Google Nexus 10 Stuck on Lock Screen

Posted on March 28, 2013 by rben13

For Xmas, my wife bought me a Google Nexus 10″ Tablet, which soon became my constant companion. I loved the fact that it was far easier to lug around than my laptop and let me do most of the things I used my laptop for. Up until recently, I would have recommended the tablet to just about anyone.

Right after my tablet upgraded to 4.2.2, it started behaving badly. When I tried to get into my tablet, by swiping the lock screen, the home screen would appear briefly, but then the screen would blank and I’d be presented with the lock screen again.

I’m pretty comfortable with computers, since I build my own, and I knew how to reset the tablet, so I tried that. When I finished booting, I was able to get to the home screen and use my tablet briefly, until it timed out and went to the lock screen again, after that, it resumed it’s former intransigence.

I searched for others with similar problems, but none seemed to exactly match my experience. So I finally called Google Customer Support, and they quickly agreed to send me a new Tablet.

The new tablet arrived today. I was very happy, figuring that my previous problems had to have been some kind of subtle hardware glitch. I plugged it in to charge, put in my email address, and let it load all my apps. One of the really nice things about Android tablets and phones is how easy it is to get back to where you were if you have to get a new one.

At first, everything was fine, but then I noticed that the tablet wanted to update to 4.2.2. I should have resisted, but I’m not the kind of person that can resist having the latest and greatest. So, foolishly, I told it to update.

You can probably surmise what happened next. The lock screen problem came back. It didn’t take me long to call Google, but the nice young woman I talked to went to the engineers and they told her it “must be user error.”

Well, I can be sympathetic to the engineers. I’ve been there, myself. It’s tough to be presented with a problem that seems illogical and not be able to come up with a ready answer. It’s easy to fall back on “the user must have done something wrong.” It’s often true. But, when the user is someone who has been programming computer and building his own machines for the past thirty-odd years, it might be wise to listen.

I’m convinced that there is some kind of interaction between one of the apps on my machine and the latest update to 4.2.2, which has broken the lock screen. I could replace the tablet a dozen times, and I’d probably still have the same issue once it updated the OS.

I decided to try something in desperation. I rebooted and managed to get to the settings screen and turn off the locking screen before it timed out. It took quite a few tries. I no longer have any security, but at least I can get to my apps.

I suggested to the young woman at support that she try to bump this problem up the line, because it’s likely there are some other very frustrated people out there. She did her best, and said she’d speak to her boss, but I think inertia will win out.

If you have the same problem, all I can suggest is that you try doing what I did. It’s not the best solution, but it’s better than having an animated brick.

If I was really industrious, I’d try removing apps one at a time until I found which one was responsible, but I’m no longer that patient. I have other things I need to do with my time.

This is one of those problems that never get solved until they blow up into an emergency. Anyone in software development has run into them. They are nearly impossible to replicate which makes them nearly impossible to fix. They don’t affect many users, but the ones they do affect, they infuriate. Managers hate them, too, and move them to the bottom of the priority queue, because they suck up time and, after all, they don’t affect that many people.

But, sooner or later, you discover that the annoying, low-priority time-sucking bug that you’ve been ignoring, has turned into a complete catastrophe. Suddenly you have thousands of users calling in after the latest update, complaining they can’t use their very expensive tablets for anything more complicated than serving trays. Then, when the team of fifteen engineers finally track down the bug after 72-hours of non-stop caffeine fueled hacking, it turns out the bug was a single misplaced curly-brace.

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Don’t Buy The New SimCity Just Yet

Posted on March 7, 2013 by rben13

SimCity looks like a great game. I’d love to be able to play it, but I’ve spent more time trying to log on and play tutorials than anyone should have to. I’ll pick a server that’s says it’s available, but when the game launches, I get a message that the game can’t talk to the game servers.

Maxis/Origin/EA made a huge mistake in making a game that has traditionally been a single player game, dependent on online servers. There doesn’t appear to be any way to play this game if you aren’t connected to the Internet. This is not what I expected when I ponied up my $60.

