Simon Fell > Its just code > July 2007

Over on Chow, Blue Bottle barista Arno Holschuh explains why pre-ground coffee is the work of the devil!.

Its 2007 after all and not 1987, you'd think by now online companies would have mastered the basics of shipping, but no, I've had a couple of run-ins recently with companies that have shipping forms that have space for a company name in the shipping address, but somehow this information never makes it to the shipping label. Resulting in a week of phone tag with Fedex or UPS trying to give them the missing info so i can finally get my hands on it.

I got fed up waiting for the source for the more current AppExchange Data Loader to wind its way to SourceForge, So i went ahead and fixed up the version that's currently in SourceForge to run on a more current Mac OSX config (mainly remove the expanded swt.jar, replace it and the jni libraries with the current SWT bits, and build it a reasonable info.plist). So, this is a version of the Data Loader that's about 2 revs out of date, it does all the basic stuff, export, insert, update, upsert (but not the new external Id FK resolution, which no one understands anyway, or the DB stuff). Go ahead and download a copy (5.4Mb).

The ADN Wiki has details about upcoming Summer 07 features for developers. There plenty of goodies lined up, improvements in Apex Code, the ability to call out to web services from apex code, the metadata API, a new asynchronous API that'll let you create/update/delete your organizations metadata starting with custom objects and custom fields, with more items coming down the pipeline later. I'll try and write up some more specific stuff in the coming weeks.

I just posted a minor update to Maildrop, this addresses an issue when trying to add a sent email from Mail wouldn't work if the To address only contained an email address, and not a email address and label. Restart Maildrop or pick check for updates from the Help menu to have the new version installed.

What happens when "It just works" is "It just randomly causes network problems"? This sordid tale is largely here to help any other poor soul who runs into this problem. My old, dusty and cranky Linksys WAP11 access point finally died on me today, can't grumble too much, it lasted at least 4 years by my count. So i picked up an Airport Extreme on the basis that it stands the best chance of "it just works" with my home network which is being slowly over run with Apple devices. I ran through the firmware update and configuration fine, and it would work for 5-10 minutes, then things on the wireless network would start failing with problems that were related to DNS lookups, weirdly, from the laptop I could ping random devices including the router, but not the windows box that runs DHCP and DNS. Even stranger i noticed that my desktop would fail in exactly the same way at the same time, I though perhaps that the airport extreme didn't like my Netgear gigabit switch, so I swapped that out for an old hub, but that made no different, reboot the extreme, work for 5-10 minutes, start randomly killing traffic, work for a while, kill some more traffic. After a few hours of carefully looking at all the options in the airport extreme setup, trying different combinations of hub, router and extreme connections, trawling google and the apple support site I was still having the same problem. Finally, largely at random I flipped the "Ethernet WAN Port" setting from "Automatic" to "100Mbs/Full duplex", and fingers crossed, so far this seems to have fixed the problem. Meh, over 3 hours for what should of been a 10 minute job.