spugbrap’s blog

News/Info:

My at&t wireless service has been horrible for the past 3 days, and I am not alone. My wife and several friends in my neighborhood (in Bristow, VA) have been having the same issues. We are not able to reliably make or receive calls or text messages. Details on the problems we’ve been having are below in the My Story section.

I finally called 611 for at&t customer service, this evening, and the Customer Service Representative (CSR) told me that this issue is affecting quite a few customers. She rattled off a list of states that were reporting these issues, and although the list may not have included every state in the Northeastern United States, it definitely included most of them. I can say, for sure, that DC, Maryland, and Virginia were on the list, since those are the ones I was listening for.

The CSR found as much information as she could, for me, from her computer and from other reps. As of 5:25pm EDT on 4/13/2008, 3200-something minutes had passed since they first learned of the issue (note: There are 1440 minutes in one day). Although she couldn’t tell me when the problem might be resolved, she said that it’s a “priority” and they’re working on it. For what it’s worth, she told me that our 911 service was still fully functional.

If it’s affecting people in that many different states, I figure that means potentially millions of customers may be without reliable voice and SMS service. The outage does not seem to affect all areas, though, but I know it at least covers about a 5 mile radius around my house. So, the actual number of at&t customers affected may be a lot smaller, if it’s just a bunch of small areas that are experiencing these problems.

My Story:

My cell phone started having issues late Friday night (4/11/2008), but at first I thought it was just my phone acting up. I just upgraded the OS on my AT&T 8525 (HTC Hermes) to Windows Mobile 6 last week, and it’s had a few minor issues every day.So, when a friend of mine IMed me and said they kept getting sent straight to voicemail when calling my mobile number, I figured my phone was just being stupid. So, I tried making an outgoing call, but it just kept saying “Dialing” and could not seem to connect.

I checked my signal strength, and saw that I had only 1 bar. Usually, in my house, I have 3-4 bars and my cell phone works just as well as the landline. So I went outside, to see if my signal would improve. I think it went up to 2 bars or something, and after a couple tries, I was able to call out. But, the call was very broken up and staticky–pretty much useless.

Still thinking it could be my phone’s fault, I went back inside, turned off the phone, and removed the battery and SIM card. I left it that way for a few minutes, since that was one of the troubleshooting steps that a Cingular CSR had be perform when I had some kind of problem last year

After about 5 minutes, I blew the visible dust out of the back of my phone, put it back together, and turned it on. When it was done booting, I still had only 1 signal bar, but I tried to make a call anyways. As expected, it was still not able to connect, and when I told my friend to try calling me again, they said it was still going straight to voicemail.

Oh well, it was late at night, and I needed to go to bed anyways. I didn’t really need to use my phone, so I just hoped it would work better in the morning.

On Saturday, my family and I planned to go out and have a pretty busy day with some friends. I ended up having the kids at home while Lacey went out with her friends Jena and Anne. It was a beautiful day out, so my kids and I went outside and planted some flowers (I tried to call Lacey to find out where, exactly, to plant them, but could not get a call through, so the kids and I just kinda used our best judgement for planting locations.), then took care of some long-overdue outside work (cleaning plant debris off the deck and treehouse).

We were expecting Dallin and Xander to come over eventually, to hang out while the wives were out shopping. I could not seem to get ahold of Dallin, though. When I tried to call him (from my landline), it went straight to voicemail. When I tried to send a text message, the message stayed in the Outbox for longer than usual, then popped up an error saying that it was unable to send.

I retried it a few times, and eventually got it to send, after about 10 minutes or so. I didn’t get a reply, though. About a half hour later, I tried to text him again, but had the same difficulties. A few minutes later, though, I received 2-3 messages from Dallin. Apparently he didn’t receive any of my messages when I sent them, but they had just come through all at once. Along with those messages from Dallin, I also received one from Lacey, which had a timestamp of about 45 minutes before. I tried to reply to Dallin and Lacey, but still could not get messages to go out without several retry attempts.

By this time, my kids were bored out of their minds, and we were all wondering what we should do. I eventually managed to get a voice call to Dallin, and by talking fast and repeating ourselves, we were able to have a short conversation, despite the fact that the call quality was horrible and static dominated the conversation. The gist of the conversation was that they were at their house, and we were going to come over.

So, the kids and I went over to Dallin’s house. We wanted to go out and do something fun, like go to the park and/or Chuck E Cheese’s. The girls had been out for quite a while, though, so we wanted to coordinate with them before going out anywhere. Of course, we were not able to effectively communicate with them. Thankfully, they arrived at Dallin’s house shortly after we did.

