The Right Tool for the Job

Recently I wrote about diagnosing a bad diagnostic tool and would like to expand on the proper use of tools. Last week I flew out to my boat to clean it up a bit and work on the engine. I needed to replace the impeller on the water pump which required removing a pin on the water pump housing. The easiest way to do that is with a hole-punch and a hammer. Unfortunately I didn't have a hammer on my boat and so I tried a number of other tools. I did have a hole punch and so I lightly hit it with a wrench, a screwdriver, and even a piece of wood. While I made some progress, none of what I tried was a good substitute for a hammer. Ultimately I drove to a local store and bought a small picture-hanging hammer. Only 3 whacks later and the pin came out nicely.

The whole time I was working on the engine, I kept thinking of the phrase, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat all your problems like nails." So what is the opposite of that phrase, when you have a bunch of other tools, but not a hammer? I'm not sure, but if you come up with something let me know.

This experience reminded me again of the importance of having the right tool for the job. With computers, this is very important. Anyone that has ever tried to work on Macintosh computers from the 1990's knows that the most important tool was a #8 Torx screwdriver. At the time you had to special order them but now you can find them at almost any store that sells tools.

While we all know the importance of hardware tools, there are a number of software tools that can make your life significantly easier as well. I remember one night trying to rebuild a corrupted database. It didn't have much data in it but the information it had was very important. To get the everything back, I looked at the raw data files using a hex editor. It allowed me to see the original data and write an extraction script to pull the information out in a human-readable format. Then I could rebuild the database and populate it with the correct information. Your typical editor or word processing software would have made the job significantly more difficult, if not impossible.

So how do you know if a better tool exists? Simple, just do a search on your favorite internet search engine and see if others have had similar problems. They will generally provide some ideas on what tools to use to solve them. That is how I solve car problems, boat problems, electrical problems, and even computer problems. Hopefully it works for you too.

Time to Find a New E-Mail Provider

Last Thursday I stopped receiving e-mail. I get enough daily e-mail that I knew something was wrong fairly quickly and so I called my e-mail service provider to register a problem. The first level of support took my information and passed it onto the second-level team. I was in a meeting when they called back but the resulting voicemail informed me that I had two invalid name servers associated with my domain name. I promptly removed the offending name servers. I was also told that there was a problem with one of their e-mail servers where and my e-mail was effected. It didn't bother me to be without e-mail for a few days but I continued checking on things over the weekend.

Monday I still didn't have e-mail and so I logged a call with their technical support. Tuesday I was tied up in meetings and didn't have the chance to check with my e-mail service provider. When things still were not working yesterday, I gave them a call again. As luck would have it, I got a call back when I was out of my home office for just a moment. The voicemail message was very similar to the one I had gotten on Thursday telling me there were two name servers that needed to be deleted. I immediately called back only to discover that level two support was done for the day and I would have to wait until this morning to hear back from them. When I called back this morning, level-two support was busy and couldn't help me. I talked with a supervisor only to be told they would have to call me back.

A week without e-mail is ridiculous. That means it is time to find a different e-mail service provider. I really don't have many requirements. I want to be able to use a webmail interface to read messages while I am at work. When I am home, I want to be able to download the messages using POP3. The only other requirement is that it comes with a good SPAM filter. In doing a bit of research, WEB.COM seems to have some fairly good packages for about $6/month. I am currently paying $10/month and so I will save myself some money. Now I just need to figure out a way to get my cached e-mail over the last week.

Problems with my Mac Laptop

Yesterday I went to turn on my Mac laptop computer and it wouldn't boot correctly. I have an encrypted hard drive in the event that someone steals my computer. When I turn on the machine, it asks for my password. I was making it that far and it was even working enough to know if the password entered was correct or not. After a few seconds, it would bring the login screen back up but not allow any input from the mouse or keyboard.

My hope was that once I got the laptop back to my office and on the network, the problem would fix itself. My flight from Salt Lake to the Bay Area was plenty early and I was in the office at 8:30 giving my hypothesis a try. Unfortunately it didn't work. Next was a call to our IT department. They asked if I had tried resetting the NVRAM and I had. There wasn't anything they could help me with over the phone and so I brought it to our IT department's walk-in office. Most of the company uses Windows laptops and I am one of the few with a Mac. That means I had to make another trip with the laptop to another office where the Mac specialists reside. I dropped the computer off and headed to a meeting.

