Posts Tagged ‘computer problems’

The iPhone 4 Signal Loss Paroxysm

By Chief Oddball on June 24th, 2010 at 11:41 pm

Filed under News, Rants ··· 1 Comment

For the last week or so, I’ve been following the news of Apple’s latest generation iPhone: the iPhone 4. Since AT&T made most of the owners of last year’s iPhone 3GS eligible for upgrade immediately, I decided to go ahead and get an iPhone 4, then sell my 3GS to make up the difference. It was a potentially net-zero-cost transaction for me, so I couldn’t really lose.

Yesterday, however, as the first of the iPhone 4 pre-order customers began to receive their phones by mail, something strange and unnerving happened. There were lots and lots of complaints. I occasionally follow the discussion forums at MacRumors.com, one of the premier Apple fan sites, and the vitriol was really flying around in there.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Serious aficionados of just about anything, from electronics to fine wines to sports cars, tend to be the most vocal nitpickers. Accordingly, there are always complainers during every Apple product launch. Last year, for example, when the iPhone 3GS arrived, many people were complaining because the color tone of the screen was too warm compared to earlier models. Others pontificated that the sleep/wake switch was loose and rattly. I didn’t experience these problems, either that or I’m just not hardcore enough for them to affect me. Since I bought it a year ago, I would describe my experience with my 3GS as “outstanding.”

The iPhone 4 launch was different. I started seeing many threads of complaints, some about trivial matters as you would expect (“My speaker sounds tinny!” or “Does anyone else’s phone rattle when you tap on the back, like, really hard?”), but others about potentially showstopping problems. One thread that seemed to be gaining traction was the “proximity sensor” thread. The iPhone has a sensor so it knows when you’re holding it up to your ear to make a call, and thus shuts off the touch screen so you don’t press buttons with your face. Apparently, a handful of people received iPhone 4 units with faulty sensors and were pressing all manner of buttons with their cheek, even hanging up in the middle of calls. Ouch.

The worst issue, however, and by far the fastest-growing one, was the signal loss issue. Specifically: What happens when you hold your iPhone 4 a certain way, and your palm, thumb or finger happens to cover up the small black seam between the Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / GPS antenna band and the UMTS / GSM antenna band? Apparently, as some users were finding out, it causes their iPhone to lose almost all reception, drop calls and completely stall data traffic.

Now, to be fair, there are people who are reporting that they cannot recreate this issue. I happen to know one of them. But there are also way, way too many people reporting that it is a problem for this to be an “imagined” defect, or a case of PEBCAK (or PEBCAP, in this case). I mean, there are problems that aren’t really problems, like the moron who posted “Every picture I take with the iPhone 4′s flash enabled is all washed out!” only to discover that he had forgotten to remove the protective plastic sheet from the back of the phone (and, thus, the camera lens). But then there’s something like the antenna issue, where you have dozens of people posting YouTube videos demonstrating it. (Want more videos? Oh yeah, there’s more.)

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Facebook Frak-Up

By Chief Oddball on March 27th, 2010 at 2:39 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 5 Comments

At times I have felt like the last person on Earth who does not have a Facebook account. Not long ago I learned that both of my parents have their own Facebook profiles, and my wife recently signed up for one at the request of a friend. Seems like everybody is keeping up with all of their acquaintances this way. Until recently, I assumed Facebook and MySpace were mostly useless sites wherein self-aggrandizing people would write about how ghetto they were and post gratuitous photos of their sexual conquests. However, since essentially everyone I know is on Facebook, and have recently been inviting me to look at photos that I can’t even see without signing up, I decided today to give it a try. If nothing else, I might even reconnect with old friends or colleagues whom I hadn’t talked to in a while.

I gotta tell you, though, I’ve just spent the last 90 minutes getting royally screwed by Facebook’s incompetently programmed administrative system, and if this is any indication of how well the rest of the Facebook service has been coded, then I fear I may be in for a world of shit.

To begin the process, my wife sent me an email invitation to Facebook so that I could just click a link, sign up and become one of her friends right away. I’d asked her to send me that invitation to my Gmail account, just in case Facebook decided to start spamming me there. For my actual Facebook profile, though, I created a new Facebook-only email address on my domain name for security reasons (and so that I could compartmentalize my Facebook communications). This decision, unfortunately, appeared to create a rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum.

When I clicked on the link in the email invitation that my wife sent me, Facebook detected that I was using Gmail and offered to automatically use my Gmail account as my Facebook email. I didn’t want that, though, so I clicked the “Use another email address” link that was provided. I went through the Facebook signup process, using the custom domain email address that I’d created, and all seemed to be well. The final step of the process asked me to upload a profile picture, which I did, and finally I arrived at my account’s home screen.