It’s obvious that the developers tried to be overly clever. Since everything else is going cloud-based, why not make games cloud-based? Then a player can play from any machine that has SimCity on it and still play their own cities. That’s nice, but how many players will actually make use of such a feature? The same server-dependence also lets you play with your friends in multi-user mode, but again, I don’t see multi-user SimCity as a giant part of the market. Making the whole game server dependent was an enormously foolish mistake.

I’ve been writing this while repeatedly trying to login. I have the same problem over and over. The server I was on yesterday is too full, so now I have to try to find another one. But every time I pick one, I’m told that the game can’t connect. If most people are having the experience that I’m having, I expect to see lots of refunds in EA’s future.

Once you do manage to get into the game, your city is confined to a relatively tiny area, especially compared to SimCity 4. I’ve heard various rumors about why this is the case, but I suspect it has to do with server traffic limits. When you make play dependent on server access and server traffic, you need to do what you can to manage the data requirements for the servers. It seems apparent that even with the smaller cities, the Maxis servers are still unable to cope.

I’m not sure I’d buy this game at all after this experience. If you are determined to get it, wait for several weeks. Give EA time to get it’s act together.

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Why Are We Allowing the Sequester?

Posted on March 1, 2013 by rben13

The Sequester, which goes into effect at midnight tonight, will, according to lots of economists, send us into a second round of recession. It’s a dumb idea. It’s makes you wonder why anyone in their right mind would let it happen.

Here’s what I think. In 2010, the Republican leaders succeeded in convincing a lot of people that somehow Obama was to blame for what Bush and the banks did to our economy. On the strength of that whopper, they managed to make substantial gains in both houses. So, they figured, as long as they could keep Obama from improving the economy, they’d have a good chance at winning back the White House in 2012. This meant they’d have to betray all their constituents and work hard to keep people out of work. It also meant any progress on other important issues, like Climate Change, would have to be put off. But how could something like Climate Change be more important than the ego of the Republican strategists.

It didn’t work. Obama got re-elected, in large part because a lot of people manged to figure out that he was trying to do a good job and the people keeping the economy in the toilet were a bunch of self-serving power mongers who couldn’t care less about what actually happened, as long as they could retain their powerful positions.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership is slow to learn. Rather than moderate their position, they are doubling down. While “We’ll never raise taxes,” makes a great sound bite, it’s incredibly stupid fiscal policy. Most economists agree that while the deficit and debt are critical long term problems, we first need to get people back to work, because without strong tax revenues, we’ll never be able to close the deficit or pay off the debt. The only way to quickly get people working is through government spending, and the responsible thing to do if you’re going to spend more money, is to raise revenues to cover those expenses. (Something Bush/Cheney apparently forgot about.)

Worse, these same paragons of virtue continue to spout nonsense about how horribly over-taxed we are. That’s simply not true, taxes, especially on the rich and corporations, are close to an all-time low for the modern era. Obama’s suggested tax hikes would simply put us back where we were when Clinton was president and we were making steady progress on paying off our debt.

So, once again, it’s a game of chicken, where the Republican leadership has decided that if it demonstrates that it is willing to drive us all off the cliff, that they’ll be back in the drivers seat, even if the car that we’re all in is diving straight for the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

What I don’t understand is why the press isn’t screaming at our so-called representatives. Why aren’t we all camped out on the Mall in Washington? Why aren’t we demanding that the idiots stop playing games and get back to doing what they’re supposed to do: make the ugly compromises that keep our country running?

The ugly truth is that our system is broken because we’ve let it happen. We sat by while our media was taken over by the ultra-rich and while Fox News became a propaganda machine for the Republicans. We accepted the notion that companies could be too big to fail. Rather than break them up as a condition of bailing them out, we just handed them money. Rather than demand substantial regulation on the Banking industry, after they crashed, we bailed them out, too. We allowed Bush to fight two wars on credit, when anyone with half-a-brain knew we’d have to pay the bill sooner or later. (Makes you wonder where the deficit hawks were back then.) Worst of all, we let our politics become a religion, where we accepted what we were told instead of insisting on proof. We’ve rewarded those who lied to us and punished those who tried to expose them.

