A Place for me to rant about politics, development, university and technology
Thank you for visiting my site. If you’re interested in my take on random issues then read on, if you’re looking for information about my consultancy, please go to www.patrickkelso.com for contact details and information.
Today I had to use my Ubuntu desktop to connect to the office using Citrix. The client installed without a problem, but as soon as I clicked on the application I wanted to run from the website I got an SSL error:
“You have not chosen to trust Thawte Server CA, the issuer of the server’s security certificate (SSL error 61)”
Now I had already copied my Mozilla SSL certificates into the ICA client directory as I knew this was required, and yet I still got the error.
A little digging and I found that Citrix for reasons known only to themselves had decided to change the path (at least in the .deb package) from /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/ to /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts.
A quick ln -s and I was in business.
Today CiviCRM started complaining that some of my tables were MyISAM instead of INNODB. Confusing to me, because my database server is definitely set to INNODB.
After trawling Google for a while I found this nifty SQL command that made it all better:
SELECT CONCAT(‘ALTER TABLE `’,table_schema,’`.`’,table_name,’` ORDER BY primary_key_column; ALTER TABLE `’,table_schema,’`.`’,table_name,’` engine=InnoDB;’) FROM information_schema.tables WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA=’$$$$MYDB$$$$’ AND ENGINE = ‘MyISAM’;
This year at the National Folk Festival in Canberra I overheard two people talking about this amazing musician that they just had to see that day. I quickly pulled out my program and highlighted his performance for myself, if he was that amazing then I wanted to see him too.
The musician was Bruce Molsky
After what was an amazing concert, like many people I rushed to the festival shop to purchase Bruce’s cd. Unfortunately Bruce, like many folk musicians, had to bring his own CDs to the festival to sell, which for a musician travelling the world with several instruments, personal items and clothes as well meant that there were not many copies. Of Bruce’s 4 CDs he had brought to the festival only 1 was left, which I duly snapped up, much to the disappointment of the folkies behind me who had’t moved quite so fast.
I also missed out on several Cloudstreet
It’s a shame that only my American readers will be able to purchase the MP3s above, but you can’t find most folk music on any other MP3 store, iTunes included. (We had an interesting experience this year, we purchased a dozen CDs on our first day at the festival and found that we didn’t have a single CD player or laptop at our campsite.
I would like to see the National Folk Festival, or a similar peak Folk organisation in Australia partner with Bigpond Music, Sanity or Itunes to give all Folk musicians access to an MP3 store, and ensure it’s availability at the folk festivals. The festival could get a small percentage of each sale from the digital versions, and would never have to worry about running out of music.
One of my customers started having trouble updating some custom fields in their database after updating to the latest version. The error I was getting was:
Database Error Code: Table ‘domain_civicrm.log_civicrm_value_branch_information_3′ doesn’t exist, 1146
Correct, that table doesn’t exist, never has. Logging isn’t turned on, and when I check under Administer/Configure/Global Settings/Miscellaneous the option is off and grayed out because I have a multilingual install.
Turns out that something had created some logging triggers when I created the custom tables. I had to dive into the database (something I usually avoid doing if possible) and drop all the triggers:
use domain_civicrm;
show triggers;
drop trigger XXXX;
Now the customer can update all the fields. It’s amazing how long one can search before finding the solution is only a few seconds long. I found the answer in the civicrm forums eventually.
I was so excited to find out today that The International Herald Tribune would be available on my Android phone thanks to the wonders of Amazon’s Kindle software. I immediately purchased today’s edition to give it a try. (Would have been better to get the 14 day free trial, but I didn’t see it). I downloaded the paper and with barely restrained glee started reading articles. And that’s when I started to notice the defects. Not glaring, this doesn’t work defects, but user experience defects that ensure I won’t be parting with my hard earned money for a subscription.
No Copying
This is a deal breaker straight up. In the first article was a quote I wanted to share with a friend, I pressed menu, but there was no option to email an article. I highlighted the text, but the only option was to search for other occurrences. How was I meant to share this article? The answer of course was I went online to the NYTimes website and copied the relevant content of the article into an email, with the URL allowing my friend to read the rest if there were interested.
No Annotating
I’m a politician, I read newspapers to keep up to date, and when I’m reading them I highlight, doodle and note things in the margins. Little reminders that I considered this bit of information important, and that I wanted to remember it later. The Kindle edition of the paper won’t let me do that. Again, this is a deal breaker.
No Saving
How do I mark an article as worthy of posterity? On the website I can bookmark the URL, or as I usually do, clip it to Evernote. On my Android phone I have no bookmarking option. Why not? This is one of the best things about reading a book through the Kindle app, instead of one of the several alternatives that on Android offer other superior features. (If I had a dollar for every time I have turned the sound off on my phone whilst reading a Kindle book because in FBReader the volume buttons change page I’d have enough to buy a real Kindle). On a Kindle you bookmark a page in a book, and through Amazon’s Whispernet, which the rest of us call the Internet, the bookmark is synced to all your Kindle devices.
