Disorderly Content

I am an idiot. Worse, I am a long suffering idiot. The suffering stopped today, the idiocy may linger a while.

A couple of months ago I switched from the Earthlink DSL I'd had for years to AT&T/Yahoo. They promised higher speeds, they promised a lower price. Faster's better, so I finally said okay. The install kit arrived while I was on a trip, so the moment I got home I had to get things running, what with them blocking my old Earthlink service. That's when the fun began.

The new modem was cool, with a built-in router with wireless. Performance was only marginally faster. But reliability was something else again, and not in a good way. I was having huge problems with servers not responding. I thought it was a DNS lookup problem, but switching to OpenDNS made no difference at all. Then I discovered that web surfing while connected through my employer's VPN worked great, even though it used the same connection. I guessed there was some retry timeout thing that the VPN was handling differently. But I endured, not having the time or energy to get on the phone and sort out what I assumed would be a protracted battle with tech support.

Then a week ago I got let go, and suddenly couldn't use my VPN workaround. So today I got on the phone with AT&T. They confirmed that my modem was putting out a weak signal. Then they beat me up about not using the cable they'd provided, and the dual port filter. I was still using the cables I'd set up for my old DSL, and didn't want to bother changing. Still, knowing they wouldn't help until I tried their solution (I used to work in tech support, so I have nothing but sympathy for those who do it now), I swapped out the cables and replaced my inline filter and splitter with their combo splitter/filter. And, as you have already guessed, things started to work. Not perfectly, mind; I still get delays accessing some major servers. But nothing like what it was like before. I'm finally back to having the quality of service I had before the switch, plus a little bit faster throughput. Which of course I'd have had right from the beginning if I'd only learn to follow directions. Not that that's gonna happen.

Update 11/14: Okay, maybe I'm not a complete idiot. There are still problems, so I'll have to get back on the phone with the phone company. But it's a whole lot more stable than it was. And that's good.

Update 11/20: And now I finally have it working the way it's supposed to work. Looks like it was a combination of problems: first, the bad connection caused by my iffy cabling; and second, a DNS problem. But not an ordinary DNS problem, where switching servers fixes things. Oh, no; that would be too easy! No, it turns out my router is acting as DNS server, passing requests to the real server. Well, it would be doing that if it were behaving, which it wasn't. The fix was easy: give my computers the DNS server addresses and bypass the router. Which also explains why having the VPN on made everything work. That was bypassing the router as well! Anyway, life's finally good on the Interwebs! Or could that just be because Senator "Series of Tubes" Ted Stevens is now about to be former Senator and newly convicted felon Ted Stevens?

A few weeks ago I let AT&T talk me into dumping my perfectly serviceable Earthlink DSL for theirs. Sure, it was cheaper. And sure, it was supposed to be faster. But why take chances?

At least that should have been my reasoning. But noooooo... So I let them sell it to me, and I got my new modem/router and got it all installed. And it was good. Except it wasn't. It was only marginally faster. And most of the time it was a lot slower. Not the data transfers, mind, but the DNS service. It took absolutely forever for it to identify certain hosts. And using a different DNS server didn't help at all. So I regretted my decision to change providers, and wondered when I'd find the time to call AT&T support and start bugging them to figure out what the hell's going on.

Anyway, today I tried to update the software in the modem/router. And once again it refused. So I though to myself, self, I thought, maybe it doesn't like upgrading from Safari. So I tried it with Firefox, and got the same result. But then a weird thing happened. For no reason I can determine, it stopped sucking. Suddenly my DNS lookups are fast. And they don't fail. And it actually feels faster than what I had before. Suddenly I don't hate AT&T nearly as much as I did before. So this is what being a satisfied customer feels like...

I'm typing this from a San Francisco-bound 767, now at cruising altitude. Which I grant isn't a big deal, until I tell you that I'm typing into an emacs window on my web server, which isn't here with me. It's that onboard WiFi we've heard a lot about but which most of us have never experienced. Except I can't say that any more; I'm one of the few, the proud...

Daring Fireball points to a wonderful story at Ars Technica about a joint MS/NBC screwup that's keeping Vista owners from recording some favorite shows. If we needed a good example of why DRM is anti-consumer, it's awfully nice of them to give it to us.

