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Justice League Miniseries You (Sadly) Can't Miss @ June 16, 2011, 8:34 p.m.
Filed under: Comedy  Frustration 
Literally. You can't miss it. I was reading Flashpoint: Deadman and the Flying Graysons and there it was. About half way through the book was a cover for Advertising Section: Justice League #1 of 4. Are you ready for a run down? There are spoilers ahead.

The cover has three big names of the DCU: Hal Jordan (Green Lantern), Batman and Superman above what I assumed was three fit fast food employees. The three guys have the name of a healthier than normal fast food establishment on their chest and one of them is doing a double fist pump. He is really excited.

As it turns out those guys are not fast good employees but American football players. They make a statement about the JL being in town as they will be the half time show. Yeah, some of the most powerful folks in the world will be doing a football halftime show. These football players are in Hawaii for some reason and decide to sneak out of work (playing football) to get some food. But where are they to go? They decide to go to the place that is on their t-shirts. Good thing they were wearing them.

As they chew their food and walk on a beach they notice Aquaman being handled by two frogment. Two of the football players want to help poor Aquaman while the third wants to eat his sandwich. The two guys (and eventually the third) go after the frogmen. Green Lantern gets involved and things settle down -- with the exception of Blank Manta stealing a sandwich sort of like the Hamburglar

The more superheros show up. I think Superman goes after Blank Manta and his sandwich while the Flash runs by for no reason at all. Wonder Woman shows up too to tie up the frogmen with her lasso ... which seems like a waste. Aquaman confides in Batman that he, King of Atlantis, shouldn't go swimming alone. Cue a football player and Green Lantern high five and a joke about making it back to work and we have the end of the issue. I guess #2 of 4 will start of answering the cliffhanger: Did the football players eat their food?

Want some pictures? Check out Bleeding Cool's take.
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The Sad State of American Brick and Mortar @ June 13, 2011, 7:25 p.m.
Filed under: Personal  Tech  Frustration 
Over the last year I've been keeping a close eye on Android tablets. It hasn't been until this latest round of releases that I really got interested in making a purchase. It took Monk pointing me at the Asus eee Transformer to finally make a decision. After using Google to see if anyone in the area had stock and finding that no one had any listed I decided to wait for a little bit. After a short bit I was told that one of the local HH Greg's was getting a shipment in on a Monday.

"Great!", I thought, "I can run to the store this coming Monday and buy one!". But then something hit me, I should probably call and make sure that they will have a unit available. I gave the store a ring and to my surprise I was told they had two units in stock right then. One unit was the floor model, the other was a unopened unit. I rushed to my car and got over to the store as fast as I could during my lunch break. I went through the whole purchase process and was ready to get my tablet ... and that is where the disappointment began.

The manager couldn't find a new unit. He said that a shipment was coming Monday if I could wait they would give me a call when it came in. I figured that wasn't a bad wait. I had already paid for it and it was better than calling every hour Monday to try to get one of the units before other geeks did. The guy who did the sale was very apologetic about the mix up saying that he really should have checked the back first. I understood how it happened, but it was still frustrating! The guy I spoke to on the phone said there were two and did not physically check. The guy who then helped me when I walked in talked to the first guy, was told there were two and took him at his word. In any case, that was Friday and I spent the weekend looking forward to getting my new tablet Monday.

Monday came and by noon I was getting antsy. I decided to give the store a call and check up. A guy picked up and said he would look up the purchase. I'm not sure if he thought he put me on hold or not but I then heard him say something similar to the following to another employee some distance away: "Hey! I don't know how to do this. What am I supposed to hit?" I kind of chuckled a bit at that being that one of HH Gregg's selling points as a company is that they have 'the best trained associates in the business'. He then told me the truck didn't come in yet and try again later. I thought "OK, I jumped the gun. I'll wait for their call."

By 8pm I was getting antsy again. The store closes at 9pm and here I was without the tablet I purchased. I decided to give a second call. This time a young lady said that the tablet did not show up on the truck. They were expecting the tablets but they did not come. She offered to transfer me to the manager but I instead asked when the next shipment was to arrive. She said that it would be Thursday. I decided to wait till then.

