*scottstuff*

One of the problems with owning a 20 year old house is that it comes full of 20 year old appliances, and most appliances are designed for a 15 year lifespan. When we bought this house almost 5 years ago, our inspector told us not to expect the appliances to last much longer, and to be happy with whatever life we got out of them.

Since then, we’ve lost the dishwasher, hot water heater, garbage disposal (who knew they could die?), and we’ve had to replace a couple faucets, a bunch of toilet parts, one complete toilet, and an outside water faucet.

Sometime tomorrow, we’ll add a new refrigerator to the list. Our current one is an old side-by-side Whirlpool with lots of fun features–the shelves don’t go all the way back, so things are prone to falling off the back of the shelves and ending up wedged behind the drawers at the bottom, where we don’t find them until we pull everything out for a big cleaning. The drawers fall off their rails all the time. The door shelves fall off sometimes. The glass shelves in the fridge pop out of their holders at a whim. The kick-plate the covers the coils doesn’t stay on right anymore; Gabe has a big gash in his foot right now from stepping on it after it fell off. And, on top of that, for the past few weeks, neither the fridge or freezer door closes properly. We’ve pulled everything out, cleaned the seals, checked alignment, and it looks like something’s bent somewhere. Even when everything’s closed as well as possible, the fridge barely makes it to 42˚ F overnight, so food’s been spoiling. Even if the seal problem is causing the lack-of-cold problem, and they’re both fixable, when all is said and done, we’d still be stuck with an old fridge that doesn’t work right.

In short, we need a new fridge. Fortunately, we’ve known this day was coming, and we’ve done way too much research. So, we had a decent idea of what we wanted, what models were available, and what they cost. After an afternoon of fighting pre-pre-Christmas shopping traffic, we’re the proud owners of one of LG’s new ”french door” models. Most of the reviews online seem positive, and we get got a decent price on it. It’s supposed to be delivered on Monday, which is better then I’d expected; when we replaced our dishwasher, it took over a month for it to show up.

Of course, there’s a downside to the story. While I was waiting for them to arrange delivery details, I spotted a pile of open-box InFocus DLP projectors for sale. I’ve been lusting after one for a while, and $735 seems like a decent price. So, I’m the proud owner of not only a new fridge, but a new projector as well. For the moment, it’s sitting in our bedroom, projecting an 8’ TiVo image on the wall, but we’ve been planning on turning our basement into a media room. It’ll be a few months before we’re ready to move it, but this gives us a nice incentive to keep after things.

I’m also trying to set up a MythTV box to go with it, but that’s a whole other story that I’ll get to later.

As widely covered in the news, Halo 2 was released today. I pre-ordered a copy through Amazon over a month ago, so I should be expecting my copy today, right?

So, I went to all of the trouble to order it a month in advance, and they can’t even be bothered to ship it until after the release date? I noticed that the shipping date was listed as the 15th yesterday, but Amazon’s site was so freakishly slow yesterday that I wasn’t able to log in and deal with it. Now, today, they’re gearing up to ship it, but it’s still not expected to arrive until the middle of next week.

This is really irritating–I need to have a copy in my hands before this weekend, because some friends have been planning a “Halo 2” party for almost 6 months.

This is sort of weird–according to CNet, PalmSource (the software company that controls the Palm OS) is releasing a new version of their software tomorrow. The new version, Cobalt 6.1, is part of their multitasking Cobalt family, announced in January of this year and yet to ship in any product. At the time it was announced, PalmSource announced that the existing PalmOS 5.x family was being renamed “Garnet” and marketed towards smartphones, like the Treo. The new line, formerly expected to be called PalmOS 6, was named “Cobalt” and was aimed towards high-end PDAs.

That was 9 months ago; so far, no “Cobalt” devices have hit the market, although PalmOne is widely expected to announce the Tungsten T5 within the next week or so.

The odd thing about the Cobalt 6.1 announcement is that it’s expected to be aimed towards smartphones. I thought that that’s what Garnet was for?