That's a Python reference, but not a particularly good one, so don't feel bad if you didn't get it. Anyway, this isn't about the Pythons, or French cities, or turn of the century painters either. It's about time, and the loss of it. Because according to the LA Times, AT&T is shutting down its time service. Maybe you aren't old enough to care, but there was a time (yeah, I know) when we would call a phone number and have a woman's voice tell us the time. That was before the Network Time Protocol; before the Internet and home computers for that matter. There's been a voice giving us time (to do what?) since the 20s. But no more. I guess when many of us carry half a dozen devices with time displays, there isn't much point in that voice giving us the time of day.

(Reported on Slashdot.)

...or maybe not. Maybe it'll all be wonderful.

What am I babbling about? I had a little lie down on Thursday afternoon, when my phone rang. It was AT&T, trying for the nth time to sell me their DSL service. And for once I didn't tell them no. I'd been thinking for a while that I was getting ripped off by Earthlink, which is charging me way too much for a service that should be either faster or cheaper after all these years. And maybe it was being awakened from my drowsy state. So I listened.

The rep on the phone was bad. Really bad. You know how it's obvious they're reading from a script? This guy was barely literate. I learned the hard way that stopping him to ask a question was a bad idea; not only was getting the answer like pulling teeth, but it meant he lost his place in the script and had to start from the beginning. Again. And again.

Anyway, at first it was about price: half what I pay now. So I asked about speed, only to discover it was the same as my current service. So I said I'd only bite if they could get me faster service. He finally agreed to put me on the list for a callback when they had faster service in my area, at which point his supervisor got in on the act. Turns out he'd misread his screen, and that I could get the faster 3 megabits per second service. So back we went, they described everything (several times), I agreed (several times), they went over my hardware environment to make sure I could actually use this faster service (several times, complicated when I told them I'm a Mac household, but then uncomplicated when I pointed out that I'm already running 1.5 mb/sec DSL and that I do know a little something about my environment). And eventually I got them off the phone.

So we'll see. I'm supposed to get a letter, confirming all the terms and the speeds and feeds and costs. And then eventually I'll get my new modem and my password and such. Twice the download speed (and ten times the upload speed, which'll be nice for sending out photos) for half the price. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

Yeah, that's what worries me.

As devices get more sophisticated, they also get more unpredictable. Case in point: my Camry Hybrid. In most every way it's a wonderful vehicle. But then something odd happens, and I'm reminded that I'm driving around with more computing horsepower and more software than the timesharing system I used in college.

The Camry has a keyless entry system: touch the door handle with the key in your pocket and it unlocks; press the button and it locks. Except on the rare occasion when it doesn't. Like today, when I was in San Francisco taking pictures. I get out of the car, press the button, and... nothing. No beep acknowledging my command to lock. Try it again. And again. Still nothing.

So I use the button on the key fob, which does work. And I wonder what's going on. And I find another location or three to take pictures. And the locking mechanism works fine, until my last stop. And I think, "WTF?" And finally the little light goes off. 'Cause what am I taking pictures of? Only the biggest damn radio antenna I've ever seen. And maybe, just maybe it's playing havoc with my little RFID key system. Which is a much more satisfying explanation than the one about my car randomly misbehaving. I just hope it's the right one.

According to QuoteDB, I have Ben Franklin to thank for that remark, which is about how the most trivial things can magnify to dramatic outcomes. Not so dramatic, at least not for you, gentle reader, but relevant, I think. Here's the story:

I've been having intermittent problems with my DSL, especially what seemed to be DNS lookups taking forever. And then a couple of days ago my modem lost its connection, took forever to get it back and, even when it did, lost it repeatedly a while later. I finally talked to Earthlink, who agreed to put in a call to Covad, the DSL provider. Except that things suddenly worked again right around the time I got through. Frustrating.

But what was really frustrating was the debugging. I'd disconnect and reconnect the phone line, reset the modem, then have to reset or sometimes even power cycle my router. And eventually I'd hit the magic combination that got my service working again. No rhyme or reason, or so I thought. Until I suddenly noticed that the teeny modular connector on my splitter (the thing that let me plug my DSL modem and my phone cable into the same socket) had a broken clip. Which would explain my intermittent service, especially with the current cold weather and the way my apartment's heat keeps changing the room's temperature from too cold to too hot.

