Droid X Power-Off Issues – Update on the Update

So, it looks like Motorola has finally fixed failed in their purported attempt to fix the ‘independent power on’ problem.

When the OS upgrade came out, I thought it was fixed. So did everyone else. I tried it a couple of times and it worked — when I powered it off, it stayed that way. Then, this week, I started noticing a few hits on the topic here.

I hadn’t been paying much attention, because I’ve been using the phone as an alarm clock (Passing of Time is a much nicer way to wake up, and why don’t alarm clock makers add an mp3 option?), and so rarely turn it off. Last night I did, and five minutes later it came back on. In another month or so I’m elegible for a phone upgrade with Verizon, and I think I might just go with a non-Motorola model.

Microsoft Strikes Again

As I have been forced to admit on a number of occasions, I still have a Win XP machine. It’s a refurbished Dell Optiplex, and I keep it around because there are some things that can only be done on a Win box. This is deliberate. It’s called vendor lock-in, and the civilized world moved past that idea sometime in the last century.

I keep the WinBox religiously updated and patched, and run an active AV program. It has, so far, met my simple needs. Until today.

Last Tuesday was, of course, Patch Tuesday, a day most sysadmins prefer to spend under their beds. As usual, there was a monster download, and as usual, it required a reboot.

Reboot, wait, get a flash of the Win logo and Intel logo and the BIOS instructions, get a flash of the Win XP logo and progress bar. Then all is blackness. Monitor still getting a signal. HDD chattering its little heart out. Nothing on the screen.

Reboot doesn’t help. Power cycle doesn’t help. Reboot with f8 doesn’t help (subliminal flash of the boot choice screen with the choice bar near the bottom, then nothing). [insert several hours of increasingly frustrated efforts]. Nada.

Interestingly, the printer function still works, and I can print from my Linux box to the printer attached to the XP machine. So it has something to do with the display.

So, I broke out a more modern monitor than the one that came with the Optiplex (both are VGA, though). And it works. Why doesn’t the other one? Who knows? If one were given to conspiracy theories, one might think that Microsoft has found a way to trash older setups, so that we will all be forced to move to a new computer with Win 7 (or even Win 8, AKA Vista 2). You know, in their proud “the job isn’t done until Lotus won’t run” tradition.

Either that or they just don’t care.

Two hours out of my life that I won’t soon see again. Thanks, Microsoft. You’re a princ.

Droid X Power-Off Issues – Update on the Update

UPDATE: So, it looks like Motorola has finally fixed failed in their purported attempt to fix the ‘independent power on’ problem. At least, that’s what everybody says. They pushed out the 15MB 4.5.621 update at midnight. I tried it once and it worked.

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: I tried it again, and it didn’t work. Idiots.

Google’s Ad Algorithm

Robert X Cringely has, in the past, written about Google’s search and advertising algorithms. Other search engines, like Bling, are trying to slide into the market by designing better search tools. Cringely says it’s not the search algorithm that’s making Google all its money, it’s the ad-matching algorithm. Google reportedly has a higher click-through rate than other companies because its algorithm does a better job of matching user interests to ad content. Not always.

My Intro-To-MIS class has its own gMail account, and I am always emailing back and forth with them on various class topics. For some reason, the topic mix (which ranges across all dimensions of MIS in business) has caused the Google ad algorithm to decide that the products I’d find most interesting are those produced by….drumroll….SCO

Yes, SCO. That SCO. The essence of all that is evil in the world SCO.* My gMail page is dominated by companies offering SCO products. Well, a company. This, despite the fact that if I were caught in a trap that could only be opened by using a SCO product, my first question would be is gnawing off my foot an alternative? The Google algorithm obviously has a major flaw.

Buy SCO Unix & Unixware 7
SysIntegrators sells & supports all SCO UnixWare 7.1.4 Operating Systems. Learn more.

The other funny thing is that the SCO web page for SysIntegrators, the company placing the ad, was last updated in December of 2009. According to the Groklaw – timeline (thank you PJ), that’s two years after SCO lost their case against IBM and Novell, found out they didn’t own Unix, burned up most of their money in lawyers fees, told the Utah judge they didn’t need to sequester the rest to pay Novell because they weren’t about to go bankrupt or anything — then switched to New Jersey and declared bankruptcy. Evidently, SI is cruising on autopilot, because I doubt that anyone has spent any money on new Unixware licenses since then. As I recall, SCO only earned about $50K in license fees the year they declared bankruptcy. Why SI are continuing to advertise the product line (and pay money to Google) is as much a mystery as the Google ad algorithm.

