You don’t have to fully understand these two brief videos from 15 years ago (I don’t) explaining solutions to tech problems building a 3D game (3D as in Quake, not as in putting on the funny glasses) to be reminded how hard it can be to do things that seem simple, and how damned clever our tech is.

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Erred watching is like bird watching: You get excitedly happy when you spot a new, rare error message.

I’ve spotted two in the past twenty-four hours.

One was a problem with PDAnet (which turned out to be trivial to solve) that put a line into the Console for which there were zero Google hits: “CDaemonCon 2 exits”

This morning, my Mac refused to boot. Instead of showing me a gray apple on a gray background, it displayed a circle with a line through it (“prohibitory sign”) on the gray background. It did this even when I tried to boot from an external disk. Apple seems to think this is a software problem, although I would have thought that it would have booted from the external disk. But maybe there’s something wrong with the external one.

Anyway, I’m very excited to have spotted these two rarities in their native habitats. Of course, when I have to reinstall all my software and realize all the stuff I had not backed up, I may be warbling a different tune. (It’s a new machine supplied by work, and I have been keeping all my files in the cloud. I think.)

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I spent about an hour this morning trying to get PDAnet to work on my MacBookPro the way it once did. Had I not magically missed the question in the FAQ that addresses the issue, I could have saved myself 58 minutes of a Sunday morning.

PDAnet allows you to use your mobile phone as a modem. So, when there’s is no wifi, or when you don’t want to pay a hotel $25/day to use their stinking wifi, you can plug your mobile into your laptop via USB (PDAnet also supports Bluetooth, but as with every other Bluetooth app, it is as close to impossible to get to work as its evil masterminds could achieve) and surf the Web via your cellphone connection. Whatever data charges your cellphone company inflicts will apply.

PDAnet had been working like a dream for me. I had sprung for the paid version so that I could access secure sites. I was in tethered heaven. Then it stopped.

I uninstalled, redownloaded, rebooted, and tried again … and again and again. I wouldn’t get error msgs anywhere except in my browser when I tried to go to a site. The ping command in my terminal told me it couldn’t resolve the host. Weirdly, Console told me “before listening on daemon socket” and “CDaemonCon 2 exits.” These were only weird because the first has a single unhelpful hit at Google and the second has none. None! It’s an error message from another planet!

Then I re-checked the PDAnet help page. And there it says quite plainly: “Mac When connecting the PdaNet menubar icon keeps blinking and I have no Internet.” The explanation:

This is because the Network Interface create by PdaNet is not added on Mac automatically for some reason.

Try to open Networks Preferences and click on “+”, then select the new Network Interface the biggest “en” number such as en2 or en3 and click “Apply” with DHCP selected.

These instructions are almost correct. So, go to System Preferences, and then to Network. Click on “+” at the bottom of the list of connections on the left. Choose “Internet adaptor” from the list. “Internet adaptor” will have some number after it. After accepting, that connection will show up in the list on the left. Make sure that the choice to the right of “Configure IPv4” says “DHCP.” You should be good to go.

PDAnet rocks when you remember to reading the effing FAQ.

D’oh.

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Jud Valeski of Gnip is talking about the rise of APIs. There’s ben a doubling of publicly available API’s in the past few years, Jud says. He shows Wired’s “The Web is dead” chart that shows the proportion of bits moving through the tubes. But, API usage shows the Web is not dead.

He divides APIs into two buckets. Functional APIs make periodic calls for bits of information, and are heavily cacheable because there’s static data on the other side. Most of the problems are solved: REST has won, along with Curl.

Volume APIs are a different matter. Call frequency and throughput are high, “and things get wonky.” The call characteristics change. Local programming challenges fall out into the network and cause problems, e.g. queuing.

We don’t yet know how to deal with SLAs (service level agreements). Open network toopology APIs don’t have clear SLAs.

He minimizes the shock by leveragng best practices, finding comonoality in the frameowkr (mashery.com, apigee.com, gnip.com), builing APIs that set the standard.

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