Aha! So I raced off to Fry's at 8pm, not remembering when they closed (9 as it turns out), to get a replacement. Got two, just in case. Raced home, only to find out that I'd gotten the wrong kind of splitter! These were for two-line phone setups, not to split a single line. Fortunately, I had another splitter I was using to connect my fax/copier/printer to the phone line. So I sacrificed my faxing ability to get my computer and phone back. Reset the modem and router one last time. And so far, so good.

And now I wonder how long that little clip's been broken. And how much unjustified anger I've felt toward Covad's unreliable service. Which wasn't unreliable at all, I now suspect. So, even though I never said anything, I'm really sorry for doubting you. I promise I'll do better, at least until the next time I draw completely erroneous conclusions from incomplete data.

I started having DSL problems a week or so ago. I'd lose access to sites, or my DNS server wouldn't know about certain domains, or my router would get kicked off, or things would just be slow. Most of the time power cycling the modem would take care of things, although I've also had to pull the power on the router, wait for it to forget everything and then try again. Annoying, but survivable.

Things went from bad to worse pretty quickly. Suddenly my modem would lose sync. And then it would come back. And go away again. Coming home from a trip to Southern Cal last night I was having nothing but grief. And I was remembering the last time this happened, the endless conversations with Earthlink in India or somewhere before they'd finally let me call the DSL provider and get them to kick the DSLAN card back into behaving.

But then I had a thought: that one of the outages happened while I was on the phone. (For anybody who isn't DSL savvy, the computer shares the phone line via a simple splitter. And you put a filter on the phone line to keep the DSL from interfering.) I'd had a problem a year or two ago where my DSL worked but the phone didn't. And I discovered that it was the DSL filter that was at fault; it had died and took my phone line with it. Replacing the filter made everything work again.

So, hoping that was the problem this time, I disconnected my phone line from the splitter. And the DSL modem was able to connect and everything was wonderful. So I pulled the filter from my bedroom phone line and moved it to the splitter. That worked; I had both DSL and phone service once again. Which was wonderful news, not just because everything was behaving, but also because I didn't have to deal with the ironically named Earthlink Customer Service.

Oh, and I went out to buy another filter. Just in case.

Or at least the late 20th. Although I'm pretty good about upgrading most of my gear, whether it needs it or not, one piece of equipment is pretty ancient. That's my printer, an HP Laserjet 4ML that cost me well over a thousand dollars once upon a time. And which hasn't given me a bit of trouble from the day it arrived to this one.

Which is kind of a shame, since I've been dying to replace it forever. It's slow for one thing, not so much in the speed with which it delivers pages, but in how long its underpowered processor and limited memory can take to render a page. And it's only 300 DPI, if you can believe it. But the thing that's driven me crazy since day one is the way it curls paper. The paper path was misdesigned, creating a route so tight that its results just refused to lie flat.

Anyway, you get the idea. I wanted to get a new printer, but just couldn't bring myself to do it as long as this one continued to churn out perfectly readable text. (It's not like the lack of resolution was really an issue, what with my decreasing ability to read tiny type.) And so the situation might have remained, if my work environment hadn't required a change. You see, I work for a small software firm. And, although they had an office here, it had been vacant for quite a while before I joined, the only other employee in the area preferring to work at home. Not that I can blame him; even my fifteen minute commute is long compared to the walk from bedroom to living room. So when they decided to close the office and have me work at home, I was agreeable. The only real sacrifice in losing the office was giving up access to a copier and a fax. Which, and I'm sure you're already ahead of me, was only a problem until I got one of those modern do-everything multifunction printers. And so I did: a Brother 7820N networked printer/copier/scanner/fax. And, having just gotten it mostly installed (I just need a slightly longer phone cable), I did a test print. And was blown away by the speed and the quality.

Shoulda done this last century...

Okay, I've had my Blackberry for two and a half weeks. And I like it, sure. But I'm just not feelin' the love like this guy. That's just sick.

Now my iPod, on the other hand...

