After 2 years of using my Treo 650 as a work phone, I decided that it was time to get something different. There really wasn’t *that* much wrong with the Treo, though I was getting tired of the crashing during mail reading and other routine cell phone functions (like phone calls). Also, with me having an iPhone which really has a much better mail reading interface, having another phone to use to read mail with didn’t really make as much sense. Having a small phone to use as a *phone* really seemed to be the requirement. So I set off to research the latest phones. Again, the requirement was a smaller phone, good battery life, and something that would still sync nicely to my Mac using iSync. Having a 2100MHz WCDMA phone also was a “wish” - it would be nice if the phone worked in Japan in case I have to go there.

I discounted SonyEricsson phones immediately. Because after 3 years, I’m still mad at them over the Z520 buggy firmware which caused my phone to crash every day or so. I don’t like the Motorola interfaces, so that kind of left me with Nokia. T-Mobile doesn’t really have a good selection of Nokia business phones, plus, I really didn’t want to buy a carrier-crippled phone, so off to searching Amazon.com for phones.

I was originally looking at a Nokia N82, but the N-series phones are expensive, and I really didn’t need a 5MP camera on the phone. Too bad because I actually really like the Series60 Symbian OS on the Nokia phones. I finally happened upon the E51 - and on sale to boot. Small, relatively light weight, and Series60 OS with iSync capabilities direct from Nokia. I ordered one up in the black metal color.



Compared to my iPhone (left), it’s about the same thickness, but about 2/3 the width. It has an unconventional key layout even for a Series60 phone. No Edit button, but shortcuts for Home, Calendar, Contacts, and Email instead. Smallish keypad, but I have small fingers so it’s not a big deal. Absolutely brilliant display. Nice sturdy feel.

After having this phone for about 2 weeks, here is some feedback on the phone.

Pros: The battery life and size of this phone are great. Sound quality is excellent, and the reception seems to be at least as good as my Treo (which had a stubby external antenna which kept jabbing me in the side). Bluetooth works great (paired right up to my Nokia BH-900 headset). Syncing is about as good as you get from anyone that isn’t named Apple, and this has got to be the *fastest* charging phone I have ever had. Nice familiar (to me) Series60 interface and the “Active Standby” has been greatly improved so it now shows me a summary of my day’s events from the calendar, waiting voicemails or text messages, and customizable short cuts to favorite things on the phone. Nokia even thoughtfully put speed keys for Bluetooth on/off and Silent/Normal mode on the * and # keys. When using my Bluetooth headset, the mute button is the button on the right in between the volume keys. Handy! This phone also does 2100MHz WCDMA/UMTS so it should also work overseas. Also has 802.11b/g wireless so it links right up to the home wireless networks. Calendar, ringtones, and music player all work nicely. Oh, and my current Nokia chargers are compatible with the new phone.

Cons: This is not a US 3G phone. It has 850MHz WCDMA support, but AT&T only supports that in some markets, and I’m not using this phone on AT&T anyways (I’m using it on T-Mobile). The side buttons are a little hard to push. The camera is really for emergency use only. And the SIM card fits in so tight, I don’t think I’m ever getting it out of this phone.... I also had a very bad time setting up email on this phone. I interrupted it while it was downloading the initial email headers and after that, every trip to the email program caused the phone to slow down and hang. I finally had to do a *#7370# to reset the phone back to factory ROM image before that problem would clear up. How extreme! Even now, the mail program isn’t the world’s fastest. It’s good for an emergency, but not much else. That’s fine though - it fits my usage criteria. No games though - not even the standard Snake game. I guess it’s because it’s a “Business” phone...

Overall, I consider this phone to be a major winner. It’s certainly a lot smaller and lighter than the Treo and the sound quality and stability of the phone are just great. It’s nice being able to have a conversation on the phone and not having to worry about the phone mysteriously crashing in the middle of the call....

Tags: Technology

It wasn’t all smooth, but yesterday, I updated the map in my Garmin Nüvi 650 and realized that my Garmin now knows my home address! Living in a new house in a new subdivision, the various online map services have only just in the last 12-18 months begun to accept our home address as a valid location.

Of course, getting this map is never as easy as saying, “Update my map”, especially when you are trying to take advantage of a free offer. First I had to upgrade the system firmware. Then I had to get my Mac to talk to the GPS. Then I had to download the (2.16GB) map. But about an hour later I was done. So I thought.

I took the GPS out for a spin and realized it was no longer speaking the names of streets. After getting home and spending some time with Google, I found out that I needed a TTS (Text to Speech) voice for that feature. Except there wasn’t one listed.

