02 Jun – 04 Jun: Jethro in Wellington.
30 Jun – 01 Jul: Jethro & Lisa in Wellington.
06 Jul – 09 Jul: Jethro & Lisa in Christchurch.

I’ll be aiming to organize some catch ups with friends on these trips, message me if you’re around and want to catch up, I’m up for a few coffee & drinks sessions and particularly keen to meet up with friends and contacts in Christchurch, since I haven’t been to Christchurch (outside of it’s airport doing transits) in over a decade.

This wasn’t happening heaps (maybe a couple times a day), but it was starting to get annoying, so I decided to sort it out properly and do a kernel driver and microcode update for my Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000 card.

The firmware/microcode update was easy enough, simply a case of downloading the latest code from Intel and installing into /lib/firmware/ – the kernel driver does the rest, finding it and loading it into the Wi-Fi card at boot time.

Next step was building a new kernel for my machine, I went through and tuned the module selection very carefully tossing out all the hardware my laptop will never use, as I was getting sick of wasting lots of disk space on the billion+ device modules in Linux these days.

After finding that my initial kernel lacked support for my video card (turns out the Lenovo X201i laptops still use AGP-based i915 cards, I was assuming PCIe) I got a working kernel up and running.

Except that my Wi-Fi stability problem was worse than ever, instead of losing connectivity every few hours, it was now doing so ever few minutes. :-(

The logs weren’t particularly helpful – NetworkManager likes to give reason numbers but I couldn’t easily find a documented explanation of these (but maybe I’m looking in the wrong place).

19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: 8 -> 9 (reason 5)
19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <warn> Activation (wlan0) failed for access point (b201)
19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <warn> Activation (wlan0) failed.
19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: 9 -> 3 (reason 0)
19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <info> (wlan0): deactivating device (reason: 0).
19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <info> (wlan0): canceled DHCP transaction, DHCP client pid 3354
19:44:36 kernel: [  391.070772] wlan0: deauthenticating from 00:0c:42:67:8b:bc by local choice (reason=3)
19:44:36 kernel: [  391.185461] wlan0: moving STA 00:0c:42:67:8b:bc to state 2
19:44:36 kernel: [  391.185466] wlan0: moving STA 00:0c:42:67:8b:bc to state 1
19:44:36 kernel: [  391.185470] wlan0: moving STA 00:0c:42:67:8b:bc to state 0
19:44:36 wpa_supplicant[1682]: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED - Disconnect event - remove keys
19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <error> [1337240676.376011] [nm-system.c:1229] check_one_route(): (wlan0): \
         error -34 returned from rtnl_route_del(): Netlink Error (errno = Numerical result out of range)
19:44:36 kernel: [  391.233344] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
19:44:36 avahi-daemon[1633]: Withdrawing address record for 192.168.1.11 on wlan0.
19:44:36 avahi-daemon[1633]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv4 with address 192.168.1.11.
19:44:36 avahi-daemon[1633]: Interface wlan0.IPv4 no longer relevant for mDNS.
19:44:36 avahi-daemon[1633]: Withdrawing address record for 2407:1000:1003:99:226:c7ff:fe66:b822 on wlan0.
19:44:36 avahi-daemon[1633]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv6 with address 2407:1000:1003:99:226:c7ff:fe66:b822.
19:44:36 NetworkManager[1650]: <info> (wlan0): writing resolv.conf to /sbin/resolvconf
19:44:36 avahi-daemon[1633]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv6 with address fe80::226:c7ff:fe66:b822.
19:44:36 avahi-daemon[1633]: Registering new address record for fe80::226:c7ff:fe66:b822 on wlan0.*.