It was a distraction to be without my computer and very difficult to concentrate during my meeting so I was very happy to get a call from the IT department telling me they figured out what was wrong with my Mac. It seems that the hard drive had somehow had permissions changed. They had to boot my laptop from another hard disk, change the permissions on my drive, and all was fixed. Unfortunately I wasn't there to watch how they did it so I can't give step-by-step instructions. It was a great relief to have everything fixed though and they didn't have to reinstall anything. Naturally the first thing I did when I got back to my office was to take a backup of the computer. Now should something go wrong again, I don't have to worry if they have to erase my hard drive to fix it. I have a backup. I should probably do that with all of my computers now. Furthermore, I should probably take backups on a regular basis. OS X includes Time Machine which is perfect for such a task and I plan to take advantage of it from now on.

Headed Home

I am at the Haneda airport in Tokyo, Japan waiting to board my plane back to the States. It has been a busy and successful trip but I am glad to be headed home. Now if my flight is on time, I might be able to make my connection from Seattle to Salt Lake City.

This morning I checked the Internet to see if my flight was on time and saw a red warning saying it was 45 minutes delayed. I want to know what algorithm Delta Airlines is using to determine my flight is going to be delayed 18 hours before I board it. I spent the day worrying if I was going to make my connection. I got online and mapped out an alternate itinerary so I could make it home without having to overnight somewhere on the West coast. Then I planned to get to the airport early so I could get the airline to change my itinerary.

I had to leave a celebration dinner early so I could have plenty of time to get to the airport only to discover trains were delayed due to an accident. Rather than take a direct train to the airport, I jumped on another one, made a connection, and got to the airport 20 minutes earlier than if I had waited for the direct train. I got up to the ticket agent and discovered my plane was now on time.

This is one of those times where computers actually complicate our lives. I spent the day wondering if I would make it home as scheduled only to discover that the computer was wrong. Every once and a while they need a little human intervention.

Game Developers Conference 2013

It has been a few years since I have been able to attend the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. That is a travesty considering I work for a video game company. I joined my current company just a few days after GDC and so I didn't attend that year. The next year, I was busy implementing a new system and couldn't break away for an afternoon to attend. Last year I was set to attend, but had to babysit a sick database machine that kept overheating (adding a 1-U space between a networking switch and one of the database servers solved that problem).

I decided that this year I would make every effort to attend GDC simply to see the state of the industry. Monday and Tuesday were filled with class sessions and I only had an Expo pass. Wednesday was busy with yet another product rollout. Thursday looked like it was going to be the day and so I planned accordingly. I went to the office and made sure there were no issues to fix. I waited for my team to show up and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I headed to downtown San Francisco. Things were looking good as I headed to the show.

I enjoyed the show and it was good to see what other companies are doing. The most enlightening section was where gaming companies are looking to hire. Everyone is having trouble finding the right talent. There were a number of people looking for jobs but the majority of them seemed to be students and companies want people with experience. I continued through the rest of the conference but didn't see anything groundbreaking. Just as I finished with the last booth, I got a call from our network operations center and there was a problem I needed to address. I jumped on a BART train back to my office and then spent most of last night fixing some configuration issues related to our recent product rollout. I was able to get everything working correctly and am now at the airport ready to board my flight back to Salt Lake City. It was hectic but at least I was able to attend the show this year.

I Got It on Video

This last weekend my two kids had a ski race at Jackson Hole in Wyoming. I enjoy skiing there but it isn't the best place to hold a ski race. It is tough to stand on the side of a wonderful mountain waiting for kids to flash by you when you could be sampling one of the greatest mountains in North America.

This weekend it was unseasonably warm and instead of being freezing, we had to contend with rain. We also had to deal with constantly changing conditions. One minute it would be sunny and the next it would be raining or snowing.

