Showing posts with label fail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fail. Show all posts

Friday, July 22, 2011

Face Down Baby

I just watched a young mother get her priorities completely mixed up. She was crossing a minor road using a pedestrian crossing. I was driving the only moving vehicle on that road and was approaching the crossing at walking speed as I prepared to stop for her. She focused all her attention on me.

Her baby, about two, pitched forward out of the stroller she was pushing and landed face first on the road. Mother didn't notice, although I could clearly hear his screams inside my sealed car. She kept pushing, scraping his face along the ground. She didn't even look down for a second to see why she had to struggle to push.

It was not until I beeped my horn and waved frantically at her and the baby that she noticed the problem. Then she dashed around, grabbed him by the arm and dragged him and stroller off the road. Last I saw, the baby was making his feelings about this pretty clear. I just hope she gets a few clues from today's experience.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

A Solaris Puzzle

I wrote about issues installing an operating system on some new hardware a few days ago. Since then I've done more exploring. A subsequent attempt to install Ubuntu 10.10 on the same box was a success, right up to the part where you reboot from the newly-installed system. That was a total failure and required power cycling to escape.

Then, several restarts later (due to my lack of speed on the DEL key), I managed to get at the BIOS. I decided to start from scratch, and loaded the safe defaults. Then I went through and tweaked it carefully (and very conservatively). After that, it booted fine. To be sure of this, I rebooted it (both warm and cold) about 30 times. All good. Then I left it to its own devices with a bunch of stuff running for a couple of days. Still good.

Then I tried again to install my Solaris-11 system, hoping that it would work on the new setup. No joy at all. The installer crashed, several times, in exactly the same place as before (i.e., long before getting close to actually installing anything). I really wanted to be able to use ZFS, which I think is a wonderful file system, but it seems impossible for me to install Solaris on any reasonably up to date hardware that I have available. I think I'm over this now and will wait for some other operating system that I can bear to use offering native ZFS.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Computers Can Make You Mad

I've just put together a new computer. It starts up fine. It reads a CD with an operating system I want to install just fine. The installer runs fine until we get close to actually doing something. Then it crashes. This is repeatable. I re-burned the CD in the drive on the new machine and tried again. Same deal.

I'm now running memtest86 over the 24G of memory in case the problem is there. So far, it has made seven complete passes without detecting anything. I will let it go until it says it has completed a full test sequence, but I'll be surprised if it finds anything now. If it's not memory, it's a bit hard to guess where the problem is. Since we never get as far as writing on a disk, it's not going to be there. Nor do we use the network.

The machine is certainly almost OK. Maybe even quite OK. It certainly seems to run Linux as I'd expect, although I haven't attempted exhaustive tests yet. Testing is so slow and so boring and gets in the way of everything else I'd like to be doing. And it's Friday.

My spouse has decided that we need a weekend away in a luxurious place far from the normal world. This seems like an excellent plan. Maybe the computer will reveal something useful next week. I'll be running out of time to claim DOA status for the bits by then, so that might affect my sleep tonight. On the other hand, losing sleep over a box of bits is probably unwise. Consider this as a muted scream.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

There's Somebody at the Door

My spouse has had a hard start to the week and announced last night that she wanted a nice easy start today because she did not have any clients until 10:15. I was happy to go along with this plan and so the morning began peacefully.

At 7:30, just as I delivered the first cup of coffee to the bedroom, the doorbell rang. Spouse looked alarmed and asked questions that were hard to answer. However, I speculated that the caller might have been one of her 7:30 clients arriving on the wrong day. Much quiet cursing followed this thought and spouse dashed about the room grabbing the minimal clothing that she could wear to the door to face a client.

By the time she opened the door, the caller had backed away and was digging in her backpack. She found her diary, looked at it, turned to spouse and said, "Oops, I'm supposed to be here next week." And off she went.

Spouse returned looking like thunder, threw her clothes on the floor and flounced back into the bed. By then the coffee was cooling. That seemed like a good moment for me to go out to the kitchen to make fresh coffee.

I guess people who need psychotherapy because their life is in chaos can be expected to make this kind of mistake, but some days it really would be great if they could look in their diaries before ringing the bell.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Easy Does It

Back in the present today, for a look at some software that I was wrestling with yesterday. I often whine about issues with free software that is hard to use or configure or that crashes messily. But it's rare for me to complain about commercial software. I'd hate people to think that was because commercial software is better when the real reason is simply that I avoid using commercial software as far as possible. But yesterday I spent some time with three of Atlassian's products (for which I have the cheap Starter Licenses).

Why? There are times when friends tell me I should use the Atlassian software rather than wasting my time with less-capable or otherwise deficient free software and I finally thought I'd combine two things by contributing a few dollars to the charity that Atlassian supports and trying out their software.

I downloaded Confluence, Jira and GreenHopper and installed Confluence first on a bare Ubuntu box. Along the way, I carefully followed every step of the instructions, including installation of additional software packages that were required. I configured a brand new MySQL installation as instructed. Then I started Confluence and began to step through its config screens per the instructions. Somewhere along the way, I encountered an error with an insane diagnostic.

Always willing to assign blame to myself in the first instance, I blew away the entire installation and began again. Again, I was meticulous about following the instructions. Again I got the same error.

I mention my following the instructions because this is a big deal for me. I'm one of those sad people who reads the owner's manual for a new car or a new mouse from cover to cover before using it, even though there is virtually no chance that I'll learn anything from my reading. But I am confident in my ability to follow written instructions perfectly. When I can't get a piece of software to work after carefully following the instructions, the problem is with the software. The instructions are part of the software, which is why I say the problem is with the software.