So I proceeded to debug:

1. Cursed and wished my 300m spool of Cat6 ethernet wasn’t in Wellington.
2. Rolled back the microcode update – my initial thought was that the new code was making the card unstable and the result was the card dropping the connection and NetworkManager doing the clean up.
3. Did a full power down to make sure that the microcode wasn’t remaining active on the card across reboots (had this problem once with a dodgy GPU once).
4. Verdict: Microcode upgrade was OK, must be something else.
5. Upgraded NetworkManager from 0.8.1 to 0.8.4 from Debian Backports – 0.8.1 isn’t too recent, was tempted to try 0.9 series but would have required a lot more backporting work.
6. Verdict: Appears not to be a NetworkManager issue in the 0.8 series – maybe something fixed in 0.9 or later?
7. Upgraded wpasupplicant from 0.6.10 to 1.0 by manual backport from unstable – the activation error made me consider it might have been a bug with newer kernels & wpasupplicant’s AP negotiation.
8. Verdict: No change to the issue.
9. Built a Linux 3.3 kernel with the older less-crashy 3.2 iwlwifi driver to see if it was driver specific, or otherwise-kernel related.
10. Verdict: Same issue continued to occur, rolling back driver version infact made no change – something about the 3.3 kernel itself was the problem.
11. Got suspicious about NetworkManager – either it or the kernel had to be at fault, one possibility was some weird API breakage with the age gap between the software versions being used. The kernel is *usually* pretty solid and something like wifi drivers dropping every couple of minutes would be a pretty serious bug to get through, so I looked through the logs to see if I could get anything more useful with NetworkManager’s logs.
12. Spotted a kernel error “ICMPv6 RA: ndisc_router_discovery() failed to add default route.“. This error tended to occur shortly before any WiFi disconnection occurred, but not immediately so.
13. Found an entry in Red Hat’s bugzilla.
14. And then the upstream bug fix from 19th April.

Turns out that the Linux 3.3 kernel and NetworkManager fight over which one is going to control the default route for each router advertised link – the kernel adds one, Network Manager removes and then the kernel gets upset and drops all router advertisements.

In hindsight, I should have spotted it sooner, but I had discarded the RA statement from being related initially as the disconnection often didn’t happen till a minute of two after the log entry occurred – eg:

19:51:40 kernel: [  814.274903] ICMPv6 RA: ndisc_router_discovery() failed to add default route.
19:52:47 NetworkManager[1650]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: 8 -> 9 (reason 5)

What’s interesting about this bug, is that at first reading it explains a loss of IPv6 connectivity perfectly – however it doesn’t explain why IPv4 or the Wi-Fi connection itself was impacted.

The reason this happened, is that NetworkManager was set to have IPv6 as a requirement for that connection to be established – in the event of IPv6 not working, NetworkManager would consider the interface to be down, even if IPv4 was up.

There is a good reason for this, that the developers detailed on their (excellently written) blog, explaining that by having NetworkManager check for IPv6, it allows applications to be written smarter to better understand their level of connectivity.

For users of the NetworkManager 0.9 series, there’s a patch already committed which you can grab here and I would expect the next NetworkManager update will have this fix.

If you’re on the NetworkManager 0.8 series, this patch won’t apply cleanly – I might make some time to go and backport it, but you can workaround it for now by using the Ignore method so that NetworkManager does nothing and leaves it up to the Linux kernel in the background to negotiate IPv6 addressing.

Breaking vs Working Network Manager Settings

Of course if you’re not connecting to any IPv6 capable networks, you don’t have anything to worry about (other than the fact you’re still stuck in the 20th century).

Initially I was a bit annoyed at NetworkManager for being so silly as to drop the whole interface when just one of the two networking stacks was broken, however after thinking about it for a bit, it does make some sense as to why it chose that behavior – often most interface issues can be fixed by reconnecting – maybe the AP got rebooted, maybe the laptop just moved between two of them, etc – a reconnect can solve many of these.

But a smarter approach, would be to determine whether network issues are layer 2 or layer 3 – if it’s just a layer 3 issue, then there’s little need to drop the Wi-Fi connection itself, instead attempt to re-establish IPv4 or IPv6 connectivity where appropriate, and if unable to do so, use the notifications to tell the user that “IPv6 connectivity is experiencing a problem, some hosts and services may be unreachable”.