Thursday came and while I was at work I decided to give a call to HH Gregg. Surely they got the unit that I purchased in store almost a week prior in by now! I gave the store a call and was told it still didn't show up. It was time for me to call the main corporate customer service line.

I spoke with a lady who did truly try to help resolve the problem. She looked in the warehouses in the area and other stores and found none in stock. It also didn't help that she was having 'computer issues' which didn't let her see all of the information. At the end of the call the best she was able to say was that by Monday the store should have some units since the past two shipments none came.

It's Monday! At noon I gave a call to the local store and was given the same response I'd been accustomed to: 'Sorry, it didn't come in on this shipment'. I called up the main customer service line of HH Gregg again. After about 5 minutes on hold a friendly guy did his best to help. He also searched warehouses and nearby stores to see if shipment had come through. He was able to find one unit but there was two issues: First, the unit was an open box item. Second, the unit was roughly 30 minutes away. As I thought about it the guy said he would give me till Wednesday to decide if I wanted that unit or if I wanted to wait for a sealed unit. I really do appreciate what he did to help but while sitting at my desk I started to think about it.

"Right now, the best they can do is offer me an open box tablet at full price after I make a 30 minute drive to pick it up myself. That is like buying an openbox item online but then deciding to drive to a UPS depot to pick up a shipment. Heck, I could have gotten the unit already if I would have ordered it online!"

Monday evening I started to look online to see if any online or local stores had any tablets in stock. If I could find one nearby I would go get it ASAP and tell HH Gregg to refund my money. Google Shopper told me that 2 stores locally had stock! Excellent! The first was Toys R Us so I decided to give them a call to confirm.

I went through the silly automated system to get to a person so they could answer my question. I told the lady who picked up I wanted to check to see if they had a tablet in stock. She asked me to hold and I waited for about a minute and a half to two minutes. I was then transfered to guy who asked why I was calling. I explained that I wanted to check to see if they had a tablet in stock. He asked me to hold and I waited another minute and a half to two minutes. A different lady picked up and the same thing happened again. And then it happened one last time where the lady said she was trying to get 'electronics' to pick up. This time when she transfered me I made it to electronics. Mind you this was roughly 6-8 minutes into a call to check if they had one item in stock. The guy in electronics listened and said he didn't think they had it in stock but would go check. I spent three minutes or so on hold before I was accidentally hung up on. At this point I decided to not call back as I didn't want to give them my money. What if the product was defective? If they could not figure out how to use phones how can they handle a return? I decided to try the other store which Google shopper said had the product: Walmart.

I called up the Walmart which Google said had stock and was greeted right away by a friendly lady. I told her why I was calling and she transfered me to electronics. Which rang about 25 times and then transfered me back to her. I told her again why I was calling and she transfered me back to electronics where it rang another 25 times before transferring back. This time when the lady picked up again she said (with some frustration) please hold. I then spent 3 minutes with nothing but dead air. I hung up and called back and told her I had just called and we were disconnected. She seemed frustrated (not at me) and transfered me again to electronics. This time someone picked up and they said that they don't carry such a product.

At this point I gave up. I figure that any American brick and mortar shop will give me the same terrible service. In all honesty none of them are worthy of the sale. I figure I'll think a little bit more on the open box item and then decide as to if I will get a refund and order from an online dealer and know that I'll get a sealed product or go ahead and take the gamble from the retail store. Oh, and if you are traveling from another country in to the US it may be a safer bet to wait till you get home to make electronics purchases ... it would be even more frustrating to not only have to wait for the product you paid for in store but then need to pay international shipping!
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TurboTax Premier 2010 Investments Gotcha @ March 31, 2011, 11 p.m.
Filed under: Personal  Frustration 
I've been trying to get my federal taxes done this past week and hit a snag. This is the first year I needed to do stock related stuff and figured TurboTax would import the data from my financial institution and all would be well but in reality I ended up hitting a bug that confused me for days.

