Well, mine bit it, and I’m pretty sure I’ve owned it for less than a year.

I’m not getting the “red ring of death” that everybody talks about. That’s the old error that indicated a total system failure where the soldering started to wane away due to heat.

Instead mine is just two of the red quadrants lighting up which means it’s overheating. I’d have turned it in under the warranty but I know it’s my fault. I keep the console in a, uh, console that sits below our TV. There’s a door on the cabinet where it resides. I’ve caught myself accidentally running it with that door closed more than a few times now, and that’s when the over heating started. I removed it from it’s little confined space last night, let it sit for hours, and it still overheated. Waited over night and I managed to play a game of Halo this morning without error, at lunch without error, and then this evening it overheated after being on for about 3 minutes.

I’m pretty sure what’s happened is I let it bake in that cabinet one too many times and the thermal transfer glue between the GPU and the heat sink has been baked to a crisp. I’ve got the thing torn down 95% of the way now. I just need to get some new thermal transfer glue, break it down all the way, and patch it back together. It should be better than when it left the factory at that point.

Funny thing about it is when my wife got home from work today she asked me if I really thought I could fix it. “Of course. It’s just a computer,” I replied. I forget sometimes that she’s never seen me rip a machine apart and toss it all back together. Hell, I used to do it when I was 13, with no supervision, no manuals, and no Internet to speak of to guide me along the way. Today? I got YouTube videos from guys showing me the correct way to tear down an XBOX 360 console. A trained monkey could pull this job off.

From my chat logs today, where I asked a coworker to shove a 15GB file onto our FTP server so I could transfer it over the Internet back to my home:

[Redacted] says:
- do download managers work for FTP sites?
- segmented downloads, and resumeable?

Justin Buist says:
- Yeah, there’s a ‘REST’ command in FTP that resets the starting point of the file transfer.
- It’s what we had to use before HTTP got support for the ‘Range’ header. *shakes cane*

I really shouldn’t make ‘old man’ jokes around the office. I’m not really any more than 2 years older than this guy, if even that, but I was poking around on the Internet before the WWW actually came popular. Back then it was Gopher, Archie, Veronica, and FTP to find what you were looking for. Some days it just feels like I’m an old man.

(FYI: The ‘Range’ header was introduced in v. 1.1 of the HTTP protocol. Here’s the RFC. It’s dated 1999 and if my memory serves me correctly we didn’t really see wide-spread adoption or support for this until around 2002, maybe 2003, a few years after I became a full-time employee in the IT industry. Or about 7-8 years after I’d first used the WWW. That is why I feel like an old man.)

I’m going off the reservation tonight because I’m too tapped to blog about anything but tech.

Deal.

Slashdot discussion on the creation of null objects. The creator of the idea calls it a billion dollar mistake.

He’s probably right.

Somebody I’m currently working with asked for some pointers on getting up to speed in a limited area of VB.Net development. I spent about 15 minutes putting together a quick hit list of things that I figured they wouldn’t see coming. One of them was “Object reference not found” errors. You will see them. They will annoy you. You will spend time (and money) trying to figure out what went wrong. This was especially important because the environment we’re talking about (SSIS custom script tasks) doesn’t provide a debugger so you’re basically stuck with figuring it out with MsgBox() alerts.

The funny thing about the “problem” is we’re so used to dealing with null references that they’re just part of the way we think about problem solving. We rely on kicking back ‘null’ from some functions as a matter of practice. Quite often we expect it, but sometimes we don’t. Mostly in working with String types.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen, or coded myself, is:if (!str.equals("")
{
// Do something
} … and then seen it blow up when whatever portion of code was responsible for populating ‘str’ shoved a damned null into there. When it blows up you alter it:if (str != null && !str.equals(""))
{
// Do something
}Problem solved, right? Yes. Unless you’re in VB.Net and forget that ‘And’ doesn’t sort circuit, part of the braindeadness that it inherited from VB.If (str IsNot Nothing AND Not str.Equals("")) Then
' do something
EndCode’s going to blow up. And doesn’t short circuit. What you wanted is:If (str IsNot Nothing AndAlso Not str.Equals("")) Then
' do something
EndOr, if you’re smart, and this is a little tip I picked up from an MIT grad with a phD, you make the language work for you a bit:if (! "".equals(str)
{
// Do something
}Boom. You no longer need to worry about str being null because when it tries to construct a string out of it it’ll default to “” and everything works as intended. Unfortunately it doesn’t, and can’t, work the other way around because trying to deference a null reference is a Bad Thing and the VM has to blow up because anything else would be insanity.