On the last day of the race, it looked like we would have good weather and be able to get all the racers down the hill safely. Then there was an issue with the timing computer. The person that normally runs timing wasn't there and the new one kept having problems. When it came time for my son to ski down the mountain, there was a course hold because of timing issues. We waited for him to come skiing down for quite a while. During this time a series of clouds rolled in and visibility went to zero. At the worst time of the day, my son was sent down the mountain. Not only was it snowing sideways but a cloud descended on the course and you could barely see the next gate in front of you.

I stood there on the side of the mountain wondering who would let a bunch of 14-year olds race in white-out conditions at 40 to 50 miles per hour. It was a miracle nobody got hurt. I tried to get my son's run on video, but the camera kept trying to focus on the flying snow. All I got was a white screen with the conversation I had with my daughter as my son skied past us.

My son finished his run safely and we packed up to head home. Luckily somebody saw the foolishness of the race and they cancelled it for the rest of the racers. I think it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt and so that was the wise thing to do.

The moral of the story is that proper computer training is important even in ski racing. My kids' race was plagued with timing issues that should have been worked out long before the competition even started. Trying to figure out computer problems at the same time you are holding an event is impossible. If my son hadn't been held at the start for 45 minutes waiting for these issues to be resolved, they could have gotten all of the boys to the finish long before the storm rolled in. Then everyone would have gotten a fair shot at doing well and that is what racing is all about.

Constructive Procrastinating

There is an item on my list of things to do that is causing me problems. I have been working on it for the past two days and am not making any progress. It is a problem with Tomcat and while there is a lot of documentation for the software, the information is mostly worthless. Faced with pouring through more online manuals or playing video games, I am leaning towards the video games.

I really should be working right now but am taking a break because I am procrastinating. My hope is that making this blog entry will give me some insight into the problem at hand and that I will be able to figure out what is going wrong and make it right. So far it seems to be working. I am already making a mental list of the next steps to try. The trick is to write the list down and go attack the problem.

When I find myself working on a problem for too long, I stop being productive. At that point it is nice to take a step back, do something useful, and then go back to the problem. If that doesn't work then it is time to ask one of my coworkers. Hopefully I get this solved before then.

Low Tide

This morning I was riding my bike to work on the path shown in the picture above and it was very low tide (unlike in the picture). Along the bike path are several piers that go out into the water. They are not much more than a couple of planks of wood and are used mainly by kids doing a bit of fishing. I have often thought about stopping on the way home and taking a walk out on one of the piers. After my ride today, I don't think that is a good idea.

At low tide, it is about a quarter of a mile walk from the bike path to the water. This leaves the piers totally exposed and you can see their supports. Salt water is a very corrosive environment and some of the supports have been eaten away to the point that they are little more than toothpicks. One or two are completely gone. At high-tide it is impossible to see the decay that has taken place and it is easy to assume the pier is safe.

Computers can sometimes be like those piers at high tide: it is tough to see what is going on underneath. Most of the time, that is fine because computers are fairly reliable. However sometimes things go wrong. Computers can easily pick up a virus and so a scan should be done on a regular basis. Hardware can also fail and so it is important to pay attention to errors you get. Hard disks are the most common component to fail and should be replaced at the slightest hint of a problem. Cooling fans and power supplies are also components that can fail. While it is rare to have memory go bad, it can happen.

Unless some maintenance is done, someday soon, one of the piers I ride by on my way to and from work is going to fail. If someone is on it when it does, then he or she is going to get wet and/or muddy. Don't neglect your computer and let the same thing happen to you. While you may not get wet, you may lose some cherished pictures from your digital camera or important documents. If your computer is getting old, be sure to make a backup of your irreplaceable files. Most importantly, pay attention to any error messages you get. It could save you some grief in the future.

My Poor Wife, Part II

Yesterday I started the story about how great my wife is but how she has had to deal with technical issues at home while I am gone. The first issue was about pulling video from our camera and putting it on the computer so my youngest son can edit it for a school project. She was able to get that problem solved only to wake up yesterday and have another computer glitch to solve.

One of the companies I was involved with over the past couple of years is in the process of being sold. They have a demo server running in my basement. This allows them to do sales presentations and testing without having to have an expensive machine in a co-location facility (where most web-based businesses keep their production servers). Yesterday was supposed to be another demo for the purchasing company and it was scheduled for 6:00 am PDT. That sounds early for me, but they are on the East coast and we had to include someone from India. 6:00 am turns out to be an optimal time for such calls.