First off, I don't have any weird investments. When I imported the data I noticed that the investments summary numbers were close but didn't fully match the paper work my financial institution sent. It didn't take me long to figure out what the issue was, but getting that change to show up in TurboTax took days. It was related to a wash sale. As it turned out TurboTax was given the right data but didn't actually utilize the fact that one was a wash until I did a work around. Since this may help someone else out there needing to do the same thing let me explain what I did (it may work for you, or it may cause more issues -- be careful -- this is not and should not be taken as tax advise!):

1. Import data from the financial institution
2. Made sure to hit done and finish imports
3. Clicked 'Wages & Income' near the top
4. Clicked 'update' next to 'Stocks, Mutual Funds....'
5. Clicked 'edit' on the first line item that was imported
6. Clicked 'done' or 'save' or whatever the bottom right good-to-go button was

.... and there you go! You got to the part that will ask you questions so you can enter a wash sale. If I didn't follow that pattern it would not utilize the wash information that was imported. Now comes the second bug which continued my trend of confusion. If you start answering the questions it will continue asking you the same questions over, and over, and over, and over again. As it turns out it's because "Importing Transactions May Cause Looping When Entering Wash Sales". In essence you end up answering the question and when it tries to repeat you click the blue 'back' button on the form, click the blue 'continue' button on the previous form and then it will actually save it.


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Hey Mitch, Why?! @ Aug. 11, 2010, 3:38 p.m.
Filed under: Security  Frustration 
This image was sent to me some time ago by a friend. I gimped out some parts to keep this Mitch fella from having a problem. This was found right next to a phone that was open for usage. My biggest question (other than WHY?!?) is could he really not remember usernames and passwords which are variations on his name?!


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Changelog Format @ June 14, 2010, 10:06 p.m.
Filed under: Code  Tech  Frustration  Fedora 
This has been bugging me fore a while. Many projects and products have a changelog. It's great! We can see in a file what changes have been made from release 1 to release 2. Wouldn't it be great to watch an upstream changelog file and use something like Buildbot that would trigger a build on a new release. Then my brain started working. It told me that humans are much better at parsing information provided in different textual formats or markups. Let me explain ....

Let's take a look at the victims project. Even though victims doesn't have a special changelog, we will follow the general scm changelog information. Victims has a changelog like so:

2010-05-20  Steve 'Ashcrow' Milner  

        * setup.py:
        added archivers module to the setup script
        [4cd8f0133b44] [tip]

2010-05-18  Steve 'Ashcrow' Milner  

        * README, src/victims/__init__.py, src/victims/archivers/__init__.py:
        rpm is now listed as a useable archive closing #8
        [e71ad437f9f4]


Based off this information we can easily create a parser! We care about the date, author/email, description and the release (tag). Through the magic of a little bit of regex the following works decent enough ... 

(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})  (.*)  <(.*)>\n\n.*:\n[ ]*(.*)\n[ ]*(.*)


Now we can parse changelogs! Yay! Oh, but then our brain explodes in fear since this is not the only project out there. Surely everyone uses the same format! Let's use nmap as a second project example.

# Nmap Changelog ($Id: CHANGELOG 18109 2010-06-14 18:48:07Z drazen $); -*-text-*-

o [NSE] Added additional vulnerability checks to smb-check-vulns.nse. These checks
  are intrusive and have MS06-025, MS07-029 designations.
  
o [NSE] Added dns-cache-snoop.nse by Eugene Alexeev. This script does
  cache snooping by either sending non-recursive queries or by measuring
  response times.


Well that isn't so bad! With a little regex we could ... wait ... if I have to do this twice with two different projects am I going to need to do this many, many more times before I create Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^Han uber parser smart enough to figure out what accent, dialect, markup, etc.. a changelog may be in? It sure seems that way!

This is when another thought entered by brain (TWO IN ONE DAY!!!): Surely someone else has thought of this. There must be a commonly used format that shares this information for easy inclusion. As it turns out, I could only find one format for this and it doesn't exactly match. The project I'm talking about is doap. While the project does seem interesting, it seems to focus more so on information about a project and it's services and not so much about project releases and changes that have happened between those releases.

Long story long .... am I out of luck? Is there not a format in the works to deal with release information such as this in an open way? If there really isn't, is anyone interested in creating a format? It seems to me that this would be quite useful for package maintainers, system administrators and developers. Hit me up on identi.ca or twitter if you know or a format or want to chat about what one would look like.
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