!Assert.Fail(): The Smurf Guide To Safe Bomb Disposal

Tonight someone who shall remain nameless thought it pertinent to question and make hurtful remarks about the progress I have been making emotionally of late. I post this not as an act of spite or malice but as a reminder to myself that the world I live in is not the same one that is in my head, and that sometimes the interplay between the two can affect my state in either. I have issues. In the past these were the fuel for my depression and a major limiting factor to my general motivation and personal development. These fall into three distinct categories:

Unexploded Ordinances
These are issues which exist for a time but can easily be defused once and will never present a threat to me again. These are issues I can usually deal with myself or with minimal support from someone in my network.

Time Bombs
Are like unexploded ordnances in that they exist only until exploded (resolved),but they tend to be more complex issues, or sets with dependencies. I like to handle these ones on my own if I can,  but I’ll sometimes call for help if one is proving particularly menacing to defuse or is threatening to explode in my face

Dirty Bombs
Are extremely complex, very volatile, and like the uranium inside a dirty bomb, will produce mass disruption when detonated. These issues tend not to have a clear path to resolution. Like the half-life of uranium, these issues can continue to exist long after they initially surface. I tend to use professional counseling to deal with these issues as often they are hazardous to my health if disposed of in inappropriate ways.

The problem with hearing these things was that they called into question the legitimacy of the happiness I have found. This was not intended to hurt me, but did because it caused me to re-evaluate my happiness in the context of the issues I have which I have not yet resolved, many of which were Dirty Bombs. I have the remaining issues mentally segregated so that I can deal with them individually in small amounts so that I don’t de-stabilize myself. The revaluation these remarks provoked caused this containment to be violated and the issues began to mix and form something akin to the green toxic sludge in DOOM

I felt the toxicity begin to build. Rather than submit to it, I waited and found a new and surprisingly effective means to survive. I wrote a list of things that make me feel good and another of issues that I feel still need to be resolved. I don’t want to post the lists here but to demonstrate my progress of late the good list had 7 items, each of which was fairly significant in contributing to my happiness. The issues list had 4 items. Only one of those I feel will be difficult to solve.

I have come a long way. I can’t stop people attacking me, but I can’t let them take what I have worked so hard to gain either. I hope I’m reminded of this post the next time I need to restore my internal state

Exposing The Tuna Conspiracy

I have come to the conclusion that a conspiracy of epic proportions exists within the canned tuna market which may extend to the highest elements of the wider canned goods industry. Specificity is a rarity in case of allegations such as these, however in this case the specificity I shall render to these claims will cement them incontrovertibly, and in so doing,the tuna eating public will rejoice and hold me in higher esteem than tuna itself.

Good reader, I prey the listen with an open mind, for the new I bare will not sit well with many of you, however I feel I must deliver it. I believe that the major tuna manufacturers of the world have been producing cans of tuna with a defective opening pull ring, the effect of which is to deprive the unwitting buyer of the delicious delicious bounty within, while the proprietor and producer still pocket the proceeds of the deprived buyers purchase.

I am behoved to warn the reader that the image which follows might cause them a considerable degree of disturbance, however I feel showing it is in the best interests of dead tuna and the dead tuna purchasing public of the world

This tuna asked us to conceal it’s identity for fear of dead-fish-in-a-can reprisal, but you can clearly see the damage that has been done to this poor defenceless can of dead fish meat.

Would you allow poor African children to have their pull-rings decapitated, yes, but those are someone else’s problem, when it comes to the precious life of dead-fish-in-a-can, we simply can’t afford to let this continue

Stand up for what’s right, I can’t because I’m a cripple, but chances are someone else, someone like you. can stand up and make a real difference in the life of one can of dead fish.

Vodafone: Information Constipation

Regular readers of my blog will know I’ve had some issues with my Vodafone Mobile Broadband connection. I paid my bill today which was about as much as I was expecting it to be, but given that I was into my extra quota for the billing period, and wanting to download some largish things, I wanted to be sure I was into my November quota first.

The first step in my quest began at the source, specifically trawling the 3G broadband plan and support pages. Having gotten no closer to the information I needed here, I shifted the focus of my search to the more generic billing section under the assumption that a section relating to monies owned would be garenteed to contain information about when they would next demand it – I was wrong. Upon realising this, I took a moment to reflect on the truth to be found in an adage stolen and imposed on me by my mother, assumption really is the mother of all fuck ups. This truth has been well illustrated in my past dealings with this company.

Thinking laterally, I poured over the legal section hoping that the very documentation obligating me to transfer my monies to them would be specific about when said monies must be transferred, but again I was thwarted by my own rationality.

At this point I had resigned to calling support and paying them a dollar to ask them when my billing period ends. Upon attempting to do so, the omnipotent automated voice informed me that human support was not available until 8AM tomorrow. Lessons previously learned would tell me that adding a human to this already volatile mix of a lack of information and frustration may result in further pain.

Having exhausted Google and Vodafone’s own support resources, I browsed the forum expecting nothing but the continued frustration I had experienced thus far, it was at this point my luck changed, reading an unrelated forum post yielded the solution to my woes.

On prepay one can text the word “bal” to 777 in order to receive a text message containing the balance of your account, it seems this feature is also available to On Account customers, when you have a data plan you will receive an additional message telling you how much of your quota remains and when your quota will be reset. Hazzah!

So a happy end to my tale, however it would serve Vodafone well to make things like this known more readily to prevent paying customers wandering aimlessly for extended periods of time in their support pages.

It might also be a good idea to use the information retrieved from whichever system runs this service to provide a higher degree of accuracy to the VMC software’s usage metre instead of the useless device packet counting that appears to be the current implementation.

