I fought Citrix Provisioning Server all yesterday afternoon. It isn’t working when it should be. I’m beginning to suspect we have issues with the license server. listen

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This is a tentative conclusion thus far, but seems pretty valid: if you have an iPhone 3G and the battery life seems very short (around three to four hours), go into Settings –> General –> Usage and compare the Usage and Standby times. If these are the same, there is something wrong in the phone’s settings.

I remedied this by going Settings –> General –> Reset –> Reset All Settings and blowing away all settings on the phone, followed by a reboot (hold down the Home and Power buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo comes up). After restoring WiFi and push mail accounts power consumption seems to be following a more normal pattern, and the Usage and Standby numbers are diverging.

I think this may have to do with restoring from a first generation iPhone backup during setup, or may be an artifact of the messed up activation process of Launch Day. I don’t have enough phones to experiment with to confirm any of that speculation.

All last week I had issues with my .Mac iDisk synching correctly between my two notebooks and the cloud. So, I spent a good deal of time this weekend futzing with it, trimming down what I was synchronizing to just what I really need, until I managed to make it all work.

Just now I sat down to work on a critically important document that I spent hours on last week and need to finish today. On opening it, I discovered that the version that had been retained in the cloud and then pushed to my notebook when the dust settled this weekend was on from early next week, not Friday. After a momentary panic, I looked on my network share and found a copy, right where I’d stashed it Friday at the end of the day. I was concerned about the flakiness of my iDisk and so took the time to save a copy in a known safe location.

Moral of the story: always be sure to have two or more up-to-date copies of critical work in known good locations. Often a Mac Time Machine backup will deal with this, but not always. Check.

I can’t believe how much better I feel now that it’s much lighter in the morning and everything is green. listen

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I normally love thunderstorms, as long as they aren’t so violent that I start to fear damage to the house. When the latest line of thunderstorms started to roll through last night though even I was a little anxious and a whole lot tired of them. I hope we have regular rain this summer and no drought, but I’m pretty well over the storms for awhile.

Boy Scouts’ actions after tornado called heroic. Damn, I feel bad for these kids. After reading and watching about how they helped each other I am proud and humbled to have been a camp staffer myself. Godspeed Sam Thomsen, Josh Fennen, Aaron Eilerts, and Ben Petrzilka.

All Macs updated to OS 10.5.3. No breakage observed at this point.

When I arrived home tonight I found a small but thick envelope from Eastgate. Inside was a nice note about supporting Tinderbox and my very own Field Notes notebook. Thanks Mark!

Wondering what to do today. I should bike ride before it gets too hot.

Revision3: “Although I can only guess, here’s what I think really happened. Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes – quite without our approval. When we closed off their backdoor access, MediaDefender’s servers freaked out, and went into attack mode – much like how a petulant toddler will throw an epic tantrum if you take away an ill-gotten Oreo.

That tantrum threw upwards of 8,000 SYN packets a second at our servers. And that was enough to bring down both our public facing site, our RSS server, and even our internal corporate email – basically the entire Revision3 business. Smashing the cookie jar, as it were, so that no one else could have any Oreos either. “

We have all this pointless security theater going on these days that does nothing more than harass and inconvenience honest citizens, but we allow and encourage a bunch of thugs to operate this sort of business. Because they claim to be acting in the interest of Big Old Media they’re allowed to commit crimes that otherwise would, and have been prosecuted as terrorism. Meanwhile, a legitimate business is materially damaged for having the temerity to field a business model different from that approved of by the thrones and powers of media publishing.

How fucked up is that?