Randy’s random musings

It’s been nearly a year since my last blog entry, partly since Facebook and Twitter have satiated my desire to express myself online, but mostly because I didn’t really have anything important to say… until now.

We bought our first iPhone a little over a year ago, for Cathy. She really liked it, and after spending some time with it, I finally decided to replace my Nokia E51 with Cathy’s old iPhone 3G, and purchased a 3GS for her. While I had some problems with my iPhone 3G (particularly with wifi and GPS reception), I was pleased, overall, with the phone. On the announcement of the iPhone 4, I had already made my mind up to change carriers in Germany, from E-Plus to T-Mobile, due to poor signal reception in our house. Since the release of the iPhone 4 together with iOS 4, it’s all gone downhill.

First, the iPhone 4 had widely-publicized antenna problems, due to the new design. I had expected to get better reception with the new phone, but instead find myself often losing service completely if I simply held the phone naturally. Apple insulted its customers with a press release that skirted the edges of flat-out dishonesty.

Really, Apple? You were “stunned” to learn that your formula for mapping signal strength into bars was “totally wrong”, since the first iPhone? Did you think nobody would remember that software update you released that “gave” people more bars, often without improving actual reception? (“You really only have 2 or 3 bars, but we’ll show you 5, to make you happy!”)

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This past weekend, I had the privilege of visiting another new country, together with Cathy and Ben. I counted the trip as an opportunity to finally put my old Canon HV20 high-def camcorder to some good use!

The combination of in-camera optical image stabilization with the ability of iMovie ’09 to add stabilization during editing is pretty powerful: together with careful hand-held shooting, footage looks nearly as smooth as if it were shot from a tripod! (as I was in a hurry to get this posted, a few scenes are lacking iMovie’s stabilization)

Be sure to watch in HD!

Our Weekend in Basel – Highlights from Randy Oostdyk on Vimeo.

For about a year now, we’ve been having trouble with our otherwise trusty 11-year-old Honda Accord. On very rare occasions, it refused to crank when we tried to start it… It’s got a manual transmission, and it was acting exactly as it would have if we hadn’t stepped on the clutch: dead silence. After waiting a few minutes, it would usually “fix itself”. As a band-aid solution to the problem, I figured out that we could get it started by running a jumper wire from the positive battery terminal to the ‘S’ solenoid input on the starter. Worked fine for emergencies, but it’s been gradually happening more and more, to the point that it’s become nearly a daily occurrence. Tired of having to pop the hood to start the car, I decided that it was time to do some real troubleshooting.
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During a recent vacation in Turkey, we saw a quite a few interesting signs and placards. While we were grateful to have things translated into our language, small mistakes were sometimes quite entertaining.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Please don't pick the flowers much... thanks!

Okay, so my German (and Cathy’s) isn’t that great, but a little punctuation goes a long way. What they meant was “Please don’t pick the flowers. Much thanks!” What we misunderstood was: “Please don’t pick the flowers too much… thanks!”

Don't adventure your life...

This sign was posted as we left the security gate at the main entrance of our hotel. There was a large bazaar on the other side of the highway, and they had built tunnels under the road for pedestrians to cross safely. Still… Adventuring my life sounds like a lot of fun!

These next few were seen at the buffet at dinner-time:

Chicken: kind-of Chinese

So, I guess this chicken is only “sorta” Chinese? When eating, I prefer my chicken to be 100% Chinese, thank you very much!

Grilled Chickenspit? Yummy!

People who know me well would probably describe me as an adventurous eater, but seeing this sign gave me pause. Besides the obvious question of how they collect the spit from the chicken, I wondered how it would taste. I tried some, it was delicious!

This one is actually from our previous trip to Turkey, we spotted it in a waterfall park area:

Dangerous to strink to the border?

We never really did figure out what it was supposed to mean… Any hypotheses?

Since switching over to Macintosh computers completely over a year ago, I’ve noticed quite a few bugs in released products. Some have been more serious than others, but they’re always frustrating! Here are just a few that have bothered me for quite a while:

• Nested soft RAID in Disk Utility is glitchy (I’m definitely an edge case here–doubt there are many others running RAID 1+0 on their Macs)
• Using my Nokia cell phone as a Bluetooth modem is intermittent, at best (since Leopard was released)
• Leopard’s Activity Monitor doesn’t show “nice” processes, and the scheduler is wonky (also since Leopard was released)
• iChat connectivity problems while using a wireless connection (AKA “Airport”)

What’s frustrating is that these bugs have been around for so long, unaddressed. The overall polish of OS X is wonderful, and it’s really nice to have Unix at the guts, so I can dive just as deep as I like… I just wish they’d fix these issues. Here’s hoping that Snow Leopard will actually fix some of this stuff!

Ever since Dreamhost moved me to a new server without warning, I’ve been trying to get my custom SpamAssassin install working the way it used to. I’ve finally succeeded, but it hasn’t been easy…

Because of the new infrastructure plan, new email accounts and shell accounts have been completely isolated. I thought that I wouldn’t need to worry about that, since I had an existing account with shell access to my email, and the change was only supposed to apply to new accounts. Unfortunately, I was completely wrong. In the most recent newsletter, Dreamhost was soliciting volunteers to move to their new servers. Less than one day later, I was having numerous issues with email and my web sites, and it dawned on me that they had moved me to new servers without any kind of notification!

After updating my DNS and changing some email client settings, everything was almost back to normal, except for my custom SpamAssassin install, which was completely broken. Getting it working again would entail a convoluted method of forwards, procmail recipes, and filters on Dreamhost’s panel. Read on for further details…

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Recently, I had occasion to try to remedy an intermittent internet connection in Turkey… It ended up being more challenging than I had anticipated. There was a LAN with a remotely-located (around 100 meters away) proxy server, and it worked intermittently. A ping to the proxy server showed no problems, unless there was congestion on the network. A ping flood would show between 5 to 10 percent packet loss, which increased with the size of the packet.

Having established that the route to the proxy server was at fault, I investigated and learned that the cable from the switch to the proxy server was probably over 100 meters, and that at least a segment of that cable ran parallel with a high voltage power line.

Thinking about the old days of dial-up, and the necessity of reducing the connection speed depending on the line quality, I had the idea of trying to reduce the link speed from 100 Mb/s to 10 Mb/s. It shouldn’t have negatively impacted the internet connection, since it was only a 6 megabit ADSL connection. The problem was that the link speed was auto-negotiated by the switch at both ends, and there was no way to force the link speed slower than 100!

Linksys WRT54GL (loaded with Tomato firmware) to the rescue! Under advanced settings was an option to manually force the link speed down to 10. I installed the router in between the switches, and the problem was gone immediately!

Here I am, almost three months later… My wife and son have come to join me (finally!), and soon my mother/brother-in-law will be here to visit, and hopefully our dogs shortly after that. (apparently, getting the right paperwork for importing dogs into Germany isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do) We found a real nice house to rent (and possibly buy, eventually) in Wassenberg-Orsbeck, and look forward to moving in next week.

I just brought a new site online for NATO Airbase Geilenkirchen, an electronic bulletin board, of sorts. The idea is to give people a place to advertise things they want to sell, like Craigslist, but for a really small community.

My Nav-Cam with Tom-Tom has paid for itself many times over, over here in Germany… Couldn’t live without it! The battery does die quickly, though, even when it’s powered off. Qaiser has a good comment with a solution that I’ll integrate into the FAQ when I get time.