Chris Erwin

As a nerd and IT guy for a non-profit full of conservative tech-illiterates (and I mean this in the kindest way possible), I’m always on the lookout for cheap or free gear.  The Allentown and Philly Craigslists are fairly active, but most of the computer equipment is home user stuff.  I’m in the market for racks, switches, patch panels, and used server equipment.

I had heard of Freecycle but had never checked it out. Freecycle aims to connect people who have shit with people who want shit.  Hey, that’s me!  I want shit!  Certainly, this is a noble cause, however the execution is absolutely terrible.  What Freecycle SHOULD be is a Craigslist-like listing of free stuff available throughout a certain geographical area.  The listing should be accessible by anyone from anywhere without the need to register any kind of account.  This is what I was expecting to see.

Instead, what they’ve done is aggregated the titles of a bunch of Yahoo groups.  Just the titles.  You search for ‘groups’ near you and are given a list of Yahoo groups that are near you.  The catch is that you have to register an account with Freecycle to click through to any of the groups.

Fine, I register an account and click through to the Allentown group.  I then click “Join Group” and am presented with a login/create account screen for Yahoo.  WHAT…THE…FUCK.  So now we’re up to two accounts necessary just to read a list of garbage that people are trying to pawn off on others.

Luckily I have a Yahoo account.  Why?  Becuase Yahoo bought Flickr and feels the need to force Flickr users to register a Yahoo account as if we’re even remotely interested in any of Yahoo’s other bullshit services.

So I log in with my Yahoo account and choose my options for email (none you jackasses, I don’t want emails about free garbage every day, I’ll look for what I want through the web interface).

Now that that’s over, I look for closer groups.  Sure enough, there’s an Upper Bucks group.  I try adding it but I’m presented with an error.  Apparently I didn’t fill out the ‘message to group administrator’ field so that the admin can approve me.  What?  You want to give approval to people who are looking for trash?!  Jesus.  So I opt for adding one word,  ‘freecycle’,  to the box, although I was considering entering ‘stop thinking your shitty trashpicking group should require approval you egomaniacal assclown’ instead.  I’m not sure who I was talking to, but they’re an idiot.  Of that I was sure.

So I go to bed thinking about what a shitty failure Freecycle is; the worst possible execution of something that is an extremely simple idea.  Why must I wait a day to trashpick?  Unbelievable.  Morning comes and some time in the night someone deemed me worthy of their refuse club.  Oh joy.  But what’s this?  11 emails from Freecycle, most of which are about people looking for something.  What the shit?  I think back on the night before and realize that when their shitty form threw a shitty error, it reset the radio buttons to “receive all alerts about people’s worthless shit” instead of “no emails, I’ll use a WEB fucking BROWSER YOU BECAUSE IT’S AT LEAST 1998 you ASSHOLES!”

I promptly clicked on the closest Unsubscribe link I could find and assumed it was over.  Nope.  I get a confirmation email from Yahoo.  I reply to that and get TWO farewell emails.  God dammit stop sending me bullshit!

So an hour of my time and 15 useless emails in my Inbox has led me to conclude that Freecycle is bullshit.  It could and should be a website with a list of links to stuff people want to get rid of.  Instead it’s a mailing list aggregator, as if mailing lists are relavant anymore.  I guess it’s back to scouring Craigslist and expanding my daily reading to the Reading, Lancaster, and Poconos Craigs.  Or lists.  Whatever they are.

Are you having problems with the Jostens toolbar not showing up in InDesign CS3?  Were you led here by Google?  Are you not interested in my uninteresting story on how I solved this technological mystery?  Then just issue these commands and move along.

sudo chmod -R a+w "/Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Plug-Ins/Jostens"
sudo find /Users -name "InDesign SavedData" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

If you’re here for the story, read on!

At work the yearbook team is using InDesign CS3 on OS X 10.4 to create the yearbooks this year.  We upgraded them to CS3 over the summer and I didn’t anticipate any problems.  Turns out we did have a problem, and it was a big one.

The printing is done by Jostens, who provided a CD with an InDesign plugin and some support files that are used for their specific layout.  I installed the plugin and opened InDesign to make sure the toolbar showed up.  It did, but unfortunately I tested it as a user with more file permission rights than the students.  I know better, but I’m also lazy, so what can I say?

A few days later the teacher reported the toolbar was not showing up when InDesign was opened.  I checked and sure enough the toolbar was not present when running InDesign as one of my student-level accounts.  To me, this pointed to file permissions issues.

I started by giving all users read, write, and execute permissions for /Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Plug-Ins/Jostens/.  I logged back in under my student account but the toolbar was still not there.  After trying all sorts of other crazy permission changes everywhere I tried another student-level account of mine.  To my surprise, the toolbar appeared when I ran InDesign.  Hmm.