And how does this fit into the Treo 650, which is expected at the same time as the Tungsten T5? Presumably, the Cobalt 6.1 release is aimed at Treo-like devices, but won’t actually show up in shipping hardware for another 6 months or so. Still, it’d be nice to see a Treo with Cobalt sooner or later.

Update: The Register has a few more details: first, this won’t ship in phones until 2005. Next, 6.1 also includes improvements to the graphics rendering code at the core of PalmOS. They include a screenshot with translucent overlays and drop shadows; maybe the “1-bit graphics plus color” look of PalmOS is finally going away. Clearly, PalmSource’s spin that this release is an upgrade for smartphones is largely spin–sure they’re adding Bluetooth and GSM support to the core of the OS, but a lot of other stuff is going in as well.

eWeek has a few more details; apparently PalmSource is claiming that 11 new PalmOS smartphones will ship in the next year. At least one of them will use this new software release.

Remember Infinium Labs, the makers of the Phantom game console, which has been total vaporware for at least a couple years? Their latest quarterly report filing says that they’re almost out of cash. While a lot of people online don’t seem too surprised by this, I have a slightly different perspective, and what I’ve seen doesn’t look like a company that’s about to implode.

As mentioned before, Infinium’s Seattle R&D office was right next to my office, and I saw their people daily until they moved into bigger offices on September 1st. They certainly weren’t acting like they were broke–the employees were working long hours right up to their move-out date. I saw glimpses of Phantom prototypes and production samples from time to time, but I never got a demo. One of their managers had a wall-mounted countdown clock, set to trigger in November–they were really focused on getting their product out on time.

Personally, I expect them to ship the thing, perhaps on time, perhaps a bit late. I don’t have high expectations for their product, but I don’t expect them to implode before they ship.

(via Gizmodo and Firing Squad)

I installed Movable Type when I first started this blog, but I’ve been itching to change for months. A small part of that itch is Movable Type’s new pricing model, but it’s really more then that. I have a number of needs that MT isn’t really filling, and I’d like to move to something that works better for me.

The big problem is that I can’t find anything that’s quite right. I looked at Drupal for a while, but there are a few things with it that I just couldn’t cope with:

• It’s a much bigger system then I really need, with a lot of complexity.
• It’s written in PHP. If I could treat it as a black box, I wouldn’t really care, but I couldn’t because…
• It’s essentially hard-coded to need MySQL. In theory, it’ll work with PostgreSQL, but I fought with it for days without actually getting it to work. There were a number of deeply-embedded MySQLisms in the code that I just couldn’t fix, even after digging into the code for a while.
• PHP’s SQL code is too scary to look at. While the core of Drupal goes to great lengths to prevent SQL injection attacks, a number of add-in modules looked pretty clueless. In addition, all of the SQL code is built up using command = 'insert into foo (a,b) values ("'+value1+'","'+value2'");'-style commands, which are inherently ugly and prone to problems. I really prefer the Perl (and Ruby) DBI version: insert into foo (a,b) values (?,?), where you provide value1 and value2 as parameters to the DBI execute function.
• Template modifications are a royal pain compared to MT. Out of the box, all of the templates used HTML tables, unlike MT’s clean CSS-only templates.

Now, if I was setting up a big community site, none of these would really matter to me. I could spend a couple weeks on templates. Heck, I’d expect to spend a while tweaking things until they worked right for me. If I was doing this from a corporate perspective, I could just hire someone with experience in Drupal, like Bryght. But I’m not building a big community site, and I’m not willing to pay someone to do it for me. I’m largely doing this for the fun of it, and Drupal doesn’t seem to be a lot of fun.

So I’m back looking again. MT has cleaned up their prices, so I could just install MT 3.1 and be done with it. It wouldn’t be a lot of work to upgrade, and there’d be a handful of benefits, but it still wouldn’t give me an HTML photo gallery or a decent interface for static non-blog pages.

I’m fighting off the urge to use Rails to write a blogging system for myself. Hopefully, if I fight off the urge long enough, then someone else will do it for me, and I can just take their framework and adapt it to my needs. One can always hope :-).

As mentioned before, I have two TiVos at home, a Series 1 upstairs and a Series 2 downstairs. I love the things. At this point, I refuse to watch TV without them. They’re genuinely changed the way I interact with my TV, and that’s mostly a good thing.