This will require a bit of explanation for those of you who can't remember back to the dark ages of computing, when a phrase like personal computer was a source of amused speculation. Back then, real programmers worked on Teletypes that spat out long streams of yellow paper with little chunks of wood embedded in it. And a very lucky few got to use primitive CRTs with flickery green screens, saving a few trees at the expense of their eyesight.

But now those days can be yours, at least if you're on a Mac. From Boing Boing comes news of GLTerminal, an OSX app that simulates the joy of typing to a glass Teletype, as some of us called them back in the day. I get all tingly with nostalgia just thinking about it!

I was out last night with some good friends from my SGI days. Lawra's a Texan¹ these days, so we only get to visit when she escapes back to California for a taste of civilization. Anyway, I got home around 10:30 and went immediately to check email and various web interests. And couldn't get anywhere. No mail, only a few websites, and everything dog slow. I tried the usual: power cycling the DSL modem, disconnecting and reconnecting with my router, power cycling the router. It was weird; some things worked, but most just hung and eventually timed out.

Good thing one of my neighbors leaves his or her wireless unprotected. An unscrupulous individual might deal with his net.withdrawal symptoms by stealing a little bandwidth. But of course that would be wrong, even if it helps him get through the night. And the morning, since the problem was still there eight hours later.

And suddenly now it's not. All's well; mail and RSS feeds and all the other blessings of the cornucopia of webly goodness are mine once again. And I have that unknown neighbor to thank for getting me through the rough times. Or at least I would, if I were so crass and dishonorable as to steal bandwidth for an unwitting benefactor. Or a witting one, for that matter.

---

1. It's only the fact that she doesn't read this blog that gives me the courage to call her that.

Back when I was doing Lisp programmer, when the Internet was the ARPANET and browsers were people skimming volumes in bookstores, there was a joke going around. It was based on the idea that everything in Lisp is an object that you reached by following memory pointers. But you never dealt with the pointers; you looked in a variable and were taken directly to the object pointed to by the pointer. Got that? And now for the joke: Lisp programmers, they'd say, know the value of everything and the cost of nothing. Which is both true and, if you get it, somewhat amusing.

And just as true for Java programmers, who by and large have no idea at the complex things that are being done on their behalf. Which is generally regarded as a good thing; Java coders can focus on the problem they're trying to solve and not get caught up in the kind of implementation details that make programming both hard and time consuming. Except, one may ask, what have we lost by not knowing the cost and the details of the tools we're using?

An excellent question, and one asked by Joel Spolsky in his latest column at Joel On Software. Joel argues that, although Java programmers may be far more productive than workers in C, they never have to face the kinds of concepts that separate the men from the boys. (Or, if you prefer, the women from the girls.) And that's bad. It's especially bad when colleges and universities use Java as the basis of their computer science curricula. Because a lot of folks who don't have what it takes to be good programmers won't be tested and found wanting. Which doesn't do them a favor so much as it just passes the problem on to their future employers.

As a programmer who fought and won his battles with pointers, recursion, lambda calculus and a lot of other stuff, I believe it's vital to know what's going on under the hood and to be able to implement most of it if you had to. Nice to know I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Credit to someone named Gisela for expressing the sentiment at right. (And to Boing Boing for getting the word out.) Sony have been very bad boys and girls and are deserving of lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings this year. Go read the reasons on Mark Russinovich's blog, on the off chance you've been living in a cave the past few weeks. And spread the word: No Sony for you!

There's an old saying in the computer biz that there are two kinds of users: those who have lost data and those who haven't... yet. I was reminded of that saying yesterday, when I discovered that the external drive on my file server had stopped responding. Walking over to the desk, I could see that the red light was on solid and the green one was flashing rapidly. Shutting down the server and restarting didn't help. Unplugging the drive didn't either. And of course, there was stuff on the drive that would be a royal pain to have to recover, if recovery was even possible.

My hope diminishing by the second, I tried moving the drive from my server to my laptop. (Ah, the wonderfulness of Firewire.) Same problem; as soon as the drive was plugged in I had the solid red/flashing green of an insane traffic signal. So I unplugged the drive. And noticed something really interesting: the little green light on the power supply was flashing like mad. Huh! Looks like the drive might actually be okay, or it will be once I can find a replacement power supply.