We had more trouble communicating with one another that evening (from the park, Burger King in Gainesville, etc.), and still more on Sunday. It’s been quite frustrating for all of us. We take our cell phone service for granted, since it’s usually pretty reliable. Jena and Dallin don’t actually have a landline, anymore, so they are pretty much cut off from the world right now when they’re at home (or anywhere near home).

I noticed that when we took the kids to their swim lessons in Manasass, Sunday evening, our phones worked just fine. We still couldn’t talk/message with Jena and Dallin, though, since they were at home. This is the point when I realized that the service problem seemed to be confined to a 5 mile radius around our neighborhood.

While the kids were swimming, I went ahead and called at&t, which brings me back to where this post started: Widespread outage, no ETA for a fix.

I’ll post updates when I find out anything more. Hopefully this entry is useful for some of those at&t customers that have been having similar frustrations. I was surprised that when I Google searched the web, news, and blogs, I did not find anything about this outage, even though it covers a wide area and has been happening for about 3 days now.

This has been going on for way too long. It definitely started after Google released the new interface for gmail, but it didn’t happen immediately. Now, I’m not blaming Firefox, and I’m not blaming Google. I’m 95% certain that it’s the result of conflicts between one or more of my extensions. I’m always changing up my extensive (hehe) lineup of extensions, and many of those extensions dramatically impact the way the browser works. I love web development extensions, debugging tools, power toys, etc.

Thankfully, I recently read an entry on Mishoo’s blog, which started out describing some [presumably completely unrelated] Firefox performance issues, and ended with a short, positive review of Safari. I decided to give it a try, for curiosity’s sake. I tried Safari when the Windows version was first released, and I remember not being impressed, to say the least. I don’t remember what I didn’t like, but I do remember uninstalling it immediately, so it must have been pretty bad. I don’t use Opera every day, but I do respect it enough to keep it installed and reasonably up-to-date.

Anyways, I tried the newest version of Safari, version 3.0.4, and was pretty impressed. The interface was attractive, simple, and fairly intuitive. Just what one might expect from Apple, I guess. I’m not a big Apple fan; I do not own an iPod or an iPhone, I don’t use iTunes, and have never owned a Mac. But even I know that Apple has a reputation for attractive, simple, and intuitive products.

Using Safari hardly felt different from using Firefox, to me. Almost all I do miss my Firefox extensions, though, and Safari’s Bookmarks menu leaves a lot to be desired. But it is fast, and I almost all the websites I’ve been to have looked and acted just fine. Best of all, it doesn’t crash when I close gmail!

So, where I had been using Firefox for 99% of my personal browsing and Internet Explorer for 1%, I now find myself splitting that 99% pretty equally between Safari and Firefox (and IE for 1%, since some sites just demand it).

One of these days I’ll probably try running Firefox in Safe Mode, and if closing gmail doesn’t crash it, I’ll start disabling one extension after another, until I find the culprit. For now, though, I’m content using Safari part of the time.

As previously mentioned, my HP DeskJet 3820 printer worked pretty well, for a while, but had a few issues over the course of its lifetime:

• It was suicidal! When we first bought it, it kept trying to push itself off the shelf where it sat, whenever we printed anything. The problem was that the clipping mechanism that usually kept the back panel securely attached, was broken.

  I think this may have been why the printer was returned–whoever bought it probably broke that piece, and then returned it, claiming that it was like that already. Why the people at Target would put it back on the shelf in that condition, though, is questionable. Perhaps the person who returned it did not bother to mention that it was broken, so the customer service people at Target did not notice. It was not something obvious–really, it required plugging it in and printing something to see that there was a problem.

  Anyways, we ended up using electrical tape to keep the back panel on, and the printer was happy again. No more jumping off the shelf.

• It had trouble letting go. I don’t think it did this from the start, but at some point it started having some paper feeding trouble. After printing one page, it’s supposed to completely spit out that page, before feeding the next piece of paper in and printing the next page.

  It had some trouble spitting out the printed pages, though. So, if you were printing multiple pages, you had to stand there and grab each page when the printer attempted to spit it out. If you didn’t, it would start feeding the next blank page in, while still hanging on to the just-printed page, and this would cause the just-printed page to pull back inside the printer and get crumpled up.

