The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Rants

And kvetching, too

  • Too Many Deer

    Five-deer herd
    Five-deer herd

    This herd, a family unit that’s been traveling around the neighborhood in recent weeks, paused for morning brunch in our neighbor’s yard. They generally cross the road at a dead run, but haven’t gotten themselves or anyone else killed. Yet.

    They and their ilk are why our vegetable gardens must have ten-foot fences with robust supports. There are no understory plants left in the wooded areas and precious few young trees; the deer population is literally eating everything in sight.

    Vassar College recently culled 60-odd deer on their preserve in about ten hours, much to the dismay of the local animal huggers. It wasn’t a hunt; professional sharpshooters took ’em out.

    We have a proposal: if you like deer so much, adopt ’em, haul ’em home, and take care of the things. Let them eat your shrubbery, crap all over your lawn, and infect your children, but keep them off the streets and out of your neighbor’s yards. Fair enough?

    And let’s not get started about deer ticks. Dutchess County is the epicenter of Lyme Disease infections, for well and good reason.

  • Why Friends Don’t Let Friends Run Windows: Mystery Banking DLL

    So I signed into the credit union’s online banking site, did the multi-factor authentication dance, and was confronted with this dialog box…

    HVFCU Mystery DLL Download
    HVFCU Mystery DLL Download

    No, as a matter of fact, I did not choose to open ibank.dll, thank you very much for asking.

    Well, what would you do?

    Got this response from the credit union’s email help desk:

    Upon speaking to out Information Technology department, I have been advised that this is a known problem for FireFox, Mac, and Linux users.

    Hmmm, well now, Internet Explorer is conspicuous by its absence on that list, isn’t it?

    A bit more prodding produced this response:

    HVFCU uses a third party vendor to provide the Internet Banking software used on our servers.  On November 22 we installed the equivalent of their year end release (which is mandatory due to regulatory changes contained in the release).  Subsequent to that upgrade we discovered that errors had been introduced for Mac and/or Linux users of Safari and FireFox (and also for a small subset of Windows Internet Explorer users).  These same errors do not occur on Safari nor FireFox running on Windows.  We reported these problems to our vendor within 24 hours of the installation.

    My guess is that the “small subset of Windows Internet Explorer users” corresponds to the few who actually armored-up their IE security settings enough that it doesn’t automatically download and execute anything offered to it from any website.

    The rest, well, those PCs are most likely part of a zombie botnet.

    He assured me:

    The “ibank.dll” program cannot run on a Mac nor a PC.  It is solely a server side application which generates HTML pages.

    Just guessing here, but if the “misconfiguration” had extended to actually serving the file, well, it probably would have run just fine (or, at least, attempted to run) on any Windows PC. They are, after all, using DLLs on the server, so it’s not like they’re a Unix-based shop.

    And it’s pretty obvious that their vendor’s testing extended only far enough to verify that the code worked with security settings dialed to “Root me!” Maybe they didn’t actually do any testing at all; this was, after all, just an end-of-year update. What could possibly go wrong?

    If you’re wondering why your Windows-based PC has been behaving oddly, maybe you’ve gotten a drive-by download from a trustworthy site with all the appropriate icons on their home page.

    Makes you really trust the banking system, doesn’t it?

    Or maybe it’s just another reason to stop using Windows…

  • Acrylic Sheet Thickness Variations

    Milling plate thickness
    Milling plate thickness

    So I measured the thickness of the black acrylic sheet I’m using for the Totally Featureless clock and machined the rabbets to match. Went to assemble everything and the rabbets are too shallow!

    Come to find out that the sheet varies in thickness from about 0.437 to 0.475 across the four pieces I’d cut and, of course, I’d measured the thinnest end of the thinnest piece. Makes no sense to me, as I’d expect the thickness to be pretty well controlled over a few feet of sheet, but that’s not how things went down.

    The simplest solution was to mill a flat on the inside of the case to match the rabbet, so all four panel ends were the same thickness. The sketch below has the straight dope.