It’s actually something that Windows does semi-OK – it figures out roughly how borked a user’s connection is and then does a balloon popup stating that there’s limited connectivity or IP conflict, or some other sometimes helpful message.

This may be better in newer versions of NetworkManager, I’ll have to have a play with a more recent release and see.

I also had to get up early (06:00) to get to the airport, before heading into the CBD to get some decent breakfast and coffee and took a few early morning pics – it’s amazing how much nicer Auckland is earlier in the morning when the roads are dead.

Because Shaky Isles doesn’t seem to open before 08:00 on a Sunday, we went for a wander around Auckland for a bit first and I got a few decent pics with my trusty professional grade photographer setup.

Good morning Mr Sun!

I do like Wynyard Quarter's mix of resturants and industry, get some pretty big ships in there at times.

"Gateway To The Cloud" (punny since the Sky Tower is one of NZ's main network exchanges)

No early morning is complete without coffee from Shaky Isles. :-D

Up in Mt Victoria, not a lot of traffic (car or boat) early Sunday morning.

Unfortunately the whole incident costs me at least $500 in excess payments, not to mention future impacts to my insurance premiums, so I’m not exactly a happy camper, even though I had full insurance.

Because I really don’t want to have to pay another $500 excess when the next muppet tries to break into it, I decided to spend the money to get an alarm installed, to deter anyone trying to break in again – going to all the effort to silence an alarm for a 1997 Toyota Starlet really won’t be worth the effort, sending them on to another easier target.

(I did consider some of those fake stickers and a blinky LED, but a real alarm does mean that if you hit the car, you’ll quickly get a chirp confirming there is an alarm present. Plus I get one of those chirpy remote controls to unlook the doors! :-D)

I do really hate car alarms, but it’s worth it to have something that will send anyone messing with my car running before it wakes up half the apartment complex.

I wanted to get a decent alarm installed properly and ended up getting referred to Mike & Lance at www.carstereoinstall.co.nz who do onsite visits to install which was really handy, and totally worth it after seeing all the effort needed to do the installation.

Car electronics spaghetti! Considering this is a pretty basic 1997 car, I'd hate to think what the newer ones are like...

There’s a bit of metal drilling, cable running, soldering, un-assembling parts of the car’s interior and trying to figure out which cables control which features of the car, all up it took two guys about 2 hours to complete.

Cost about $325 for the alarm and labor, plus an extra $40 as they had to run wires and install switches for the boot, which is pretty good when you consider it’s a 4 man hour job, would have taken all day if I’d done it at noob pace.

Would recommend these guys if you’re in Auckland. As an extra bonus, Mike turned out to be an ex-IT telco guy so we had some interesting chats – NZ is such a small world at times :-/

I spent most of my years in Wellington focusing on the CBD and southwards, so Johnsonville, Khandallah and it’s surrounding walks are quite new to me.

We took the route up from Johnsonville, going up to the peak and then back down into Khandallah side, before walking back through the suburbs, near the rail line, to Johnsonville.

The Wellington City Council has a good map of the Northern Walks available for download showing the route, I also quickly whipped up a rough Google map of the start & exit points I took along with the route diagram. I should really record more GPS accurate tracks with my phone, but that stuff loves chewing up the battery quickly so not always possible.

Starting out climb up....

It's a @macropiper! By a tunnel! (Turns out this tunnel is for the old water reservoir pipe).

TV transmission tower in the distance - it's visible clearly down on street level in Johnsonville and looks a long way away from there - not really too hard getting there though.

It's Welly! So pretty!

Uh-oh, what has Tom found?

Not a kitteh!

Will these landmark TV transmission towers still be relevant in 25 years time after everything has been replaced with IP over fibre?

I love this city!

Wellington suburbs lapping at the foothills.

Harbour view, love the trail of the turning cargo ship.

Panorama view over the harbour, CBD, surburbs and out towards Makara in the far right. Not very visable is the large wind farm out that way. Pictures don't really do the view from up here justice.

