Take Pitty On Your State Insurance Commissioner

I watched President Obama talk today about administrative remedies that his administration is going to make so that he can make good on his promise of "if I (oops, I mean you) like your insurance plan, you can keep your insurance plan, period."

Either Mr. Obama knows nothing about how insurance companies do their business, or, he knows all too well...

Insurance regulation falls within the purview of state government, since it is not an enumerated power of the United States Constitution.  This means that the insurance companies have to re-apply to the state insurance boards where they sell products, to every state where they sell products, and ask for approval to sell the old products.  And most likely, these will not be under the same rates.  I have never seen this process take shorter than months (having been in the insurance industry).

But, Mr. Obama has done his part.  Blame for losing your plan can now be placed on either the state insurance commissioners or the insurance companies if they decided not to re-instate products for which cannot be sold to new customers (a big waste of time and money), or both.

Problem solved and promise kept!

USB Serial Port Adapter and Other USB Problems on Mavericks (OSX 10.9)

I upgraded to Mavericks yesterday and I have to say it went smoothly, except for the Moschip-based 7720 USB to serial port adapter I use to debug AVR embedded projects.  It worked fine on Snow Leopard.

I also noticed several complaints for these kinds of devices (not just Moschip based devices) on Mavericks.  So, beware...

From my syslog, the following errors were noted:

       
Dec  2 06:51:03 charles-benedicts-macbook.local com.apple.kextd[12]: WARNING - Invalid signature -67062 0xFFFFFFFFFFFEFA0A for kext "/System/Library/Extensions/MCS7720Driver.kext"


Dec  2 06:51:03 charles-benedicts-macbook.local com.apple.kextd[12]: Can't load /System/Library/Extensions/MCS7720Driver.kext - no code for running kernel's architecture.


Dec  2 06:51:03 charles-benedicts-macbook.local com.apple.kextd[12]: Load com.MosChip.driver.MCS7720Driver failed; removing personalities from kernel.

I am not sure whether the "no code" error is because the signature was invalid or whether the driver must be recompiled for 10.9.

Further research yields the following:

       
charles-benedicts-macbook:Extensions chuck_benedict$ sudo kextutil -b kextload -t ./MCS7720Driver.kext
Notice: /System/Library/Extensions/MCS7720Driver.kext has debug properties set.
Diagnostics for /System/Library/Extensions/MCS7720Driver.kext:
Warnings: 
    Executable does not contain code for architecture: 
        x86_64


Code Signing Failure: not code signed
Warnings: 
    Executable does not contain code for architecture: 
        x86_64


WARNING - Invalid signature -67062 0xFFFFFFFFFFFEFA0A for kext "/System/Library/Extensions/MCS7720Driver.kext"


Can't load /System/Library/Extensions/MCS7720Driver.kext - no code for running kernel's architecture.

So I did what I usually do in these cases.  I booted up Linux on Virtualbox and the serial port adapter works fine.

Finally, I have a home-built USBasp programmer that I use for hobby micro-controller projects with Atmel chips.  I had this device plugged into a powered Belkin USB hub and under Snow Leopard, it worked fine.  Since upgrading to Mavericks, the only way I can get it to work is to plug it directly into my Macbook.  Hmph...I don't know why this is, yet.