Software development estimates

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How do you estimate development tasks? For most this is usually a process of guessing. Sometimes the guesses are accurate and many times they are not. One person I highly respect in the software development field is Joel Spolsky. He wrote an article explaining the process of doing evidence based estimates. This is very similar to one of the new features in a product his company makes called fogbugz (which I have not used). A bug tracking system does seem like an obvious place for this type of functionality to live. Especially since it should be one of the core tools used as part of your software development process. The idea of doing estimates this way is interesting though. It got me thinking, why don’t more estimates get calculated this way? I hope to be using a system similar to this in the future myself.

Painful lesson with PHPUnit, IPv6, and Vista

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For some reason Windows Vista enables IPv6 by default. Why? I wasn’t aware of this so I ended up troubleshooting a non-problem with PHPUnit. I have unit tests that connect to the web server to test a web service. The URL my tests were using was “localhost”. Because vista was resolving localhost to ::1 the tests couldn’t make a socket connection.

All I had to do to fix the problem was disable IPv6 and comment out the localhost ::1 line in my hosts file. This took a significant amount of troubleshooting to figure out though. I thought there was some type of problem with PHPUnit or php itself. Luckily I was finally able to solve the problem.

It seems like a really bad idea for Microsoft to enable IPv6 by default and additionally put it higher in the resolution order than IPv4 addresses. Based on the number of active IPv6 networks this can’t be a good default decision. Supporting IPv6 is a good idea, but it shouldn’t be the default method of resolving addresses. Windows should have knowledge that you are connected to an IPv4 network and disable or lower the priority of IPv6 accordingly.

Why no Cisco VPN for 64 bit Windows Vista?

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I decided to take the plunge to try out Vista. Because the system I’m using has 4GB of memory I also decided to use the 64 bit version to take full advantage of the hardware I’m using. Everything has worked pretty well so far. The main problem I’ve ran into is the lack of a Cisco VPN client for the 64 bit version of Windows Vista and the 32 bit version won’t even install. This is unfortunate that a huge company making billions of dollars can’t dedicate resources to let their existing customers use an updated operating system. This is especially true when it is likely the majority of customers who use this type of VPN system have service contracts with them. Just goes to show that commercial software doesn’t really mean better support.

The closest I came to any type of solution was by following the discussion at Bill Evjen’s Blog. Even after tinkering though the best pseudo solution I came up with was running XP inside of a VM. It isn’t really a solution, but it gets me by for the few things I absolutely need the VPN for. Hopefully these types of issues will get resolved over time. Unfortunately, I’m pretty certain this isn’t the last issue I’ll run into with 64 bit Vista.

Copyright is out of control

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We definitaly have
a problem with the current state copyright laws in the US. Yearly liability for the professor at the U of U that wrote the article is estimated at $4.5B. Thats B for Billion. I don’t think very many people can afford that.

This article does a great job of pointing out how pervasive the problems an average person encounters every day are. People violate copyright in one way or another all the time and don’t even realize it. How should we fix it?

Making Hamachi play nice with older games

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Last week I was trying to play one of my favorite games Starcraft over Hamachi with some friends. Starcraft is not the newest game, so unlike many newer games it doesn’t give you the option to pick your network interface.

While we were logged into our Hamachi network we were able to ping each other and followed all the troubleshooting instructions given by the Hamachi site. This was despite the fact that starcraft is one of the games that is supposed to “just work” with Hamachi. None of us were able to see games that anyone else created. After tinkering around with this for probably about a half-hour my friend orb360 found a solution. The steps to get Starcraft and probably many other older applications working with Hamachi are below. These instructions are Windows specific. Although the method should probably work on other platforms.

The main tip is to make Hamachi the first network interface that Windows tries to use. On other platformsthe goal would be the same. Only the way you accomplish it would be different.

1. Go into control panel then click on “network connections”

2. Click the “advanced” link in the menu

3. Click “advanced settings”

4. Change the order so it looks something like this


hamachi setup

5. Reboot Windows

After taking these steps Hamachi and Starcraft played nice together.

I want to start riding my bike to work someday

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I am a person who loves to ride bikes. Road bikes, Mountain bikes, pretty much any kind of bike is something I like to ride. I don’t ride nearly often enough though. Riding my bike to work is something I’ve thought about several times but never done it because I’ve had various lame excuses. Today I read an article about biking to work. I want to make this a goal of mine once I get rid of the lame excuses. Hopefully this day will come soon since it would be a great way to ride more often and get healthier.

Skype login problems

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I have been using skype as my sole landline-type telephone service for a couple months now. I have been highly impressed overall. It has been unfortunate to be having problems today. It seems like the worst part about it is that everything except for login/authentication is working properly. From the users perspective though if login doesn’t work nothing works. Hopefully they’ll be able to get this fixed soon since so many people including myself rely on skype every day.

what version of Linux are you running?

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I’m always learning new neat commands on Linux.

Sometimes I’ve been logged into a machine and wondered what distro and/or version of a distro is running.

The command I found that does the trick is

lsb_release -a

This should work on most recent distros such as ubuntu, redhat, or suse.

Vonage doesn’t understand customer service

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Today I had one of the top 5 worst customer service experiences I’ve ever had with any company (Vonage). I had a good experience with them up until this experience which makes this even more unfortunate. One of the most customer unfriendly practices of many new businesses is to make signing up for services extremely easy but canceling extremely difficult. Vonage is definitely in this group.

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