Visits to Fry's, Micro Center and even Weird Stuff Warehouse (hey, you never know) proved fruitless. Fortunately, I had better luck at online stores. And in a couple of days I should have my new power bricklet and will see if I'm back in business. Oh, and of course I'll set up a backup regimen for my big drive. I have another external drive I'm not doing much with. What's that other old saying? "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me?" Something like that.

Update 10/13: All's well that ends well, as the Bard once wrote. My replacement power supply arrived a few minutes ago. Plugged it in, reconnected the drive and I'm back to normal, or at least as close to normal as I ever get. Now I just need to do something about backing up that drive. Good thing I have an even larger Firewire drive that's not doing much right now.

I can beat most people in the "my job was worse than your job" contest. For two weeks in high school, I worked as a piss pourer in a urinalysis lab. Which is every bit as disgusting as it sounds. Dangerous too; to balance the pH level in the samples, I had to add measured amounts of hydrochloric acid. Fortunately, I emerged from my ordeal both uninjured and with my sense of smell intact.

What brought this particular stroll down memory lane to mind? Two things. First, yesterday I had to wee in a jar for a preemployment drug test. (One of the few times in my life when I suffered from performance anxiety, but that's another matter.) The second is a blog posting at Boing Boing about a pair of animatronic statues in Prague that write out famous quotes with their pee. There are even some Flash videos (apologies for the pun; it wasn't mine) showing the statues in action.

I promise; no more bodily fluid posts for at least a week.

WAR IS PEACE
IGNORANCE IS KNOWLEDGE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

So went the slogans of Big Brother's government in the classic 1984. And how he might have recognized the hand of Big Brother in Trusted Computing, the benign sounding attempt by the biz to build in technology to control what is and isn't allowed access to your computer, phone, DVD player, game system. What's not nearly so benign is that, while the computing may be trusted, the computing user isn't. Control moves from the owner of the device to the maker, in yet another enormous land grab by the owners of content.

Scary stuff. And presented very well by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel in a little Quicktime movie. As they put it, how can we trust them when they don't trust us?

During my recent travels I had a series of less than satisfactory experiences with hotel WiFi. Granted, unstable access is still better than none at all. And granted, in most places that access came with the room. But still I was frustrated.

About a week after I got home from my last trip I was having trouble reaching one particular site, which kept rejecting my requests for connection. As part of my diagnosis I figured I'd try connecting to one of my neighbors' WiFi; there's always somebody who doesn't bother with security. But when I turned on the wireless on my laptop I was surprised not to see my own WiFi network. And that got me thinking that maybe the problem is with my PowerBook. Maybe the intermittent WiFi was an indication of an AirPort card going flooey.

Of course, I did nothing to investigate further. Until tonight, when I connected to my Linksys router, checked the settings and realized that nothing looked the way it should. Which is when I realized that I'd upgraded the router's firmware a week or so ago and never thought to check the settings. You see, the new firmware came with a bunch of new wireless security features. And with those new features came a reset of all the WiFi settings, including network name and password. No wonder my laptop couldn't find the network!

To think I used to do technical support for a living. I really do know better than to draw unwarranted conclusions. Or at least I know how to chastise customers when they do it.

The legal system moves with almost geologic slowness, so much so that it often doesn't seem to move at all. The world of tech is the opposite, which is one aspect of its appeal. I can't imagine working in a field where everything works now the way it did then and will continue to work long after I'm gone. Which may be why I rarely find legal conflict all that interesting until it's over.

There are exceptions of course. The Watergate hearings, which were history coming to me as it happened. The combination of amazing revelations and high stakes made it all too fascinating. The Microsoft antitrust trial. And lately, the SCO vs. Linux, Open Source and a whole bunch of other folks.

What's amazing about the SCO case is that so many people believed that there must be a case there despite a shocking lack of public evidence. SCO managed to scare a lot of people in the tech world. And people who are scared and who then discover over time that they were really being manipulated, those people tend to lash back. That's been fun to watch.

If you haven't been paying attention to SCO vs. Linux et al., there's a pretty good summary called There's No Business Like SCO Business on the site IT-Analysis.com. Like reading about Watergate after the fact, it can put events into a context that wasn't so clear as they occurred. Best of all, what we gain in understanding we don't give up in entertainment or outrage. Just in case things end with a whimper rather than a bang, you know.