  When I looked for official HP support on this subject, I found a couple of relevant paper-jam support pages, but these tips did not help me resolve my paper feeding issues. Here are the pages, though, in case they might be useful for solving someone else’s HP DJ 3820 paper feeding problems:

  HP Deskjet Printers - Preventing Paper Jams on the 3800 Series Printer

  HP Deskjet 3800 Series Printers - Fixing Paper Jams

• It recently became paralyzed. A few weeks ago, the printer started going nuts, and this error message popped up on the computer screen:”Mechanism Error. The print cartridge cradle cannot move. Please check under the device’s top cover for a paper jam or other obstruction.”There was no paper jam, and no visible obstruction.

  I tried pushing the various cryptic buttons on the front of the printer, which seemed to all have flashing lights next to them. I tried opening the front cover, pulling out the ink cartridges, putting them back in, unplugging the printer and plugging it in a couple minutes later, and so forth. Nothing fixed the problem.

  At some point, during this process, the cartridge cradle did move across from the right side (where it was supposedly stuck) to the left, and back again, but then it gave me the same error message again.

So, was it time to buy a new printer? Or was it simply a matter of needing to clean/lubricate something inside the printer? I googled for the error message, and found several useful sites. Apparently, this is a very common problem, with HP DeskJet 3820 printers, and many resourceful geeks have successfully repaired their own printers.

I found some forums, where people posted their own questions, answers, and links. Here are a couple of relevant threads:

• HP Deskjet 3820 - fixyourownprinter.com
• The HP 3820 problem - fixyourownprinter.com

From there, I learned that the “mechanism error” is caused by a buildup of ink in a chamber inside the printer. During normal printer operation, the printer is constantly cleaning the print heads, and the excess ink goes into this chamber. The ink dries, there, and over time a large buildup of dried ink forms. Eventually, this mass of dried ink gets in the way of one of the gears, and causes the gear to break. This is when you will most likely start seeing the dreaded “mechanism error”, if you haven’t already.

I don’t remember some of the details, but when I read about all this, I was left wondering whether my gear was already broken, or if I might still be able to prevent it by cleaning out that ink chamber. I decided to take the printer apart and find out. I figured there was no harm in trying, since the printer was already useless to me in the error state that it was in.

Thankfully, several people have written detailed, step-by-step, illustrated guides to repairing an HP 3820 that is having the dreaded “mechanism error”. Here are some of the ones I consulted:

• Oprava HP DeskJet 3820 - this page is from the Czech Republic, and the instructions are not in English. However, there are a lot of useful photographs that help to bridge the language gap.
• Ma 3820 fait du bruit - this set of instructions is in French, and spans 7 pages or so. The photographs are pretty good, but I felt like the words were necessary to complement them. So, I ran each page through Google Translate, an automatic stastical translation service, and was able to understand most of the instructions.
• Google translation of “Ma 3820 fait du bruit” - Google’s automatic translation did help me to understand a lot of these instructions (along with the photographs), but some of the translation was just horrible! For example, throughout the instructions, they kept referring to the “food”–a very important part of the printer, apparently. It took me a while, but eventually I realized it was talking about the power supply. :)
  Note: I just took another look at the translated pages, and they actually look a lot different now than they did a week or two ago. No mention of “food”, anymore, and a lot of the instructions seem a lot more readable. There are still a lot of things that do not make any sense, but it’s pretty cool to see that Google Translate is constantly evolving!

One of those forum threads pointed me to another set of instructions (this time actually in English). While this initially seemed useful, it got a bit too technical for me part-way through–referring to parts I was not familiar with–and the photos were not as good as some of the ones on the Czech and French instruction pages.

By referring to all three of these instruction pages, I was able to take my printer apart. The ink chamber was quite a mess! I took some pictures, to add to the collective body of photos of HP 3820 guts. I’m not sure if these photos will be of any value to anyone (especially since the lighting and focus are not ideal), but here they are:

Photos of my broken HP DeskJet 3820 printer

I tried to clean the ink chamber, but it was just too much to deal with. Plus, my gear was indeed broken (see photos). So, I decided it wasn’t worth dealing with, anymore. I was not motivated enough to try and do a very thorough cleaning, and getting a replacement gear is bit of a hassle, since you have to order them from overseas.

All in all, it was fun reading the fixyourownprinter.com forums, and taking the printer apart, but now the printer is history. Now, I need to decide whether to buy a new printer, or buy more ink for my Dell J740 printer.

I’m a programmer, not a DBA, but I do have to be able to perform basic database configuration and maintenance tasks. One thing that’s come up, a couple times, over the past few years, is a transaction log getting full.

