Working in the IT business, I can appreciate a lot of these.  That first button is especially appropriate.

When I did my taxes recently I tried to use Kiplinger’s TaxCut, instead of TurboTax because I was upset with TurboTax for their product activation policy.  I checked out the features on the box for TaxCut and it seemed to compare favorably in that it listed the ability to download my stock trade info and my W2.  Unfortunately, the reality turned out to be less impressive.  It turned out that they didn’t support my company’s W2 download and they only supported about 8 brokerage firms.  It seemed kind of cheesy to me that they couldn’t download data from E*Trade.

So out of frustration after trying to import data via files, I gave up and used TurboTax online.  The TurboTax software worked quite well and included a very useful cost basis calculator (which came in handy with some stock that I sold off as a single lot that was originally bought in three lots).

As part of the Kiplinger TaxCut setup, it asked me to register.  Being suspicious of registration schemes, I always make up a new email address for each company that I do business with online.  It only took a week before I started getting spam at the new address that I used, despite the fact that I opted out of ALL emails from them.  What’s worse, is that they were using an outside agency, so it implies that someone actually had to go to the trouble of pulling the data and sending it to the spamhaus.

They just blew their one and only chance to work with me.  I won’t be buying TaxCut in the future, regardless of whether they fix their import problems.  I’m serious about not wanting any email crap.  I get a bunch of email as it is and I don’t need unsolicited offers crowding out real email.  If I get another spam from them I will redirect the address so that the email is sent to one of their online contact emails (or, if I can find it, to their CEO).

The conference I’m attending is for technical people from my company.  A variety of technical sessions are being offered through Wednesday.  I attended one today concerning creating highly-available systems.  The presenter was a former chief engineer on a nuclear sub who now works for the company.  His point throughout the presentation was that your system’s reliability depends not only on technology, but also on your people and the processes that they follow. 

The most interesting point he brought out was something that was learned from 9/11.  We in the industry were quick to set up redundant systems in geographically separated datacenters and to put procedures in place for offsite backups, but we forgot about distributing people.  The companies that were located in the World Trade Center had offsite backups and redundant systems in place, but they didn’t have people who were ready to step in and fill the positions of those who were killed.  All that physical preparation wasn’t very useful because there were no people available who knew the systems.

I have to admit that I hadn’t given much thought to this topic before, even though I’ve seen what happens when people become too specialized and aren’t cross-trained on each other’s jobs.  It’s one more thing to factor into the next system that I’m involved with.

Better now, though I was going through withdrawal symptoms there for a while, since the *$%^#@$ cable modem went down around 6:00 and just came back up.  Argh!

I am being frustrated by cable modem outages.  You don’t realize how much you use it until it doesn’t work.  The system has been going down randomly for the past few days, usually in the evenings. 

But I experienced a power-related cable modem outage this morning.  We had a very short power outage this morning (just one or two seconds).  Whenever the power takes a hit, I have to force a DHCP lease renewal before my internet connection will work again.  Since my router and cable modem are protected by my UPS, it makes me suspect that Charter doesn’t have a backup power supply on their headend.

Everyone else is doing a far better job of war coverage than I ever could, so I guess I’ll stick to my usual stuff….

The 802.11g specification is still a draft standard, so there will be some potential problems deploying products based on that standard.  So despite my recent problems with a WPC54G card, I still like Linksys products.  Which is why I’m a bit concerned about the news today that Cisco is planning to buy Linksys.  I understand that Cisco makes good products in the corporate environment, but I’ve not had much exposure to them.  I’m a software guy, so their products are hidden from me at work and I haven’t used them at home.  My hope is that they will keep the Linksys product line distinct from their other products.  This could happen, since the reason given for Cisco’s purchase is that they wanted to get into the home wireless LAN business, which is an area where Linksys is very strong.

I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

One of my criteria for evaluating notebooks was the size and quality of the keyboard.  I’m a touch typist and the keyboard makes a big difference to me.  The keyboard needs to be big enough to accomodate my hands (and should ideally be close to full size).  Further, it needs to have a layout that makes sense (it should mimic a full size keyboard wherever possible). 

The reason I mention this is that the Toshiba laptops that I saw looked good in all respects except one:  I couldn’t find the delete key.  Maybe they had one, but I couldn’t find it.  Given my habits with the keyboard, not having a delete key in a sane position would drive me nuts.

