Year: 2008

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AT&T – I offer you some free consulting

First, let’s begin with emailing from your phones. It’s a simple process and should never see an error like:

Your MSG could not be DELIVERED because InvalidPduContent

Soon we will discuss daylight savings time, servers and time stamping. And radiowave propagation.

Update: So far, it would appear that any SMS message over 160 characters causes this problem. Now, the thing is, the phone (a Motorola RAZR v3xx) is supposed to be able to send email as well as SMS. I believe it uses the same interface. So 160 characters doesn’t fly. Plus, the interface is supposed to take anything over 160 characters and automatically break it into multiple messages. Hmm. I wonder if that’s it. Perhaps it sends the first 160 characters successfully but fails to put the correct header on the next message so the later part of the email doesn’t get sent successfully.

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I’ve got myself a keylogger!

Maybe.. Windows security popped up to explain that I’ve got the Trojan-Keylogger.WIN32.Fung. Now, I’m typing fast and thinking slow. I may have just fallen prey to a popup ad because Windows security could only "enable protection" which when clicked took me to a … oh, this is pseudo phishing scam. That had to be a popup ad well designed to look like the windows security popup. It took me to an affiliate site for a free download or the ability to buy some software. I can’t believe I nibbled at that! None-the-less, I’m going to do a few scans and ensure the integrity of this machine. Back to work.

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Has FireFox forgotten you?

Many sites have the option to log in and remember you for a time period, usually a couple of weeks. For instance, Delicious, GMail, and Twitter all remember that I’ve logged in and only make me log back in after a couple of weeks even if Firefox is shutdown, crashed, or the computer is rebooted. That is, until last week when I noticed that every time I went to one of the sites I had to log in again even if I’d checked the "remember me" box. Naturally, I assumed a cookie problem.

As it turns out, if this is happening to you, a file called cookies.sqlite is damaged. Close Firefox! Right click on the START menu and open Explore. You may be navigating to some hidden directories so once Windows Explorer opens, go to the Tools menu and choose Folder Options. Go to the View tab. Make sure the bullet is on "Show hidden files and folders" instead of "Do not show hidden files and folders" Personally, I would recommend removing the check from "Hide extensions for known file types" Now navigate to this directory: C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ Note that C will be the letter of your drive where windows is installed and it may not necessarily be C. {username} will be the name you use when logging into windows. Once in that directory, find your profile directory. It will probably be the only subdirectory and most likely will be a bunch of random numbers and letters dot default like 2fwe34ccc.default. Go into that directory. Find the file cookies.sqlite and delete it. Restart Firefox and your problem should be solved.

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The Halloween Costume from Hell Lives at Target

So last night (Tuesday night) was interesting. Cathy and Amy drove to the high school around 4pm to pickup Sarah and shoot across the street to Party City for Amy and Evan’s costumes, only they were out of Evan’s size. They returned home for a quick freshening up before having to rush Sarah to a 5:30pm color guard practice at Hardin Valley Academy. Since I was supposed to be running the Knoxville Asperger Support Group at 6pm, and we only have one functioning vehicle, I felt it prudent that I drive (plus the girls were tight on time and I have this way of bending space and time…more through backroads and minding the traffic patterns than speeding mind you). We got Sarah to Hardin Valley on time and waited 15 minutes for her to give us the thumbs up that she was situated. We drove off with me hoping to get to the support group meeting just a couple of minutes late and Cathy hoping we’d skip the support group meeting and go to Party City in Turkey Creek instead.

Naturally we ended up at Party City where I bumped into a familiar face (but that’s for another post) and the signs indicated they had not sold out of the toddler sized pirate costume! Yea! But the employee came back to say they had none. Boo. BUT! The computer indicated that the Broadway store had a single one left. For those that don’t know the area. From our house to Hardin Valley is pretty extreme. From Turkey Creek to Fountain City are exact opposite corners of Knoxville. After several hangups and infinite holds, the Turkey Creek employee finally convinced the Broadway employee to put the costume on hold. As I leave the store, an employee is telling another employee who is on the phone with a customer, "No way! We don’t put any costumes on hold two days before Halloween."

Cathy puts an SOS out on Twitter. As we drive toward Fountain City, someone alerts us that there is a temporary Halloween store in West Town Mall. We are just reaching that exit so we pull off the Interstate and into the mall parking lot. I slow to 5 mph and push Cathy out the door. I circle the parking lot to keep the antsy children calm while Cathy discovers the costumes are far superior in quality to Party City, but alas, no toddler sizes.