I'm sure I could probably get somebody at Atlassian to step me through the setup for Confluence, but I'm not interested in doing that. I've learnt all I need to know. That means that I won't use any of the Atlassian products, nor will I suggest that other people try them. I'm really documenting this here so I can point to it any time somebody suggests Confluence or Jira to me in the future.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

A Horse to Remember

A weedy little bloke from some runt of a town in western NSW walked into a pub on a Carlton street corner one spring day. The regulars at the bar gave him the stare, but he went ahead and ordered a beer. His name was Kenny and he became a regular and some of the men started to recognize him. He bought beers for me and some mates and we got to ask him why he was in Melbourne.

This was not something he wanted to share with everybody, so he almost whispered it. "I'm here to back Galilee in the Cups," he said. This theme was constant for a week or two. He was an odd punter, always in the pub rather than at the racecourses or even the TAB. This was 1966, and this pub had never had a TV in the bar. But he kept having enough money to buy his share.

He disappeared on Caulfield Cup day, but was back with a major hangover and a lopsided grin the following Monday. Galilee had won and Kenny had won with the bookies. Over the next few days, my mates decided that Kenny knew something and decided they had to back Galilee in the Melbourne Cup. I was a student then, so the other guys elected me their representative to back the horse on Cup Day. I'd never been in a TAB or bet on anything, so this was a shock.

I did some reading and found that only five horses had won the cup double in the past 90 years. It seemed unlikely that it would happen this year. So I kept the money, avoided the TAB, drank as much as I could hold and discovered too late how treacherous horses and gambling can be when Galilee came home first. We never saw Kenny again, and I was lucky to see anything at all when my excited mates came to collect their winnings. I vowed to avoid horses and betting for the rest of my life. And I had to find a new pub.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Coles Puts Customers Last

For ages now, all the Coles supermarkets I use have had a nice simple EFT setup. While the cashier is scanning your purchases, you could swipe your loyalty card if you had one and you could swipe your credit/debit card and select your account. At the end, you could quickly enter your PIN, wait a few seconds for the receipt to be printed and be on your way.

Today, the local Coles introduced a new "improved" system that finally took into account the chip on your debit/credit card. And, at the same time removed the little bit of streamlining that everybody has become accustomed to. You can no longer do anything with the card reader until the cashier has finished, and you can't swipe your loyalty card at all—that difficult task is now reserved to the cashier. So you wait, then you insert your card, then you wait until the machine is ready, then you select your account and wait a bit more. Finally, you get to enter your PIN. This all adds a noticeable delay to the checkout process.

Coles, it's not an improvement at all and there's just no excuse for it.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Is Oracle the new SCO?

I avoided Java for many years, partly because I thought it was a failure in language design and partly because I found Sun's tight control disconcerting. I avoided Solaris because of Sun's tight control and because there were plenty of satisfactory alternatives.

When OpenSolaris appeared, I began to experiment with it. It still felt risky, but operating systems are much easier to change than the languages you use to create software with, so the risks seemed acceptable. When Sun made moves to open Java up, I began to consider using it or, more likely, other languages that built on the JVM.

Then Sun fell in a hole and I put things on hold. I had some hopes for a takeover by IBM, based on my belief that that they might continue the Sun stuff of interest in a way I could live with. That might have been unduly optimistic, but is now irrelevant. IBM went away and Oracle stepped in. Oracle is not a company I have ever admired in any way and it is run by a man I find even less admirable than Bill Gates. But many analysts, who claimed to have better sources of information than I have, seemed to think that Oracle would probably continue with OpenSolaris and would certainly nurture Java.

Now it appears that OpenSolaris is dead. And Larry Ellison has decided to tackle Google over Java. I have no idea how that will unfold. I do know that Google have the money to withstand a legal challenge. I'd like to see Oracle do a SCO and collapse under the legal mess, although I fear that they might survive. I am certainly going to avoid OpenSolaris and Java for the next few months or years. I'm also starting to think about alternatives to OpenOffice. I'd love big Oracle customers to announce that they are going to walk away from Oracle because they can't rely on Oracle's ability to survive.

At least database technology is pretty much a solved problem and alternatives to Oracle exist and others can be created. So it will be possible for people to drop the Oracle database money pit. Getting everybody to walk away from their Java investments will be much harder, but I'd like to see people considering that too. At least I have nothing to lose, having no investment in either Java or Oracle. But I will be cheering for anybody who helps to cut the ground from under Oracle.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Foursquare Privacy Fail

I've been seeing a number of friends take up with foursquare and I've seen quite a few mentions of their service in the blogs, so yesterday I thought I'd have a look at it and signed up. Bad timing. They chose to get embroiled in a story of a privacy policy that describes something quite different from what they deliver.

That's not the bad part. All of us make mistakes. Rapidly-growing startups probably make more than most. I like it better when people don't make mistakes, but I can live with it—unless it's a matter of life and death. And I can live with the mistakes if the same people don't make a point of repeating the same mistakes all the time.

The thing I can't abide is people and businesses who make mistakes and refuse to admit them or try to conceal the mistakes from the affected people. A recent story in Wired claims that Foursquare Puts Money Before Privacy and backs that up with plenty of data. Read it.

I'm getting sick of companies that don't even pretend to care about their customers and my policy has hardened in past few months. I had already cancelled my Facebook account because of their behaviour—not that you can cancel with them. They just treat you as if you're having a little time out and maintain your account regardless. Major fail. I'm not planning to do anything with foursquare now.