Then I remembered during the system firmware update the note about “optional voices will be erased with the update, but you can download them again later.” I had ignored it because, hey, I had never added any optional voices. Apparently the TTS voice is optional, but happened to be loaded with my GPS.

As a further pain, I could not find anywhere on Garmin’s website how to update voices to the Mac. I found the PC installer, but no Mac information.

Frustrated, I loaded up the Garmin WebUpdater software to see if I could maybe revert back to the older version of firmware to get my TTS back. The second the WebUpdater software detected my GPS, it immediately offered to add optional voices, like my TTS back. Hey! Why didn’t they just say that in the first place!

So now, I’m happy. My GPS is back as it was with new maps. Now why couldn’t they have made that voice installation instruction a little more obvious? Hmmmph!

But everyone with a Garmin - if you want to come over and not have to punch in the address to the pool house to get here, get a map update!

Tags: Technology, Rants

Whether or not it’s true, it’s pretty funny. At least for those of us who don’t care for Microsoft.

http://gizmodo.com/5035456/blue-screen-of-death-strikes-birds-nest-during-opening-ceremonies-torch-lighting

Tags: Technology

Someone sent me the following two links as overpackaging demonstrations by HP.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/hp_packaging/

and

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/enormouse/

Ayup....items definitely overpacked. Must be that oversized European A4 paper....

Tags: Humor, Technology

With all the hype surrounding the "imminent" announcement of the new iPhone, perhaps we can hope that Steve's announcement will go smoother than some of these moments.



This made my day.

Tags: Technology, Humor

So my FiOS line was installed yesterday. Again, for those of you who don't know what this is, look here. And so far, it's been great except for a few James inflicted issues....

All during the week, I've had people painting my yard (marking various utilities) and then digging up my yard (a nice neat trench) to run the fiber cables to my house. There was a little drama on Thursday. I walked outside to find 3 trucks from UtiliQuest (the utility marking company) and the cable digging subcontractor for Verizon all pointing at my driveway. Turns out, the electric lines that feed the houses across the street go underneath the dead center of my driveway. Oh joy. This resulted in a 3" x 3" cut in the driveway so they could make sure the fiber lines didn't take out electrical power (I agreed that that was a safety precaution worthy of sacrificing the driveway - and they promised to come back and fix it).

Friday morning and John, my installation technician, showed up as scheduled all ready to do the installation. He took a look at the wiring and where everything came in in the basement, and my ethernet switch with rack of servers and blinking lights and said, "This shouldn't be too tough." It took John about 4 hours to install the new interface box, run the cables into the house, hook up the FiOS router, install the TV boxes, test everything, and be on his way. No glitches in the install. Everything worked great.

I firmly believe that no technician should ever be subject to the insanity that's called my network at home, so I instructed John to set it up as for a "typical" customer, I would verify everything was working, and after he left, I'd proceed to destroy all of Verizon's neat consumer setup to integrate it with my network -- absolving him of any responsibility for sorting that mess out. He left me with full administrative access to the Actiontec router and pointed out the master reset button in case I did something I couldn't recover from. I get the feeling he figured out I've occasionally needed that in the past.

The only real challenge in making the setup work with my existing network was figuring out how to handle DHCP requests. Changing IP addresses on the router was easy enough, but the set top TV boxes obtain IP addresses from the router, so the DHCP server on the router had to be changed. *AND*, the router also is programmed to hand out IP addresses in the x.x.x.100 to x.x.x.150 range. And John warned me that having the set top box hand out the IP addresses was important, though I have yet to figure out exactly why...

Problem with this is that I have other devices on my network also needing DHCP addresses, and I have my own DHCP server set up to configure them as needed. And there are devices on my network which I need (okay, really, really want) to get the same IP all the time (for troubleshooting purposes - those devices also don't allow static IP assignments as best as I can tell). And, how do you handle the multiple outbound routes from my home network (there's the FiOS route out and the Comcast Cable Modem route out) without accidentally routing Comcast traffic to Verizon, and vice versa. Oh, and how to best use the now 3 wireless networks in the house (though the new one added by the FiOS router really isn't usable in most of the house because it's in the basement and the signal doesn't reach well to the second floor).

In the end, what I did was for all known DHCP clients in the house, have my DHCP server hand out a static IP based on MAC address and can access the network via hardwire or any of the 3 wireless networks. Simple enough - there's about 5 devices, and that's a limited amount of work. Servers have static IPs defined and manual routes set to route out through Comcast. Also simple enough. If you're hard wire into the network, you have a manually assigned IP (I set it up for you - and I can't think the last time someone came over to my house and needed a Cat-5 jack). 100-150 is now reserved for the televisions and that DHCP range is handled by the FiOS router. Guest laptops (or anything else I don't care to set up a static IP or permanent DHCP assignment) now connect to the second wireless network which is off a Linksys WRT54G unit which hands out IPs on its own subnet, then NAT's into the main network.

