diary of an Endorphin Junkie

There are some things you just can't search for. Well, you can -- but you get way too many hits to be useful.

I want to find an online wish list service, to replace my Amazon wishlist. I would like to be able to view it and edit it from my Android phone. Unfortunately there are no words here which produce useful or relevant results.

online wish list android
online wish list "mobile interface"
wish list android app
...etc

Are all everyone's wish list postings about other stuff. I've spent an hour searching and it's really truly useless.

Note: yes I know that Kaboodle has an android app for "add to wishlist" but what I really need is the ability to read the wishlist, and kaboodle's interface is way too busy to use on a phone.

Postini, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, is a global leader in
on-demand communications security, policy, and productions solutions.

Heh. So after trying to use the postini service for a few weeks now I'm going to have to call them out for being None Of The Above.

#1: There is a FATAL flaw in Postini's Quarantine. When outbound messages are quarantined by the Content Manager, only one recipient per domain gets a copy of the message.

For example, if the recipients of my e-mail are a@postini.com, b@postini.com, c@postini.com, a@google.com, b@google.com... when the message is approved, only a@postini.com and a@google.com receive the message. All other recipients are silently discarded.

( Lots of other technical details on how badly Postini fails at policy enforcement. )

Conclusion: Postini might be useful for anti-spam, or attachment filtering, or something else we're not trying to do with them. But do not consider them a security company, or for use in policy compliance.

So after losing my Treo 680 and well, I really wanted an iPhone but I knew that some things weren't perfect with it... I decided to give T-Mobile their only chance of keeping me, and give 30 days of testing on the Android G1 phone.

It turns out that I love the G1. It's the best phone I've had in years - as in, like actually Making Phone Calls it's got better signal and better call quality than any Treo I've owned, and better than an iPhone. There's already like 1200 applications for it, and especially including an SSH client (something the iPhone still doesn't have). It uses straight Java, so it's pretty easy to make applications for it.

Yes, there are some downsides to it and even one truly boneheaded mistake. But so far, I like it more than I like the iPhone, even after playing with both of them side by side for a few hours. That's mostly because I like the physical keyboard better, but there are some things in the UI which are much better thought out. (and some things which aren't)

I'll be posting a bit later about specific good things and specific issues. I'll tag those specifically so they are easy to avoid. For now, I have a bunch of links on my website on where to find the best Android this-and-that at http://www.bitchandwine.net/j/android-phone.html.

So I finally tried to get on the RSS bandwagon and get an RSS aggregator working. Based on the reviews I read it seemed like Rojo was the way to go.

After 3 attempts to create an account, separated by at least 6 hours, all failed... I gave up, and am using the Google Reader.

Rojo is often called the best product with too small of a market. Well, not surprising if you can't join.

If you run a mailing list server, or want to run a mailing list server, you should read this.

( Mailman's problems with backscatter. )

Here's the good news. It had been a long time since I evaluated MLMs, and I was happily surprised. Not only are there a lot more choices on the market, but every free MLM that is currently supported deals with these problems better than Mailman.

In fact, the following two products already provide the kind of rules-based logic that Mailman developers "think might be possible in 3.0". If you're running a Mailman installation today, I highly encourage you to migrate to one of the following products (both freeware)

Dada Mail: http://mojo.skazat.com/

Sympa: http://www.sympa.org/

Sympa production can be configured properly, but the version in SVN appears to have much better defaults and logic. They are active and aware of the issues involved here. http://www.sympa.org/dev-manual/antispam

So I just tried to set up an E*Trade account. You know, E*Trade. The company that does online trading. Their website is the foundation of their service, right?

In just 5 minutes I found 14 bugs in their service. Broken links for adding services or options were just the least of it.

1. You set up the account online, but you can't transfer money into it until you validate it. The links to validate it say that you don't have an online account.

2. It turns out that you need to "internal setup" to complete before you can validate it. No mention of this.

3. You are supposed to wait for an e-mail from them with your account number, and use that account number to validate the account. But the e-mail only contains the last 4 digits of your account number. You have to call them to find out the full account number.

4. You created a new username for this account, and when you're done you are logged in. But no mention of the account you created. You have to manually link your username to the account you created (with that account number that you weren't provided with)

This is the worst UI I have seen in years. Is there any Q/A testing at all?

So my boss's new laptop included Office 2007 demo. He wanted to buy it naturally, but couldn't seem to get through the process. Dumps on my lap.

After 3.5 hours, I have to wonder just WTF is Microsoft thinking? The process does not work. I mean, seriously, I'm an expert computer user. I know how to read, and I can follow instructions. And I have gone through the process all of the different ways, and it all comes down to this a selection that doesn't exist.

In the Activation Wizard, do one of the following:

* If you have purchased a product key from a retailer,
  click Enter Product Key, and then follow the
  instructions in the wizard.

* If you have not purchased a product key and would
  like to purchase one online, click 
  Buy Product Key Online, and then
  follow the instructions in the wizard. 

Obviously the second choice is what I need. But that button does not exist. Period. And there are half a dozen ways to start this process, but they all end here.

Wow, pure genius.

I ended up uninstalling the demo version and then downloaded the full product fresh from the website.

So yesthattom wrote this book Time Management for System Administrators. And I had been to his talks and improved a bit, and I knew he absolutely took on as much if not more in his daily life as I did, but really seemed a lot happier with it. So why didn't I rush out and buy this book? I was too busy, naturally.

Well, after spending the last two years learning how to get a better grip on my life and make my life more enjoyable, I finally picked up his book at the conference. And I figured to read the introduction on the plane while taxing (because I always fall asleep during takeoff).

Well, not so much. I didn't sleep a wink and I all but finished the book before I landed.

No surprise to say that absolutely everything I have painstakingly figured out for myself in the last two years was in this book. And a whole lot more, including points about significant things which are still holding me back. Wow.

So while not all of you are system administrators, the vast majority of you are analytical in nature and work in interrupt-driven jobs. This book is for you.

And I'm not even saying "go out and buy this book". I'm saying that if you are in my friends list and tell me that you haven't read this book, I'll buy it for you. Because it's that good.

I'm back from the LISA conference. It was a blast as always, though the value of the hallways track compared to the conference proceedings was even higher this year. Ah, I actually shouldn't complain. Although the proceedings were mostly... eh. Several of the talks were downright spectacular, and sent me off spinning around on how to best implement the ideas.

A side benefit was the ability to catch up with many many people I really never see, including gothgeekgirl, jss1113, luggage, unzeugmatic and yesthattom.

Sadly missing from the ranks were bjarvis, cpj, dev_random, and jkhedron.

Okay, you got to love this. Perl is psychic. It knows that an undefined value is a hash. I'm sorry, would be a hash if an alternate reality had been taken. But it wasn't, so that value is not a hash. It should be NULL. Very odd.

( Click here for all the gory details. )

It is unfortunately not simple enough to provide a 6-line script which demonstrates this. It has something to do with the routine being inside a package, or the fact that the conditional isn't known until a file is read in and evaluated. I'm trying to figure out what the limitation is. But it's very odd, given that the code expects the undefined hash to have an address of 0.