Of course, as soon as I post about my OSX kernel panics being fixed, there it is again. This definitely has something to do with networking, but it is tough to tell with all the layers.

I am using:

• WiFi (with patched 802.11n firmware)
• Wired Ethernet
• Tunnelblick (OpenVPN)
• Parallels Shared Networking

The crash always seems to occur, but not consistently:

• When switching from WiFi to Ethernet, or the other way around
• When Tunnelblick connection is dropped unexpectedly
• When switching from shared to host only networking in Parallels

I am going to try my best to recreate the issue consistently soon and be done with it for good.

Update (1/30/2008):
Upgrading my version of Parallels to 3.0, build 5582 has fully fixed the problem once and for all. It has now been over 30 days without a Kernel Panic!

I’ve been using Chandler for a few weeks now to try to organize my life.

I tried building Chandler Server from source today. Following the instructions on their site give’s me a build error because it can’t find a copy of Apache Abdera

Some of the error:

/mnt/drive2/chandler/cosmo/cosmo/src/main/java/org/osaf/cosmo/atom/provider/UserTarget.java:[20,46] cannot find symbol
symbol  : class AbstractTarget
location: package org.apache.abdera.protocol.server.impl
 
/mnt/drive2/chandler/cosmo/cosmo/src/main/java/org/osaf/cosmo/atom/provider/UserTarget.java:[29,32] cannot find symbol
symbol: class AbstractTarget
public class UserTarget extends AbstractTarget {
 
/mnt/drive2/chandler/cosmo/cosmo/src/main/java/org/osaf/cosmo/atom/provider/BaseItemTarget.java:[22,46] cannot find symbol
symbol  : class AbstractTarget
location: package org.apache.abdera.protocol.server.impl
 
/mnt/drive2/chandler/cosmo/cosmo/src/main/java/org/osaf/cosmo/atom/provider/BaseItemTarget.java:[25,45] cannot find symbol
symbol: class AbstractTarget
public abstract class BaseItemTarget extends AbstractTarget

After much fiddeling around, and even trying to install Abdera from source, I was able to get it to build by checking out everything related to cosmo and building that.

• svn co http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/trunk
• cd trunk/cosmo
• mvn package

ta-da.

I still get some errors with the unit tests, but I don’t know if those are serious or not yet.

Now let’s see if it run’s with Tomcat 6.0

Just a follow-up to that post a few entries ago about the OSX kernel panics I was getting.

I had hoped 10.5.1 would fix them, and they seemed to get a little less frequent when I installed that. What really seemed to do the trick was upgrading to the latest version of Parallels which I almost always have running.

It has now been 5 days since a Kernel panic.

For the horse race: I was getting 2 a day with 10.5.0, and one every other day with 10.5.1.

I think it is solved. We will see.

The OSX Dictionary screen saver is totally awesome. It gives you a handy word of the day as the screen saver. Why didn’t I see this in any of the reviews of Leopard out there?

As a side note, every time mine starts up it flashes the word “scrimshaw”. This is pretty awesome, but I am curious: does it do this for everyone? Is this some sort of inside apple joke?

Since I am trying to commit to writing to this blog more, I am trying to find it’s voice and figure out what direction I am going to go with writing. After that last post I realized it could easily go towards a Microsoft/Vista hate blog since I find myself complaining about vista to someone almost daily. To balance it out early on, here I will post the one thing I have been loving about Windows Vista.

Earlier this summer, I purchased two identical PCs from BestBuy.
Both computers were:

Gateway-E6400
GM5424
Intel® Core™2 Duo E6400
Intel® Viiv™ technology
2GB DDR2
Intel® EM64T enhancement
DL DVD±RW/CD-RW drive
400GB hard drive
Windows Vista Ultimate
TV tuner

Not super great machines, but BB had them for $599 which seemed to me to be a pretty low price.

The first desktop I have been using around the office. It sucks shit and I want it to die. But I will write more about that some other time. This post is for praise.

The second desktop went home with my business partner to replace an older dell she had been using. The goal was to replace her home desktop and have something she could use as a primary means of watching television and DVD’s. She has a small apartment and a 23 inch monitor is the perfect size tv for it.

The at home, in the living room, experience of this desktop is totally top notch.

I’ll say it right now: Windows vista media center is really well done.

Right out of the box, this PC:

• Set up with her cable connection in about 10 minutes
• Came with a remote that replaced the cable box remote (it has this weird computer cable box ir transfer cable)
• Pulls down television listings off the net
• Easily and intuitively schedules and records live television
• Has excellent, stutter-free playback of both television and DVDs even when applications are running in the background

We did replace the keyboard and mouse. Gateway: these things are not comfortable at all. A $10 MS mouse and $15 no-name keyboard beat these things in comfort by a wide margin.

I have always used TiVos in the past, but I am seriously considering getting a machine like this for my apartment. It can’t be hacked like a TiVo and you can’t really save the video or transfer it to other machines, but I never did that anyway. For a device that is just going to be connected to your Television for entertainment and occasional business productivity related stuff, this is a great way to go. At $600 it isn’t that much more than any other DVR and really I think it was a great value.

