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Stupid Bug
The other day as I was tracking down a bug, I almost kicked myself when I saw the problem. The code was something like:
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The end of 2 good years
It's time for me to sell my PowerBook G4. It has been a good machine for the last 2 years, but as technology changes, I need to keep up as my customers and users have already done so. Like all the machines I have owned, I use them a lot, but don't abuse them. My PowerBook has been my main machine for the last 2 years and it has served me well. We'll see if anyone is interested in it. There are still a few reasons to own a PowerBook as opposed to a MacBook or MacBook Pro (PCMCIA slot, runs Photoshop, Word, etc. faster as those applications aren't designed for Intel, yet, and it can still run Classic which the new Intel machines can't). I'm not a great salesman as I can't honestly say that I'd purchase this machine over a new MacBook, but that's just me and I don't need to run non-Intel native applications all that often.
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Effective meetings
Being self-employed and working at home have many benefits. First, being self-employed means that every meeting I have to attend (except for initial client meetings), I get paid to be there even if nothing gets accomplished or I don't say anything. So you'd expect people to sparingly invite me to meetings. Second, working from home means that most of my meetings are on the phone; good thing there is a mute button so I can be working on something else.
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Diagnosing network problems
Yesterday turned out to be one of those days that makes me hate technology. First it started (actually left over from the previous week) where I could only sometimes access a server I use for my job. I no longer run that server, so all I could do was figure out the problem and tell the person in charge of it to fix it. Unfortunately or fortunately, I have the knowledge to figure out the problem. Turns out that the 2 DNS servers that are used for that server were returning different values, so depending on which DNS server got my request, would determine if I could connect to the server. Very frustrating, but at least I figured out the problem. The second major network problem had to do with my dad's network. He had turned off all his equipment when he left on a trip and when he turned it back on, weird things started happening. His entire network uses DHCP, so it should have just worked, but I believe a bug in the firmware of his router (a Linksys WRT54g) was assigning the same IP address to 2 machines and his iMac was complaining. So after some futzing and me helping him, my dad updated the firmware on the router, restarted everything and was almost in business (I had to help him secure his wireless access point). He wanted me to teach him what I was talking about so that he wouldn't have to call again, which I appreciate, but it seems that networking has a lot of vodoo in it, especially when you deal with a very mixed environment. He has a Windows XP Home edition PC, and iMac (OS X 10.4), an iBook (OS 10.3.9) connected via 802.11b, a Linux box running the SlimServer software (connected via ethernet), and a Squeezebox (connected via 802.11b). Since I helped him setup a bunch of the pieces, I end up being the only person that can diagnose the network.