There are a couple of reasons this can happen:

• poorly written queries that run for a very long time
• applications neglecting to end transactions, when they encounter error conditions

Here are a few useful commands I’ve found that deal with transaction logs (Note: I’m using Sybase ASE 12.5.1):

check for long-running transactions (found here):
use master;

SELECT * FROM syslogshold
WHERE dbid = db_id(’MyDbName’);

transaction log space free:
SELECT CONVERT(CHAR,
(lct_admin('logsegment_freepages', 4) -
lct_admin('reserved_for_rollbacks', 4)) * 2)

transaction log space total:
SELECT SUM(size)
FROM master..sysusages
WHERE dbid = db_id('MyDbName')
AND segmap & 4 = 4 -- logsegment

dump the transaction log (clears it out, so things can get moving again!):
***WARNING*** Use this command at your OWN RISK! Please do some additional reading before executing the following statement, so that you fully understand the implications. The transaction log is there for a reason, and, from what I understand, you should not tamper with it unless you know what you’re doing. On the occasions that I’ve used this, it was a last resort. It solved my problems, with no ill effects, but it might not solve yours!

dump tran myDbName with truncate_only;
commit;

For additional information/reference, Sybase’s online books sometimes come in handy. When trying to find out how to dump transaction logs, I referred to their dump transaction page.

Another site I’ve found useful*, on numerous occasions, is Sybase 101. I found a related tip, there, for tips, there, for Dealing With Server Failure, which addresses what to do when your log fills up completely, such that you can’t even restart the server.

*Beware: I just noticed that Sybase 101 has become less useful than it used to be, because useful pages are automatically redirecting to one main start page. If they were just trying to prevent deep linking from the outside world, I could understand this behavior a little more; but it’s even happening when I click other links from their own site! Navigation works fine with javascript disabled, though.

This morning, I didn’t have enough bread to make my usual breakfast: a peanut peanut butter and jelly sandwich made with toast. Plus, I was extraordinarily sleepy.

So, I decided to stop at Caribou on the way to work, to get a mocha latte and a chocolate caramel muffin.

I decided to take a Vivarin instead, and wait until I was closer to work to get food; specifically, at the drive-thru Dunkin Donuts in Manassas Park. As I pulled into the drive-thru, I realized that I can’t buy donuts that way. I wanted two donuts, but I needed to check what kinds they had, and what looked good to me today, which is something I could not do from the drive-thru.

So, I parked and went into the restaurant. After picking out a drink that looked and sounded interesting, and waiting in line for a few minutes, I ordered two donuts. With the drink, the total came to $3.something, so I handed the cashier my check card. She handed it back, and said that they do not accept credit cards.

This boggled my mind, since this is 2006, and even temporary Fireworks stands, off-brand gas stations, and parking garages accept credit cards. I used to always look for the VISA/MC symbols in a store’s door/window, or ask before ordering something, if I wasn’t sure. But the thought never even crossed my mind, since it’s so rare to encounter a place that does not accept credit cards.

Well, I only had $1 in my wallet, and was not about to try to decide which ONE donut to buy. So I walked out, and continued down the road to the Giant Food grocery store. I thought that might actually turn out to be a good thing, since I could get Krispy Kreme donuts from the bakery section, there. I was bummed to find out that this particular Giant bakes their own donuts. I could have bought a pre-packaged box of Krispy Kreme donuts, but I really only wanted to get two donuts, not 6 or 12, so I went ahead and bought two Giant bakery donuts.

The donuts were too sweet, and not as tasty as Krispy Kreme would have been, so I feel like all of that time and effort was kind of wasted. I think Dunkin Donuts would have satisfied me as well, but unfortunately they are still living in the Stone Age or something.

A few minutes ago, I realized that this is not the first time I’ve been disappointed by Dunkin Donuts. A year or so ago, I stopped at the one in Herndon, and even had my kids all psyched up about getting some donnuts. No credit cards. I do not carry cash much, at all, because I prefer to use credit/check cards to keep track of where money goes. So I had to find a different place to get donuts that day as well.

So, I am hereby doing a “lazy boycott” of Dunkin Donuts. Lazy, because I very rarely go out with the intention of buying donuts, and rarely carry [much/any] cash, so I will avoid buying Dunkin Donuts without expending any actual effort. However, if the opportunity ever *does* present itself (cash + donut craving + near a Dunkin Donuts), I will go out of my way to buy some [pre-packaged if necessary] Krispy Kreme donuts somewhere else instead.

**edit**
Oh yeah, in a quick effort to see if this was a company-wide anti-cc policy, I ran across this funny story, in which (among lots of hiliarious stuff) I learned that some Dunkin Donuts stores do accept credit cards. Definitely worth a read!
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card