I just wish they’d stop dying on me.

It started a few months ago, when the Series 2 TiVo started locking up once or twice per day. I ended up replacing the hard drive in it, and as part of the upgrade process, I discovered that the old drive had a number of bad sectors right in the middle of the swap partition. It worked perfectly after the drive swap was complete, so I assumed that the worst was over and I was in for another year or two of trouble-free TiVo use.

Unfortunately, in early July it started crashing again, and by the end of the month, it wouldn’t stay up for more then an hour without freezing. We ended up unplugging it entirely and leaving the TV off for the first half of August. Eventually, though, the lack of TV got to us, and I ordered a new drive from newegg to replace the 120 GB drive in the TiVo, assuming that the drive had failed again.

Unfortunately, swapping drives didn’t help this time. I didn’t see any media errors while copying data, and the TiVo is still locking up at least once per day. At this point, I’m getting fed up with the whole thing. At some point this weekend I’m going to rip the box back open and make sure that the IDE cable isn’t broken, but after that I’m out of things to try. I’m going to have to call TiVo and see if there’s anything that they can do for me.

Since new TiVos are selling for as little as $100 this week, and this one is almost two years old, I wouldn’t normally be that irritated. Unfortunately, we paid for lifetime service on the dying box, and that’s currently going for $300. So, the dying TiVo would cost $400 to replace, not just $100. And that’s more then enough money to get me to spend an hour or two sitting on hold, waiting to yell at their support people. That’s because the “lifetime service” is good for the lifetime of the box, not the life of the owner. When the box dies, your $300 evaporates.

I tried calling TiVo’s support line. They try really hard to shunt you off to their web site, or into their automated support recordings. Of course none of the options provided have anything at all do with “my TiVo crashes several times every day.” By playing the “other” “other” “other” game, I eventually got through to a real person, but all he could do was give me a case number and punt me into the 35+ minute tech support queue. And I don’t have time for that now.

I swear, I’m inches from selling both TiVos and building myself a bunch of cheap MythTV boxes.

Around a year and a half ago, there was a story going around about a boatload of bad motherboard capacitors. It had all sorts of fun elements–industrial espionage, corporate cost-cutting, bad customer support, and so on. The general gist of the story was that a lot of motherboards were going to fail after a few months of use due to bad capacitors.

Interesting story, but it didn’t really affect me much. I hadn’t seen any failed systems in a while, and I was down to a dozen or so systems, from the 700+ that I managed at my previous job, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I forgot all about it.

Fast-forward a year. At work, we have a handful of really cheap test boxes. Lowest bidder, no-name parts, lousy design, but they work. Or, they did until a few weeks ago, when one failed. Then another. We lost a third one today. The first two were running the same software, so we were concerned–had we broken something? The third one was completely different, though, but it died with the same symptoms, and I was able to reproduce the problem running “known good” software from a year ago. My boss looked a bit skeptical and wanted to know how you get 3 machines from the same batch to all fail synchronously. It was a good question, and I didn’t have an answer, until I remembered the capacitor story.

I went back to my office and popped the cover off of one of the bad cases and there it was–half of the caps on the motherboard were leaking khaki-colored gunk. The other two dying boxes showed the same problem, as did one box that hasn’t failed yet. It’s nice to know what’s wrong. Now we’re just one little order from newegg away from having the boxes back in use.

I want to dump my analog phone line at home. I’m just not sure if I can.

This has been building for a while. I’ve been using Asterisk for over 4 months. At this point, my home POTS line is both the most expensive and least reliable part of the whole system. It’s currently costing me over $33/month, and that’s just for incoming calls and outgoing local calls. I’ve been sending long distance calls to NuFone for over 4 months, and they’ve only charged me $10 for the privilege. That’s less then my average monthly long-distance bill used to be.

According to Asterisk’s logs, I average around 400 minutes of incoming and outgoing local phone service per month. At $0.02/minute, that’s only $8/month. I’m paying that much just for Caller ID on my POTS line. If I could drop the POTS line, then I could save around $25/month. That’d be a nice addition to my DSL speed, or it’d cover cellular data usage with a Treo on most networks.