Sometimes it's good to live in Silicon Valley. And tonight was one of those times, thanks to a panel at the Computer History Museum. The subject was computer animation. And the panelists know a bit about the subject: Ed Catmull, cofounder and president of Pixar; Alvy Ray Smith, one of the pioneers of computer graphics; Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and writer on Pixar's first four films; and Brad Bird, writer/director on The Incredibles.

Although the discussion started with some history of 2D computer graphics and dropped more than a few well known names in the biz, it turned pretty quickly to the creative side of animation, the storytelling that uses all that hardware and software rather than the mechanics. And one of the joys of being in such a young industry is that so many of its leading lights glow with boyish (yeah, it was all boys on the panel) enthusiasm. Gives me hope that I can hold on to my own excitement for the field for another decade or two.

Thanks to Slashdot for pointing out that we're only a few hours from a Unix time of 1111111111. We'll reach this milestone at 5:58 PM and 31 seconds Pacific time. For you non-techies, Unix and workalike systems like Mac OS X record time as the number of seconds since January 1st, 1969 at midnight GMT. You can see for yourself in a terminal window like this:

$ date +%s
1111087273

By the way, we'll never make it to 2222222222; the 32-bit time value will overflow in January of 2038. Ohmygosh! It's Y2K all over again!

Update 03/17: The date overflow situation is a little bit more complicated than I described above. In FreeBSD and Mac OS X and, I assume, other current systems, the time in seconds since 1/1/69 is now stored as a long (64-bit) integer, so it won't overflow in 2038. However, various parts of the system don't yet accomodate 64-bit time values. For example, an attempt to set the date on my Mac beyond 2038 gets rejected out of hand. And the following Perl code, which prints the date equivalent to 2222222222, shows that it's still treating the number as a signed 32-bit value:

$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime 2222222222, "\n"'
Tue Apr 26 13:28:46 1904

The good news is that we have three more decades to get the rest of this stuff straightened out before everything breaks.

Not quite as stylish as the ones on Star Trek or Farscape, but pretty cool nonetheless, Gizmodo reports that Siemens has built a wearable communicator that can recognize and respond to thousands of individual words (which, given the German ability to express entire paragraphs in a single word, means it can probably interpret both the Bible and Gone With The Wind). Primary function is home control: turning on lights, opening the pod bay garage door, that sort of thing. But can "arm photon torpedoes!" or "commence Starburst!" be far behind?

From Boing Boing comes a link to a shocking story of vendor lock-in. It seems HP laptops include a list of Mini-PCI cards they'll permit to be installed. Insert a card not on the list, like one that supports Linux, and the computer refuses to boot. It's the next logical step from printers that won't accept third party ink/toner cartridges. What's next? Stereo receivers that reject unapproved speakers?

I'm willing to bet that HP would justify such an action by claiming to reduce its support costs. But an important lesson I learned in life is this: Never let somebody else make their problem your problem.

Another reason to be glad I'm a Mac person. And that the only piece of HP gear I own is an ancient Laserjet 4ML. When it finally dies, you can be sure its replacement will play nice with third party hardware, software and consumables. It's called voting with your dollars.

My visit to Colorado Springs last week was my first since switching over from my old AT&T Wireless phone to Cingular. So imagine my surprise when I tried to use my new phone and got a yellow road sign indicator and the message "Emergency Calls Only". Trying a different number later on, I got a different display with the same meaning: you can't do what you want to do. What's going on? I was supposed to have nationwide long distance. And if there's a signal, and the phone claimed there was a good one, shouldn't I be able to use it?

I tried the phone in Phoenix during my trip home and was able to call out. So this morning I called Cingular to find out what the heck's going on. From what the service person could determine, the problem wasn't with my calling plan; there was a service outage in parts of Colorado Springs. And the message that I interpreted as "we won't let you use your phone here" really meant "we'd be happy to let you use your phone, but we can't do it right now, so try again a little later".

I guess when you only have room for a couple of words on the display, getting across subtleties becomes something as a challenge. And here's one more demonstration of my talent for misinterpreting any message I'm given. Assuming of course that my new understanding is correct and the phone works correctly the next time I'm in town. We'll see.

