From the monthly archives:

March 2004

documentation wierdness

March 31, 2004

in Links

Darren Barefoot’s Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness has been passed about the blogs before — but its got a bunch of new stuff now, and its way funny.

I particularly like CrankCase Collar (how on EARTH did that get past editorial?) and for sheer WTF wierdness, Saiyan Wield Ways and Means. I am also amused by the User Manure, because, well half the time that’s what I feel like I’m writing anyhow.

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dinner rolls that go BOOM

March 30, 2004

in Links

Foods: Urgent Safety Notice Regarding Ice Box Rolls Recipe in April Issue on Page 154: Potential Fire and Safety Hazard.

“Combining the water and shortening as described in the recipe may cause the mixture to ignite…”

May cause the mixture to IGNITE? Did the original recipe include turpentine? Eeek!

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ouch ouch ouch

March 28, 2004

in Personal, Stories

I went for a bicycle ride this morning, my usual sunday morning 30-40 mile ride. Did the ride out by the reservoirs in San Jose, which is a pretty ride, not too much traffic, lots of hills to play on.

I was on my way back and I stopped at a park to rest and have a gu. While I was there I watched two HUGE wild turkeys peck away at the grass. I thought for a while they were peacocks they were so huge, but no: turkeys. gobble gobble. They seemed unconcerned that I was there. I suppose they knew that they could run faster than I could if I came after them.

I left the park after my rest, and my intent was to turn left back onto the road. Its not normally very busy; sometimes I have to wait for a couple of cars but usually I just pull right out. There was a big truck with a horse trailer coming down the road, so I paused and waited for it to pass. It slowed way down and signalled that it was going to turn into the park. OK, I thought, and I pulled out into the lane.

And then I saw the SUV behind the horse trailer, pulling around it into the far lane and accelerating. Oh, shit! Rather than get smeared all over the road I continued on through both lanes and onto the far shoulder, through some gravel and into some muddy ruts, which caught my front tire and smacked me right down onto the ground. ow.

I picked myself right back up again, covered in mud, feeling really angry at myself. Pulling out into oncoming traffic without knowing what’s coming: dumb. dumb. The guy with the horse trailer had stopped and bolted over to ask me if I was OK. That guy nearly ran you down, he said. Yea, I replied. And he didn’t even stop — he just continued right on up the road.

I insisted I was fine, just muddy, although I discovered after the horse trailer guy continued on that I was pretty banged up. Major road rash on my left knee. I was bleeding pretty nastily. Both cleats were coated in gritty mud and I couldn’t clip into my pedals. I crossed back over the road to the park on foot and cleaned up a little and managed to ride back to my car, slowly, ow ow ow ow.

Once I got home I thought I was OK, that all I had to do was bandage up my knee and I would be fine. It was already drying out and kind of scabbing over. Then I realized that the wound had all kinds of nasty dirt in it. That dirt has to come out. Infection city.

I think possibly the only thing worse than getting road rash in the first place is having to scrub the dirt out of it with a stiff brush. ow ow ow ow.

I’ll be good friends with a fistful of ibuprofen and a cold beer tonight.

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no more Mac Frame

March 23, 2004

in Tech

Adobe announced this morning that they are end-of-life’ing FrameMaker for the Mac. For those of you joining us outside the tech world, FrameMaker is a desktop publishing system. It’s especially good for really long book-type documents with lots of figures and tables and cross-references. Non-fictiony stuff. Its pretty much the standard tool for tech writers.

Adobe bought the Frame company a bunch of years back and they haven’t done much of anything with the product since then. Working in Frame is like working with desktop publishing circa 1992. The interface is hopelessly primitive. Its clunky. But its the best thing out there for the sort of work we do (Word cannot even begin to handle this sort of thing gracefully). There have been rumors for years that Adobe really just wished that Frame would go away, that everyone would convert to InDesign (and we would, if InDesign had the FEATURES that Frame does).

So its no real surprise that Frame on the Mac is going away, although as a Mac user I’m kind of depressed about it. I don’t think this is a sign that things will magically get better for the Windows and Solaris versions of Frame; I think this is just the first step. I don’t think Frame is long for this world in Adobe’s hands.

I’m noting that Macromedia is doing more to emphasize its tools for eLearning and online help (they just bought a company called RoboHelp, which is the other standard tool for tech writers for creating help systems). Perhaps Frame would do better at that company. Hint Hint.

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IMAP crazies

March 17, 2004

in Tech

Still setting things up on the new server. Eric believes strongly in ASCII mail readers (he also uses vi, poor dear) so it was up to me to re-set-up IMAP so that I could use a mail reader more recent than 1956.

I had a lot of problems setting up the IMAP server…lots of authentication errors. I thought the problem was PAM. It wasn’t. Google is sometimes good for this thing and sometimes not — from googling about this I found a lot of people who had the problem but not a lot of answers about what to do about it.

So in the interest of putting something authoratative up and plugging google with the right keywords, here’s what I had and what solved it. If you’re not interested in really geeky unixy stuff you can skip the rest of this post.

I was using the IMAP server from the University of Washington, otherwise known as UW-IMAP. Its a good basic IMAP server. It compiles out of the box just fine. I set up xinetd to trigger it and it started up just fine. Then I got authentication errors from my mail readers: rejected logins. In /var/log/messages I got “Login disabled.” If I telnetted to port 143 (the IMAP port) I was seeing LOGINDISABLED messages there, too.

As I mentioned I thought initially the problem was PAM (pluggable authentication modules) and I spent some time mucking around with that. Then deep in a single google post I got a clue about what was really wrong.

The issue is that UW-IMAP, as compiled out of the box, does not accept plaintext passwords unless you are also running an SSL connection. Unfortunately as far as I can see mail readers DO send plaintext passwords. Its not a PAM issue.

To solve the problem, either connect to your IMAP server using SSL, or recompile UW-IMAP using the makefile option SSLTYPE=unix (eg “make rhl SSLTYPE=unix”). The IMAP server will accept plaintext passwords after that. I suppose you could also use a different form of authentication (CRAM-MD5 or kerberos or something, I dunno) but this solution worked for me.

Yay! Imap!

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