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*Did you know there was a company in San Francisco who said in their recruiting announcement that if your resume showed you had worked for SCO after the start of the lawsuit, you shouldn’t bother to apply for a job with them.

Droid Power-Off Issues

UPDATE: Looks like it’s fixed still not fixed.

Since the latest OS update (Gingerbread 2.3.3), a number of Motorola Droid X users have reported problems* with powering off their phones. I’m one of them.

The issue is this. You want to turn off your phone, so you hold down the power button, and get the menu (power off, sleep, airplane mode, etc). You press Power Off. The phone says it’s powering down, gives its little death rattle, and dies. Eight and a half minutes later (I timed it), you hear the cheery chord that tells you it’s just powered back up. So far, powering down a second time appears to do the trick.

The problem seems to be in the way it, or some embedded app, handles the Sleep function (evidently your Droid X prefers to die in its sleep). Previously, there were reported problems with Sleep, problems that were intended to be fixed with the new update. However, a well known fact is that every time you touch a line of code to fix a bug you have about a 30% chance of introducing a new one. This, they did.

So far, Motorola seems to be stonewalling the issue. Some people have been given new phones. It didn’t help — it’s a software problem. Some people have been given elaborate instructions on how to clear the cache. Didn’t help — it’s not a configuration function. One report says it only appears in a few phones, and in those phones only because of a certain combination of chips. Motorola buys chips from a variety of manufacturers, and some of them apparently have QC problems. I’m sure the people who are on their third wonky phone won’t agree.

I have an app killer installed on my phone. It’s not set to automatic, so I have to tell it when to shut stuff down, but it will pretty well clear the boards of almost all running apps — for a moment. I’ve tried using it to kill everything prior to poweroff, but it doesn’t always work. There are some apps that just don’t want to die. If I kill all possible apps, go back to the Home Page, count to five, and look at the app killer page again, I see that eight or ten apps have restarted. If I kill all possible apps, then immediately shut down (while still on the app killer page), I can see one or two restarting behind the hazy “Shutting down now” screen. One of them looks like the App app. That’s Motorola’s app that lets you download other apps from the marketplace. It’s one of the many, very many, apps that has the ability to keep the phone from sleeping.

I thought that killing all the apps as part of the shut down process might be a workaround until the new version of the OS comes out next year. Didn’t help. Then I tried putting the phone into Airplane Mode right before shutting down. Worked sometimes, but not always — as I found when I turned off my phone and sat down to write this. Finally, tried combining the two, and that also failed. It may be that there is no workaround, and you have to keep turning the phone off. So far, turning it off twice in a row has always worked.

This is a major issue. If my phone is low on power, I don’t want to have it soaking up power with a reboot. If I am getting on an airplane, I don’t want it coming back on during take-off. If I am going to bed, I don’t want it waking me up three minutes later with a chord from across the room. And if I am leaving it on the table and going into the bedroom, I don’t want it running itself down to zero while I sleep. Motorola should be doing something about this, but they’re not. Why should they? What will I do, go buy a Blackberry?
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*This update introduced a number of bugs, including the phantom update available notification. Whenever I start the phone, it tells me there’s updates available. Most of the time the update manager denies all knowledge. Sometimes there’s an update available, in which case, the phone tells me there’s two updates.

Barcodes

Here is an interesting take on the future impact of barcodes on society. I can already attest that the combination of barcodes, smartphones, and the Internet have had on my family.

Recently, my wife ordered a bunch of stuff, that was delivered in three big boxes by UPS. Unlike most firms, the company she was dealing with didn’t email us that the stuff was on its way, and therefore also didn’t give us a UPS tracking number. Two boxes showed up at our door, on Wednesday, requiring a signature. We knew there had to be another box, but we had no idea of the status. Barcodes to the rescue.

