  6. Press UP (you’re now above the DEF and below the ABC)
  7. Press DELETE (…not backspace… the white space is closed up, with DEF coming up a line)
  8. Press END (you’re now at the line end of the letters DEF)
  9. Type the letter G

At that point, the cursor jumps back up the prior line where you were, and inserts the G up there. In this state, you’ll now be fighting the editor, which will occasionally reposition the cursor to the wrong area.

Bye, Everwood

Everwood has its series finale… what will I do with my date nights now?

Well, it was a bitter sweet goodbye to one of our favoite television series, Everwood.

Andy Brown found himself, said goodbye and made peace with his departed wife, raised his children well, and his heart finally healed allowing him to find new love. The series employed a wonderful style of humor, patience, and a loving, giving, kindness that historically has always been attributed to shows with Michael Landon.

It’s nice to know that there can be good television that invokes drama and touches on issues without degreading into nothing but a soap opera, and where not all story threads have to have a happy ending. Everwood comes to a close well before jumping the shark, and I look forward with hope to something of its equal to replace the time slot.

Baby’s Blowout

The baby has a blow out, in the middle of a fondue dinner.

My sister and her husband are in town, having flown in from Colorado to let us see how Bennett, our new nephew, is doing. We were all trying to figure out what to do for dinner, when Loralie invited us to her birthday bash with her sister at the Melting Pot. Vat’O’Cheese and Vat’O’Chocolate — count us in.

Bennett was well behaved, playful, and happy — he was celebrating his 7-month anniversary as well by cutting his tooth and nibbling on any adult knuckle that was presented to him.

During the dessert phase, which consisted of a huge warm bowl of melted dark chocolate with flaming marshmellows, my sister announced to her husband that they should change Bennett, as he just had a blow out.

I’ve seen blow outs before, when the diaper can no longer contain what’s been put into it, and it oozes out uncontrollably via every exit possible.

Concerned that we’d need to get a manager and wipe down the seat, I turned my head to assess the damage. Something I should not have done. Certainly not at that exact moment.

My sister sets Bennett down, pulls up her hand, and there’s a dark brown streak on it, to which she… licks it off.

The expression that must have been on my face had to have been shock and horror, because my stomach was about to wrench.

My sister looks over at me in that instance, catches my expression, and starts laughing so hard she can’t breathe.

That’s when I clued in that she clued into to what I had thought had just happened, and realized that it in fact wasn’t what I thought it was, but that she had been reaching for a napkin, not the baby, and that it was dark chocolate she was removing from her forefinger and thumb orally.

It’s amazing how long it took for my appetite to return, even after being assured. It was like walking into the middle of a conversation and picking out the last bit without context, only visually.