January 2007 Archives

The OSCON talk & tutorial submission period ends in about a week on February 5. Please submit your proposals soon!

And woah - we've done a poor job at beating people over the head with the submission deadline! Usually we have many many times more submissions than slots, but as of right now it's quite the other way around (which probably is normal too, I don't remember the stats for when the submissions come in). In the categories I'm particularly interested in there are only a handful of submitted Perl talks and only one(!) MySQL talk submitted to the databases track. The Ruby submissions are pretty sparse too, as of now. We'd like some more. :-)

Many more talks are submitted to "Web applications, client- and server-side" already, but as far as I'm concerned it absolutely won't hurt to have more to pick from. ;-)

OSCON is in Portland, OR July 23-27, 2007.

Google have made Fuse work on OS X (project page). This means that it is now trivial-ish to implement all sorts of file systems on OS X. The big deal is that you can do it as a regular program, rather than as a kernel extension.

One of the most useful ones are sshfs that lets you mount a directory on another server over ssh. Any box you can ssh to, you can now mount on your mac! The Transmit / TextMate integration is nice, but this is about a thousand times better. Someone already made a sshfs OS X binary.

Yay, this is Really Cool.

Update 2: I decided to call again and eventually got someone helpful who let me replace the switch for a small fee. Still didn't make the process less frustrating.

Woah. Let's just say that Netgear management didn't read "Who did you make smile today?".

(If you need Netgear Customer Support, call 888‑638‑432 - press 41. Don't leave a comment here!)

I have a bunch of Netgear switches at home, I've been getting them mostly because of the neat slim form factor.

One of them have been working intermittently for the last 6 months; every week or two it just "hangs". Netgear claims to have "a solid warranty: switch - 5 years, power supply - 2 years", so hey - I should call them, right? Well, wrong!

First I wait on hold and when finally through they tell that they can't help until I go to the website to register the product. Fine, whatever. I do that and call back and wait on hold for another 10-15 minutes.

After finally getting through the technical support person was trying to make me find the reset button so we could get the switch to "factory settings". I had to patiently explain it's a dumb switch with no settings. No no she kept insisting, "you want to get it to factory settings, right?". Aargh.

When we got through that, they decided that they can't replace it because "it's working"! Apparently "it turns on with no smoke coming out" is "it is working". Besides, it's not made to "be on all day". It's a 16 port switch with only 6 ports in use! It is reasonable that a few of those devices are "24/7". Their list price is $400+ (it retails for a little less than $200). "Oh sir, you can't be using your { VoIP / wireless router / DSL modem / print server } all day so just turn off the switch when you are away from your desk". How in the world can that be sane? Well, it's "Netgear policy".

They say that it is overheating and since it's "on all day" it's not a defect that they can replace on warranty! It's on my network at home - a bit of SMTP, a bit of NFS and MySQL (for MythTV), traffic from the wireless network when we are home. It's under my desk with reasonable circulation - not behind the fans on a warm computer or some such.

Alright then, on to my 8-port which last week started to hang during large file transfers. Sometimes after 20 minutes, sometimes after a few hours. Quickly again they decide that it must be overheating and insist that it's working. "Hanging after 20 minutes is working?" "Yes, you must understand my situation there is nothing we can do". Yes, I understand that she (Sarnya was her name, hello google) has to get approval from someone to give me an RMA and let me return the defect product; No, I don't understand how "it works for 20 minutes so it is okay" is a reasonable response.

I tried to find out what could possibly be covered by their warranty when "switch hangs after 20 minutes" isn't covered, but she couldn't tell me.

I kept asking for a supervisor and was told that "the supervisors aren't technical" so that wasn't possible. When I insisted I was promised that a supervisor would call me back in one hour. Hah. Yeah right they will. (A couple of hours later: No, they didn't.)

Anyway, don't buy Netgear equipment. It is badly designed and will break and they won't care. If you read through all this, please go mark my Amazon review helpful. :-)

Update: I mentioned it to Leonard Lin and his brief comment was "Had a similar overheating Netgear problem; switched to Linksys; never looked back".

First of all: Happy New Year everyone! For reasons I don't understand, or maybe no reason at all, there are a couple thousand of you who end up here every day (actually, closer to 4000 a day but many end up on old archive pages and, I'm guessing, quickly leave).

By now you've probably seen the oh so promising Apple iPhone. Woah, does that thing look neat!

I'm attached to my Treo, but I think I found my upgrade. I might even switch to Cingular for it, at least if they get an unlimited data plan that's not vastly super-duper overpriced. Heck, with the beautiful "visual voicemail" feature I might switch to Cingular anyway.

One thing that I'll occasionally will be missing is, of course, an ssh client which brings me to the big question: Will Apple provide an SDK and let us install our own programs on the phone?

From what I understand about the phone industry, that might be the kind of thing that makes the phone company go bonkers, but on the other hand Apple is the kind of company that can make them think differently (haha).

The hardware looks like it's completely blow anything else away, so if they make the platform open it should be an amazing success.

Oh, and I've heard that there are a few not-Apple companies working on applications for it! Hopefully they are just testing the new version of Xcode that's going to be announced in the summer. :-)

Didn't Apple start telling developers to do resolution independent applications a year ago? This would have been to make applications work on displays with much higher "per inch" resolution, like - tada - the 160 DPI iPhone display. (It's also a rumored/hoped for unannounced 10.5 feature).

I wonder what kind of processor is in it. And how stripped down is the iPhone version of OS X? I'm sure it'll still have the SQLite framework, but does it still come with say Perl? Apache? Could we port and install MySQL?

Speaking of open platform phones, if you haven't seen it, be sure to check out OpenMoko, in particular the OpenMoko presentation.

A reader pointed out some time ago that I was right about VMWare for OS X, but of course pretty wrong about the iTunes Movies thing. As a developer and AAPL shareholder I hope the "iPhone.app target" in Xcode will be one of the obvious, easy guesses. :-)