New MacBook Pro?
The rumor sites are pretty clear that there is a new MacBook coming out soon (next week)? I've been waiting to replace my first-generation Intel MBP for a while now, but I have to say that based on my iPhone 3G experience, I'm nervous about what my experience will be with a brand-new (vs. bump) MBP. Especially if Apple is really skipping the Intel chipsets and going with one from nVidia. I think I'll likely end up waiting at least a month to see if anyone else at work gets one first, and whether they experience problems with it...
How could anyone vote McCain/Palin?
It is truly beyond my comprehension how any reasonably intelligent, educated, and literate person could believe that the McCain/Palin ticket provides an even marginally acceptable leadership choice for our country. George W. Bush has been the complete, unmitigated disaster of a President that any thinking person could and should have seen coming. John McCain is guaranteed to be just as bad, if not worse.
The intellectual dishonesty and bankruptcy of trumpeting being "right" about the "surge", without acknowledging that he's been completely and utterly incorrect about everything else about Iraq demonstrates that he lives right next to GW Bush in the great state of Denial. Choosing the incredibly lightweight Palin as a VP candidate has to be the second-worse VP choice of all time, exceeded only by Perot's pick for VP.
If there was a fiscally conservative party or candidate, then that's where I'd probably put my vote. Unfortunately, the administration of both Bush's have shown that despite their rhetoric, Republicans are just as fiscally irresponsible as Democrats, if not more so. The fact that no one is talking about GWB's incredible ability to drive the country from a huge budget surplus that could have been used to reduce the deficit into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is indeed depressing. As close as I thought Gore was to an eco-nut, I have to think that the U.S. economy would be in hugely better shape if we'd have used the surplus for debt reduction and greenhouse gas emission reduction under Gore, and avoided the whole Iraq invasion scenario that Bush planned for us well before the 9/11 attacks.
If we end up in a decade(s) long recession/depression, then I hope historians vilify this truly horrific President as he truly deserves. Anyone reading this who was either sufficiently ignorant or negligent to have voted for Bush, please learn from the past and don't make the same mistake this time. If you can't see your way clear to voting for Barack Obama, then just stay home.
Maybe I just need to change courses
I played golf today for the 5th or 6th time this year, and this is the first time I've had a score worth mentioning. I've had some good holes (parred 3 out of the first 4 holes at Duke a few weeks ago, and had two birdies last week), but many more bad ones.
Today, however, I shot a 50 on the front nine, and a 43 on the back nine at Hillandale. Hillandale is certainly an easier course than Duke, especially with how wild my drive has been in the last month or so. Playing Hillandale, I can hit a drive well out of the fairway and still recover; the same distance outside the fairway at Duke is either lost or in a hazard. The rough a Duke has also been substantially more punitive than it was today at Hillandale.
It was also nice to play at 8:30 a.m. rather than 7:30; I got to "sleep in". Maybe I just needed a change. I definitely still need to practice, though.
It's been a while
I can't believe I haven't created a blog entry since we got back from Jerusalem. It's been a long, long time since then. Perhaps it's because I haven't had a good golf score in that long (hadn't been golfing much), perhaps it was being too busy at work (I have a new position at NetApp). Anyway, I think I'll make up some time and backdate a few posts...
Rocky road with iPhone 3G finally smoothing out
I swear I had more problems with the iPhone 3G than I'd imagined possible. Everything from dropped calls (6 consecutively in the same conversation while I was sitting still), stuck e-mail (over a day with no e-mail sync with work), to truly pathetic battery life (100% to < 10% in 7 hours with no phone calls). Plus more crashes in Safari than before, and the phone was slower to find a signal while traveling that the original (I know, because I was driving from NC to Michigan with both versions in the car). I'd actually called the Apple store at one point to try to return the phone.
Now, though, things are substantially better. The 2.1 firmware certainly helped a lot, but that wasn't actually the main difference. The main difference in battery life and e-mail stability was within the IT infrastructure at my company. It turns out there were ActiveSync, Exchange, and Firewall configuration issues that have been recently solved. Now my phone spends dramatically less time checking for e-mail or downloading messages while I'm reading. Moving/deleting a message is substantially faster.
As a result, I now get more than 18 hours of battery life, and my e-mail is consistently up to date. I haven't been using it much as a phone lately, so I can't really assess whether the dropped call problem has gone away, but I'm betting it has improved.
