Monthly Archives: August 2011

Refreshing Tech Support

It’s happened again … I had some really GOOD tech support.

The phone adapter for our VOIPo service died … no dial tone, no connection, nothing.

Oddly enough, I could log in to the devices web interface … so I contacted VOIPo customer support.  After a few email exchanges, it was determined that they would need to do some interactive diagnostics to determine what was going wrong.

I called them and talked to James … he had me test a few things … and then said something truly amazing … “Could you put the VOIP adapter in to your routers DMZ so I could take a look at it directly?”.

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Modifying the Environment

Here’s a problem I just encountered … and, unfortunately, haven’t figured out a solution.

A customer is trying to run my Eclipse RCP application … but it’s crashing because it can’t find ‘com.mercury.javashared.agentloader.AgentBootstrap’ class (which is apparently part of the HP QuickTest Professional product).

Turns out they had the ‘JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS’ environment variable set to ‘-agentlib:jvmhook’ at the system level (set in the Windows control panel).

This was causing the boot loader to try and load the class that couldn’t be found.

A temporary work around is to set the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS environment variable to blank every time they launch the application … but that’s a major pain in the long term.

I’d like to fix this by finding a way to override the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS environment variable in the eclipse.ini file, or possibly providing a different ‘-agentlib’ parameter option that will supersede the existing value.

I guess I could provide a batch file that clears the environment variable before invoking the application … but that’s kind of kludgy (IMO).

Of course, any product that sets a global environment variable such as this is (at least in my opinion) seriously broken.  The only global environment variable that any application should set (or even be allowed to set) is maybe the path.

Android and sendmail

And you probably read in my last post … I had a problem getting mail setup my new Android phone.

I could receive mail fine … but it failed (with a totally useless message) whenever I tried to send mail.  I was sure I had the settings right (userid, password, ssl, etc).

I have my mail server configured to do authenticated sending (as all good mail server admin’s should) … but for some reason the authentication wasn’t working correctly.

I tried various setting combinations to see what might be the problem … I verified the settings with my iPhone and Thunderbird.  Everything matched up.

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And Now I’m a Droid

Android … to be specific.

I decided it was time to upgrade my phone … and switched to an Android based phone.  I got a Motorola ATRIX.

I was split between the ATRIX and the HTC Inspire … the Inspire has better battery life and a bigger screen, but the ATRIX has expandable memory and a front facing camera.

The primary reason for switching was so I could do mobile app development … I’ve got a few ideas for apps in my head and didn’t want to invest in a Mac just so I could develop them.  Android apps are developed in Java and the SDK is free (and Eclipse based).

It’s going to take a bit of time to get used to the new user interface … but so far I’m liking it a lot.

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