At about 10 minutes before the meeting was supposed to start, I got a call from the person doing the demo, who said he couldn't get to the server. I was just turning on my computer and so I began looking into the problem. The first thing I did was call my wife to see if the server was still running. It wasn't. There was a power flicker the previous night and it shut down all of the computers in the house. Having the server on an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) would have alleviated the problem, but the one I have needs the battery replaced. I guess I had better add that to my list of things to do.

The demo server has been running so long without any problems, I could not remember the process to restart everything. The first thing I had my wife do, was to turn the machine on. While it was booting, I had her go through my office looking for my notebook associated with that computer. She then looked through my notes until she found the right page with the restart instructions. It was one line of cryptic code that was nearly impossible to read. Fortunately it was enough to jog my memory and we had everything running a minute later.

I logged into the conference call and WebEx demo, which was the sign to the presenter that the machine was back up and he could safely move into the live-demo portion of the meeting. Everything went well and my wife saved the day once again. Now I just hope nothing else goes wrong.

My Poor Wife, Part I

My wife is great! She loves to ski and lets me ski as much as I am able. She loves to sail and lets me live on a sailboat during the week. She is a great cook and wonderful mother. Her only flaw is that she married me, someone that spends a bit too much time with computers.

Over the past 24 hours, she has had to take care of several computer related problems at home because I am not there. She has done a great job, but I imagine her patience is wearing thin and I can only hope that something else doesn't go wrong.

Yesterday my youngest son came home with some friends from school to work on a project for his German class. The idea was to make a video or DVD. As we have a great camera capable of shooting true high-definition (HD) video, this shouldn't have been a problem. My son and his classmates created the various pieces of footage and were ready to edit everything together. That is where the first problem began.

I never realized that computers and video cameras could be monogamous. My laptop that I have with me in San Francisco is the computer that is set up to work with my video camera. All I have to do is attach the USB cable between them and the two devices know how to talk to each other. Once I get the footage on my machine, it is a simple matter of editing it with iMovie and then using iDVD to create a disk that will work in most DVD players. Yesterday, my camera did not want to talk to any other computers. My oldest son tried to get the camera to work with the family Mac without any luck. My wife, being the wise woman that she is, took the camera up to my dad's who tried to get it to talk with his Mac. Again, no luck.

Normally I wouldn't suggest anyone's parents for computer help. Generally your best bet is to go with someone younger, like one of your children. However, My dad has been working with computers for the last 40 years and is generally a good backup when I am out of town. After searching the Internet, they were able to come up with a workaround solution and were able to get the video off the camera. Currently that video is stored on a flash-drive and will be edited after school today. We will see how that process goes.

I went to sleep last night happy to know that my son's project was well on its way to being done. Considering it isn't due until Friday, I applaud my son for starting early. When I woke up, a second and completely unrelated computer problem arose and it was up to my trusty wife to solve yet another issue . . .

Solving Problems

Today was one of those days where everything seemed to go wrong with my computer projects. Some of the problems were real and reared their ugly heads today, while others were just old problems that I put off solving until now. By the end of the day, I got tired of researching problems and just wanted to get one solved.

One can only take so much lack of progress before it is time to sell the computer and start entering pie eating contests. I grabbed my screwdriver and headed to my wife's sewing room. She has a light that hasn't worked in a year or so and so I was determined to fix it.

I unscrewed a few bolts and removed the light fixture from the ceiling. It took about a minute to figure out the problem. Moisture had gotten into the wiring causing excessive corrosion. Eventually it built up enough oxidation to stop working. I had a spare light fixture from remodelling my kitchen last year and replaced the old one. Ten minutes after I started, my wife's light was working correctly.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes from solving a problem. It pulls you out of that frustration caused by too many dead-ends and reminds you that you are not a moron. It also makes it easier to go back and attack those nasty problems.

If you find yourself getting frustrated with your computer, push the keyboard away and see if there is another problem you can quickly solve. Sometimes I will clean my desk or take the dog for a walk. Then sometimes it seems cold fusion has a simpler solution than the problem I am trying to solve.