    Acrylic sheet thickness fix
    Acrylic sheet thickness fix

    Milling with a 3/8-inch end mill at 2500 rpm, 10 ipm, in one pass with no cooling was OK.

    I’ll insert some brass shimstock into the rabbets to make the outside edges wind up flush.

  • Sink Drain Pop-Up Lever: The Rot

    Rusted Drain Rod
    Rusted Drain Rod

    The drain in our black bathroom(*) stopped working: the pop-up drain seal didn’t pop up.

    I finally wedged myself under the sink, with my feet in the shower stall, and removed the operating rod. Turns out that we replaced the countertop and sink (nine years ago; nothing lasts) and the drain used plastic pipe.

    Except, of course, for the operating rod that sticks out into the drain. That’s chrome-plated steel, evidently with a few plating imperfections, and the end had simply rotted away. I suppose there’s a small chunk of steel decomposing in the trap.

    How much would it have cost to use stainless steel in this corrosion-prone application? Or good old brass (“contains an ingredient known to the State of California to cause cancer or birth defects”)?

    After a brief moment of consideration, with my feet still in the shower, I pushed the rod through the bearing ball so the other end stuck out by about the right amount and replaced it in the drain.

    Swapped Rod
    Swapped Rod

    Yeah, there’s an icky rusted end hanging out there in mid-air, but the next person under that sink will understand exactly what’s going on…

    (*) It’s the size of a large closet with wraparound black ceramic tile, a white tile shower stall, and a wall-sized mirror over the sink. We painted the walls and ceiling white, installed an ersatz gray granite counter top (it’s laminate, not anything spendy) with a shiny white sink, and it’s all good. The original half-century-old grout is in fine shape: some things really do last!

  • Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic: FAIL FAIL FAIL

    Soooo, for the last several days my main desktop system, recently installed with Xubuntu 9.10, has come up without networking services. The eth0 network interface is there, the (static!) IP is correct, Web browsing works… but NFS shares aren’t mounted and, upon poking around, other vital system services weren’t started.

    Worse, networking can’t be manually started, either, and there are no diagnostic log messages.

    Sometimes rebooting helps, sometimes it doesn’t. The problem is definitely timing-related, so sometimes pausing before signing in makes it work. Sometimes it doesn’t.

    Come to find out that Karmic has revised how system services get started during boot. The intricacies are lost on me, but the old Unix-style /etc/init.d/ model is now obsolete. Documentation on upstart, the replacement, is sketchy at best.

    We’re to type sudo service mumble start|stop|restart when we want to do things manually. Oh, maybe only start and stop have been implemented; everything else is defunct, but you can’t use the old method, either.

    Except that something in upstart 0.6.3-11 is broken / different, to the extent that system services no longer start up properly. Evidently that upgrade happened here in the very recent past, part of the usual system update routine. I do this manually, but there wasn’t any heads-up notice mentioning “Oh, by the way, this update will kill your system”, so I just installed it.

    Downgrading to -10 resolves the problem for many people, not including me, but that is not regarded as an actual fix. The older version has similar problems and downgrading just pushes the symptoms somewhere else. Part of the problem is that logging doesn’t (seem to) happen from upstart for any of the affected services.

    Now, Linux distributions started as a way to bottle up various combinations of upstream programs in known-good configurations, so that we end-user types didn’t have to go through the Linux From Scratch effort. That model seems largely dead; each major distro now applies so much floobydust to their combination that any resemblance to the upstream programs is purely coincidental.

    Like, for example, did you know that you’re probably not running OpenOffice, but Go-OO? Never heard of it? Me, either. Do the obvious search and see what you’ve not been told. Hint: Mono is still optional.

    Long ago, in a universe far away, I actually enjoyed beta testing software. These days, I just want it to work; I have other things to do. It’s painfully obvious that Windows isn’t the answer, but it’s becoming evident that (at least) Ubuntu has lost sight of the “it just works” goal.

    When vital parts of the system (like, for example, networking and system service startup) Just Don’t Work, something has gone badly wrong in the distro’s QA process. Yes, some problems remain hard to find, but when they’re reported (by other folks; I’m not first in line by any means) something should happen muy pronto.