I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about Best Buy.  Today, though, they’ve probably lost me for good.  I had decided that I wanted to get a laptop for use around the house, since I’m getting tired of being tied to my desktop (which is in my home office).  After doing some online research and visiting a couple of stores, I was ready to buy today.  I went in to the Best Buy in Lewisville, and after examining their available systems, I found one that I liked.  The problem was that there was no one available to assist me when I was ready to buy (despite there being plenty of people around when I started looking).  I think what finally did it for me was the overall noise level in the store.  Combined with being ignored, it made for a very annoying experience.

I’m currently writing this entry from a laptop that I purchased at Compusa.  The experience there wasn’t that great, either, although they did have someone available to take my money.  The salesman pushed a bit too hard to get me to buy the extended service plan (to the point of asking me afterward why I didn’t buy it and almost trying to argue with me about it, even though I had politely declined), and they tried to gather my personal info at the checkout (which I also politely declined).  Finally, the advertised price included two mail-in rebates, but now that I’ve had a chance to examine the terms (they were both online, so I couldn’t see them at the time), I find that both of them want the original UPC code.  I’ve sent in a complaint to Compusa about this, since it seems deceptive to me to advertise both rebates if you can’t redeem both of them (and their ad for the laptop definitely shows both rebates, which can be seen here).

Of course, the fact that this laptop doesn’t want to work with the Linksys WPC54G card doesn’t make me any happier (I’ve currently got a cable strung across the living room to my wireless bridge).  But that’s an issue I’ll take up with Linksys and the laptop manufacturer.  This is a new model of laptop, so there may be some BIOS issues to work out.

Update: CompUSA informed me today that they will accept copies of the UPC when there are multiple rebates.

This will quickly fall off into computer geek land, so those who don’t care for such things may wish to scroll down.

I’m working on a web project that has to access some backend (legacy) systems.  Of course our corporate security people don’t allow direct access to these systems (and rightly so) from systems that are accessed from the internet.  They have created a couple of layers of firewalls, so that when you access one of our online applications, your request is proxied and redirected across a firewall into the hosting zone (not the actual names used by our security people).  Even though this zone is protected, it is still not trusted.  If a system needs access to something in the internal network, it has to go through an intermediary system which has been certified and approved for crossing the firewall.

Our application has been designed to use a Web Services interface to access the data that it requires.  We have put in place a set of these services on the internal network that will access the backend systems.  We’re using SOAP over HTTP for this.  Since the security folks won’t allow HTTP traffic across the firewall, we have to use another protocol (in this case it’s a bit of messaging middleware).  To prevent our application from having to know about all this, we created a “bridge” that takes an HTTP request and puts it into a message.  There is another application running on the internal network that dequeues the message, contacts the web service, and puts the result back into a message, which gets sent to the front-end of the bridge.  If this sounds like a very round-about way of doing things, it is, but we’re required to do things like this for security purposes (that and our bridge code is very careful to accept requests only from validated systems/users and to send the requests to validated target URLs; it won’t act as a standard HTTP proxy).

Anyway, the bridge code works fine in every instance except one.  If the web service throws an exception, the bridge was not passing it on to the caller.  After going back and forth through the Java code, it appears that this all comes down to a peculiarity of how Java handles URLs.  The URL requires a trailing slash (’/’), which had been left off in the configuration file that specifies the target URL.  Normally, this doesn’t seem to matter.  The SOAP client code doesn’t care, and a web browser wouldn’t either.  If that trailing slash isn’t there, a call to HttpURLConnection.getInputStream() will throw a FileNotFoundException (but only when there is a SOAP fault, which causes an HTTP 500 return code).

It’s one of those things that drive you crazy.  You search and search for a bug in the code only to find that it’s in the JDK and it can be fixed by a small change to the URL.  One of my team members has been looking at this all week and I finally got involved and spent most of today on it.

With computers, you really do have to sweat the small stuff.  Now I need to get away from this computer for a while to let my eyes uncross after reading code, scanning books and manuals, and searching online discussions all day.

I have to admit that there have been times recently when I’ve been sorely tempted to do this:

George Doughty hung his latest hunting trophy on the wall of his Sportsman’s Bar and Restaurant. Then he went to jail.

The problem was the trophy was Doughty’s laptop computer.

He shot it four times, as customers watched, after it crashed once too often.

After one too many times listening to my laptop swap memory simply to open a new window (or even the damn Start menu) I might respond in a similar fashion.  It’s like swimming in molasses.

As a public service reminder, though, I should caution against shooting your computer in a public place.  Take the computer to a suitable location where it is safe (and legal) to discharge a firearm.  Otherwise, like Mr. Doughty, you may be facing some annoying charges.

Link via The Volokh Conspiracy.