So far, this setup seems to be working well. I quickly found out when the TV's got the wrong IP addresses assigned that functions such as channel guides and OnDemand services didn't work, and the set top boxes were very unhappy. Reconfiguring my DHCP server fixed that (I think). The speed off the FiOS is as advertised - 15M down and 2M up (actually, more like 15.5M down and 1.9M up). So far so good.

More reports as I spend more time with the service.

Tags: Technology

Verizon finally flipped the switch on FiOS in my neighborhood. After false starts, more false starts, and lots of digging, I'm on the books to be installed on Friday May 16th. I was even able to help my neighbor out who works for Verizon (he gets a referral fee for sending people over).

Cost-wise, I think monthly service will be a wash with respect to Comcast cable. However, my backup DSL line (at 3M/550k) will get replaced by a FiOS internet line which is advertised at 15M/2M.

Will report on how the install goes. I just hope that they don't hit any sprinkler or cable lines while digging, and that the orange paint that they've used to mark line locations will stay on the grass through this torrential downpour we are having.

Tags: Technology

Some of you probably won't find this that interesting. Certainly not anyone who has been to the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. But I found the elevator system at the hotel to be kind of fascinating.

You walk up to the elevator banks and push a keypad as your floor destination.



It then tells you which letter elevator to go to:



After an small eternity waiting for the elevator, you walk in and the elevator takes you to your floor. There are no floor buttons.



The no floor buttons is the thing that took me the most to get used to.

What also appears to happen is that the computer system keeps track of the number of people who have requested a particular floor. So after a certain number of buttons presses for, say, the 40th floor, the next request for 40 will send you to a different elevator. Unfortunately, the system is a bit flawed because people keep pushing the pad when the elevator doesn't arrive, and there's no accommodation for people and large pieces of luggage.

But it's an interesting system nonetheless.

Tags: Technology

Not that I really like the coffee at Starbucks that much, but here's something nice to know:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/01/atandt-wifi-hotspots-free-to-iphone-owners-anyone-with-a-brain/

Even if they plug the access hole, I still have an iPhone to use.

Tags: Technology

Saw this interesting picture today.

http://gizmodo.com/384479/steve-ballmers-presentation-laptop-is-a-strange-choice

Though I don't know why it's so strange - it runs Windows just fine (though I wouldn't....)

Probably fake, but regardless, wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility.

Tags: Technology

I upgraded my main web/mail server this evening. In the process, I managed to disassociate some of the images from my blog from their image files.

I have to go back through and reassociate them. Might take a few days. Sorry if you were dying to see those blog entries with pictures.

Tags: Technology

We've had our new hybrid vehicle for about a month now. We're still enjoying the car immensely, but we're still getting used to a few of the nuances of driving the vehicle. So far, our average mileage is around 28 mpg in mixed driving. Pretty good. The part that takes the most getting used to is that the hybrid system shuts the engine off when it's not needed, and can cruise around at speeds of up to 35 mph in all electric mode - running purely off the car's batteries. I call this "Electric Golf Cart Mode" when this happens - especially at the mall or in a parking lot.

The great benefit to Electric Golf Cart Mode is that you can cruise around the parking lot looking for a parking space and not be burning any gas. This is a tremendous gas savings and does a lot to boost mileage. It does have the side effect that people no longer get out of your way when going through the parking lot at Costco for example. I was quite frustrated yesterday about this lady who was walking along, apparently oblivious to the fact that I was driving very slowly behind her, unable to pass because she was in the middle of the road. It then dawned on us that she *was* oblivious - we were cruising around on the electric motors and I'm sure she *couldn't* hear us. You're kind of stuck in this case because I think beeping your horn in this case to be really a bit rude and unnecessarily annoying.

When I worked at Six Flags Magic Mountain many years back, they had little electric cars that went around a track as a ride. These cars were originally the gasoline lawn-mower-powered cars you still see in amusements parks outside of California, but were "upgraded" to be more "clean". The year they did that, we realized, the effect of the ride was no longer the same - the cars were totally silent except for the whir of the electric motors. The solution was to add an artificial noise maker to add a sound effect. Maybe I need one of those for our car now....

The other issue is that the display on the navigation system which shows battery drain/generation is really fun to watch. Too fun to watch though. It's distracting. But it's really helpful to know how you're doing in terms of driving. I'm hoping that this issue goes away with time.