Every single issue is a result of the publishers of the paper deciding to do this, not Amazon, all the issues are technically possible and indeed work in other Kindle books. I humbly suggest that if the Newspaper industry wants to live on that they at a minimum release the Kindle editions with the same capabilities of their print editions. Which I’m sure you’ll find I can copy text from, annotate and save using no more complex devices than a pen and a pair of scissors.
I’ve just donated to the donation call to keep New Matilda alive for another year.
I had been thinking about it for a while, weighing my RSS subscription to New Matilda against spending the money on fast women and loose cars. Ultimately it was the satire of Ben Pobjie who convinced me the money was well spent, with his insightful look at the Victorian Election. Independent (As in, not Fairfax or News Limited) journalism is a valuable part of Democracy, I read multiple blogs every day that provide analysis and insight into Australia, Democracy, International Development & Economics. Some have ads, some don’t. Some are updated daily and some whenever the blogger gets a connection to the Internet. All are great, but few have been going as long as New Matilda, I know, I’ve got a New Matilda sticker on my motorcycle, and I’ve had it for a long time. Every now and then someone asks me if I work there, and sometimes I really want to lie and say yes, because they have this hopeful look in their eye. At least now I can tell them honestly that I don’t work there, but I have paid some of their rent.
So to my 4 RSS subscribers please go and read New Matilda and if you find something you like, why not sling them a few bob to keep them going.
According to the website for Australia’s first Social Innovation Camp it has been 117 days since the camp. I wonder what has happened since then with the ideas that went to the camp?
I know what has happened with one of my ideas that didn’t make it, “Cup of Sugar” a website that allowed you to share your household goods with friends and neighbours. For instance does every house in your street need a 4m ladder every day? I doubt it, and when I need one I borrow from a neighbour. The idea of the website was to scale that system. Using a feedback and rewards system like Ebay and Couchsurfing.org to promote trust.
I was pleased today to find Neighborgoods.net (Excuse the American spelling), a website that allows you to share your household goods in your neighbourhood, with a verification system like couchsurfers and a rating system like Ebay.
Let me be clear, I’m not insinuating that this idea was stolen from me, I have complete faith that Micki Krimmel independently came up with the idea herself. I think it’s great that someone had the idea, the time and the capital to get this rolling, which I wasn’t able to do and I wish them well. Of course if they did get the idea from me royalty payments can be sent to my paypal account 
I’ve been reading with interest Tony Pearson’s blog Inside System Storage as the IBM view on things is often very different to the EMC/NetApp/Everyone Else view on things.
The last two posts have been about getting a new laptop, and all the effort Tony has gone to getting all his data synched (he is currently searching for a crossover cable).
When I received a new laptop at EMC, not because the company automatically replaced them after 4 years, but rather because the hinge snapped about a week after the warranty expired, I had some similar issues, thuogh certainly not 134 applications to reinstall.
As an early adopter of Dropbox all my important files are synchronised with the cloud. Anything customer sensitive that I couldn’t host online was kept on a Truecrypt encrypted USB key that lives on my keychain. (It used to live in my pocket, but after two trips through the washing machine I moved it to the keychain (If you’re interested it’s a Patriot XPorter XT)).
So old laptop boots up a Darik’s Boot & Nuke and starts wiping. The new laptop boots up the corporate image which I promptly transfer into a vmware image using vmware converter. I then install my OS of choice, which was the Windows 7 beta at the time, VMware server & Dropbox. An hour later (using LAN sync and getting the data off my desktop not the Dropbox server) I have all my files back. I then install my base applications that I cannot live without, Firefox, Launchy, PeaZip, Java, Acrobat Viewer, PDF Printer, Open Office & Truecrypt to start.
I could have saved an hour and just installed Dropbox in the corporate image, but where is the fun in that. I currently have 3 desktop computers & 2 laptops. Thanks to Dropbox I always have my files. I can even access them from my Android phone bringing support to a total of 4 operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac, Android.
According to Google Reader I’m the only person subscribed to the ALP RSS Feed.
Feed URL: http://www.labor.com.au/media/rss/2.0/feed.xml
Posts per week:26.4Subscribers:1Last updated:7:42 AM (1 hour ago)
I can hardly talk, only 2 Google Reader users are subscribed to my blog, 1 is me, I’m assuming the other is my wife. (Hello dearest).
Looking at many of my other feeds which I’m the only subscriber many are friends, coworkers or other acquaintances.
So my Samsung drives don’t work with the Adaptec controller, so if anyone wants to buy 5 2tb Samsung F3EG drives drop me a line.
Now on my desk I have 5 Western Digital WD20EADS which are definitely on the qualified list of drives. So when I get home tonight it’s time to build a 4+1 R5.
Oh the joy.
Copyright © 2012 Patrick's Musings All rights reserved. Theme by Laptop Geek.