Ness' Outpost

This one had a few of us rolling on the floor laughing at work today.

I found out today that my typing wasn’t as bad as I thought.
I kept trying to log into my banking web site to pay some bills and was told my username/password was incorrect on Friday night. I gave it a day or two since I thought all my wrong attempts might have locked up the account for some amount of time. I tried again and no dice. So I attempted to reset my password with my security questions. No dice there either and the web page told me to call the help desk.

Turns out my card was canclled by the bank because it was flagged as either tamppered with or copied by someone in a police investigation. Now I am without banking abilities since that card number is tied to online banking. Therefore until I can get my new card activated I can’t do any banking.

Too bad I was trying to log on to pay a bill. Hopefully the card will be mailed to me before my mastercard is due. Otherwise I’ll have to call them and tell them my sob story looking for an extension.

Just this past week I updated the OS on my laptop from Fedora Core 5 to 6. Even though 6 was released on the 24th of October it just took me a while to motivate myself to upgrade. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. So I broke it. ;)

Actually the upgrade went fine. Usually I do a fresh install of OS major version bumps since I’ve partitoned my laptops HD into /, /home, etc. I just keep the home partion unchanged and we’re off to the races. This time I did an OS upgrade to the new version and everything went grate until a day later I ran yum to try and upgrade the packages that must have been outdated by now.

The OS upgrade left a FC 5 mono package lying around on my machine. I removed that by hand after wondering why my yum upgrade commands were failing. After that yum did a nice job upgrading my OS’s packages and going through all the dependencies. Or so I thought.

Of course I expected a new kernel to be installed and one was. When I booted up my laptop the GUI informed me that CPU frequency scaling was disabled because it wasn’t supported by my hardware – that was a red flag that something was up. When I ran uname -a after the upgrade everything looked fine so I started searching the web and found that I had the i586 kernel installed on my machine. This kernel is for machines pre Pentium II. I have a P4m chip in this laptop!

To get the right kernel on your machine run check out this page which explains how to diagnose the problem and fix it. Then life should be consuming less power for you again durning the noop's.

Penelope was due for her 95k oil change service and I had noticed some “chirping” noises in the wheels since I need to roll down my window to access the magnetic key fabs for my building. I had been ignoring that for quite a few weeks now because some days my 2002 Chevy Cavalier is a symphony of groans and squeaks.

That “chirping” noise was the front brake pad warnings – I should have known better since it went away when the brakes were applied. Apparently when they inspected the pads on the lift I had 3mm left therefore a brake job was in my future as well. I knew my rotors were warped since the car bounced around pretty well when braking was taking place so I had to bite the bullet and make the decision on the spot.

When I bought the car the dealer did a brake job for me at 65k so those pads only lasted me 30,000 km – which I found out from Scott at Richardson Chevrolet is near the norm depending on the parts used.

The rotors were already warped, having only 3mm of pads I didn’t want to drive it around since I could etch the rotors with the calipers if those 3mm wear out, I don’t have a jack, stands or a garage to do the work in myself. I was stuck, so I had the guys at Richardson do the work.
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It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here but I have been plenty busy with packing, moving, unpacking plus the daily grind on top of that.

But all work and no play makes me a dull boy — that’s where the Wii helps. I was in a race with Chris at work to see who could accumulate > 2000 points in Wii Tennis. On Sunday night I won a game which put me at 2011 points. Just enough to edge Chris out before he could get there, but he’ll stick to his story that he had tennis elbow and couldn’t play as often as I could.

On Tuesday this week Lauren and I picked up a vacuum cleaner from Canadian Tire. It’s a Roomba Discovery created by iRobot. iRobot is a robotics company that just happens to have a hugely successful robotic vacuum. From the outside it looks like a pretty neat company with some very interesting software challenges.

Now for the neat part. You can control the roomba’s motors and read the sensors through the serial port. There is a published serial port (hardware) hack that puts a Bluetooth radio onboard the device which allows the radio to connect to any other Bluetooth device that can talk the serial port protocol. Now I need to build some hardware so I can write some software.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to buy a version of Microsoft’s new operating system labeled “Vista”.

The time to upgrade to Vista will be when you buy a new computer and Vista comes preinstalled. This way you won’t have to worry about hardware incompatibilities and slow execution because your machine may not have enough horsepower.

Most software vendors say their software is “Vista Compatible”, but I wonder how true that is. Things like tax software, and anti-virus could be issues. If you’re not dreaming about the bleeding edge of technology and you like your computer to work for more than a few hours — then just wait. Don’t be an early adopter unless you want to deal with the upcoming issues that are bound to surface as the code base is explored by more users in new and exciting ways.

Is XP broken for you? If not, just keep on trucking because your web browser will continue to work if you don’t upgrade.

Here is a new argument against Vista based on the environmental impact of replacing tonnes of computer components. While I don’t endorse all the political ideas of the green party they do have a valid point in this specific case.

I’ve arrived safe and sound after my drive to Montreal for the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. The interesting stuff starts tomorrow – for now I need to find a nice little place to go for dinner.

Update: On the way to the hotel I was stopped at a red light with a car on the left and a bus on the right. A bike messenger tried to squeeze between the bus and me but forgot his handle bars are wider than the rest of the bike. He nearly took off my right mirror and then bounced into the bus. He just got up and drove away with a wave. Crazy people here in Montreal.

Lauren and I wrote our PPE for the PEO. Ethics and Law were ringing through my head at the time. Another test that is complete in the walk of life.

After the test we caught up with some friends, had dinner and then went back to Jay’s to play with is new Nintendo Wii Console.

It is a very different gaming system. You make the motion with your hands holding the controllers to move your characters on the screen. It was very fun, and rather addicting. Even Lauren liked the games — bowling, tennis, boxing and baseball — and she’s a pretty hard critic of video consoles in general.

I picked up some new tires at Active Green & Ross today. Monday night was pretty slippery so I decided it was time to replace the Goodyear/Handcook mix that came on my orphan’s rims when I got her about a year ago. Since I’m on vacation this week to study for my PPE exam I had some time to burn.

I bought some Uniroyal Tiger Paw AS65′s which are rated for 110k km. It was one of those buy one get one 1/2 off deals, but I still had to pay for balancing and valves of course so it becomes less attractive. But since I plan on riding out these tires until they or the car end I think it’s best to pay a bit more than going for the bargin basement tires.