I realized I was using an old email address for my Apple account. Besides some bizarre rules which make it hard to juggle active and backup emails, they send broken confirmation emails.

Here’s what I read:

Just click the link below to verify, sign in using your Apple ID and password, then follow the prompts.

Verify Now >

Yes. That’s the link. They oh so helpfully took the HTML part of the email:

Just click the link below to verify, sign =
in using your Apple ID and password, then follow the prompts. <br><br><a hr=
ef=3D"https://id.apple.com/..." cla=
ss=3D"aapl-link" style=3D"color:#0088cc">Verify Now ></a>

And converted it to text for me. Thanks! The ... part of that, btw, is about 400 chars of base64 encoded something. I approve, except unquoting and line folding it by hand is quite the chore. The strangest part is I have three slightly different emails from Apple, regarding my primary email, my backup email, and my security questions. Some of them have the above link, but omit other links.

I’m going to start posting examples of broken emails that companies send me. It’s 2012. What are you using to send this crap? I plan to exclude spam, which is almost always broken in some way (perhaps on purpose, the theory being that spam is designed to target the people who don’t filter it), but large companies which should know better.

Amazon can’t pick a charset in their order emails. I bought an MP3 album by The Crüxshadows (let’s not discuss that right now, or ever). Here’s part of the email:

------=_Part_10851441_1164149591.1346373530449
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
...
<meta http-equiv=3D"Content-Type" content=3D"text/html; charset=3Diso-8859-1">
...
The Cr=C3=BCxshadows

Yes, it’s quoted printable and it is utf-8. So why is there a meta tag saying it’s latin-1? End result? This shit: The Crüxshadows

In ruby, the new cool thing to do when interfacing with a C library is to use FFI. The same is true with luajit as well. Instead of writing a bunch of C code, you just declare the existing C functions you want to use, and the runtime mostly handles things for you. There’s still a bit of a mismatch, because you’re not writing in C, so I generally stack a couple layers of abstraction over the top.

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I watched three movies recently.

The Dark Knight Rises

Hero defeats Bad Guy. What’s next? Hero fights Son of Bad Guy. Really? Hey, remember when the Joker made the people of Gotham participate in a social experiment game? That was really edgy, let’s do that again! Probably wouldn’t have been so bad with more Batman being cool and less Bruce Wayne moping about.

The Bourne Legacy

Let’s have an operative of a secret government project befriend a lady in distress and run away with her. What really disappoints here is that you only get half a movie. The other half of the time we’re watching news footage about the events of The Bourne Supremacy. Do I care about Pamela Landy climbing into a car? Not in this movie. Then we cut to Edward Norton shuffling some files around on a table to remind us, hey, look how many different secret programs there. See how imaginative we are.

Underworld Awakening

Especially after the third Underworld movie, I think expectations were set pretty low, but as far as sequels go, this is actually pretty good. It introduces new good guys and new bad guys, and they aren’t generic clones of the previous generation. It’s vampires versus werewolves, for sure, and of course the ultimate bad guy is even more ultimate, but now the humans are somewhat involved and they updated the look to a more futuristic urban environment. Also, the occasional daytime scene. More unique ideas here than in the above two movies combined.

First off, don’t use VirtualBox. It’s terrible for running OpenBSD. I’ve had zero problems with VMWare Player. I installed using an OS type of FreeBSD, though it doesn’t seem to matter much. (This post was written against Player 4. Player 5 may sort out the networking issues. It provides a few more options in the machine configurator.)

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Newest laptop has some USB 3 ports, and one USB 2, which I’m thankful still exists. USB 3 isn’t quite fully backwards compatible. Sure, all the old USB devices work when plugged into a working USB 3 port, but the key point there is it has to be a working USB 3 port.

USB 3 controllers (xhci) differ from USB 2 controllers (ehci) from the host computer’s viewpoint. Drivers for ehci won’t work with xhci. At all. No driver, no port, no back compat.

Where does one find ehci drivers, but no xhci drivers? In my BIOS. External keyboard doesn’t work at the truecrypt boot prompt unless it’s plugged into a USB 2 port. In VMWare. USB passthru only works for devices plugged into the USB 2 port. Anything plugged into the USB 3 ports is simply invisible to VMWare, at least until they update their own USB driver to handle xhci as well. (Update: The recently released Workstation 9 and Player 5 are supposed to support USB 3. I haven’t upgraded yet.) In OpenBSD or any other operating system not yet updated to include xhci.

The situation is somewhat analogous to gigabit ethernet. It, too, had back compat with fast ethernet, in that you could plug it into a fast ethernet switch and everything worked. But you can’t generally use whatever fast ethernet driver you had with a new gigabit adapter. It’s a little simpler with USB, since the controller interface is fixed and doesn’t vary by manufacturer.

There are some completely logical reasons why xhci controllers shouldn’t provide ehci interfaces, but at least for now, it’s important that hardware continue to include some USB 2 ports. Something to consider when looking at hardware that includes only USB 3 ports, like the newest Macbook Air. My BIOS appears to have an option to turn the USB 3 port into a USB 2 port, which may be an effective workaround, but then I’d lose the ability to get super speeds from USB 3 devices. Untested.

Less than a week after my T430s arrives, Lenovo finally announces real availability of the X1 Carbon that I gave up waiting for. And then they announce the T430u as well, which seems a lot like the T430s, but is even slimmer. One review of the X1 claimed it had an IPS screen, which would have been a major regret for me, but others claim the screen angles are only ok. I wonder which is true. I did look a little closer at the performance numbers, and the 17W i5 appears to struggle against the 35W version. More so on the graphics side it appears. There’s just not enough headroom to allow the CPU to turbo up to max speeds consistently. Both models come with buttonless clickpads. Not sure I’m ready to make that leap.

Regrets? Not really. I’m not sure what advantage the T430u offers. It still weighs the same four pounds, and the s model is plenty slim for me. Reduced functionality for no weight reduction. The X1 is harder to disregard. I’m going to tell myself I wouldn’t have been happy with the performance of a low voltage CPU.

The newest addition to my stable of laptops, the Thinkpad T430s. I replaced the factory hard drive with a Samsung 830 SSD, 256GB, so I’ll review that too.

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After deciding a 3G tethered internet connection wasn’t enough (though honestly it kind of was, I just miss Amazon videos), I signed up for Comcast xfinity cable internet service. (Sidenote: I like the name xfinity. It’s a little cool, not trying too hard, suggests the future is now. That kind of thing.) I bought my own modem (uBee 3513) to avoid the bonus rental charge. Waited for my self install kit to arrive. Open it up to discover it’s... 3 feet of coax cable. Thanks. I could have gotten the ball rolling days ago if I knew that’s all you were shipping me.

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