If you're in the tech world, you may have been following the antics of SCO, the company that bought Unix from Novell, claimed ownership of Linux and then proceeded to sue IBM, Red Hat, Daimler Chrysler, Autozone and various other suppliers and users of Linux. (If you're not and are curious, head over to Groklaw for the whole sordid story.) Anyway, today a colleague sent me the picture at right, which describes the situation and its likely outcome better than all the analyses I've read. As for the title of this posting, that's my pseudo-Latin for "In photography there is truth." Unless of course you know how to use Photoshop, in which case all bets are off.

A couple of weeks ago the tech news, at least the online Mac version, was full of reports of Macintosh pioneer Jef Raskin's complaining about Mac OS X, that there's no difference between it and Windows XP and how what the computing world really needs is a big does of Artificial Intelligence so users can say do what I mean and the computer will figure out what the heck that is. I thought it was nonsense at the time, a no-longer-listened-to prophet getting old and cranky. And having spent a bunch of years around Artificial Intelligence, I was a lot less confident than Jef that a computer's idea of DWIM would look anything like the user's.

A small example is the SB-600 flash I got for my Nikon D70. It offers two automatic modes when coupled to the D70. The cool mode is called i-TTL Balanced; it uses the camera to determine just how much light to apply to the scene, balancing the need to light the subject of the picture as well as the background. Then there's plain old i-TTL; it lights the subject and lets the background fend for itself. And one guide to the camera warns you not to use Balanced mode, because you won't be able to predict the results. By trying to light both subject and background, you may end up with both lit poorly. Whereas just doing the subject, you can be pretty confident that it will be lit correctly.

And this is the problem with AI solutions to normal problems: that what you gain in the quality of the solution (assuming the solution is actually good), you lose in predictability. And for humans, getting the answer we expect is more important.

What made me think of all this today is an article on As The Apple Turns, my favorite humorous Apple news site, that talks about the surprising product suggestions you can get from Amazon's own brand of AI. To wit, add Mac OS X 10.3 Panther to your wish list and you'll get a suggestion of Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special. Ask for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger instead and you'll be told about The Tripleets of Belleville. And the magazine suggestions are even better: interest in Panther makes you a target reader for The New Yorker, while Tiger buyers are candidates for Playboy.

All of which suggests something I figured out around 1989: this AI stuff is fun, but I sure wouldn't stake anything important on it. (Too bad I got started in it in '83. But some of us take a while to discover important truths. And some of us never do.)

Last night my DSL service up and died. I'd been having regular disconnects for a few weeks, so I assumed that whatever was flaky had finally decided to flake off. And perhaps I should have pursued the problem before it went pear shaped (a British expression I much prefer to crapped out, although both apply). But never mind that; it was time to enter the circle of hell known as Customer Support.

I started with Earthlink's online chat, which was probably a mistake. They assume it's my fault, despite my telling them that:

1. I've tried connecting with two different computers, both with and without a router.
2. It was all working until last night.
3. I haven't changed any hardware or software.
4. Yes, I've tried power cycling the modem. Several times.
5. I've swapped cables, disconnected the phone on the DSL line and tried out all the other stalling tactics they could come up with.

Then they told me to talk to my DSL provider. "You're my DSL provider," I explained. "Then talk to your phone company about the line." "Covad did that. I've never dealt with the phone company about the DSL connection and wouldn't know where to start".

That got them to point me at their phone line, who could give me a contact at Covad. So I spent a pleasant half hour on the phone with another customer service rep, presumably in a cheaper part of the world (nice accent, I thought) who took me through all the usual steps before accepting that the problem likely wasn't at my end. She sent a trouble ticket to Covad and forwarded my call there. Where, after a few minutes of light classics hold music, I talked to somebody who put in a request to check the lines and figure out what's really going on.

As I write this I've only been DSL-less for 24 hours. And if I'm very lucky they'll track down the problem before I get up tomorrow morning. If not, I expect I'll spend some quality time in the office this weekend. Because whatever else I think of the place, their networking sure beats the hell out of dialup.

Update: It's the following morning. A chat with Covad later, they ran a test and discovered that their DLSAN card (whatever that might be) was misbehaving. They issued a reset and suddenly I'm back from the mid-20th century, technology-wise. Most excellent!