When I'd looked at the ActiveSync architectural paper, I figured that delivering a high quality of service with this infrastructure would be significantly more difficult than with RIM/Blackberry. The RIM architecture appears significantly superior; RIM has control over a much more extensive part of the infrastructure required to get mail from the company server to the phone, and therefore is in a much better position to be able to troubleshoot, diagnose, and harden their solution. With the iPhone so far, Apple has the core OS, the ActiveSync technology come from Microsoft, the connection between the phone and the Internet belongs to ATT, who knows who is between ATT and your company's ISP, and then you have your corporate IT department responsible for multiple components (an ActiveSync server, Exchange server, and firewalls). Who do you call when you aren't getting e-mail?
The iPhone mailing list at work regularly has a message from someone saying "I can't get mail on my iPhone, is anyone else having this problem?". I wouldn't trade my iPhone for a Blackberry, because my iPhone is dramatically more useful for lots of other things I care about. Having said that, I'd love to have enterprise-class reliability for e-mail on the iPhone, so I can stop worrying that I'm missing something critical while I'm traveling.
Perfect football weekend
How can it be better than this? Michigan came back and beat Wisconsin, Duke thrashed Virginia, Washington beat Dallas, and the Panthers won as well. I don't know how many times in history all the teams I like have won, but it has to have been pretty rare.
Gave up on MythTV, now I have a Tivo
I finally gave up on MythTV. I spent a huge amount of time working to get it set up, and it would work for a while, and then stop. The user experience is simply awful; 2-3 seconds to change channels is terrible. The effort required to set up and configure is unreal.
I couldn't find a card that would record HD, it appears that the content owners have done a good job at preventing consumers from achieving fair use with broadcast HD signals; hopefully that will change some day. I assume that the reason that the MythTV experience is so awful is that there aren't enough developers working on it to polish it and make it usable. It's too bad that the focus wasn't a truly great user experience as a DVR, rather than continuing to throw in tons of useless and irrelevant features (news reader, weather, multi-room support, ...)
So far my Tivo is doing fine; it has a Cable Card so I don't need two boxes any more; and the UI isn't too bad. Eventually I want to be able to figure out how to move content from the Tivo to my iPhone, but I can live with what I have until then.
Made our first photo book with iLife
I used iLife 08 to create a photo book for the first time to document the truly wonderful time we had in Israel. Tal and I gave it to her parents, who hosted us for the trip. The whole experience of creating the book was simple; the hardest thing to do was pick from the 1,300 pictures we took in Israel and narrow them down to a set that fit in a reasonable number of pages. Tal's parents were moved by getting this great keepsake from our vacation; this is clearly a great way to preserve memories of great times; I highly recommend it.
New role at NetApp
So July has been an interesting month at work. At the beginning of July, my promotion to Director was announced. I have to admit to being fairly proud of being promoted twice in four years from my starting role as a first line manager. However, that really wasn't the most interesting event in July. Today, my new role at NetApp was announced internally. I'm no longer responsible for the performance engineering team; I've moved to a new role where I'm responsible for the Data ONTAP release process and quality metrics. I lobbied for this for a couple of months; I think there is a great opportunity here to positively impact both NetApp and our customers.
This new role will be challenging for several reasons. First, I go from working with a team in RTP that I've built over the last several years, to working with a team in Sunnyvale. I also now report into Sunnyvale rather than RTP. So for at least the first few months, I'll be splitting my time 50/50 between both locations.
This is a huge challenge that I'm very excited about. Hopefully I'll still be excited after a couple of months on the job...
Cafe in Central Jerusalem
I'm writing this sitting in a cafe in Central Jerusalem. The rest of the family has gone to the Dead Sea to swim. Only Liora and Ilana are excited about this, because it is an hour to hour and a half drive from Jerusalem, and the water is smelly and unpleasant. Plus, it is hot. Liora is especially excited about this though, because she's looking forward to floating on the top of the water.
So far I've enjoyed wandering around central Jerusalem and seeing the incredible variety of people who are out and about. There are tourists from all over the world, and lots of Israelis as well. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is which.
I've been amazed as we walked around how many young folks seem to be here prepared to camp; carrying full backpacks and camping gear. Since so far we've been in the old city and downtown Jerusalem, it is surprising to see so many campers around.