I pondered this for a while, envisioning myself at the critical plot twist of an episode of House, ACSA.  I didn’t have a team to bounce ideas off of and insult, nor did I have a cane or a three-day beard.  I sure had a mystery on my hands though.  What was the difference between these two accounts?  I logged in and out of each one a few times, running InDesign and pondering the results.  When I logged in as cerwin, the toolbar did not appear.  When I logged in as chrise, it did.  Every time.

“…can’t be autoimmune…”

I thought about ordering a CT or treating for sarcoidosis, but then I realized I had four more patients (computers) in the room, all presenting the same symptoms.  I wrote off the first patient as dead (for now) and slid down a seat.  Starting over, I logged in as an administrator and made /Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Plug-Ins/Jostens 777.  Is it a good idea to give normal users write rights to an important folder?  No, but I was in a hurry and figured I could restore that folder any time a user mucked with it.

Logged in as chrise.  The expectation was that the toolbar would show up fine, which it did.  Logged out and in as cerwin.  The expectation this time was that it wouldn’t show up, for no good reason.  Much to my surprise, it did show up.  Hmm.  It’s not Lupus.  But it is a compound problem, combining the permissions on the plugin folder with something else.

I thought a bit more until I realized the problem.  InDesign is caching its toolbar layout in a file in my profile somewhere.  Since cerwin had logged in on computer 1 before the permissions were fixed, the toolbar failed to launch, and InDesign made its layout cache without including that toolbar.  chrise had logged in after the permissions were fixed and thus InDesign’s layout cache in that profile included the Jostens toolbar.

Simple enough.  A few quick rm -r commands and I was back on computer #1 with a clean slate.  I logged in as cerwin and lo and behold, there was the toolbar.  Ok, that’s simple enough, I can just go around and delete everyone’s profile out of /Users, right?  It’s not that easy, since the users might have saved some larger files locally to avoid taking up space on the server.

I poked around /Users a bit until I found the offending file.  I finally found it: “InDesign SavedData”  Nice extension, Adobe.  No matter, as it was time for some bash fu.

sudo find /Users -name “InDesign SavedData” -print0 | xargs -0 rm

This removed the InDesign SavedData file from everyone’s profile and restored their access to the Jostens toolbar.

When I told the teacher in charge of one of the laptop carts at the high school that I’d be taking 3 of his laptops and his access point because “the computers are set to connect to the access point, but they just won’t” he asked if I was going to put them in therapy.  I confirmed that I’d be setting them up in a circle for group therapy so we could work through their aversion to connecting the the WAP.  I was more correct in this than I had first thought.

Turns out there’s an extra check box in Vista’s wireless network profiles that says “Connect even if the network is not broadcasting” and sure enough our WAPs don’t broadcast their SSIDs.  Simple enough fix, and if you’ve found this via googling about why your Vista laptop won’t reconnect to your wireless network, you’re done.  I however have 120 laptops that have this setting.  Hmm.

For a simpler fix we now turn our attention to the Proxim AP-4000M, of which I have 9 to deal with.  Simple enough, but they don’t have the SSID broadcast setting in their web interface.  After about 20 minutes of perusing the manual, I found the telnet commands I needed.  I fired up putty and in no time had all 120 laptops working.  “show wif” lists your wireless profiles.  make note of the numbers and type “set wif # closedsys disable” for each number.  “reboot 0″ or power-cycle the access point.

“But Chris!” you say, “Isn’t broadcasting your SSID a bad idea?”  Well, you see we use WEP encryption with MAC filtering, which is about as secure as a 1-digit bike lock to someone who knows what they’re doing, not to mention the whole system is being replaced by a building-wide Cisco setup soon enough.  Not broadcasting your SSID is security through obscurity.  Besides, how else can you show off your clever network name?  Our home network is currently SPACEBALLS: The Router.

…and to quote Slashdot poster geminidomino, “5.9907 billion people STILL don’t give a fuck.”

The wonderful world of Chris Erwin has just been moved from my GoDaddy hosting account to my new Dreamhost account. Now, I’ve heard some bad things about Dreamhost in the way of downtime, but I’ve heard worse things about GoDaddy in the way of illegitimate domain suspensions with unnecessary reactivation fees, so I figured it was time to move. This is in addition to the fact that their site annoys the crap out of me, and I couldn’t turn down Dreamhost’s discount for goons. I’m in the process of transferring the domain registration now. Downtime isn’t a huge deal, since I have approximately zero readership. As long as it’s up once in a while so I can spew this veritable river of pure, unblemished genius that flows from my mind, through my hands, and into this very database. Nobody may be reading it now, but you just wait until I’m famous.

Just don’t hold your breath.