We return to the Interstate and rush to the junction of Old Broadway, Tazwell Pike, and Broadway. After a painfully long wait, we screech across the 4 lanes of Broadway and into the Party City parking lot. Upon entering and saying I have one on hold, the costume people look at me like I’m crazy. A helpful employee comes to my aide and tracks down the costume held in my name. It is indeed the last toddler size pirate costume in the store. I quickly purchase it and go to the car. Cathy points out that it is a 2T! Ugh. We needed a 4T. I go back inside and they are quick to point out the no returns policy but I get a full refund anyway. A giant billboard over Party City says there is a costume store at North Peters (for you outta townies, that’s pretty darn close to Turkey Creek).

The children are getting surly. We grab McDonald’s and allow the necessary potty breaks.

We drive from BFE East to BFE West and find the North Peters store. It blows all the other stores away! Great displays and wonderful stuff but no toddler pirate outfits. They confirm that I have been to every possible costume store in town. Dejected, we decide to return home.

As we come off the Interstate at West Town Mall, we decide to check Target, a mere 3½ miles from our house. We find the best Captain Jack Sparrow costume in Evan’s size and it was on sale at 30% off! It only cost a quarter tank of gas and 4 hours of driving. We even remembered to bring Noah home!

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Knox County Charter Amendments in Plain English

Upon examining the sample ballot from the General Election in Knox County, TN November 4, 2008, I found the questions of the Charter Amendments confusing. So I emailed the Election Commission and learned that they are not allowed to comment on the ballots. However, the County Law Director’s Office writes the questions so I called and spoke to a very kind and informative lawyer at the County Law Director’s Office. He also pointed me to today’s Knoxnews Editorial (which says vote yes to 3 and 4. I disagree.). The following is my interpretation of the Chart Amendment questions based upon his answers to my questions. Please see this earlier post or the sample ballot for the actual questions.

LIQUOR REFERENDUM

First we discussed the Liquor Referendum. There are not overreaching implications of this question. Either we want to be able to have liquor by the drink served in bars and restaurants in the county, just like we do in the city, or we don’t. It’s a very straight forward question.

COUNTY CHARTER AMENDMENT QUESTION 1

This is a housekeeping amendment to bring our county into conformance with state law. In short, the amendment says, "Amendments can be added to the ballot."

COUNTY CHARTER AMENDMENT QUESTION 2

This is also a housekeeping amendment. Apparently the current charter does not explicitly state how the composition of a Charter Review Committee (that is, who makes up the committee). I looked for the actual wording in the current charter but Google is failing me at the moment. So, as a matter of housekeeping, this question adds to the charter language that says:

a Charter Review Committee is "composed of 27 members with 1 member of the County Commission from each commission district to be nominated by the Commission, 9 non-commission members who are registered Knox County voters nominated by the Commission and 9 noncommission members who are registered Knox County voters nominated by the Knox County Mayor."

There is no hidden agenda or far overreaching implication.

COUNTY CHARTER AMENDMENT QUESTION 3

This question is actually two unrelated questions in one. The first half of the question is asking do we reduce the number of county commissioners from 19 to 11. Each commission district would be reduced from 2 representatives to 1. And 2 at-large commissioners who would serve county wide and not be bound to district. This is similar to the way the city government works. So if you feel the city’s representation of the people is effective, then that part of the question is a YES vote. If you feel the city’s government is ineffective, then that half of the question is a NO vote.

The second half of the question regards a nepotism policy which obviously prohibits family from supervising or influencing employment of a relative. It also says that no person drawing a paycheck from Knox County would be able to serve as a commissioner. For example, a Knox County school teacher could not also be a Knox County Commissioner.

This is a tough question simply because the first half has to weigh between less overhead in our county government versus less representation. And the second half has to do with eliminating the good ol’ boy network in our county government (again, my interpretation, not the County Law Director’s Office). However, you cannot vote NO to half and YES to the other half. Your vote is either FOR or AGAINST.

COUNTY CHARTER AMENDMENT QUESTION 4

Right now, the positions of County Trustee, County Clerk, Register of Deeds and County Law Director are all elected positions. If you live in the county, you get to vote for the people who hold those positions. This question proposes that those four positions will no longer be elected. Instead the Mayor will appoint those positions.

