Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

Pebble released a significant update to their iOS app and Firmware. However, getting it running properly turned out to be a bit of a challenge. I’d be surprised if you ended up here before somewhere else in your searches for solutions; but in case you haven’t, here’s what you can expect and how I got it working.

Fitbit is a company that makes “activity trackers”: devices that will track your activities and give you an idea of how much you’ve done “something” throughout the day. My wife, owner of a competing product (Jawbone Up), convinced me to get a Fitbit One. Here are my thoughts on the ideas behind an activity tracker, the Fitbit One specifically, Fitbit’s iPhone app, and comparing that app to Jawbone Up’s app.

The first modern “smartwatch” to make it onto my radar, the Pebble has much promise and delivers on much of it. It’s a smart phone companion, but certainly not a smart phone replacement; and even as a companion, it might not do everything someone would want. I got one, and here are my thoughts so far.

An attempt to communicate an issue (and the solution) I ran into with Perl’s Net::SNMP function “get_table”, that would result in a “The message size exceeded the buffer maxMsgSize of 1452” error. It took a couple of packet captures and Googling to figure out why this problem was occurring and implement a fix.

I was wondering if I could come up with a quick way to describe my impressions; the best I can come up with: It’s like Apple is trying to borrow from the Android operating systems, but it’s also like they took one of the worst Android interfaces and left out the ability to customize it properly.

A fellow engineer attempting to debug a jumbo frames issue was seeing what should have been a bunch of fragmented frames as a single 13,000 byte frame. Once he figured out why, I was told to fix it. Here’s my solution.

Ran into a little issue at work and decided to write up some things to keep in mind when you have multiple masters with slaves behind each individual master.

Just a quickie, probably subject to some editing later on, about how to use the “bind” option multiple times with a given service – mainly, to have a TFTP server operate from behind a virtual IP as the virtual IP (instead of becoming its real IP in the middle of the transfer).

Having obtained a new MacBook Pro from work, along with a copy of VMWare Fusion, I decided to seek out a copy of Windows 8 to see what people were complaining about. While it might seem a little sacrilegious to full screen Windows 8 on a Mac, I take this sacrifice for you to let you know what I think.

It’s not all bad.

But it’s still pretty bad.

While my home setup is unlikely to change any time soon, I recently started pondering switching my main workstation at work from Windows 7 to XUbuntu, and making my secondary machine my Windows 7 system. But if Windows 7 is no longer the Synergy server, but a Synergy client, how do you keep the connection secure through SSH? Easy! Keep the Windows box as the SSH server, just change the tunnel direction. Read on for additional details.