UBIkey Neo configuration suggestion

In order to reduce my risk of being phished or otherwise have my account(s) hacked, I decided to get a Yubikey for my personal laptop. We use them at work, work is paranoid, if it’s good enough for them it is good enough for me.

Avoid Paypal

Avoid Paypal

I’ve been using Paypal intermittently for years, but recently encountered a problem so severe that I am now trying to terminate my account completely. The fact that I cannot, and that they cannot tell me why (without contacting “customer service”, as if I expect that to be productive) is one of the reasons why.

What precipitated this was two things. First, I moved my primary bank account from the credit union whose only remaining branch was a 30-minute drive away, to one a short walk from work, and our credit card company “upgraded” (?) us from MasterCard to Visa. Over time I took steps to upgrade all my recurring payments and stored credit cards. Most organizations would let me know if they had been missed, and I’d fix it, and poof, it was done.

Except PayPal.

For months, every attempt to remove the deprecated (now closed) bank account produced a message “Sorry, you can’t remove this bank account because of a pending transaction. Please try again later”. Same for the defunct credit card. This continued for months. I managed to find the place where the primary bank and credit card were configured, I changed those to be the new ones. I found the place where the recurring and preauthorized transactions were listed, and I canceled all of them, and went to the vendors at the other end to update their payment methods to a credit card (happily, I have a leftover credit card from oldest child sent to college, he’s employed, married, and working on a retirement plan, and it is perfect for this – low credit limit, almost never used, this cuts the risk both to me and my credit card company should any of the recurring-payment people be less secure than we might want). So, those two accounts have been deselected from everything, all the recurring payments are shut down – and no change. Still can’t delete the dead accounts.

Note that nowhere in the message from Paypal does it suggest that I can do these other things; I did have one shot at “customer service” and they told me about making sure that they old accounts were not the primary funding source – but that didn’t work.

So, given proven incompetence on the part of Paypal, it seems pretty wise to sever all ties with them, how do I know my money is safe, it was foolish of me to ever give them access to any of my money. But when I hit the “close my account” button, I get:

Before you close your account
Sorry, there’s a problem. If you keep seeing this, please contact customer service.

I’m not entirely sure what to do next. I may talk to my bank; I really don’t like the idea of these guys having access to my money, and I’m virtually certain that in the EULA that I didn’t read I consented to binding abitration bullshit, and that’s just way the hell too much exposure to someone else’s incompetence.

Bad noob experience with AWS

“Your recent Trac powered by Bitnami launch failed. Your requested instance type (m1.small) is not supported in your requested Availability Zone (us-east-1e). Please retry your request by not specifying an Availability Zone or choosing us-east-1b, us-east-1a, us-east-1c.”

And how, pray tell, is “retry my request” accomplished? I probed various links, none of them took me to the place where I launched from, do I need to delete this one first, or is it already dead? If I make the obvious mistake here, will it cost me money? (I don’t think it will, but there’s a gap between “don’t think it will” and “won’t”.)

And why did it let me make this request in the first place, if it was doomed to failure (I think this was all specified on an early page, why was this combo shown to me, never mind that it was chosen as the default)? And why isn’t there a help/feedback button on this page where I need help or want to give feedback?

Fortunately, I have a blog. Always remember, this is not just about public shaming of (other) bozos, this is doing them a favor by pointing out the upside potential in their products. People who care about improving their software will make it as easy as possible to file bugs, and will make it as easy as possible for the filed bugs to be informative to whoever has to deal with them.

IBM SPSS (22), “Serialization scheme was not recognized”

I’m being called in as IT consultant by my wife, who uses SPSS.
Today, mysteriously, it started INTERMITTENTLY failing with messages
like “Serialization scheme was not recognized” and “Could not instantiate a required server object”.

My snap answer (knowing that it has Java in it, and knowing that “serialization” is a magic word) was to suspect some sort of a Java version mismatch — but I didn’t see any evidence of a recent update at all. I go looking online, and all the advice tends to revolve around Java, but none of it has been updated (I looked inside the application’s package contents, nothing looked new there, there was no other new Java on the box). One thing that looked a little peculiar was in ~/Library/Application Support/IBM/SPSS/Statistics/22/Eclipse/configuration/nl/en_US/ . There, org.eclipse.osgi and org.eclipse.update had both been touched TODAY, “right around when the problems started”.

