Dear Canada

Dear Conservative Party,

We want an adult to lead our country, but not a paranoid, neurotic adult who refuses to recognize the consequences of his actions.

Dear National Democratic Party,

Yes, you were the official opposition, but that one ad that claimed you were a better choice because you had less ground to make up made you sound like a petulant seven year old. And desperate. Your whole campaign was immature.

Dear fans of proportional representation,

You should start posting of Facebook about how unfair this election is. Some 60% of the country voted against the Liberal Party. The Liberals should receive only a minority government of 134 seats (they expect 184 as I wrote this), the Conservatives should get 108 seats (instead of 102), the NDP should have 66 (41), the Bloc Quebecois 16 (10), and the Green 11 (1). Additionally, there could be an independent and maybe a Libertarian.

Dear Liberal Party,

Here’s your ball. Run with it until you trip.

SamKnows and the LAN

I have volunteered to take part in the CRTC’s bandwidth-measurement campaign, which follows on the heels of similar projects in the EU and by the American FTC.

It’s a simple process. You sign up and the company running the project, SamKnows, sends you a router which you plug into your home Internet feed. Exactly how it works depends on whether your modem and router are in the same box. Our modem and router (Ethernet and Wi-Fi) are separate devices so the structure of our home local-area network (LAN) looks like this, which I scanned from the installation instructions:

(I apologize for the quality of the image, but I had to scan it since I can’t find that document online.)

The text instructions are even easier to follow than the image and, indeed, I got it up and working in a minute or two. Everything was working as before, almost. One nifty thing about the Whitebox is that its antennas passively pick up Wi-Fi traffic but only record the bandwidth. It’s not actually a wireless router itself. Ethernet connections do pass through it.

As (very) faithful readers may remember, I run a Plex media server on my iMac. I was downstairs and wanted to watch something on the Plex server through the PS3 but the PS3 had lost the media server link. That happens once in a while, but this time the PS3 couldn’t the media server when asked to. That was altogether a more worrisome problem.

I rebooted the server on the iMac. Our iPad could find the Plex server but still the PS3 could not. This called for research.

Aha! The PS3 use DNLA to access media servers. Although SamKnows doesn’t explicitly admit this anywhere, I suspected their Whitebox device does not. And users cannot get into the device to wiggle its settings.

I was looking at the LAN structure when I had an idea. The iMac, on Ethernet, sat behind the Whitebox. If I moved it to our established router, the PS3 could get to Plex without passing through the Whitebox – but that would mean either going on Wi-Fi (I love me my physical connections) or ignoring the Whitebox entirely, which runs counter to the point of having it.

So, I thought, what if I activate the Wi-Fi network on my iMac while maintaining the existing Ethernet connection?

Yeah, that works, as the PS3 can recognize Plex through our router without having any of that traffic pass through the Whitebox. Problem solved.

Bonus thought:

SamKnows and the LAN would be a great name for a band.

Another tale of tech support

I have a client I set up with an e-mail workaround. His domain service provider provided only POP e-mail while he, like most people with multiple devices, needed IMAP (which these days you’d call cloud e-mail).

I kept his work domain but routed everything through Gmail, which had the added benefit of the best spam filters in the world. His e-mail looked like it came from his-domain.ca, and all replies to him went to his-domain.ca, but Gmail was the way station between his-domain.ca and all his desktop and mobile devices.

Everything worked great for years until yesterday. His Mail application (I dislike that name even more than I dislike the application itself) stopped sending and retrieving his e-mail. I thought it was a problem at his domain provider and told him to hold tight while they no doubt fixed it overnight. This morning, things were still awry.

His other devices could access and send mail just fine. He called his domain provider and they recommended he access their IMAP server directly. Then he called me in.

It sounds like it was an authentication issue, right? I could log in to his Gmail page in a browser without a problem, so I knew I had the correct password and account name, but using them in Mail did not help. A quick look at Mail’s Connection Doctor showed that we could not access Gmail to get mail or its SMTP server to send mail.

While waiting for his domain provider to call me to help work this out, I had an idea. The browser passwords are stored separately from the system passwords. What would happen if I deleted all traces of his Google account from Mac OS X?

I opened the Keychain Access utility and looked at all the Google entries. There were four. I forget exactly what they were, but one was an authentication expiry, one was a new deadline, etc. I looked at the entries and nothing seemed particularly troublesome, but since I knew how to log in, deleting them would do no lasting harm.

I tried deleting the youngest first, but the entry would immediately be rebuilt – no good. So I deleted them starting from the oldest. In doing so, I got a system notification that I would have to log in again, which heartened me.

I closed Keychain Access and went back to Mail. I put in the requested password and poof – everything was working perfectly.

I didn’t find this solution when I looked, so I decided to write this to advance such obscure human knowledge through Google searches.