inside aebrahim’s head

After a lot of hard work by the Mozilla team and tons of volunteers, Firefox 3.0 has been released. Help set the Guinness World Records for downloads by downloading today.

Personally, my favourite new feature is the AwesomeBar. What’s yours?

I’ve been having a couple of issues recently with a Google Groups hosted list that I manage, for which no solutions seem to be available.

Issue #1 - Google Groups Atom Feed id and link attribute broken

I’ve detailed this issue more in my post to the Is Something Broken forum on the Google Groups website, but so far there’s no resolution. Basically the Atom feeds generated by Google Groups generate a id and link attribute that contains a relative link without an FQDN so that when viewed from an RSS reader, the links are broken because the RSS reader passes a URL without an FQDN to the web browser. I hope this gets fixed as it seems like a pretty major problem.

When viewed from Firefox’s Live Bookmarks it works fine, but not otherwise.

The RSS 2.0 feed generated by Google Groups does have an FQDN in the link attribute so it works properly. The “obvious” solution (other than fixing the issue, which is up to Google) is to use the RSS 2.0 feed instead of the Atom feed but that creates another problem.

UPDATE (18/06/2008): As of today, Google seems to have fixed the issue with the Atom feeds.

Issue #2 - FeedDemon 2.7 does not handle the pubDate in the RSS 2.0 feeds correctly

The pubDates in the RSS 2.0 feed seem to be generated correctly, like the following:

<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:02:27 UT</pubDate>

When the RSS 2.0 feed is added to FeedDemon in synced mode (where it syncs with the Newsgator servers), it seems to ignore the pubDate and pick some arbitrary date for all the entries, and all the entries share this same date.

When the RSS 2.0 feed is added in non-synced mode (where FeedDemon pulls from the feed server directly), all the pubDates are respected and it works properly. In Firefox Live Bookmarks it works properly too.

With the Atom 1.0 feed from Google, the dates are correct in all cases but the links are broken. But at the moment users are in a quandry as there appear to be problems in both Google’s feed implementation and FeedDemon’s parsing of Google’s feeds.

UPDATE (08/06/2008): Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon has been able to reproduce the bug and has added it to the FeedDemon bug tracking database.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to Yusuf about setting up wireless internet access at my workplace for guests. In the past we had them plug into our wired network, but the downside of this is that unless you have very expensive DNAC equipment like InfoExpress, or have static NAC configured (very cumbersome), your guests are clients on your main office network and can wreak havoc if their computers have viruses or are otherwise exploited.

Network infection via guests is a real vector and one of which companies should be very afraid. Ideally guests would always be on a separate VLAN.

One way to acheive this is to use a FON router to sandbox guests into a separate VLAN. The FON routers have two SSIDs, a private one that is WPA2 protected that gives full access to the local network, and a public SSID that is (by default) completely separate from the main network and guests on this VLAN cannot talk to computers on the main network, only through to internet IP addresses.

Using the friends and family feature of FON, you can set up a custom username and password that your office guests can use to authenticate on the public SSID (multiple logins with a single credential is possible).

This kills two birds with one stone because you not only have secure access to your own network via WPA2 (which is generally considered to be unbreakable using today’s technology) and you offer guests wifi access to the internet without allowing them access to your internal network.

A couple of things are on my FON wishlist:

• Seamless handover between FON access points on both public and private SSID
• Proper resolution of NetBIOS names on the private SSID (even though its on a different subnet from the main network)
• Better tolerance for old network drivers (this is a big one because in quite a few cases clients using older drivers could not connect to FON even though they could use other wifi networks - older Intel drivers in particular seem to be a problem)
• More powerful customisation options for the FON portal
• On the La Fonera+, allow the extra wired ethernet port to optionally connect to the public FON network instead of the private network

One other thing to bear in mind is that if you choose this solution, you allow anybody to use your bandwidth when authenticated through the FON network. Depending on your corporate policies, this may or may not be a problem for you. If bandwidth is the only issue, on the public SSID you can optionally limit this to as little as 512Kbps to make sure that guests don’t hog your pipeline.

