Category: technology

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technology

to err is human

I thought this reg article on error messages was brilliant. Of course it makes sense that an error message would be required for a screen buffer related exception hence the “blem wit” extract from “There is a problem with the Memory Control Block for the shell”. Did windows TSR programmers of that era consider logging to files? You betcha but debugging TSR’s was often a nightmare.
My favourite error message for jaw-dropping unhelpfulness is the old win32 error

Error: “The parameter is correct”

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technology

tethereal and diameter

Here’s a useful tethereal filter that’s helped me out while debugging the Sh diameter interface of Fokus’ OpenIMSCore.

# tethereal -i lo -f "port 3868" -V -R "diameter"

I appreciate it’s a bit random but tethereal is one of my favourite tools and in Verbose mode it nicely format’s all diameter AVP information.

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technology

Categorically speaking

Ontologies are great. Everyone should have one.
Unfortunately for many semantic web researchers they do.

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technology

Vista mail client & other woes

I’m currently using Vista on one of my machines. It’s not going as well as I’d hoped. Sure, I’ve bitched on this blog before about the stupid shutdown menu but liked most other features of the OS. However, there are two things that really bug me.

  • The erratic wireless networking
  • The so-bad-its-not-true email client

We’ve both a vista laptop and a vista pc in Manifesto. We’ve noticed a range of wireless networking issues. When the vista laptop goes into powersaving mode it sometimes disconnects from the wireless network. It then fails to reconnect. We also had a wireless AP where the DHCP server wasn’t compatible with Vista. Try as we might, the machine kept returning from ipconfig /renew with a local address. Very frustrating. It’s to do with the BROADCAST flag in the DHCP discovery request. Vista assumes your AP supports it. Well many don’t and rather than degrading to a request WITHOUT this flag set in the event it can’t get a response it just assigns a local IP. Here’s what the Microsoft KB has to say.
While we’re on the subject it’s also got intermittent connectivity issues. Sometimes you get periodic connection issues. Seriously. It appears to be working, then you have to renew an address or restart and it suddenly stops working. This is down to more Microsoftian brilliance. Vista programmers decided to use an APIPA IP after waiting for only 6 seconds for a DHCP response. It’s in the Microsoft KB. This confuses the hell out of some routers.
Many more issues are catalogued here
I’m not sure if there’s a fix out for the email stuck in the outbox problem but it’s a pain in the butt to sort out. The solution is not for non-technical people and it’s amazing how easily this problem occurs. Just by using the software as intended, in fact! Then you’re into deleting hidden files and restoring folders. R found this terrifying and I don’t blame her. It’s difficult to see a broken email client (and it is broken) as progress.
The Windows Mail client is also obsolete with the introduction of live hotmail.
So now that we’ve moved to Vista I get much more phonecalls from the staff who can’t figure out why their spanking new machines aren’t working. Needless to say I’m absolutely hacked off that the latest and greatest from Microsoft has basic issues with networking and email. I know the programmers at Microsoft can and WILL do better!