We have one more day in Jerusalem before we pack up and head to our next destination.
On our way
As I write this, we're getting ready to leave the hotel in New York to go to the airport to board our flight to Israel. We left RTP last night. The kids and I really enjoyed the limo from LaGuardia to JFK; it was the first time for all three of us in a stretch limo. The girls were a little freaked out at first, but then relaxed and enjoyed it. I had no idea how cramped the inside of a Lincoln-based limo would be; now I understand the Hummer-based ones better.
The best part about this is the fact that the packing & preparing for vacation is done. More from Israel later...
End of Entourage
Goodbye, Entourage. This week I had my second major personal e-mail outage of the year. This time it was a silently corrupted identity in Entourage 2008. The symptom was that I stopped receiving mail. After several hours of diagnostics, I determined that Entourage could sync almost any folder with our Exchange server except the Inbox folder. I rebuilt my Office 2008 database (successfully, unlike last time), but the problem persisted.
I used one of my two free Office 2008 tech support calls with Microsoft to determine that the root cause of this was a corrupted identity, which can not be repaired. This despite the fact that the database tool could not find any corruptions. Their answer was to build a new identity, then export my 12000 e-mail messages from the old identity to the new one.
I asked about whether this could happen again, and the answer I got was "it depends. Some people have this happen more frequently than others.". As a manager with close to 40 people on my team and a variety of cross-functional responsibilities, my single most important work tool (besides my voice) is e-mail. I simply cannot afford the reliability problems I've had with Entourage 2008 in the last four months.
Therefore, I decided to export my old mail to Mail.app instead, and try it an iCal for a while. I ran into some problems with Entourage creating .mbox files that Mail gave up on reading partway through. The answer to that was to download Thunderbird 2.0 and use it to read the Entourage .mbox files, then let Mail.app import the Thunderbird .mbox files instead. This works, and now I have my entire set of mail stored in Mail.app.
We'll see if I can get used to Mail's oddities relatively quickly. I will miss how Entourage remembered the last ~20 folders I'd moved messages to, and made moving more messages to one of the same folders easier than it is in Mail. I won't miss that in Entourage dragging a message from the inbox to another folder copied it rather than moving it. I wont' miss Entourage's inability to create real HTML links in e-mail messages (where the text displayed is something other than the URL of the link).
Wish me luck.
Annoying documentation niglets
Well, I've been working with a partial Roller 4.0 install for the last several weeks while I tried to figure out why the planet aggregator would not work. I didn't get much help from the dl, since my problem was "bizarre". I should have known that this was a synonym for "you missed something so basic we can't recognize the problem".
It turns out that I had the config entry to enable the planet aggregator in the wrong properties file. Despite the effort to make Roller 4.0 simpler to install, there are still issues. In particular, the user documentation specifies only one properties file (roller-custom.properties). There is a bug documented that the planet aggregator actually requires its own properties file with some duplicated entries (e.g. the database connection configuration entries). I assumed that the setting that indicated that the planet aggregator was enabled belonged in this file; it turns out it needs to be in the roller-custom.properties file.
Now that I am past this little niglet, hopefully the rest of the roller 4.0 experience will be good.
Leopard's Time Machine corrupts Entourage 2008 database backups
When I installed Leopard, I decided that since Apple had embedded an incremental backup solution into the OS, that this would make it more likely that I could keep my backups current. I'm not really good at remembering to take the time to back up my notebook normally, and this seemed like it would be a great solution.
In evaluating this, I read several articles that claimed that using Time Machine with the Office 2008 identity database was suboptimal because it would take a lot of backup space, since the large database file would be completely backed up each hour. This didn't bother me much, because my mail database is so critical to how I work that I would trade a lot of backup disk capacity for a guarantee of losing no more than an hour of e-mail updates due to a hard disk failure or other issue.
Then it happened. I had sync problems after upgrading to 10.5.2 (see my other post on this topic), and in the process of trying to resolve them, I accidentally destroyed all of my calendar data. I figured this wouldn't be a problem; I could just restore the identity folder from my Time Machine backup and I'd be OK. After doing the restore, Entourage would not start because the database file was corrupt. I tried to rebuild the database using the Microsoft database utility. After running for ~18 hours, it failed with an unrecoverable error.