Facebook wanted me to confirm my email address next. At the top of the screen was a ribbon indicating that a confirmation email had been dispatched to me. Sure enough, I received it. But when I clicked the confirmation link in that email, I was taken to a Facebook page that said “An error has occurred.” Ohhhhhhh-kay…so I can’t confirm my account, then? WTF?

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Fix Slow WebDAV Performance in Windows 7

By Chief Oddball on December 18th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

Filed under Journal, Randomness ··· 4 Comments

I have an iPhone file storage app called Air Sharing that uses a WebDAV server to let you connect to it with a PC. For some reason, a few weeks after installing Windows 7, file transfers to or from this (or any other) WebDAV server became incredibly, mind-numbingly, literally-33.6K-dialup slow. And yet, from all my other computers in the house, even those still running Windows XP, file transfers over the LAN to my iPhone were as fast as you’d expect.

Today, finally, I got so sick and tired of it that I — gasp! — searched for a solution. To my embarrassment, I found the answer in just a minute or two, illustrating quite succinctly just how much time I had been wasting just “putting up with it.” Oddly, the culprit is none other than Internet Explorer 8. Quite simply, all you have to do is turn off IE’s automatic proxy settings detection. Here’s how to do that:

  1. In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu, then click Internet Options.
  2. Select the Connections tab.
  3. Click the LAN Settings button.
  4. Uncheck the “Automatically detect settings” box.
  5. Click OK until you’re out of dialog hell.

Immediately after doing this, file transfers to my iPhone graduated from CompuServe Modem Simulator to Transwarp Conduit Simulator. It was that much of an improvement.

I found the answer on this Microsoft Technet discussion, incidentally. The solution was posted by “Daniel CD” about two-thirds of the way down the page. Props to that guy.

Gotta love Intarweb collaboration.

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Comedycast

By Chief Oddball on September 28th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

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About two weeks ago, shortly after we returned from our trip to Michigan, disaster struck. Our Internet connection started going down every morning, sometimes for more than an hour, and suffering from flaky speeds on a seemingly random basis.

Now, I realize that this is a pretty generous definition of “disaster” when you get right down to it. You’re probably thinking that I must live a pretty cushioned life for this to even register on my “holy shit” meter. And to be frank, you’d be right. I’d be lying if I said that I’ve spent much of my life enduring hardship of great or small import. But given that I work from home in an IT position that requires frequent (if not constant) use of the Internet, and that in today’s economy you don’t want to give your boss any excuse to discontinue your services as an employee, perhaps that will help put this in perspective.

I’ve spoken to Comcast support four or five times already, each on different mornings in the last week as I’ve tried to get some resolution to this problem. Every time, they ask me to reboot my modem while they send it a reset signal, and usually if we do that once, twice or three times, it will start working, the Tier 1 support person will say “Whew, glad that’s settled” and that will be that. Until the next morning, when the entire cycle would always repeat itself.

Eventually I got them to send me a technician, and on Sunday morning no less, right at the time when the connection is always going out. Except, as if to spite me, it didn’t go out that morning. A rather surly tech showed up, watched video news stories on my computer for a while and then swapped out my modem just in case that might have had anything at all to do with it. It didn’t, because an hour after he left, our connection went to shit — barely more than dialup speed again — and didn’t fully recover for the rest of the day.

In the course of my work, naturally, the situation has been even more untenable. I’ve already endured one embarrassing VoIP meeting, during which my Internet connection spent the entire call making it nigh-impossible to hear the other parties before finally going out right when my boss asked me to present a report. This morning I got up early to prepare for the Monday morning ops meeting and discovered as soon as I walked into my room that the Internet was out again. The cable modem’s network sync light was blinking in its usual, brain-dead manner, endlessly searching for a connection and finding none.

I had 45 minutes until the meeting, so rather than eat breakfast, I spent it doing diagnostics, fiddling around with possible remedies (none of which worked) and waiting on hold at the Comcast support center (which I eventually abandoned when it became clear that no one was going to pick up before the meeting started). Thanking my lucky stars for my iPhone 3GS and AT&T’s reliable 3G network here in south Florida — which I’m convinced is the only AT&T market in the country which can actually be called “reliable,” or at least I have yet to find another — I sent an email to my boss and asked if they could conference me in on my cell number instead of through Skype.

Long story short, I made it to the meeting. But come 11:00 our Internet was still out, and I was getting annoyed.

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ComputerWeek

By Chief Oddball on August 5th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 4 Comments

Wasn’t “ComputerWeek” once a publication full of hardware deals and stuff like that? Seems like it was, but we’re reaching back into the 1990s with that one.

Regardless, I’ve certainly spent a lot of time around computers this week. Not that I don’t normally; after all, I work with them for my job, which has me sitting in front of one for at least 8-10 hours a day. But this week I’ve been engaged in a lot of fussing around with hardware and software, researching compatibility, coming up with contingency plans and even overclocking my own workstation here at home (something I haven’t dabbled with in some years). It’s to the point where today feels more like a Thursday or Friday than a mere Wednesday.

