So, I picked out an item that I couldn’t pay for with a single gift card. No problem, I’ll just tell Amazon to charge two of these cards and that would be that, right? Only, I discover that I can only choose one credit card to pay for the transaction. Ha, ha, this must be a joke, right? It’s 2009, you can’t expect me to believe that the company that basically pioneered e-commerce hasn’t figured out how to implement split billing?

Out of disappointment, I decided to locate the same item on Buy.com, where I discovered that they also only allow you to choose one credit card as payment. I did notice that both Amazon and Buy.com allow you to use multiple site-specific gift certificates to pay for an order, so I decided to work around the problem by ordering a Buy.com gift certificate for $50, the value of one of my Visa gift cards. I chose email fulfillment, figuring that I’d soon receive the necessary information by email to redeem my card and be done.

How can an e-product be “on backorder”?

When I received my order confirmation email from Buy.com, this is what I saw. Try to appreciate the moment of WTF I experienced as I tried to believe what I was reading. An emailed gift certificate was on back-order??! Are you kidding me? What, did they run out of electrons or bytes in the warehouse?

I tried to attribute this to some bug in their order confirmation email process, so I waited for an hour for a second email, which would never arrive, containing the gift certificate. Finally, I gave up and went back to Buy.com and cancelled my order.

Does Amazon.com do any better? I’m not sure. I just noticed this fine print on their gift certificate order page:

* Note: For security purposes, e-mail gift cards and printable gift cards may go under a 24-hour review process while payment information is verified.

I don’t know what to do, at this point. Have any of you been in this situation, trying to make a purchase using multiple credit cards? Should I just bite the bullet and purchase these Amazon.com gift certificates and wait 24 hours? Are there any better solutions? Please, help me out, leave me a comment with your best suggestions.

In the bad old days of Twitter only allowing HTTP Basic authentication, in order for third-party applications to access your Twitter account, you had to hand out your username and password. While this “worked” it wasn’t ideal. Why? Well, any time you changed your password — either to prevent an application from continuing to have access to your account, or out of good “security hygiene” practices of regularly changing your password — you had to go back to every application that you wanted to continue to work on your behalf. If you use more than a few applications, this quickly became a tedious process as you can imagine. Again, this was less than ideal.

Eventually, Twitter rolls out OAuth, an open implementation of a cross-service authorization scheme. Each application now requests authorization to act on a user’s behalf, and such access is now manageable per application rather than an all-or-nothing as it were with HTTP Basic auth. This is a huge win as this decouples the user’s Twitter credentials from a third-party application’s privileges to act on behalf of that user. You can now change your Twitter password to maintain good security hygiene without the inconvenience of having to update every third-party application with your new password. You can now revoke access from a single application without having to, again, update every other third-party application with your new password.

Terence, sadly, mistakes this radical improvement as a defect and a security flaw. What’s truly sad is that Terence even knows about the Twitter OAuth Connections page where one can de-authorize individual applications, yet he still missed the whole point and benefit of OAuth in the first place. How?

He suggests that “Changing a password should – in the minds of most people – mean that you need to re-enter your password even if you have previously authenticated yourself.” Is this true? Is this what “most people” (that means YOU) think? Please, let me know in the comments below if this is truly the case when you authorize an application using Twitter’s OAuth. If this is true, then the problem still isn’t what Terence suggests. It’s a matter of user education. Read this entry again and absorb the goodness that OAuth provides over HTTP Basic auth. for third-party applications. Do not fall victim to Terence’s FUD.

I know we all love this time of year with kids dressing up in cute costumes and the mounds of candy and parties, but with the current H1N1 swine flu pandemic, have we stopped to think about what we’re really doing?

Picture this: people who may be carrying the swine flu virus are handling candy that is being given out to children, who will then handle it and eat it, possibly putting their hands in their mouths in the process.

See the problem, yet?

Happy Halloween!

But, that’s not the point … what I really want to write about is some introspecting I did. I’ve known that I’m an extrovert, but oddly I don’t tend to enjoy myself amongst a large number of people. I usually end up spending time with the same few people once I identify who I want to spend time with.

A while ago, I stumbled upon the definition of dissocial personality disorder which fits me to a tee. I’m finding that the Paxil and Wellbutrin combo are helping a lot with this, but it hasn’t totally eliminated the feelings of “gee, I wish there weren’t so many people here.”

I realize that the definition of extrovert doesn’t necessarily speak to the number of people one interacts with but merely the fact that external interaction brings positive effect, and it’s clearly possible to be a dissocial extrovert because I am one, but it also means finding people that I enjoy spending time with is difficult.