Anyone know what this weird tree is?

Johnsonville rail line

It was a pretty good walk all up, not to long or taxing, but with a rewarding view and an excuse to wander through the suburbs for the first time.

We came across a few promising looking cafes hidden in weird places in the suburbs whilst on the return walk, if I have more time in Wellington again soon I wouldn’t mind checking a few of them out, particularly one which was busy pulling home made pies out of the oven….

If you take a look at the council map for the Northern Walkway, it’s actually possible to walk all the way from Johnsonville to the Botanic gardens, staying mostly in parks with a few detors through streets. This route is also part of the Te Araroa walk, so good practice for me for when I’m ready to do it. :-)

The last two weekends I’ve done the Takapuna to Devonport (Green Route) walk, a pathway I discovered purely by chance whilst walking to Devonport along the main road route due to an entrance onto a park just at the start of the memorial WW2 tree-lined road half-way in my journey.

It takes you through a number of parks that I didn’t even know existed, over the marsh lands and through some of the older streets towards Devonport with characteristic turn of the century houses (Devonport being established as a suburb around 1840 and one of Auckland’s older suburbs).

There’s a handy map you can download from the council here and the whole route is walk & cycle safe. It’s certainly the better route to take, the road route between Takapuna and Devonport should be avoided at all costs, considering it’s always congested and overloaded with traffic, as there is only one road route from Devonport all the way up to Takapuna in order to get onto the motorway.

Having made the mistake of trying to drive to Devonport once before, I’d avoid it at all costs, you’d get from Devonport to Takapuna faster by taking the ferry to Britomart and bus from there IMHO, nose-to-tail traffic the whole way on a Sunday evening isn’t that fun, not to mention a nightmare finding car parking in Devonport itself.

Traffic backed up from the Esmond Rd - Lake Rd junction. It's like this for a good suburb or two, even on weekends. :-/

The sane way for non-car loving Aucklanders to get around.

The route signage is pretty good, although I found that whilst Devonport-to-Takapuna was almost perfect in directional signage, the Takapuna-to-Devonport approach has a few bits that are a little confusing if you hadn’t done it the other way first.

There’s also a complete nightmare in terms of cycle vs pedestrian marking, something that the North Shore City Council loves doing, such as alternating conventions of left vs right side for cyclists – something I’ll cover in a future post. :-/

The route doesn’t seem particularly busy, most of the activity I saw was with people in the various parks the route crosses through, rather than others completing the same route as me – I expect the length detours them a bit (took me around 1.5hrs).

Starting from Takapuna/Esmond road, the route is firstly though the newer suburbs of Takapuna, with a weird suburban/industrial mix of some lovely power pylons running along the street.

Ah, the serenity! :-D

TBH, Takapuna suburbs bore me senseless, they’re a giant collection of 1970s-2012 housing projects, very American-dream type feel at times. Thankfully one soon escapes to the parks and walkways along the marshy coast.

Marshy land, Auckland Harbour bridge in the distance.

One of several boardwalks so you won't get your feet/wheels muddy - unless you want to. :-)

Long bridge is long! (kind of reminds me of Crash Bandicot's Road to Nowhere). If the ground is dry, you could brave cycling alongside it through the marsh, few tracks suggesting this is somewhat popular.

The route slowly starts getting more parks and greenery, with small intermissions of going back along suburb streets, before rejoining more natural routes.

Got a skateboard? And a hoodie? This is the place for you to hang in this otherwise quite empty grassy field called a park.

/home/devonport_residents/.Trash/ (that's a recycling bin joke for you windows users!)

Once you come out of the park, you end up walking through a few blocks of Devonport’s residential area, before coming out onto the main street and along to the shopping and cafe area.

An old church, where Aucklanders worship their god "Automobile".

I quite like Devonport, it has a good number of cafes, bars, the waterfront, classic architecture (not bland corporate crap like Takapuna) and generally has charm.