Since this past Sunday, I’ve put most of my efforts toward setting up my dad’s new notebook computer. It’s a Toshiba Satellite A505, if I recall correctly, which he will be using as his main workstation during his upcoming work-from-home efforts. This is actually a really nice machine — 16-inch ultrawide screen, backlit keyboard with full numeric keypad, excellent sound (for a notebook, especially), slot-loading DVD burner and a number of other cool things. There’s a lot of attention to detail evident in the design of this machine, the kind of attention I never saw Dell put into anything. The form factor and weight are a little unwieldy if you want to carry it around a lot, but as a desktop replacement it’s a good size.

The problems I’ve been having, though, aren’t related to the Toshiba, really, but to the Palm Treo that my dad uses as his phone, master organizer and PDA. This Treo runs Palm OS, and I’ve since come to learn that Palm completely dropped the ball with their Palm OS-based product line. The new laptop shipped with Windows Vista 64-bit, so as to take advantage of the preinstalled 4GB of RAM. Unfortunately, Palm’s support for 64-bit operating systems (and Vista in general) is woeful, to the point where you cannot even plug your Palm Treo into the computer via USB. There are no drivers for the USB cable.

All this means you have to sync via Bluetooth, but the Toshiba Satellite A505 doesn’t have Bluetooth. So we had to make an emergency run to Best Buy to pick up a micro Bluetooth adapter. (For reference, the Rocketfish RF-BCDM4 works right out of the box with Vista x64, using Microsoft’s own built-in drivers — and as a bonus, it’s ridiculously tiny.) Despite having to travel to the neighboring city to find a Best Buy that had the thing in stock, we finally got one, loaded it up and it worked great. So I thought our Palm problems were over.

I was wrong. While HotSyncing my dad’s Treo via Bluetooth worked perfectly, the Palm Desktop software did not. The issue is that Palm Desktop version 4, which he’s been using for some time now, doesn’t work in our configuration. Palm claims it doesn’t work under Windows Vista at all, a claim I seemed to refute by installing it successfully on my own Vista-based machine. The problem, though, is that Palm Desktop 4 doesn’t support Bluetooth syncing, and Vista prevents you from using USB syncing. In other words, I can’t see any way to friggin’ sync the phone under Desktop 4. So, Palm advises that you upgrade to Palm Desktop 6.2 instead. OK, fine. I downloaded it. It’s two versions newer, so it must be better anyway.

Boy, was that an asinine assumption. Palm Desktop 6.2 is way worse than Palm Desktop 4. This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever experienced a full-on software regression. The biggest problem is that version 6 completely drops the color-coded categories feature in an astounding display of poor judgment. It’s also missing the Expenses and Notepad apps. Tasks no longer have the “Repeat” function. Birthdays are no longer supported in Calendar. And there’s also a superfluous pmTraceDatabase failure message on every sync (which at least Palm has issued a fix for). This is unconscionably bad. Horrible, actually.

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Technical Gaffe Day

By Chief Oddball on September 13th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

Filed under Rants ··· 8 Comments

Odd. My usual “cruise control” pace of living has been tripped up several times today by strange malfunctions that came out of nowhere. And I’m telling you, it’s got to stop.

First thing was when I fired up Photoshop and found my preferences file was completely wiped out. Like, gone. I had my workspace layout saved in a file, so I was able to restore it, but I had to reconfigure Photoshop’s core settings to get things back the way I like. Recent file dialog was cleared out, tools were reset to default, etc. This has happened before, always at random and for no reason. I’m not amused, Adobe.

For our next technical cock-up, I recently realized that my TiVo HD hadn’t recorded a suggestion since August 24th. At first I thought it had just run out of disk space, but there’s a damn terabyte in there — and sure enough, after deleting nearly 100 GB worth of stuff, TiVo still refused to record any suggestions. I happen to like the suggestions feature, so this pissed me off. Today I got online and discovered a whole swath of people on the TiVo Community Forums having the same problem, and learned that some engineers at TiVo are “looking into it,” but no one has any idea what’s happening. Great, so I guess I’ll just do without.

(Incidentally, I turned suggestions off, rebooted, then turned them back on, rebooted again, and forced a manual connection to the TiVo service…and this seemed to get suggestions working again. However, based on posts at the Community Forums, this “fix” may only work for a day or so. I will continue to monitor.)