Besides simple cost, I’m just generally unhappy with telcos. Today’s big point came from Telepocalypse. Plan on phone line charges going up another $4/month in the near future. That, coupled with my Verizon DSL upgrade saga, really makes me want to dump Verizon altogether. See TeleTruth’s “dirty phone bill” for another quick take on what’s hiding in a typical phone bill.

Unfortunately, I just don’t see how I can do it for a reasonable cost. I’m in Comcast cable-modem territory, but they want $50/month for service for non-subscribers, and they don’t offer static addresses with residential service. They might offer them with business services, but those start at $95 and go up. I’d be amazed if I could get a static address (and the ability to run servers) out of them for under $150/month. I don’t seem to have any alternatives for home broadband; it’s either Verizon DSL or Comcast cable modem. Or a T1, but that’s way more then I’m willing to spend.

There does seem to be one way out–I could move the mail and web server out of the house and into a colo server. Several providers advertise dedicated P4 boxes with reasonable amounts of RAM, disk, and network connectivity for around $50/month. I could conceivably drop the DSL and POTS line and move to a $50 server and $50 cable modem, and come out slightly ahead, but I don’t see it being worth the trouble, even if I’d have 4x the bandwidth.

Finally, even ignoring all of the connectivity problems, I’m still left with one problem–how do I dial 911 without a POTS line? 90% of the time, we have a cell phone handy, but they’re never really handy in emergencies. I haven’t seen anyone discuss how to dial 911 is a pure roll-your-own VoIP system. Do you just redirect it to some local phone number? Or do you just leave the POTS line plugged in and trust that they’ll leave it live for 911?

I can tell that my PowerBook is going to need to be replaced before too much longer–it’s starting to shed pieces. A month or two ago, I lost my hard drive. This week’s victim is my keyboard–the left Command/Apple key broke off. It’s been having problems for weeks–one of the clips that holds it in place broke a month or so ago–but I’d hoped that it’d last a while longer. No luck–the second set of clips broke off this afternoon, leaving the key free to wander around my desktop. Since this is probably my second most commonly used key (after the space bar), it’s really hard to use the laptop without it.

I did a bunch of poking around online, and found replacement keyboards for as little as $79, but overnight shipping on one of those runs it back up over $100, and I’m trying to save money for a new Treo. So I looked around a while longer and discovered that pbparts.com sells replacement keycaps for $5. They still want over $8 for shipping, but I’m a lot happier paying $13 then I am paying $100.

While I was checking out, I noticed something interesting–the part that I was buying was labeled “command key,” not “left command key.” A quick check of the keyboard showed that the left and right command keys are, in fact, identical. So, after a brief hunt for tools, I popped the right command key off of the keyboard and swapped it with the broken left command key, and I’m back in business. There’s an ugly spot on my keyboard with no key, but that’ll go away in a couple days when the new key arrives. Until then, I have a perfectly functional keyboard with a working left command key.

Surprisingly enough, they also carry the screen release latch that died a couple months after I bought this thing. Apple was willing to replace it under warranty, but I wasn’t willing to part with my laptop for 2 weeks. I’ve mostly learned to live with the broken latch, but I’ll probably replace it sooner or later.

Okay, this is just strange. As mentioned before, I have a Cisco 7940 IP Phone in my kitchen, currently connected to a Linksys WET11 wireless Ethernet bridge. I’ve been having problems lately with weird connection failures, which I assumed was caused by low signal strength.

That is, until I looked at my logs. Apparently the phone has left my network and migrated onto one of my neighbors’ networks, because the phone is now logging in from Comcast’s IP space. This is strange on several fronts–first, the WET11 is supposed to be hard-coded to use my SSID. Second, I’ve never seen any of my neighbors’ networks from my PowerBook, and I’ve looked around a few times, just to see if I could track down the source of my interference.

I’ll try moving everything to a different channel tonight and see if that helps. Failing that, I guess I’ll have to pull out my drill and start pulling Cat 5 through the basement this weekend.