I whipped out my trusty ‘droid, and scanned the tracking number on one of the labels. The scanner app offered to search for that number, and found it on UPS. Following the link showed the shipment, the fact that two boxes had been delivered, and that the third was indeed at the sorting facility, awaiting final transport. It came the next day.

All of this was done without reference to the company, or phone calls and fighting with clueless service desk people. One scan, one search, and we’re done.

Deep Thought vs Moore’s Law

Most people overestimate the short term impact of new technology, and woefully underestimate the long-term impact.

See the full sized version at Virtual Shackles.

Why I’m Staying With Linux — A Valentine’s Day Story

OK, the week after Valentine’s day. A post-Valentineism. Look on this as a sequel to the Christmas Story.

It all started with an update. Linux updates more often than the other OS’s, because bug fixes are released as they are completed. Also Linux updates everything. You don’t have to go check each product to see if there’s an update (or worse, have one pop up when you open your app because need to use it right now!). Every few years, something goes wrong.

As I said in an earlier post, there was an update that broke my system. GRUB went away. Wouldn’t boot. Best I could get was a message from the Intel boot genie that no-one had given it a bootfile name. Turned on one of my backup machines and went onto the Ubuntu forums. I had a useful answer within an hour.

Let me say that again. Within an hour of posting, I had a response from someone at the company that had built my computer. Nobody gave me a runaround. Nobody accused me of piracy. Nobody pointed a finger and said I should talk to some other company. They didn’t laugh when I downloaded the wrong fix (twice). They just provided good, solid help. If it hadn’t been for the timing, my schedule, and slow internet connection, I’d have had it fixed that day.

Linux. Yeah. I’m keeping it.

Bad Boot Blues

So, I come home from my morning class, and my Ubuntu machine says it has an update for me. I install the update, because one must keep up with the security patches, and it asks for a reboot. This is moderately unusual. Unlike Windows or Mac, only about one in five or six Linux patches requires restarting the machine. [begin rant] and why does Mac need so much rebooting? Mac OS X is Unix, and doesn’t need it, unless they are doing something nefarious with iTunes. [end rant]

At any rate, I rebooted. The machine beeped once, flashed the Sys76 logo, and went blank. Required a power-cycle restart. When I booted with F12 I got:

DHCP …with spinner, for a while, then

PXE-E53 No boot filename recieved
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent

Doubleplus ungood.

Now, I have most of my current files backed up, but I don’t have my …bookmarks, wand passwords, Twitter, Skype, Facebook stuff backed. Until this is resolved, I am thrown back on online resources, like gmail, and the school machines, plus any old boxen I can dig out of the closet [See, Mrs, there's a reason to keep all that stuff]. Thank ghu I live most of my life off a USB stick.

Absent expert advice, which I am soliciting on the fora, either my hard drive chose this moment to fail-without-warning, or something in the update overwrote my boot sector.

Watch this space.

UPDATE: 1352/17/02/2011
Looks like it’s a problem with the GRUB bootloader. Easily fixable if I can find my live CD.
LATER UPDATE: This had a happy ending

Cringely on Egypt

I’ve been following the Robert X. Cringely columns since the 1980′s. He’s a well-connected and astute observer of the technical scene. This week he has an interesting take on the use of technology in the Egyptian revolution. He notes that most of the tweeting was about the protesters, not from the protesters. His position is that, like Europe in 1848 (Le Mis‘ anyone?), the regimes in the Middle East are corrupt and sedentary and ripe for revolution, and technology isn’t a major driver in the events.

Europe of the mid-1800′s was frozen in the form defined by the Congress of Vienna of 1815. After the paroxysm of the Napoleonic Wars, the rulers were all for peace and stability – and no-one worried about what the peasants and bourgeoise wanted. Things simmered quietly for over thirty years before exploding. Fast forward to the mid-1900′s and we find the world of the Middle East frozen in the form defined by agreements made after the paroxysms of the two world wars. Regimes were imposed, not elected, and the resulting corruption and peasant discontent may finally have cooked off sixty, not thirty years later. The delay is likely due to the impact of the Cold War.

So, in the Middle East and North Africa today, technology is an enabler and a recorder, but it may not be a driver. Revolutions are happening because the time for revolutions has come. As Heinlein said “when it’s time to railroad, people start railroading.”