    When a desktop environment (like, for example) KDE can’t handle two independent monitors, but has all manner of glitzy 3D effects, the development effort has wandered off into the bushes of irrelevancy. The fact that KDE can claim to have fixed 10,000 bugs in the 4.3 release is not, to my mind, much to brag about.

    To quote the immortal Iphigenia Deme, “That’s obscene-gerund enough!”

    Right now, I have a column to finish and ship, with another right behind. With any luck, this system will hang together long enough to get those done, at which point I must devote some time to finding out which, if any, distros have a better recent track record.

    Some early fiddling indicates Arch Linux, which is sort of like Linux From Scratch with bigger and sorta-kinda snap-together pieces, should do the trick. Most important: it’s agnostic with respect to which desktop environment you pick, unlike the GNOME-oriented Ubuntu chassis that sorta-kinda allows you to bolt on KDE or Xubuntu bodywork.

    Quick summary of what’s needed: separate X sessions, right-hand session on a rotated-to-portrait monitor, Wacom tablet pinned to the left monitor, left- and right-handed trackballs. This configuration was fine in Kubuntu 8.04, got flaky in 8.10, and fell apart after that.

    There may well be upstream problems with some of those pieces, which generally isn’t something a distro can fix. I contend they could better apply their resources to fixing such problems than screwing up something else.

    More to follow…

  • Adobe Reader Default Toolbar: FAIL

    Maybe I’m misusing Adobe Reader, but I’ve always thought of it as a program that displays PDF files. In my case, that means data sheets for various & sundry electronic parts: I carefully squirrel both PDFs and parts away, having learned that physical parts can outlast both datasheets and company websites.

    So I open quite a few PDFs that reside on my file server in the basement.

    With that in mind, what’s missing from this row of toolbar icons?

    Adobe Reader Default Toolbar
    Adobe Reader Default Toolbar

    Go ahead, take your time…

    Hint: the only active button lets you “start an Acrobat Connect meeting and share documents”.

    This has been true for the last few versions; the Official Ubuntu Linux Version seems to be stuck at 8.1-ish. Let’s jump ahead a bit, fetch 9.3 directly from the Adobe download page, and install it:

    Adobe Reader 9.3 Toolbar
    Adobe Reader 9.3 Toolbar

    Now I can not only “Share documents and collaborate live within PDF documents”, but also “Click to create PDF using Acrobat.com”.

    What I can’t do is open a PDF file from disk by just clicking a button. That rarely used function is relegated to the File pulldown menu and, for those of us who can touch-type fairly well, hidden behind the arcane Ctrl-O keyboard chord.

    Reconfiguring the toolbar is a few minutes of clickety-click action, but it seems odd to me that none of the focus group participants suggested putting an Open File button on the toolbar.

    Although I never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, this continuing design decision does seem to require forethought.

  • Digikey Full-Line Catalog

    For the first time ever, Digikey sent me a full-line catalog.

    Digikey catalog
    Digikey catalog

    It’s 2778 pages long, three inches thick, and weight 2 kg.

    Some time ago I made the mistake of replacing our large rusted-out mailbox with a much smaller one: the catalog presented a solid wall of paper when I opened the door.

    Here’s a closeup…

    Digikey catalog vs Arduino Duemilanovae
    Digikey catalog vs Arduino Duemilanovae

    Now, I’d love to have you believe I’m such a high-rollin’ kind of engineer that Digikey spares no expense on my behalf, but the only explanation for this embarassing situation I can come up with is that their customer service system blew a gasket in my general direction…

    What makes it even more ironic is that they’d recently sent me a survey asking how I’d like to get their catalog. I’d emphatically replied that I did not need a paper catalog or a USB stick with the PDFs. Just let me do the on-line searching and occasionally refer to the appropriate PDF pages and I’ll be fine.

    The damned thing is basically useless; I hate to just toss it in the recycling, but I can’t think of any reason to keep it around.

    I just removed my mailing address from their list, presumably leaving my account info intact; we’ll see if that sticks.