I just wanted to get these thoughts down in writing before they escaped my head, so I can reflect on them later, and perhaps some of you have insights to share that I may not have thought of, yet. See, there I go again, that extroverted nature which thinks better by expressing than reflecting, looking for external inputs …

Years ago, before everyone had Caller ID, when you received a phone call, you didn’t know was on the other end. To err on the side of caution, we answered our phones more formally — the caller could be a parent, an employer, etc. But, now with everyone having Caller ID, we now know who the caller is before we answer and that familiarity results in the casual response when we answer.

Have you noticed this trend? Think there’s another explanation? Just curious …

Tags: telephone, etiquette, Caller ID

1. Download teacup for MacOS X

The teacup binary can be downloaded from this location:

• http://teapot.activestate.com/entity/name/teacup/index

Here is a direct link to the latest teacup binary. The file is named file.exe — simply rename that to teacup and put it in /usr/local/bin or another convenient place in your $PATH.

2. Create the installation repository

You will need an installation repository where teacup can store its data locally. The default location is /Library/Tcl/teapot and you can create it like this:

$ sudo teacup create
Repository @ /Library/Tcl/teapot
    Created

3. Patch MacPorts tclsh to handle teapot repositories

$ sudo teacup setup /opt/local/bin/tclsh
Looking at tcl shell /opt/local/bin/tclsh ...
  Already able to handle Tcl Modules.
  Already has the platform packages.
  Patching: Adding code to handle teapot repositories ...
Done

4. Link teacup to MacPorts tclsh

$ sudo teacup link make /Library/Tcl/teapot /opt/local/bin/tclsh
Ok

That’s it! You’re done. You should now be able to list available packages within TEA using teacup list and install them using sudo teacup install "packagename".

I’ve tested this on MacOS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard with Tcl 8.5.7 from MacPorts.

Tags: HOWTO, Tcl, ActiveState, TEA, teacup

True friends are there to help you celebrate your success, not complain that you have it and they don’t.

Tags: friendship, success, quote

Lots of people have cast aspersions on D. J. Bernstein and his software, usually with emotional and irrational claims. Of course, most of these people can’t even read code well enough to understand what it does or how it does it. However, when you encounter the opinions of actual programmers, we all tend to share a similar but different opinion.

Today, Aaron Swartz put this into words better than I could: D. J. Bernstein is the greatest programmer in the history of the world. The money quote:

[...] djb’s programs do not work like most programs, for the simple reason that the way most programs work is wrong.

Amen.

Tags: D. J. Bernstein (djb), djbdns, qmail, Aaron Swartz

My friend Keith has a Troy-Bilt TB70SS weed whacker that stopped working the other day. Not being one to pass on a good opportunity to do a DIY repair, I took it apart and discovered that the piston arm had broken and the reed spring had gotten mangled.

The best source for parts that I’ve found is, surprisingly, the Home Depot Power Equipment Parts site. They have the exploded parts view in PDF form, which makes ordering really simple.

I wonder if there’s pictures or videos online showing folks how to take apart and re-assemble these things — it’s really pretty simple and can be a lot of fun to repair your own things.

Tags: Troy-Bilt TB70SS, DIY, repair, Home Depot Power Equipment Parts

Many people have suggested the upgrade was smooth and painless for them, and I totally believe this to be the case for probably 98% of Mac users, but I’m a developer and have installed lots of third-party (non-Apple) applications. I was completely expecting a bit of work to get my system running normally again, but my first symptom that something was wrong totally puzzled me: the system would stop performing I/O to disk, causing every process to spin the shiny hypnodisk at me. Basically, I could boot the system, and after about 3 minutes, everything would hang. So, keep this in mind as I describe all the things I fixed, because getting through each step involved several reboots just to make the necessary changes.

Here’s the list of problems I encountered and fixed:

Checkpoint SecureClient VPN

This complained at boot-up that the SecureClient service wasn’t started. A known work-around is to binary edit two files, StartupItemsMgr and SecureClientStarter and replace the string “kextload -s” with “kextload -r“. This worked for me.

MacPorts

The old MacPorts compiled against dependencies that are no longer available on Snow Leopard, including MacPorts.dylib itself. Luckily, I just grabbed the latest MacPorts installer .dmg for Snow Leopard which enabled me to selfupdate and upgrade outdated and get things working again.

Soundflower

Periodically, a dialog box complaining about Soundflower.kext popped up:

I had Soundflower 1.4.3 installed, which was the most recent release before Snow Leopard was released. Now, Soundflower 1.5.1 is available, so I upgraded to it. This appears to be sufficient to get it working again, too.

Oh, the agony …

At this point, my system appeared to be stable enough to use — no spurious errors being logged to /var/log/system.log and no more annoying hangs. I’m sure I’ll discover a few more annoyances next week when I start dealing with work stuff again, but for now I can at least use the machine again.

Was the upgrade worth it? I guess I’ll find out.

Tags: Apple, MacOS X, Snow Leopard