Jakub Anderwald

I just found another reason to love IPv6.

I spent 2 hours debugging why I can’t connect via RDP to a new server I built at home. Traces, firewall checks, vpings. Nothing – the port seemed closed from the network, even though it was wide open on the server OS.

Finally I found the reason – I was connecting via netbios name and the connection was going to a virtual machine I had opened, not to the actual physical server.

Thanks to IPv6, I couldn’t just recognize that looking at the ping results – it’s not that easy to spot a difference in IPv6, as it was with v4.

Just a rant. But quite annoying.

I never liked Quicktime. The Windows player for it was always incompatible, slow, hanging. It also used it’s own chrome, so it never looked like Windows software. Since some time, due to fancy Apple Software update, it was trying to push some other Apple software (Safari and iTunes mostly) to your system with every update.

Because of that I never wanted to install the Quicktime player on my machines. I tried using Quicktime alternative codecs, or avoided having videos in Quicktime, but there’s always a situation when you get a quicktime video and have to see it, at least once.

Recently, I found a solution to that. I just upload the quicktime video to YouTube as private, and then decide if it’s worth keeping or not. I know it’s a twisted way, very slow and error-prone, but I am so happy I don’t need to install the player that I can spare those 10 minutes of my time.

This made me think: how far can you go in hating a product? I mean, the player is just a player, but I feel so much discomfort when I have to install it, that I will do a lot to avoid it. I felt the same way about Java applications, and luckily, they’re gone. It should be some kind of a warning sign for the seoftware vendor: if people hate you enough to use their time and resources (bandwidth in this case) just to avoid using it, you should rethink your strategy. Seriously.

I currently use HTC Touch Pro. It’s small, nice, easy to write on, functional. However, I bouyght it 1,5 years ago and since then there have been newer phones, bigger, faster, with more features.

I usually upgrade my phone every year or two, so I thought – it’s the time.

However, there is no good replacement for Touch Pro. There’s a thing called Touch Pro 2, but it’s just a minor refinement. Moreover, I had a look through HTC’s leaked plans for 2010, they don’t have anything with bigger screen and much better CPU and hardware keyboard. I would love to buy “HD2 Pro”, but it seems it’s not going to happen.

So I decided to do a software upgrade instead, to get the new features. However, it’s a pain in the back. If I don’t want to spend weeks tweaking and building my new mobile OS, I have to download one of the “custom built” ROMs, e.g. from XDA Developers. But they do have issues. They hang, they’re not as stable as the original OS, they miss some features, draw weird things on the screen etc.

How come Apple gives you the newest software, no matter if you have 3-year old iPhone or the new and shiny 3GS, and HTC / Microsoft don’t? Do they fear I won’t buy I new phone? Hell, I will buy, just make me a device with WVGA, Snapdragon CPU and hardware keyboad and I will gladly pay whatever ridiculous price you put on it.

If not, just let me upgrade my phone, don’t make me feel like I’m stuck with whatever I have because I bought it a year ago.

A friend of mine asked me for help recently.

His new Windows 7 laptop could not authenticate to access a network share in a workgroup environment. I said “that’s going to be easy” and ran him through the usual troubleshooting – security logs, share permissions and maximum number of users, password synchronisation etc.. By the time all seemed fine and he said that he already reinstalled the OS on the laptop twice, and that all other machines are working fine with the same share and same username, I realised it’s not one of the “usual suspects”.

After enabling the correct logging procedures, we got two nice failed events in security log on the server – 680 and 529. Based on my experience, event 529 never lies. You can tell with all the certainty in the world, that when a user gets event 529, he made a mistake in his password, there is no other explaination. Well, I’ll have to revise that policy.

Password was set to “1234″ for both accounts and we still got the same error. I had to go to office, so I told him to move the hard drive from the new machine to one of the older ones. I came back couple hours later and saw an IM message from him waiting for me. “DAMN, it worked.”

Reason? Failed motherboard.

Somehow it could connect to the Internet, could browse local network, but failed at authenticating a local account.

Don’t ask me how.

Following the examples of Larry Page, Bill Gates and Jeff Atwood I just bought myself 2 additional 21 inch displays.

I can finally keep my email always open (on the left-hand side monitor), put IM communicator, desktop widgets and other trivia stuff to the right-hand side one and be focused on my main task. I had to precisely choose the side displays for my setup, so they match the resolution, physical dimensions (at least visible screen height) and color quality of the center one, which I already had.

I use two NECs at work, so having 3 monitors should be better, right? It is. I don’t have the small gap in front of me, just a wide 24″, 1920×1200 area waiting for me to do something.