I’ll try to write this week about the other desktop I am using at the office, it is like the exact opposite of this review.

The copy of Windows Vista Business running on my laptop decided tonight that it was no longer activated and I had to re-activate it. I don’t think I need to go into how frustrating that a copy of software that you legally own decides that you no longer own it. I bet the cracked copies on the internet never have this problem.

Internet activation failed, automated phone activation failed, so I finally had to do the dreaded in-person phone tech support call.

Apparently the only difference between the in person call and the automated call is that the person asks you “How many computers is this software installed on?”. I guess it is easy to lie to a computer, but in person you are supposed to say “2?”, “3?” — and then they got-cha you filthy pirate. anyway.

So I’m all pissed off at this whole process that has now taken 30+ minutes, but I find myself thinking less about the pain in the ass and more about the voice of this woman on the other end of the phone line.

The woman, who knows where she is (it is 2am EST here), speaks near-perfect British English. I would think that I was speaking to someone in the UK, but she seemed to only have the exact vocabulary required to read off scripted answers. She couldn’t comprehend or reply to even the most basic question; like: “why do I have to even be talking to you when I own this software?”. It was almost like talking to a computer voice recognizing phone system, it was really bizzare. I had exchanges like this:

Q: Who can I write to complain about this:
A: I don’t understand

Q: I would like to complain about this process:
A: I have noted your complaint.

Q: Where can I send a complaint letter to
A: Yes

Q: I would like to mail a complaint, what is the address:
A: I will submit your complaint

Q: No, I would like to Mail a formal complaint to your company:
A: I don’t understand
Q: I would like an address to send a letter to
A: 1-800
Q: No An Address
A: ?
Q: Postal, Mailing, Physical Address
A: please hold
– 10 minute wait
A: support@microsoft.com

Q: No, not email, I Need an address
(I googled the address a long time ago at this point, but I might as well see through)
A: please hold
– 5 minute wait
A:
Microsoft Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052-6399

Q: wow thanks
A: have a nice day

But here’s the best part: she didn’t know how to pronounce Redmond, so she just spelled it out for me:

Roman echo delta monkey oscar nile delta

She said these words faster and more perfect than I could reading them right now. She had obviously been trained to speak these specific words to spell things out.

I googled all over the place, figuring I could learn where this woman learned english based on the phonetic words she used.

This is a pretty good listing of different Phonetic alphabets used around the world. Each word in her list appears in one of the alphabets, but none contain all of the words. I guess it will forever be a mystery.

fyi. I put on my chandler task list to actually write a letter to Microsoft. But in reality, if vista decides it isn’t activated anymore again, I am probably just going to search for a crack to fix the problem. I am sure there is one out there. Maybe sp1 will save us all.

I had a server die on me last week and I needed to reinstall it as quickly as possible. It was running Fedora Core 4. I only had install media for Fedora core 6. I knew it would be a bit of a pain to update all of the config files for everything running on the server, but I figured now is as good a time as any. I would have updated to 7 or 8, but I didn’t have time to download those on CDs (I have 8 on dvd but the server doesn’t have a dvd drive).

Anyway. I updated everything and it all seemed to run swimmingly. I didn’t even have to configure anything too drastically different. I switched from Courier IMAP to Dovecot, but that is another story.

The issue that got me pulling my hair out last night was that my tomcat log kept showing odd smtp related error messages in the stack trace:

javax.mail.SendFailedException: Sending failed;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.MessagingException: 501 5.5.4 Bad RET parameter syntax
        at javax.mail.Transport.send0(Transport.java:218)
        at javax.mail.Transport.send(Transport.java:80)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.sendMail(Notification.java:116)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.run(Notification.java:56)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)

After a lot of digging, it seems that javamail sends the RET parameter as described in RFC-1891, even if it is not set up in the config file. Since this is an optional parameter, you would think that leaving it out of your properties file would make javamail not send it to the mail server. It seems it sends “RET=” rather than leaving it out.

It also seems that postfix v2.2.2 ignores “RET=”, but v2.3.3 is a little more strict and expects your parameter to have a value.

I don’t know what application is behaving improperly here. My guess is that postfix is doing the right thing, and that javamail should probably not send the RET parameter, but I guess they could argue that I just need to always configure it in my settings to make sure I’m compliant. (I am using javamail 1.3.0 btw, so it may have changed in newer versions)

to fix the problem, all I had to do was add these two lines to my javamail config properties file:
mail.smtp.dsn.ret=HDRS
mail.smtp.dsn.notify=NEVER

I found I also had to set the mail.smtp.dns.notify value too, because if I don’t I get this error:

javax.mail.SendFailedException: Sending failed;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.SendFailedException: Invalid Addresses;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.SendFailedException: 501 5.5.4 Error: Bad NOTIFY parameter syntax;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.SendFailedException: 501 5.5.4 Error: Bad NOTIFY parameter syntax
        at javax.mail.Transport.send0(Transport.java:218)
        at javax.mail.Transport.send(Transport.java:80)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.sendMail(Notification.java:116)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.run(Notification.java:56)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)

It looks like javamail sends that along as blank as well. weird.