If I was going to live in Auckland long term, I’d seriously consider Devonport as a good place to have house, I’d even consider not bothering with a car, depending on the availability of a good close supermarket.

Of course this assumes working in the CBD or from home, so you can just take the ferry into the CBD, rather than needing to mess around with commuting up to the motorway and into the city everyday. If a car-based commute is vital, you might want to do Devonport a favor and go live in a less classy suburb with closer motorway access.

Knitted handrails! This place has style!

Vertical water accelerator.

I stopped for a coffee at one of the several cafes around the main street with an outside area and was pleasantly surprised for a change – I didn’t even see a Starbucks there!

The local residential population appears to have a lot of members of the baby boomer generation and either residential or visiting families attracted to the parks and waterfront.

As I was there, I decided to make the short climb up Mt Victoria (*curses settlers who named about 50 million places in NZ Mt Victoria*) and get a good look out over the area. In typical Auckland fashion, it is entirely possible to drive right up to the top, or take a segway tour, but despite the name it’s really just a medium sized hill, nothing compared to Wellington stuff.

Looking out towards Okahu & Mission Bay. Start to get an idea why Auckland is the "City of Sails".

Our old friend Rangitoto island again. Incidentally, Mt Victoria itself is also a volcano, just not anywhere nearly as large.

Looking out over houses towards North Head,

Auckland CBD

Panorama out towards Rangitoto

Panorama showing Auckland CBD on left, Devonport centre and Takapuna in the horizon on the right.

I didn’t know anything about it other than it was a big hill, so damn I was going to climb and conquer that, but it turns out it was part of Auckland’s early military history with a large disappearing gun (BL 8 inch Mk VII naval gun) which was installed in 1899, well before WW2 – seems NZ has a number of good examples of these interesting pre-WW1 weapons.

The magical disappearing cannon!

Fuck being the poor suckers who had to lug this all the way up the hill. :-/

Mushroom vents hint to a large underground complex - sadly closed to the public.

One thing I missed is the other large hill in the area – North Head – which offers a much larger selection of 1800′s – WW2 relics including tunnels and additional guns which are open to the public.

Devonport has had a long military history and is where the main naval base of New Zealand, dating back to 1841, usually has a couple ships berthed to look at – or sometimes coming/going offering some neat photo opportunities.

I tend to find that Auckland really hides it’s interesting stuff, I lived in Takapuna for months before I discovered the existence of many of these interesting walkways and sights, in many cases they just aren’t advertised and from a distance, you don’t get an idea of how interesting some of these places can be. (Mt Victoria and North Head look just like plain hills with some sheds on them from sea level).

That’s why I love exploring on foot, find so many gems, look them up online, find another 5 related ones to go and check out. :-) And don’t be afraid to take random interesting looking paths to see where they lead, it’s how I find many places – including many of Wellington’s paths and walkways.

After the trip up Mt Victoria, I wandered back down and along the waterfront – turns out it’s a fantastic place to get close up shots of any large ships passing by.

Rena-sized cargo ship, gives an idea how massively large these things are when seeing up close. See the little speedboat to the right for an idea of the size difference. :-D

I ended up heading to the ferry terminal to get the ferry over to Britomart to catch up with friends, only took less than 15mins to board and cross over the harbor for $6. (frequent traveler discounts available).

This is Fuller Ferry, requesting Devenport wharf command center to lower defence grid for safe docking.

Cruising in to the Britomart ferry terminal, past the Rugby Word Cup "Cloud" event center.

Finally wrapped up the day with a delicious coffee and snack at my much loved Shakey Isles before they closed (closing time is 17:00 on weekends FYI).

Om nom nom (totally not addicted to chocolate)

If you don’t live in Takapuna and want to reproduce this walk, I’d recommend taking the Northern Express (NEX) bus to Akoranga Station, or the normal Takapuna buses to the shopping center, doing the walk to Devonport and then ferry back into Britomart.

It’s an easy day trip and could be as short as 3-4 hrs or as long as an entire day depending what sights and coffee you decide to partake in whilst at Devonport.