A Good Notebook

Recently I was cleaning out my office and found a bunch of notebooks from college. In the engineering program, each class has you purchase a notebook with graph paper sewn in. Each page is supposed to be numbered. If you wanted to spend a bit of money, you could buy the notebooks with the numbers already printed at the top of each page. I didn't mind writing the numbers myself and saved some cash.

In school, the professors wanted you to keep detailed notes of everything you did. We were supposed to write everything down and part of the class grade was based on your notebook. If you tried an experiment and it didn't work, make a note of it and try again. If things did work the first time then there was a lot less writing. When I was done with school, I continued keeping notebooks. It was, and still is, a great way to keep track of information.

While cleaning out my basement, I also found a bunch of 3-ring binders from school. I immediately threw out the insides and put the binder in my "for the kids" pile. Sometimes I will need a binder and pull from the pile as well.

When I started my latest project, I decided to use on of the 3-ring binders instead of a notebook. I am such a perfectionist that I have grown tired of printing out important e-mails, trimming the margins in the paper cutter, and gluing them into my notebook. I thought it would be much easier to print out the e-mail, 3-hole punch it, and put it in my binder. It turns out, I am saving an incredible amount of time. The downside is that I might be putting too much information in the notebook now.

Today my notebook has helped me tremendously and here is why. If you have a problem once, it is important to write down the steps used to help solve it. Chances are that you will have the problem again and don't want to recreate the solution. Then keep your notebook by the computer so you don't have to go looking for it. A problem I had solved earlier came up again today. All I had to do was look at my notes and I had the solution in a matter of minutes.

It's Not the Computer's Fault This Time

This September has started out a little bit warmer than usual for this part of the country. On Saturday my air conditioning went out. I didn't think it would be much of a problem because it is almost time to turn off the costly device. Saturday was pretty warm and I was glad to open the windows at night. Sunday was not much better and so I called the repairman on Monday morning.

My heating and air conditioning unit is 15-years old and so it is not surprising it is starting to show its age. In the past several years, I have had to replace the furnace controller twice. The controller is a very simple computer that controls everything about the heating and cooling of my home. Since it had gone out twice already in about the same number of years, I figured it needed replacing again. I looked on the Internet and a new one was going to cost me $200. You can get one of those new NetBooks for $200 and so I was hoping the repair would fall under the warranty.

The repairman came out and I recognized him from when he was out less than a year ago. I told him that if I leave the AC off but try to run just the circulating fan, it runs for a little over two minutes and then shuts off. The same thing happens with the AC on. That eliminates the problem with the air conditioning unit (good thing because those are really expensive). He agreed with me and so he started his diagnosis at the fan unit.

When I am working I hate it when someone is standing over my shoulder watching and so I headed into my study to get some of my own work done. My study is in the basement right next to the heating and air conditioning unit and so I could still hear the repairman working. I was surprised when he turned on the heat. Its a million degrees outside and this crazy guy turns on my heat. My hope was that he could get the AC fixed shortly or I wasn't going to need to turn on the stove to cook food in my kitchen.

The heat ran for about 5 minutes when the repairman turned it off. So that leads one to the question as to why the fan can only run for two minutes alone or with the AC but can run longer with the heat. To me it sounds like a stupid computer problem and I would have replaced the controller and gone on to my next appointment. However that didn't fit with the repairman's experience and he continued looking for other sources of the problem. In the end it turned out to be a faulty switch.

On the outside of the fan unit is a switch that is the same type used to turn on and off lights throughout my house. The electrician that wired up the furnace never had a clean contact for one of the wires attached to the switch and it was wiggling around loose. The vibrations from the fan would wiggle it loose causing the fan to shut off. Running the heat caused the connections to expand and increased the contact area so the switch would work perfectly. Furthermore it was probably the faulty wiring in the switch that caused the computer to fail the past two times.

In the end it turned out to be a $2 switch and not the over-priced-heating-and-air-conditioning computer. Those of us that work around computers know that they can be the cause of a lot of problems. That wasn't the case this time and now I know I need to be a bit more thorough the next time I blindly assume it is the computer's fault.