So WTFF Eclipse doing in my wife’s SPSS “Application Support”? She does not use Eclipse.

So I shut down SPSS (took it minutes at 100% CPU, ???) moved the IBM folder over out of the way (made sibling directory “NOT”, moved IBM and the other sibling SPSS folder into NOT) and restarted. This appears to have made things better.

Omnigraffle, not getting product evaluation right.

Update: I went ahead and paid for the update and upgraded to Pro, and it is lovely. But still…

Product annoyance du jour: a product that disables features when you exceed the (wall, not use) time limit on its evaluation, but doesn’t make it clear which features are disabled for this reason.

Annoyance number two: discovering that someone else made EXACTLY the same complaint on the previous release of the product, even down to looking for documentation on and not finding it.

Annoyance number three: after registering for the user forums (passing two spam filters on the way, plus an e-mail ping-back) discovering that I am still not allowed to post “ditto, why didn’t you fix this annoying problem for this release?” without pinging a human for permission to post.

So, having consumed my quota of annoying runarounds, I decided instead to post my complaint here, where I already have permission to post. I’m trying to decide if I’m going to upgrade anyway, or if the previous release is good enough.

Software developers can’t write error messages

This is the sort of stuff that drives me nuts. Some guy (you know it was a guy) saved himself, oh, a minute or two by not writing an error message correctly, and that means that I (another guy) must spend many, many minutes in a debugging McGuffin to try to figure out what’s really going on.

Eclipse Fall Down Go Boom

Blows up before it even runs, looks like the Mercurial plugin having a bad day.

No point bothering to report the bug, it’s a pain in the ass and they never seem to fix them. Just for example, notice how the text in the picture naming the file above looks like it’s selected, so I could copy and paste it when opening an editor to look at the contents of the file? That’s a lie, like a “pull” handle on a “push” door, and it’s long-ago-reported bug, never fixed.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to go try IntelliJ IDEA, and this just might be it.

Someone at Google is flunking security ergonomics

User experience, starting a few weeks ago:

Using the Little Snitch firewall, a program called “ksfetch” wakes up every hour or so, asking for permission to connect to the world.
I check to see that it is Google software update related, decide that is okay, and give it eternal permission.
A little while later, even though it has eternal permission, I am bothered again. And again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
WTF?

What’s happening is that the Google Software updater (“Keystone”, apparently) frequently writes out a new version of ksfetch, and because it is a new application, firewalls like Little Snitch decide that it has not been approved for access. Why this fails security ergonomics is that it is very annoying, and it trains people into the bad habit of automatically approving access by anything named “ksfetch”; if I were writing a virus, I’d be sure to call it “ksfetch”.

You can see people attempting to figure this out on a Google product forum here. There’s one reply from someone who might be with Google, but they’re clearly not getting it.

New laptop glitches

This is more or less a log, maybe I’ll bother Apple about it. The from-backup-disk install (Lion to Lion) was surprisingly good, but there were a few glitches:

• The command line tools for XCode were installed on the old system, but not the new.
• Java was installed/enabled on the old system, but not the new.

This was a surprising pair of omissions, because (on the other hand) all my MacPorts stuff woke up happy, including the auto-started apache daemon for the Trac server I run on my laptop.

Whoops, one more glitch — it did not automatically transfer over my iTunes authorizations, or ask me if I would like that to happen. And for some reason, the store is not answering the request to authorize the new computer. DRM, I hate it. This is why I don’t buy DRM’d music anymore — not sure if iTunes store is or isn’t nowadays, because when I switched to eMusic, it was, and Apple hasn’t fixed the problem yet for the music I bought from them so long ago. (Dear RIAA: I curse you guys everytime this happens. Way to screw over your paying customers; the pirates deliver a superior product.)

Happiest surprise: realizing that with spaces and swipes (no idea how long these have been supported, but only with Lion did I start to pay attention), I could run my “Complete” New Yorker in its own screen-hogging “space”, and just swipe back and forth to it at my convenience. Next thing to try is to see if this same trick works for screen-hogging games like Civ 5; I fear it will not.

iCal in Lion is FUCKED

Consider this a bug report. Workaround is to disable iCal with extreme prejudice, and get BusyCal.