Category Archives: corporations

Here Goes Nothing

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Which is to say, here goes quite a bit.

I’m about to try to update my WordPress 2.5 to 2.7. I just did that over on colonelpod.com with the click of a button, because I had that boy on SimpleScripts. And that’s nice.  But I haven’t converted this one, yet.  The one thing SimpleScripts doesn’t do is convert an existing installation.  So,…  I’m going to have to fiddle around with lots of things, and let’s hope not too much breaks.  Backing up things now.

What I should do:

  • manually upgrade to 2.7 (many steps in itself)
  • backup the database
  • move the installation out of the way
  • reinstall a 2.7 with simple scripts
  • restore the database
  • copy in the local files that have been added from the old copy

The new backend of WordPress is worth the pain I’m about to suffer.

Markets Burning

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The markets are in a free fall. Friday the Dow swung 1000 points. (18% down for the week) At the end of the day, it rallied to only be 150 down. Hoping positive thoughts for the G7 Financial Ministers meeting this weekend.

They think they’re going to get seven pre-eminent economists to agree on a future course of action and all act on it. I think there’s a very small chance of that so more Down on Monday.

I was also humored that there was no talk of the “G8” since we’re talking about actual economics and Russia’s economy is a rounding error compared to the other seven. They are only ever included for political reasons.

This is the most important point in the last eight years for this country to have a Leader, easily more important than 9/11. So much of the market is reacting emotionally, and without any leadership there have been dozens of voices for the fearful and angry to listen to, only magnifying their negative emotions.

And, oh, by the way, we’re four weeks away from a presidential election.

At&t Is Oblivious

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18 days after the storm and I get the runaround or the cover-my-ass questions from the AT&T reps.

“you only contacted us this morning for the first time?”

Since I’ve been without power for 14 days and couldn’t confirm their outage, they will want me to pay.

And on top of that they have NO IDEA what the status of the network is. Wendy, a very cordial girl who asked about the weather “there aren’t any hurricanes around are there?”, told me to call back in another four hours. It’s the standard response. “Call back at 3:15am”, she actually said to me!

There’s no f-ing way it’s going to be fixed at that time or that anyone will know what’s going on at that time. If I happen to wake in the middle of the night, I may call them out of hatred. And in honor of squeeky wheels.

Twitter and Trees Felled in the Woods

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There have been several stories in the news about companies “listening in” on the Twitter feed for people struggling with their products, and providing personal support.

A reactive Squeaky Wheel policy that can preempt possible public bad mouthing before it happens. (Or truncate it soon after it begins.)

Since those examples, I’ve made a point of mentioning the products and services i’ve had issues with. On Wednesday I got a hit.

In the morning I whined about a Web 2.0 word that annoys me:

“webinar” – i wish I knew who coined that term, so I could make them my arch enemy, and dedicate my existence to their desctruction *pow* 10 am

About an hour later I mentioned the Internet broadcast lecture I was about to start watching.

attending a webinar by MyEclipse on Maven – i.e. i’m sitting at my desk 11 am

In the afternoon, just after 2pm, I received notice that myeclipseide had begun to follow me, in apparent response to my explicit “MyEclipse” reference.

The notice was shunted to my not-so-important folder, and I didn’t see it until later that evening. In the mean time, I had complained about one issue, without mentioning MyEclipse explicitly though.

does the Eclipse java debugger have a data watch/breakpoint? or are you going to make me revert to 1970s techniques to find this bug? 3pm

There was no response from the twitter account (which would of course only confirm the limitation of the debugger).

As an explanation to the unaware who have made it this far, Eclipse is an open source IDE that is practically infinitely extensible. MyEclipse is a configured, supported version of the IDE provided for sale by a company. (IDE is an acronym for Integrated Development Environment)

Another thing of interest is that the MyEclipseIDE account is only two weeks old, with 8 of their 9 posts coming in the last 3 days. Currently they have 15 followers and 36 followees.

The Maven presentation was informative, but I suspect they don’t have the development moxie to be modifying the java debugger to support data watch points. Thus the non-response, if they even noticed it.

Dark Markets of Enron

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If you haven’t noticed, our government hasn’t been regulating things in this country for about eight years. It cuts across almost every agency in the bureaucracy. Mostly they just unfunded the regulators or told them to stop doing their jobs. See recent headlines on airplanes being grounded because they hadn’t been inspected in timely fashion for an example.

You need only listen to the news any given day to be reminded. We haven’t been keeping our government accountable. Neither has our corporate media. So, we can blame only ourselves. Or only our media, if we are cowards. (Yes, I consider ignoring our own failing an act of cowardice. Blaming others is the height of it.)

It was interesting to hear of another regulatory failing on Marketplace on Monday night. This one not of Executive Branch malfeasance, but one of political will-bending in the Legislature in December of 2000.

I’m sure everyone remembers Enron. They went south in a very large way about a year later. But before that they got this legislation passed. Basically, deregulating (and effectively hiding) the trading of about 30% of the energy market.

Recently, we’ve had out-of-control rises in the price of crude oil. All the analysts say we’ve got plenty of supply. So, whatever could be the cause of the price rises?

Well the Legislature has finally fixed their part in this non-regulation snafu. Soon it is of course passing back into the Executive’s hands. What will happen there, only time will tell.

Michael Greenburger, previous Head of Trading and Markets for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission says “many observers believe that because those markets are not being policed, malpractices are being committed and traders are able to boost the price virtually at their will… From my own experience as a commodity regulator, I believe that if the Bush Administration were serious about its regulation, we could begin seeing prices drop within a month.”

If things don’t start moving in a positive direction, let’s make sure we tell our elected employees we aren’t happy about it.

Major iPhone Touch Bug – Playcount = 0 ad infinitum

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I may push the iPods a bit more than most, but I find all kinds of bugs in them. I could consistently crash my nano when I first got it. After one software update, that was fixed. After a few more, most of the non-crash bugs were gone. I was left only with interface annoyances – that’s how it was designed and they ain’t gonna fix it.

Now with my new iPod Touch, I’ve noticed one whopper! I thought it was only a “not updating the smart list on the iPod” problem, which plagued the Nanos when they first arrived as well. But, it’s worse. (5900584)

Any podcast that I listen to entirely doesn’t get its play count updated! How am I supposed to keep track of the hundreds of podcasts I have and listen to when they don’t get marked as being played? Podcast support – ever stepping backward. I have many smart playlists with “playcount = 0” as one of the filters, and now they’re all screwed – or it’s back to the Nano.

They really should fix it before the June release, and do it for free. But I’d bet that doesn’t happen. Alternately, when the iPhone/iPod becomes an open platform, someone should develop an application that actually supports podcast management!

I could provide you with a lengthy list of the many ways I want to handle my podcasts, if someone out there needs some specs to build to.

(Another pet peeve of mine: Apple doesn’t maintain a publicly accessible database of known bugs.)