That's when I started to look at the database file in each of the last several Time Machine backups. There were four consecutive hourly backups between 10am and 2pm in which the database file was the same size and had the same last modified timestamp. Since I'd sent and filed numerous messages during that time, it seemed to indicate a problem. I tried restoring each of these backups, and all were corrupt. I then went further backward to the first backup that had a different last modified timestamp on the database file. It too was corrupt. Again there were several hourly backups with this same last modified timestamp, although there should have been modified data between each backup.
I then gave up and called Microsoft. While I was on the phone with them, I found this KB article that states "If Time Machine starts an automatic backup while Entourage 2008 is modifying the user database, the backup process may damage the backup copy of the user database.". The Microsoft support rep I talked to on the phone was more blunt; she said that it was unlikely that any of my time machine backups of the database would be whole & usable, and none would be recoverable via the database utility due to the nature of the corruption.
After close to two days using Outlook via Parallels while I tried to figure out a way to get a relatively recent backup restored, I gave up and went back to the last SuperDuper backup I had before I started using Time Machine. I lost months of e-mail because of this problem, and I'm not at all happy. It seems highly unlikely to me that Apple and Microsoft would not have found this during any reasonable testing. If they had, there should at least have been documentation of the problem, and more likely they should have flagged the Office identify file to be skipped by Time Machine, with a clear notice to this effect in both the Leopard installer and the Office 2008 installer.
Leopard 10.5.2 Sync Conflicts between Entourage and iCal
I have Entourage configured to sync my Exchange calendar to iCal, so that I can use iTunes to transfer it to my iPhone. It took a long time to get this set up initially, and during this process I ended up using Syncrospector under Tiger to clear out the Sync Services truth database to finally stop getting duplicate entries and/or unresovable conflicts. After doing so, however, it was very usable.
I want the sync to be one-way for this calendar, so that there is no possibility of sync conflicts damaging my Exchange calendar. 90+% of my appointments are work-related. I keep the rest in a separate iCal calendar, and therefore I can see both on my iPhone normally. There is a setting for this in Entourage sync services that allows you to specify that the sync is one-way, and the Entourage data will always overwrite the iCal data.
Then I upgraded to 10.5.2. Right after the upgrade, I started getting notifications every couple of hours that there were > 200 sync conflicts between iCal and Entourage. If you think about how the setting works, this should be impossible on its face. I've configured the sync to overwrite iCal's version of the calendar; since I did so, how could there be a conflict? In any case, no option I selected in the conflict resolution dialog would clear these exceptions.
I decided to re-do what I'd done originally to get this working smoothly. I turned off syncing from Entourage. I deleted the Entourage calendar within iCal. I deleted the synchronization-related preferences files in /Library for both Entourage and iCal. I stopped the Microsoft database daemon process. I used Syncrospector to empty the Sync Services truth database. I then started Entourage and re-enabled sync services. I then restarted iCal.
The Entourage calendar had been recreated in iCal, but it was empty. I looked at the Truth database in Syncrospector and noticed that it had > 4000 entries from Entourage, so the Entourage sync was working. I looked at the sync state information for iCal in Syncrospector, and noticed that the "fast" sync status for iCal showed errors. I tried it again, and it failed again. I changed the sync type to "Refresh Sync", and that failed too. I then made my fatal mistake, and changed the sync type to "Push the Truth". I understood this to mean that it would push the existing truth data to iCal. Instead, it pushed the "Truth" that the Entourage calendar should be empty to the Sync Services truth database. Worse that that, Sync Services then overrode my Entourage preferences and pushed the Sync Services truth to my Entourage calendar and deleted all of the entries in it. Which then Entourage kindly synced to the Exchange server and deleted all of my calendars there.
There are multiple bugs/bug-like features here. First that you can configure a one-way sync and end up with unresolvable sync conficts. Second that you can use a developer utility like Syncrospector to override a one-way sync definition. Third that the wording in the Syncrospector utility is open to such dangerous misinterpretation.
I thought this problem would simply be annoying; I'd just restore the Entourage database from the most recent Time Machine backup and move on. Little did I know that I wasn't done finding Leopard/Entourage bugs and bug-like features. In fact, the worst was yet to come. See my upcoming post how Time Machine corrupts backups of the Office 2008 identity database.