Then, at dinner, my phone rings, doing the “standard ringtone” it uses when the caller isn’t in my contacts list. I ignored it. Later, I found it was my mom calling, but for some reason the phone didn’t recognize her number. I check my contacts list and discover why — it’s blank. WTF? At least I figured this one out: I installed iTunes 8.0 yesterday, and whenever you upgrade to a new version, the stupid software resets your contact sync preferences to the default, which in my system’s case is Outlook. But I don’t use Outlook to store contacts (because I don’t want personal contacts to get mixed up with my work stuff), I use Windows Vista’s built-in Contacts instead. Once I changed this preference and re-synced, everything came back. But this is why I never quite trusted the concept of “syncing” things — seems way to easy for some stupid gaffe like this to mess it all up.

Anyway, I (grudgingly) am supposed to be doing some more work here, until about 9 PM or so. Really don’t feel like it, though. Oh: I took all the hurricane shutters down off my parents’ house today. Gave me more trouble than usual…seems like they wouldn’t fit right in the garage, and there were roaches, weird spiders and lizards all hiding behind the damn things. I leave these shutters up for a week and the bugs turn them into houses. Got to love that.

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Comcast Does a Nice Thing

By Chief Oddball on June 14th, 2008 at 2:45 am

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I complained about their mishandling of my TiVo’s CableCARDs, but I can’t fault them for this. In fact, I can only thank them — profusely. Comcast has upgraded all broadband customers to 1 megabit upload (if you were on the 6/384 tier, like me), or 2 megabits (if you were on the 8/768 tier) — at no additional charge. Finally, the dad-blasted 384k upload cap is gone.

Not only that, but I’m actually getting closer to 2 megabits in real-world speed on FTP uploads, even though I should be getting 1. Now that’s service! (Actually, that’s PowerBoost – a Comcast feature wherein you get double your cap for the first 10-30 seconds of an upload or download.)

It was a hard road getting here, though. The upgrades supposedly went out to all areas a few days ago, but by this afternoon I still hadn’t seen them and was starting to become concerned. I discovered that Comcast has tech support guys on Twitter who actually respond to questions and problems with your service, so I actually got a Twitter account just so I could message them and ask when we were gonna get the upload speed bump. They responded with an email address to send my account info to so they could look into it.

To my surprise, a Comcast “Digital Media Outreach” executive actually called me personally not 30 minutes later and told me he had actually looked at my modem and confirmed that my signal levels are good and that I have the upgraded speeds. This was great customer service, but it still didn’t explain why I wasn’t seeing those speeds. The Comcast exec suggested a few things to try and told me to give him a call on Monday if I still hadn’t resolved the issue, and he’d get the local Florida techs involved.

I remained thoroughly perplexed throughout the rest of the day. I was too busy to deal with the problem further, but it remained stuck firmly in the back of my mind until I could no longer take it. Already feeling a surge of energy and industriousness after some other events that occurred today, I laid around in bed tonight for a while, thinking about the problem, before I decided to get up and try some experiments.

In the end, I solved the problem and learned it had been my own fault from the very beginning. I run a custom firmware on my wireless router that does QoS; this ensures that important data packets from my VoIP phone and Skype aways receive priority over things like BitTorrent and FTP. At some point in the distant past, I had manually set my connection’s upload bandwidth limit at 330k for QoS purposes — which actually limits throughput at the router level. What an idiot!

Long story short, the self-imposed cap has been removed, my router firmware has been upgraded for good measure, and I am now flying along at 1.5-2 megabit upload speeds. Fantastic!

This, I suspect, will provide the catalyst I’ve been needing to convert and upload the videos we shot in Thailand, so our family there can see them. I can also toss some more photos up on my Flickr account, enjoy far greater responsiveness when working remotely with terminal services at my office, and, of course, treat my peers to faster shares of Torrents if the need arises. ;)

Now I can go to bed satisfied.

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Nuke Plant Gets SQL Slammed

By Chief Oddball on August 20th, 2003 at 6:12 pm

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In light of the big northeastern blackout last week, I’ve heard some jokes spread around that maybe the infamous LoveSan computer virus took out the grid. Not bloody likely—or so we thought. According to SecurityFocus, the SQL Slammer worm of a few weeks ago nearly did just that…at Ohio’s Davis-Besse nuclear power plant.

The Slammer worm entered the Davis-Besse plant through a circuitous route. It began by penetrating the unsecured network of an unnamed Davis-Besse contractor, then squirmed through a T1 line bridging that network and Davis-Besse’s corporate network. The T1 line, investigators later found, was one of multiple ingresses into Davis-Besse’s business network that completely bypassed the plant’s firewall, which was programmed to block the port Slammer used to spread.

From the business network, the worm spread to the plant network, where it found purchase in at least one unpatched Windows server. According to the reports, plant computer engineers hadn’t installed the patch for the MS-SQL vulnerability that Slammer exploited. In fact, they didn’t know there was a patch, which Microsoft released six months before Slammer struck.

By 4:00 p.m., power plant workers noticed a slowdown on the plant network. At 4:50 p.m., the congestion created by the worm’s scanning crashed the plant’s computerized display panel, called the Safety Parameter Display System.

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