Jeremy Durham

One of the things I miss about My last gig is the day-to-day interaction with servers. I feel like I’m missing out a lot when big server moves happen because I’m no longer deploying my applications to a server that requires my configuration, and so I kinda just “take what I get”.

On that note, I’ve moved to a VPS running Gentoo (I’m a Debian guy) to get familiar with Gentoo as well as get back to configuring and running things the way I want.

For the longest time I complained about the Mac terminal not being keyboard friendly. Home inserted ~ instead of going to the beginning of the line, all that junk. While on one of my rants, someone told me that emacs commands work in terminal (I do not know emacs what-so-ever). Apparently, Control A goes to the beginning of the line, Control E goes to the end, and Control K deletes to the end of the line. Control XU undos. Not half bad!

Eons…

A big shout out to all of the people who made the Eons launch possible! I’ve been honored to be on a really great team with a lot of excellent people. Check us out at Eons, we’re going to do some great things.

So, aside from my normal geekiness, I have a real soft spot for Wing Chun. In fact, I studied it for several years when I lived in Michigan. I really enjoyed the whole deal, and my Sifu was unbelievably good. Since moving to Boston, it’s been impossible for me to find people to practive with. Isn’t there anyone who does Yip Man (Traditional) Wing Chun in Boston? Where are they?

It looks like early July I’ll be headed back to Michigan for a week to study Wing Chun with my Sifu.

Brian Delacey pointed me at Gyre, which is a nice web based debugger for Rails apps.

I really, really like the idea behind Standout Jobs. I don’t generally hire people (ever), but I think it’s a great idea. There’s already a few places looking for Ruby developers.

On a side note, the Ruby market is definitely in low supply high demand mode. It’s a great time to be doing, or learning, Ruby.

There’s now a browse-able darcs repository running at darcs.jeremydurham.com. You can get some of the code I’ve written, borrowed, or backported. I’ll add the rest over the next few days, including the new ActionWebService for Merb and JQuery for Rails plugins.

Although my DNS-321 is last year’s model, having been superseded by the awesome DNS-320, I decided last night that I’d love to get OpenVPN running on it and set up a VPN that would give me access to my shared directories and home computer from the office.

OpenVPN requires liblzo, which is available for fun_plug, so I grabbed that and installed it:

wget http://www.inreto.de/dns323/fun-plug/0.5/extra-packages/libs/lzo-2.03-1.tgz

funpkg -i lzo-2.03-1.tgz

There is also an OpenVPN package, but it’s built for the DNS-323, so I installed it:

wget http://www.condor-edv.com/~rubber/Download/openvpn_2_1_2-DNS323.tgz

funpkg -i openvpn_2_1_2-DNS323.tgz

After installing, attempting to start gave me “invalid module format”, with dmesg telling me that the tun module included in the package was compiled for a different kernel than the stock kernel on the DNS-321.

A bit of Googling told me that no one (I could find) had provided a tun module for the DNS-321, so I set out to create one. Having been a Mac convert from Linux for the last 4 or 5 years, I haven’t built a kernel in quite a while, but it proved to be like riding a bike. I won’t get into the dirty details but you need version 2.6.22.7 of the kernel, the .config from the DNS-321 kernel, and an hour or so to kill. “make config” still works and after answering the right questions I was able to “make modules”, install the tun module and configure my VPN.

Although the DNS-321 is not as popular as it once was, I hope this helps someone else (or future me). Here is a copy of the tun.ko built for DNS-321 firmware 1.03: tun.ko

People who’ve never owned an Apple product tell me that I’ve paid too much. They tell me that I could probably build something better, cheaper. I’ve probably had the best customer experiences ever from Apple, but first I’m going to talk about the other side. The bottom of the barrel products that the companies they produced could care less about, and what kind of support you can expect for these products.

Last August I was involved in the HP Touchpad “firesale”, and I managed to purchase two tablets. The first tablet has been fine, has worked great since day 1, and it won’t be the topic of this article. The second tablet is the one I want to discuss.

Because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the tablet, it sat until around December. When I first started the tablet, it went into infinite reboot on startup. After troubleshoot the issue, it was obvious it needed to go back. I called HP and was greeted by their support team, which determined, after about 15 minutes or so that the tablet needed to be returned. I was sent a box to return the tablet, and a week or so later, I received a new tablet, and was informed that my tablet was not repairable. This was sometime in January.

After a few hours with the new tablet, it was pretty obvious something was wrong. Every time the tablet went to sleep and sat for 15-20 minutes, I had to forceable reboot the tablet by pressing the sleep and home button, or worse: the tablet would just automatically reboot. I went through all the steps of WebOS doctoring (wiping) the tablet, and after a week or so of messing around called HP. This time it was much different. I spent about a half hour troubleshooting with HP, going through various steps with support. We decided to send back the tablet for repair. Another box at my door, wait a week or so, get a new tablet, and test it out. At this point it was around February.

I won’t detail any more of the incident, but I want to get to the important points. At this point, I’ve sent back a tablet four times, waited a week or two each time, and I am about to send the tablet back for a fifth time, but this time, they’re going to give me a tablet first so I can make sure it works. I’ve probably spent about 4-5 hours of my time on the phone with HP support, not including the countless hours I spent troubleshoot before calling them, and I am still hoping that my next Touchpad will work. Sure, I only paid $150 in cash for the tablet, but how much is my time worth?

In my situation about, the company is HP, but it could just as well be anyone. My point is, before you go off buying some device because it’s “uber” cheap, make sure the company is going to stand behind it. Better yet, reward the companies that treat you well with more business, and punish companies that treat you poorly with no business.

I started this article with Apple, so I want to talk about why I happily hand my money to Apple. Every Apple device I’ve ever bought was a refurbished device. Every iPhone, every iPod, every laptop. That means I paid somewhere between 10-15% lower than “retail”, and my device came in a little brown box.

I’ve also had a few situations where my Apple device has misbehaved, been defective, or failed. In every situation, my problem was solved, the first time, in under an hour. The best story I can tell is when my hard drive died when I opened my laptop after landing 1000 miles from home. I called the Apple store while still sitting on the plane, who made me an appointment for 30 minutes later. After replacing the hard drive in less than 15 minutes (with OS preinstalled), they gave me the old hard drive (without me asking), allowing me to recover all of the data. Total amount of money I paid for these repairs? $0. It was within the warranty period, but they handled it the way you would expect it to be handled.

This is one of the main reasons I buy Apple products, and will continue to buy Apple products. I write software for a living, I don’t sit on the phone with support people for hours upon end while they can’t solve my issues. I don’t send devices back 4-5 times before they are fixed, losing months of use. Well, actually I do. But when I do, I never buy another product from that company again. I hope you consider doing the same.