That’s it. To review and my recommendations:

  1. (YES) Housekeeping
  2. (YES) Housekeeping
  3. (NO) Two unrelated questions: a) reduce the number of commissioners b) Instate a nepotism policy
  4. (NO) Change 4 elected positions to positions appointed by the Mayor
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The Joy of Software

I’ve written this PHP application. I work on a development server. Then I move code to a staging server for preliminary testing and client approvals. When the code is ready, it gets moved to a production server. In an ideal world, dev, staging, and production would all be configured identically. In the real world, you get different operating systems, different versions of the middleware application software (PHP, ColdFusion, .NET, etc.), different version of the databases, drivers don’t match, security patches are applied on one server but not another, and so forth.

So, this PHP application has a calendar piece for associating a date with a form collecting data. When adding a new thing, the form should have certain default values and the date should automagically show today’s date at 00:00 hours for the starting date and today’s date at 00:14 hours for the ending date. This works great on the development server. This works great on the staging server. But on staging, the date defaults to December 31, 2008 at 19:00 hours for the first date (the beginning date) and December 31, 2008 at 00:14 hours for the second date (the ending date).

It’s the little that make life so interesting and keep the padded rooms booked up.

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On Failed Communications

I just realized I have spent the entire day with my phone on silent. Wow! And what productive day it has been! But I’ve missed calls and text messages. For that, I apologize.

Also, yesterday I became away that I forgot to renew my CFNinja.com domain name last week. Fortunately there is a grace period for renewals but any mail sent to my cfninja.com email address on Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday bounced. Several people let me know this last night. Again, my apologies and if you sent me an email over the past 4 days, please resend it. Thanks!

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The Dark Side of Working from Home

I’m under a lot of pressure right now. I’m trying hard to close out a project. The end of projects are always the most difficult because time and budget is usually running out. Often the client realizes they want features that either were never requested or not implemented for whatever reason. In using the product during testing, user interface issues arise or the enduser finds it would be easier with just this "one simple change". Those are generalizations to "many projects" and not necessarily talking about the one I am on. But today I have been really trying hard to reach a couple of very specific goals and it hasn’t gone as fast or as smoothly as planned.

Enter the children. Since its nearing 4pm, Sarah has to be picked up from the high school, which is right across the street from Party City aka Halloween Depot. So Amy and Cathy are off to get Sarah, costumes, and accessories leaving me with my computer and Evan until Noah gets home to babysit. Of course, Evan just wants to play with Dad so he comes down to my desk and starts moving things around. In his cuteness, he wants to help so while I type on one computer, he starts typing on the other and unknowingly messing up my test bed. I lose it. No tv Dad for me today. I’ll reserve 50 lashings for myself later when in great self-flagellation when I punish myself for my loss of temper. Of course, that won’t change the fact that I sent a crying 3 year old packing to an empty upstairs. I feel like crud. I should work at night while they sleep. I just cannot figure out when I’d sleep. Time to go make amends and give some hugs.

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jQuery’s datepicker driving me nuts

I love jQuery! And its UI library. But I’m having difficult implementing a simple date picker. The datepicker method is throwing an error for me: "inst is undefined datepicker" The solution of adding "{onSelect: function() {}}" did not work. I’m at the point of no return. Choosing a different calendar application.

Update: Solved! I had an artifact left over from trying to implement the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library‘s calendar. jQuery’s UI datepicker conflict’s with YUI’s datepicker.

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Looking forward to November 5

I’ve wondered in this political season how many people who enjoyed a particular blog quit reading because of that person’s support for a particular candidate. I feel this election is very important and as such I have been very outspoken in support of Barack Obama. I hope that has not driven people away who have enjoyed Reality Me in the past. Recently, Cathy and I upset, and ran off, one reader that we assumed was passing through and making brief comments on blogs supporting Obama. We forgot that the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon taught us that all people are closely connected. In this case, our "passing" Republican was not a troll but a quiet reader of both our blogs who delurked for a political statement. I know this because it turns out she is a friend of my brother.

So, I’m looking forward to November 5, 2008, to cut back on some of the political posts and get back to the humor in life, some tech, pictures of my children, and news of the odd.

Blogging, at least mine, is an opinionated form of publishing that may be biased and at times without objectiveness. With its world-wide reach, the potential audience for a blog is huge. As such, the odds are someone is going to be disturbed, or offended. I can only hope that spurs some interesting conversations in comments and perhaps an opportunity to meet for coffee and discuss our differences. So if the Pro-Obamaness of Reality Me has driven you nuts, let’s have some coffee together and talk something other than politics. In the meantime, check out this great video from Obama!

And this transcription of his remarks in Canton, Ohio.