Vodem Blues

One of the pitfalls of moving to Christchurch was a loss of ability to mooch free broadband of my mother which naturally created the need for me to acquire an Internet connection of my own. In my current living arrangements it is not economically or logistically feasible for me to acquire a fixed phone line and thus ADSL became an impossibility. To remedy this I needed wireless Internet and signed up for Vodafone 3g wireless broadband.

More specifically my Internet connection arrangements are thus

• 1GB monthly quota for $59.95
• $10 fee added automatically to reset quota the first time it is exceeded
• If quota is exceeded again it’s $0.50/MB
• HSDPA 3.2mbps theoretical maximum speed using a “vodem” which is a Vodafone branded Hauwei E220 HSDPA USB modem

After having used the device I’ve run into more than a few issues with the device and the service.

Un-Activated SIM & Bad Firmware

When I purchased the device its SIM was programmed with the data plan I had chosen, however the SIM card had not been activated by Vodafone which meant that I could not use the service until my SIM was activated which took approx. one week. It was only after that issue had been resolved that I was able to discover that the firmware on the device I had been sold was not compatible with Vista despite assurances that the device was compatible with Vista 32-bit. Upon bringing this to Vodafone’s attention they replaced my modem with one that had the appropriate firmware on it and so I was at last able to connect after almost three weeks of waiting.

VMC is Very Mutilated Crapware

Vodafone mandate that I use Vodafone Mobile Connect Lite (VMCLite) to establish a connection to their network, after several months of using the software I have found it to be bug ridden to the point where it is almost unusable.

• The software inexplicably crashes with varying degrees of intensity
• Sometimes the application can be restarted and will continue functioning normally
• Occasionally when the software is re-launched VMC fails to recognise the modem and quickly closes. In this case it is necessary to remove and re-insert the modem.
• Occasionally the system must be restarted in order for VMC to recognise the modem or in some cases to even acknowledge the presence of the device at all,
• A network connection can not be established using the RAS (Dial-Up-Networking) UI in windows vista, however this can apparently be done in windows XP.
• There seams to be no reliable way to check your usage, the usage meter in VMC is only an approximation and a very bad one at that
• If you re-insert the device on another USB port usage from the other port is not counted.
• The session timer will freeze at 9:59:59
• The device  does not properly support power management
• If the device is connected while resuming from hibernation it  will fail to reload its driver and the machine will black screen of death. Luckily you can resume restoring the system after a warm boot when the device is removed but you would expect a product aimed at mobile users to support features commonly used by mobile devices.
• VMC uses an ActiveX control for sockets calls
• Using procmon one can can see that VMC calls mswinsck.ocx quite frequently. This leads me to believe that he application is written in Visual Basic because unmanaged VB applications can’t call C functions such as the WinSock API’s directly. Maybe i’m a snob developer but I would have expected better architecture than that from either Vodafone or Hauwei.

More Bad Firmware

The Vodafone Solutions people inform me that many of the issues described above are specific to the firmware version on my device and are remodied in updated firmware. After following the instructions precisely and allowing the update process to completely finish I find that my device ceased to work, it would seam the vista firmware upgrade created more issues than it solved.

The Current Situation

I am currently using a loaned vodem to access the Internet while my bricked device is being repaired (or more likely replaced). While I am happy to have access to the Internet for now, I am one very dissatisfied Vodafone customer.

Blissfuly Annihilated

The apocalypse

There are some freakishly lucky windows users whose installation does not degrade over time, unfortunatly for me, I am not a part of this group, so when the time came to reinstall windows (yet again) I just accepted it as part of life and commenced the installation process.

Step 1: Backup

This was made easy by the Windows Easy Transfer application on the vista system, which prepared a backup of my user account and settings.

Step 2: Death

Recovery for laptops is typiclly a 3 step process:

1. Erase entire operating system partition
2. Restore from image on recovery partition
3. Reboot

The definition of “typical” stated above doesn’t quite apply to the Toshiba recovery process because it stops just after step one has begun, leaving all your data intact but rendering you completely incapable of accessing it.

“Well, that sucked” thought I, this however did not behoove despair, I didn’t have a way to recover windows, but I did have all my data backed up to my eternal hard drive.

Saved by a Penguin

So, I moved the hard disk to the other computer and downloaded windows easy transfer for windows XP, which offered no means of restoring the backups I had made.

I then tried to restore the backups using the user state migration toolkit, but to no avail, the only way to restore my backup is by opening it on a vista machine, I don’t have access to one of those.

So, with no backups, and no way of accessing the data trapped on my OS partition, I booted into Ubuntu Linux from the live CD and instructed it’s installer to begin installing to the hard disk, when asked about how I wanted to partition the new system, I sighed a final goodbye to vista and checked the “erase entire disk” check box.

Two days of tweaking and updates later, I am beginning to get accustomed to Linux, I have begun re-ripping my music collection sans ~NZ$200 worth of iTunes protected content.

I’m not sure if I’ll go back to vista or not, I might, I’ll have to reinstall it somehow, at least temporarily to recover my backed up files and burn the protected music to an audio CD and then re-rip into Linux.

[Updated a minute later: fixed numerous spelling issues]

R.I.P. Phone

After just over a month of owning a new nokia, I’ve managed to kill it, just miutes ago I managed to turf it into a toilet, I didn’t notice it was in there, and so, I flushed,.  Is this the end for  my phone? I hope not.

I did manage to retrieve the phone, I haven’t yet turned it on, it was on when i dropped it, so sometome between me flushing, and tying to find my phone to text mum to tell her i”d been sitting on the volume button for the sky remote all day, the phone turned off, possibly due to internal injuries, but like I said, I hope not