The other approach is to do Takapuna – Devonport & return, something that might appeal particularly if wanting to do it by bike rather than foot, there’s a bit more parking around Takapuna, particular Fred Thomas drive area near Akaranga Station to drive to with your bikes.

Whilst data has slowly been getting cheaper, there’s been an emerging problem of people owning multiple 3G capable devices, such as a mobile phone, tablet and a laptop and wanting to get them all online, but not wanting to pay an expensive data plan for each device.

I personally ended up just using tethering on my phone to connect my laptop, even though my laptop has a built-in 3G modem, simply due to the high cost of maybe once-a-week usage of my laptop not being enough to justify having a separate plan, particularly when only needing a few hundred MB at most.

However 2degrees have now just announced new shared data plans, where you pay an extra $5 a month, plus $1 per device to be able to share the data plan from another account (for up to 5 devices).

This is pretty compelling, I can go buy a bunch of prepaid SIMs for my laptop, spare phones, USB 3G stick and be able to use them all with my shared data at a fraction of the cost compared to doing so on Telecom or Vodafone, whom are going to need to up their game if they want to retain multi-device users.

2degrees certainly aren’t sitting still – in the past week they’ve announced both this shared data service as well as their Touch2Pay arrangement with Snapper, to allow the use of smartphones with NFC for payment on the Snapper network (used for Wellington and Auckland buses), future is looking bright for them.

The problem with both these services, is that they deny interaction from external users who aren’t registered with their service.

With traditional blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, or other custom developed blogs, any visitor to the blog could read it and post comment – the interfaces would vary, the ease of posting would vary and the method of validation of posting would vary, but you could 99% of the time still be able to post comments and engage with the author.

This has not been the case with social networks to date – platforms like Twitter or Facebook require a user to be logged in, in order to communicate with others – however this tends to work OK, since they’re mostly used for person-to-person messages and broadcasting, rather than detailed posts you will sent to users outside of those networks (after all 140 char tweets aren’t exactly where you’ll debate things of key meaning).

The real issue starts with half-blog, half-microblog services such as Tumblr and Google Plus, which users have started to use for anything from cat pictures to detailed Linux kernel posts, turning these tools into de-facto blogging platforms, but without the freedom for outsiders to post comments and engage in conversation.

Tumblr is one of the worst networks, as it’s very much designed as a glorified replacement for chain email forwards – you post some text or some pictures and all your friends “reblog” your page if they like it and users all pat themselves on their back at how witty and original they all are.

But to make a comment, one must reblog the post, add a comment and have it end up in the pages long list of reblog and like statements at the bottom of the post. And if the original poster wants to comment on that, you’d have to re-blog their blog. :-/

Yo dawg, we heard you like to reblog your reblogging.

The issue is that more people are starting to use it for more than just funny cat pictures and treat it as a replacement to blogging, which makes for a terrible time engaging with anyone. I have friends who use the service to post updates about their lives, but I can’t engage back – makes me feel like some kind of outcast stalker peering through the windows at them.

And even if I was on Tumblr, I’d actually want to be able to comment on things without reblogging them – nobody else cares if Jane had a baby, but I’d like to say “Congrats Jane, you look a lot less fat now the fork()ed process is out” to let my friend know I care.

Considering most Tumblr users are going to use Facebook or Twitter as well, they might as well use the image and short statement posting features of those networks and instead use an actual blog for actual content. Really the fault is due to PEBKAC – users using a bad service in the wrong way.

Google Plus is a bit better than Tumblr, in the respect that it actually has expected functionality like posts you can comment on, however it lacks the ability for outsiders to post comments and engage with the author – Google has been pretty persistent with trying to get people to sign up for an account, so it’s to be expected somewhat.

I’ve seen a lot of uptake with Google Plus by developers and geeks, seemingly because they don’t want the commitment of actually using a blog for detailed posts, but want somewhere to post lengthy bits of test.