A couple of days ago I wrote about some headaches upgrading to Windows XP SP3. This was related to my ability to rotate my screen being scuttled by the SP3 update. Microsoft said I needed a driver update to restore this functionality but Dell did not seem to provide one, so I tried to get some publicly available drivers from the ATI website which didn’t work for me, because they didn’t contain any definitions for the Mobility Radeon series, only the desktop versions. This meant that although my monitor rotation worked, I couldn’t get my LCD to display at the native 1400×1050 resolution that it usually displays at, which was a deal breaker and I had to revert to SP2 and install the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit to stop it from automatically upgrading again.

A couple of comments later, people pointed out that the problem is really Dell’s rather than Microsoft’s because Dell hadn’t bothered to release a driver update in years despite ATI continually updating their reference drivers. What’s worse, Dell has a deal with ATI where Dell users can’t download drivers directly from the ATI website. So users are supposedly stuck with the broken old Dell drivers that Dell couldn’t be bothered to update.

I did some researching on the Dell forums and found two entries that gave me the correct information so that I could find drivers that worked with SP3, even though they were unsupported by Dell. There is a “hidden” link on the ATI website that allows you to download the drivers for Mobility Radeon series bypassing the compatibility check that usually stops Dell users from accessing the drivers:

http://www.ati.com/online/mobilecatalyst/

After I got the drivers from this site, everything worked like a charm and I was able to use my video card rotation function correctly with SP3. One small gotcha regarding the latest ATI drivers is that you must have the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 installed in order to use them.

All of this would have been a lot simpler if Dell just kept their drivers up to date! I have a Dell Latitude D610, which is widely deployed at enterprises worldwide. It’s surprising that their enterprise customers haven’t made a bigger fuss about this.

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.

As an experiment, I’ve set up a website called Planet Bohra. This website contains all the Dawoodi Bohra owned blogs that I’m aware of, and aggregates them into a single page that shows them in reverse-chronological order, newest first.

My intent in doing so is to create a site that lets the reader get a feel for the “Bohra pulse”. Our community is so diverse and community members have such varied talents and interests that it’s often both interesting and inspiring to read about others’ thoughts, experiences and views about their areas of interest or expertise.

At the moment the site is new and I don’t have a large number of blogs listed. I therefore ask you to comment with your full name and blog URL if you’d like your blog to be added to the Planet Bohra website and aggregated there.

I hope that it can be a useful resource and invite any comments or suggestions. On my friend’s blog, some comments regarding the setup have already been made, and I do agree with the general sentiment that it’s too disorganised. I’ve not figured out a way to solve this, but at the same time I think that part of the beauty of the site is to breathe in the diversity of thought.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for some time now, and it’s really long overdue given how rapidly things are forgotten and how quickly new issues come up. Between the trio of McCain, Hillary, and Obama, I think I’m pretty clear in my mind that Obama has the best vision for the country.

I hate to use the cliché, but McCain really would be just another four years of Bush. And let’s be honest here, I’m pretty unhappy with how the last eight years went, politics wise. Between the two democrats, Hillary is the “republican” and Obama is the “democrat”. What does this mean? First I refer you to the NYT Decision Tree, which I think is an excellent piece of work. What does it tell us? That the well educated vote for Obama, and the less than well educated vote for Hillary.

In short, educated democrats vote for Obama, and uneducated democrats vote for Hillary. That’s no surprise really, Hillary tells great sob stories. People identify with that. Especially uneducated people who don’t know any better.

I might be considered an elitist for saying this, but I strongly believe that educated people make better policy decisions and that Obama’s vision is one that appeals to this crowd for good reason.

This is why I was especially disappointed with the handling of Obama’s “Muslim identity crisis”. He could have handled it so much better. It’s said that one shows their true colours when they’re cornered, and when Obama was cornered his campaign put out statements that were disappointingly anti-Islam and borderline racist.

Instead of playing clean and saying “I’m a committed Christian, but there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim in our secular country,” his campaign went all out denouncing Islam as an evil that is anathema to Obama. That anybody who insinuates that he is a Muslim is insulting the core of his very being. From someone who is looked up to as a visionary, I expected a lot better.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have. Conservative Christians and Jews are too important a demographic in American politics and anybody who upsets them doesn’t have a real shot at the presidency. After all, what good is a visionary who is unelectable?

All things considered, I’d still take Obama over the others, by a long shot. But what used to be unadulterated admiration is now tempered by a wariness about his character. He’s not been tested so far; and when push comes to shove, how will he react? I’d venture still better than the others, but should ‘better than Hillary and McCain’ really be America’s benchmark?