If we want things fixed, we have to make noise. We have to call and write our representatives and remind them that they are working for us, and that at least some of us will vote based on their actual performance. We also have to accept that we’ll never get everything we want out of our government, because we aren’t the only people who count. There are three hundred million of us, and we all have a right to have a voice in the decisions that affect us all.

As has been said many times, Democracy is messy, it’s the worst form of government except all others.

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Supreme Court Considering Dumping Section 5 of Voting Rights Act

Posted on March 1, 2013 by rben13

If you listen to what the conservative justices on the Supreme Court say, you’d think the Voting Rights Act was some terrible insult to the whole of Dixie and an egregious overstep of federal authority. This is because they want to discard section 5 of the VRA, which requires certain states and counties to clear any voting redistricting changes with the court. That sounds very much like overreach, until you look at the history of voting regulation in those locations.

According the the VRA, all you have to do to be exempt from section 5 is to have a clean bill of health for ten years. If you go ten years without having the court say no to some voting changes you try to make, you’re considered reformed. That doesn’t seem like it’s too much to ask. The Alabama county that is suing for the change recently tried to eliminate a minority Representative by redistricting him out of office. The Supreme Court’s answer should be simple, “If it hurts when you do that, stop doing that.” Isn’t that what the VRA was put in place for?

Congress recently upheld the law recently with a vote of 98 to 2 in the Senate. So by striking down section 5 of the VRA, the Supreme Court would be doing the very thing the Conservatives keep complaining about, legislating from the bench, overruling the will of the legislative bodies that are actually tasked, by the constitution, with making law. Ironic how it’s cool as long as it’s something the Republicans want and a break with out Founding Father’s Ideals when it’s something the Republicans don’t like.

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You Can’t Teach an Old Elephant New Tricks

Posted on February 6, 2013 by rben13

Harry Reid and the old guard Democrats who want to be sure they have the filibuster for use the next time they are in the minority, made a crappy deal with the Republicans in which they promised not to do real filibuster reform if the Republicans stopped abusing the filibuster at every opportunity.

Guess what’s happened? Well, the Republicans have, once again, declared they will filibuster any nominee to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Congress first guts the CFPB’s ability to do any real good.

Supporting the CFPB should be a no-brainer. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is meant to give us consumers a way to fight back against unexplained charges, unfair rate increases, and a host of other abuses by the banking industry that cost consumers millions of dollars, every year.

In the past thirty years, banks have run wild and besides having to be bailed out time and time again, have nearly bankrupted the country, have tanked the housing market, and now sit on the side lines hoping that by delaying a recovery, they’ll force law makers to bow down to them. The banks keep telling us they are too big to fail and have to be bailed out, but if we, the taxpayers who have rescued them, ask for some reforms in return … well, how dare we!

The CFPB was a good first step towards some kind of real reform. The agency, which was championed by Elizabeth Warren, was supposed to help prevent the kind of banking abuses which have buried hard working people in debt. I fully operational CFPB might even do something about the ruinous interest rates that used to be controlled by usury laws. We get paid less than 1% on our savings, but have to pay up to 30% for consumer loans? I even saw an add on TV for a loan with an interest rate of 87%. It was marketed as a way for someone to improve their credit.

Apparently, losing so many elections wasn’t enough to convince the Republican party that they are badly outnumbered by people who live in a world with mortgages, not enough jobs, and too much credit card debt.

So now, we need Harry Reid to demonstrate to the Republicans that there are consequences for bad behavior. He needs to push through real filibuster reform. It’s time he used the Democratic majority to get something done that makes a real difference.

If you feel like I do, make sure your law makers knew about it, especially your Senators. Tell them it’s time to start acting like a real deliberative body. They need to fix the rules which allow the minority to grind all activity to a halt and then they need to learn how to work together to do what needs to be done.

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