Linus Torvalds is one particular user whom I might want to follow on Google Plus, but there’s not even RSS if you wanted to get updates on new posts! (To get RSS, you’d have to use external thirdparty services).

Tumblr at least has RSS so I can still use it in my reader like everything else, even if I can’t reply to the author….

Follow Linus! Teenage fanboy Jethro squeee!

And of course with no ability for posting comments by outsiders, I can’t post Linus comments requesting his hand in marriage after merging a kernel bug fix for my laptop. :-(

So with all these issues, why are users adopting these services? After all, there are thousands of free blogging services, several well known and very good ones, all better technical options.

I think it’s a combination of issues:

• Users got overwhelmed by RSS – we followed everything we loved, then got scared by the 10,000 unread posts in our readers – and resolved by simply not opening the reader in fear of the queue waiting for us. The social media style approaches used by Google+, Tumblr and of course Twitter and Facebook focus less on following every single post by users, but rather what’s happening here and now – users don’t feel bad if they miss reading 1,000 posts overnight, they just go on to the next.
• Users love copying. The MPAA & RIAA love this fact about humans, we love to copy and share stuff with others. Blogging culture tends to frown on this, but Tumblr’s reblogging style of use makes it more acceptable and maintains a credit trail.
• Less commitment – if I started posting pictures of funny cats or one paragraph posts on this blog, it wouldn’t be doing it justice or up to the level of quality readers expect. However on social network based services, this is OK, there’s no expectation of a certain level of presentation and effort into a post. A funny cat picture followed by the post about you raging about by GNU Hurd will always be better than BSD is acceptable – on a blog, you’d drop the funny cat and be expected to write a well detailed post explaining your reasoning. Another label would be that it’s “more casual”, than conventional blogs.
• Easier interactions with your readers (at least with Google+) – there’s no standards with blogging for handling notifications to users about changes to your blog or replies to comments. Even WordPress, one of the most popular platforms, doesn’t provided native email notifications to comments.
• I noticed a major improvement in the level of interaction between myself and my readers after adding Subscribe to Comments Reloaded plugin to this site, using email notifications to users about replies to my blog post. And considering how slack many people are with checking their email, I do wonder how much better it would be if I added support for notification to new posts and comment replies via Twitter or Facebook.
• Conventional blogs tend to take a bit more effort to post comments, some go overboard with captcha input fields that take 10 attempts or painful comment validation. I’ve tried to keep mine simple with basic fields and dealing with spam using Akismet rather than captcha (which has worked very well for me).

In my opinion the biggest issue is the communication, notification and interaction issue as noted above. I don’t believe we can fix the cultural side of users such as the crap they post or the inability to actually make the effort to read their RSS but we can go someway towards improving the technology to reduce/eliminate some of the pain points, to encourage use of the services.

There have been some attempts to address these issues already:

• Linkback techniques such as Pingback address the issue of finding out who’s linking to your blog (although I turned this off as I found it really spammy and I get that information out of awstats anyway).
• RSS handles getting updates of new posts on a polling basis and smarter RSS readers offer better filtering/grouping/etc.
• Email notifications for blog comments and updates.

But it’s not good enough yet – what I’d actually like to see would be:

• Improvement of linkback techniques to spam pages less, potentially with the addition of some AI logic to determine whether the linkback was just “check out this cool post!” or some actual useful content that readers of your post would like to read (such as a rebuttal).
• Smarter RSS readers that act more like social network feeds, to give users who want more of a “live stream” feel what they want.
• Live commenting technology – not all users have push email, so email notifications kind of suck for many users. A better solution would be to use the existing XMPP standard to send notifications to the user’s XMPP server (anyone using Gmail already has an XMPP service with them and numerous geeks run their own – like me ;-), so the user gets a chat message pop up. If the message format was standardized, it would be possible to have the IM client recognize it was a blog comment reply and to hand off to the installed RSS reader to handle for better UX – or fall back to posting text with a link to the reply for support with any XMPP standard client.
• (I did see that there is an outdated plugin for XMPP on WordPress  as well as some commercial live-commenting packages that hook into social networks, but I really want a proper open source solution that does everything in one plugin, so there’s a more seemless UX – rather than having 20 checkboxes for which method the user would like notifications via.)
• Whilst mentioning XMPP, we could even consider replacing RSS with XMPP based push notifications – blog servers sending out a push message when they get an update, rather than readers polling services. Advantage is near-instant update of new posts and potentially less server load of not having thousands of wasted polls when there hasn’t been any update to fetch.
• Comment reply via notification support. If you send someone an XMPP IM, email, tweet, virtual sheep or whatever to alert to a comment or blog post, they should be able to reply via that native medium and have the blog server interpret, validate and integrate that reply into the page.