It’s a weird issue. It’s not something that’s even remotely difficult to code around, but it crops up all the time. People. Just. Forget. What makes it worse is that when the issue really does manifest itself in the real world we’re usually dealing with something like:if (a.Equals("A1") && !b.Equals("B2") && c.Equals("C3")
{
// Do something
} And all we get back at run time is “Object reference not set” or “NullPointerException” at line 18094. I understand why the VM can’t tell me which object is null, but that doesn’t make my job any easier. You still have to hunt it down and figure out what in the hell is going on.

I have no good answer to the issue, but I do find comfort in the fact that people are actually talking about it.

Over the holidays visiting with Theresa’s 83 year old grandfather he mentioned that we should think about making living wills, just in case. It’s not something we’ve ever really talked about, honestly.

I looked right at my wife and said: “Honey, keep me alive no matter what. Someday they’ll be able to put my brain into a robot body.”

I’d totally get GigaBuist etched into my chest if I had a robot body.

Every now and again technology amazes me when I reflect on the past.

The other night I fired up my Xbox 360 to play some Halo 3 and got hit with a message that I needed to upgrade my software. I figured it was just another patch to prevent cheating.

With the patch installed I noticed that the interface was different and poked around. There was a new “NetFlix” channel on there. I downloaded that, fired it up, and viola — I can now stream any film NetFlix has in their “instant viewing” category right to my TV via the Xbox. Awesome. Now I can watch The A-Team on demand.

What got me is I couldn’t help but reflect upon the progression of technology that got us to this point. Back in the early ’80′s a VHS based VCR must have still been about $200 bucks and people bought them. Maybe it was $300. I don’t know. What I do know is that it was affordable but not a common expenditure. My father loves movies, and we had one in the early 80′s, but they were uncommon enough he had to drive a good 30 minutes to just rent a video at the time. We actually had a Betamax and a VHS system, though I don’t recall ever watching anything on the Betamax one.

Anyway, that’s not the point.

Roll forward to 1993 when I finally get online with a 2400 baud modem. At the time the only “pictures” you’d see were text in nature. ANSI art was as good as it got unless you wanted to wait 8 minutes for a proper JPEG image to download. Around 1996 I remember a guy pontificating, with absolute certainty, that you’d see JPEG and GIF images coming down the pipe just like we were seeing ANSI art. The bandwidth would be there.

Thought the dude was a loon. Turns out he was right.

Now, you have to remember that around 1994 to 1996 people were dialing up with modems in the 2400-14,400 baud range. At the low end we were kicking around 250 bytes per second, and at the high end 1400 bytes per second. The ISPs that we dial in to to get internet access only had 56k connections to their uplink. They were spreading that 56k connection around to the 3-4 guys that were actually on “the internet” at the time, and we were happy with it.

And then we all rolled around to 28.8k modems, and finally 56k modems, and then the masses picked up on it. In 2000 DSL lines capable of 512k or 768k started hitting. Cable services were offering up 388k and 768k services.

This shit was off the fucking hook for us old timers! I’ve come to terms with it, but I’m still blown away at times when I get a really good connection on my 6meg home connection. Hell, I worked on systems where 6meg wasn’t possible between two machines sitting 8 feet from one another.

Today I can fire up my Xbox, a $300 device which when weighed against inflation is probably cheaper than a VHS system back in the early ’80′s, use my $60/month internet connection that I use for work, and combine that with a $4.99/month NetFlix fee to watch everything in their “instant view” library.

And now we can watch movies our our TV cheaper than ever before and it only takes 30 seconds to make it happen.

So, what’s next?

One of my home machines (Ubuntu AMD64 8.04 Desktop) can’t get to this website anymore.

The name resolves.
I don’t have an override in /etc/hosts.
I can ping it.
But I can’t access it through any browser or FTP to it. Firefox, Konqueror, and lynx all fail. So do ‘ftp’ and ‘netcat’ clients from the command line.

This is annoying, and I’ve run out of ideas. I already killed my ‘tor’ server on it, thinking that maybe it was trying to proxy all my requests for me, as a stab in the dark, but that didn’t work. Obviously.

Anybody have any ideas? I’m kinda stumped.

I’m working on a VPC install of Ubuntu 8 Desktop right now. It’s not exactly straight forward but these instructions should get you through it.

In related news my experience with LAMP might come in handy at work.

Anybody else wonder what indoor cell phone reception would be like if we were still using lead paint? No? Just me?

Okay, back to work.