inside aebrahim’s head

I took the plunge and updated my machine to Windows XP SP3 today, a good month after general release. I don’t like to install Microsoft software when it’s first released, because more often than not, there are too many unknown bugs and I like my workhorse machine to work well.

After installing SP3, everything (so far) seemed to work fine except that the monitor rotation feature of my ATI Radeon X300 stopped working, so I could no longer orient my monitor in a vertical position rather than the standard horizontal. I like vertical because it’s better for the office as more email headers and text info can be viewed on a single screen.

After tinkering around and getting new drivers from the Dell website (I have a Latitude D610), it still doesn’t work. I then do a bit of Googling and find Microsoft KB 947309 (euphemistically titled Some third-party programs may experience a change in functionality after you install Windows XP Service Pack 3), which explains that this feature requires an updated driver to work with SP3.

Dell’s newest driver didn’t work (go figure), so I tried the one from ATI. When I tried to install it, it said that I didn’t have any cards that were supported by the driver (which cannot be true). In the end I had to use XP’s manual driver update interface and use the “Have disk” button to force it to install drivers that it warned me would not be compatible. I chose the ATI Radeon X300/X550/X1050 Series driver that came with version 8.5 of the ATI Catalyst software.

That seemed to do the trick after a reboot, but it did leave me wondering how any Joe Average computer user is supposed to figure this out and why this kind of stuff needs to break with a service pack upgrade in the first place.

This is also precisely why I never let any of my friends do OS upgrades with Windows, because it’s less headache to start fresh and reinstall apps then it is to try to troubleshoot the shortcomings of Microsoft’s upgrade paths.

UPDATE: I had to revert back to SP2 and the old Dell drivers. More details later (and a fix).

A friend of mine wrote a blog entry about Hillary and I felt like writing a response because there are a lot of things I don’t agree with.

Hillary’s campaign has not been one waged on ethics and grassroots support but rather one that is based on entitlement, poor ethics, and poor planning to boot. A brief note about each follows.

Entitlement
As much as she tries to distance herself from Bill, there’s no doubt that Hillary would be a nothing without him and she’s riding on his coattails.

Women are supposed to identify with her because of what happened to her in the Whitehouse, but would that experience make her a good President? I don’t see why it would.

Poor Ethics
When she’s down, she hits out with negative comments about other candidates and turns the campaign into a cursing match instead of focusing on any substantive issues.

When she’s down her campaign preys on Islamophobia by releasing pictures of Obama in “muslim garb”, that is more African than Muslim anyway. Not to mention totally irrelevant.

When she’s down she wants to throw away the rules and make up new ones so that delegates from states that broke all the election rules get seated anyway. Especially in states where Obama was not even on the ballot.

Sounds like she’s teaching the next generation to denigrate those who disagree with you, if that doesn’t work, make people afraid of them, and if that fails as well, just subvert the playing field.

Poor Planning
How in the world is she going to balance the budget and reverse the trend of mounting debt when she couldn’t even achieve the relatively much simpler task of balancing her campaign budget.

We already know that her solution to debt is to borrow, borrow, and borrow more. Can you say sinking US dollar?

There’s just so much wrong with her campaign and so little that’s right with it that sometimes I wonder how blind some Americans are not to be able to see it.

I subscribe to a number of moderated lists, and one of the poor practices that I see is untimely moderation of email. When list messages are not moderated quickly, there are two major pitfalls that end users can experience of which many list moderators may not even be aware.

The first of these is that most users sort their mailboxes by the Date: header, not the date that the message was received at the user’s inbox. This means that messages which are a few days old and have just been let through the moderation queue may show up a couple of pages above the newest messages in the user’s email client or webmail. This means that if a message that is 3 days old is approved, it shows up near other messages that are 3 days old that have already been read, not near the most recent messages. It is very easy to miss these messages and not read them, especially if the user’ unread mail count is consistently greater than zero.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, if the Date: header on mail is significantly (usually 24 hours or more) older than the current time, this can actually affect deliverability of email because spam filters use the difference between the Date: header and the current time as a criteria to evaluate the likelihood that a message is spam. A common characteristic of spam messages is that the Date: header is incorrect. Here is a real world example:

X-Spam-Status: No, hits=2.3 required=3.5 tests=DATE_IN_PAST_96_XX autolearn=disabled version=3.002004

The above message was moderated more than 4 days after it was sent into the queue, and you can see that SpamAssassin gave it a score of 2.3 (out of a required 3.5 to categorise as spam). Another single rule triggered could have caused the message to get sent to the spam folder. Here’s an example of where that happened:

X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=4.4 required=3.5 tests=DATE_IN_PAST_96_XX,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_32,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_06,HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_TAG_BALANCE_BODY autolearn=disabled version=3.002004

Had this message been moderated quickly, it would not have incurred a point score of 2.3 for being so old, and would have been below the threshold of 3.5 required to classify it as spam.

In short, the lesson to mailing list administrators is that it is crucial to moderate messages in a timely manner so that users can easily notice the mail, and also so that the mail actually gets delivered to an inbox rather than to a spam folder.

With the great success of the iPhone and iPod Touch, you’d think Apple would be sitting pretty as the king of wireless networking. Plus, Apple has a reputation for making relatively complicated tasks more user friendly by having more streamlined UI than the competition.

However, my experience with Apple’s networking products has been pretty disappointing. Not because they don’t work well (they do), but because they are the most confusing and user-unfriendly wifi products I have used, ever.

My first foray into Apple’s wifi products was the Time Capsule. The idea behind this is excellent, to have NAS built into the router so that backup for Mac users is painless by just having to flip a switch to turn Time Machine on. Whether the user is plugged in or not, this still works behind the scenes, eliminating the biggest barrier to having regular users back up.

The idea is great; the implementation, well, not so smooth. Out of the box, the Time Capsule seemed to work okay, until I tried connecting via wifi. This didn’t work at all, no matter what I did. It would connect, and then drop, and I’d then have to reset the router and then rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. I found others on forums had the same problems, with no solution. In the end, this magically started working a few weeks later with a firmware update to 7.3.1. That’s nice, but you’d think that basic wireless connectivity would have been better tested before release.

Today I picked up an Airport Express so that I could extend the range of the network to cover our entire apartment. This device also shipped with what I would consider broken firmware, and I had to upgrade to 7.3.1 before it would do anything useful. It’s now working okay (I think), but only after about an hour of tinkering.

My main beef with Apple is that the documentation is so simple. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t work, you just have to scratch your head and go to Google, because God forbid Apple have any useful troubleshooting resources online to scare the non-tech saavy users away.

One point which I find thoroughly confusing is that the Airport Express has an option to either participate in a WDS or to “Extend wireless network”. Both of these options appear to be variations of the same thing, but I can’t figure out what the difference is between the two of them. A lot of people are asking the same question.

After a lot of searching, I still don’t know what the difference is, except that maybe the option to “Extend wireless network” is sort of like WDS on steroids. However, I have no idea and there’s no information on this that I can find. Apple doesn’t explain this anywhere either, even though both the options are obviously different.

The most important question I have which is as yet unanswered is whether either of the two options supports seamless handover of clients between different access points on the same network.

Long story short: Apple wifi products work great once they’re configured. Good luck trying to get them configured correctly.