My hope is that with these upgrades, blogging platforms will extend themselves to be better placed for holding up against social networking sites, making it easier to have detailed conversations and long running threads with readers and authors.

Moving to a new generation communication platform build around the existing blogging platforms would be as much of an improvement for real time social responsiveness as shifting from email to Twitter and hopefully, the uptake in real time communications will bring more users back to decentralised, open and varied platforms.

I’m tempted to give this a go by building a WordPress plugin to provide unified notifications using XMPP / Email / Social Media, but it’ll depend on time (lol who has that??) and I haven’t done much with WordPress’s codebase before. If you know of something existing, I would certainly be interested to read about it and I’ll be taking a look at options to build upon.

Upon attempting to save it as a draft, I got the following:

Not exactly the message I wanted to get after going to the effort to write it. Usually I copy all the text just before submitting just-in-case, but I hadn’t done it this evening. :-/

After logging into WordPress and clicking “Please try again”, I was taken to a blank new post screen, leading to much cursing and concern that I had lost my post.

Turns out that this screen doesn’t handle particularly well and had instead created the post in the background, but taken me to a new add form without any data, leading to concern I had lost the post.

Instead, I found I had the post saved (minus the tags for some reason) as a draft and so it wasn’t an entire loss… thankfully. :-/

The apartment alarm system is quite simple – if the alarms get triggered by a local source, they go off for the apartment, but not the complex. Opening the apartment door, will trigger the alarms for the entire complex, assuming the designers decided that someone running out of their apartment has created a fire big enough to cause others worry too.

Seems simple enough, however for whatever reason, the system has had some technical issues, and engineers have been onsite adjusting the system for one of the apartment blocks.

Which they do by triggering alarms without any notice that there is testing taking place….. so over the past month, I’ve had several incidents of the alarm going off without notice during the day, setting up a dangerous situation where tenant aren’t going to take the alarms seriously any more – I know that I don’t any more, if I ran outside on every alarm, I’d be spending a lot of time outside without cause.

The tests also isolated another issue that I had not considered though – when the alarm goes off, there is no way for me to tell whether it’s just for my apartment (ie: burnt toast) or for the entire complex.

Unless I actually see a fire in my apartment, I have no way of checking without going out into the common hallway to check if that’s going off. But opening the door to my apartment will trigger the building wide alarm, which will incur me high false-callout fees if there isn’t a legitimate fire.

So in the event of a fire, we’ve now trained tenants to a) never leave the apartment, least they get charged high callout fees for setting off building alarms b) ignore all alarms since they’re from some muppet testing without giving notice.

End result is that one day I’m going to overclock my Linux-powered-toaster one too many times and end up dying in a horrible fire and it’ll all be the fault of the so-called safety system.

So what’s the solution?

1. Program the fire alarm system to alert and state whether it’s a local or complex-wide alarm – the alarm has voice capabilities, so they should make clear use of them. Sometimes during testing, the alarm would state that we should “evacuate the building”. But what does it mean when it’s *not* saying that? Does that mean we should remain? Clarity isn’t being provided. And why not state “heat alarm” or “smoke alarm”?
2. Give proper notice for testing! Failing to give clear notice about alarm equipment tests leads to people not taking them seriously.

Really don’t know why these basic ideas are so hard for safety system implementers to get right. :-(