Tags: Technology

Zandra and I bought a hybrid car to replace her car about 3 weeks ago. The decision was somewhat accelerated after her Volvo got hit in the parking lot at Costco, causing enough damage to need fixing, but not enough to call the insurance company about (i.e., about equal to our deductible).

We had long been considering getting a larger vehicle to replace her Volvo S40 - we had purchased the Volvo when we were a family of 3. As a family of 4, the car was tighter and taking along a stroller or any amount of kid stuff effectively eliminated our capacity to bring anything else home. Our Ford Freestyle is wonderful as a family car, but sometimes, it was just *too* big (I think our eyes were bigger than our stomachs when it came to deciding how much capacity we really needed...) The Mini Cooper, of course, is just for fun.

But, with gas prices doing what they are, we wanted something relatively fuel efficient. We'd always been interested in getting a hybrid, and that's what we ended up doing. I won't mention what kind of hybrid we got though.

The hybrid has been living up to our expectations (and then some) when it comes to mileage. For an SUV type vehicle, we are averaging about 28 miles per gallon. Not bad for 4400 lbs. of car. We are now driving it almost everywhere, averaging about 400 miles/week in various errands, etc. It's comfy, quiet, and pretty good on power too.

Of course, I was curious to figure out how long it was going to take for us to pay for the difference in the price of the car over a non-hybrid. I calculated we paid a hefty $4500 premium for the privilege of owning a hybrid over a gas model. Here's the math.

For the gas version of this car: 15000 miles/year / 22 miles/gallon == 681.81 gallons of gas per year.
For our hybrid version, assuming our mileage stays the same: 15000 miles/year / 28 miles/gallon == 535.71 gallons of gas per year.
I save 681.81 gallons - 535.71 gallons == 146.1 gallons each year.
At $3.50/gallon of gas (what it *currently* costs for premium unleaded where we are), this works out to roughly $511.35/year in savings.
$4500/$511.35 == 8.8 years to pay the difference.

A less optimistic calculation is if you compare it to the 22 mpg we average on the Freestyle (which uses regular gas).
681.81 gallons * $3.25/gal == $2215.88 per year versus 535.71 * $3.50/gal == $1874.99
This results in a savings of only $340.89 per year, or 13.20 years to make up the difference.

If the price of gas changes, however, the time decreases. Let's say I go up 20%. Using the Freestyle calculation:
681.81 gallons * $3.85/gal == $2624.97 per year versus 535.71 * $4.20/gal = $2249.98
This results in a savings of $375/year or roughly 12 years to make up the difference.

Worth it? From an environmental point of view, yes. Dollars, it's probably a sacrifice. I may revisit this calculation later in case of errors or other new interesting data....

(Followup on 3/31/2008 - I forgot to mention that even though the $$$ may not add up, having twice the space is definitely not to be forgotten! -- JH)

Tags: Technology

I recently started a project to upgrade my stickman.org server. What I thought would be a few nights work has turned into a true ordeal.

Most of my issues have centered around the web server. I prefer to use Apache - and I grabbed the latest 2.2.8 server from apache.org. All seemed to go well until I tried getting the https side of the server working. I kept getting strange failures from Firefox about an incorrect mathematical response or something of the like. Turns out, it was a problem with OpenSSL 0.9.8 which I had compiled. And it wasn't a problem with the source. It was a problem with the *compiler* - the Sun Studio 11 compiler to be exact.

I was getting, running make test:

*** Error code 9
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `test_evp'

Turns out it was a known problem - writeup here: http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=99121

I chose to just get the newest Studio12 compiler. Thought I was done.

Um....nope not yet.

Now I kept getting:

Syntax error on line 78 of /usr/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:
Could not resolve address '255.255.255.255' -- check resolver configuration.

Arrrghh...this is the virtual host entry in the ssl config file that defines: What's up with that?

So the manual says, this means DNS isn't getting consulted. Well....it is. Everywhere. But guess what? My old friend nscd is to blame again (a great idea, but one that has killed me so many times...) nscd apparently has problems dealing with lookups to anything other than files. Doing an svcadm disable name-service-cache and then starting the web server worked great! Except, there are some efficiencies to be gained by using nscd. I'd like to try to keep that running if possible.

So....off to install 127111-11 (latest as of this posting). And its prereqs. All in an attempt to try to resolve bug 6612782 which appeared to fit my problem. Still no dice. Apparently some major changes went into Solaris 10 08/07 have, again, left nscd somewhat non-functional.

So I'm bypassing nscd for a bit until I can sort this out further. Actually, I'll probably file a bug....this seems to be a regression from Solaris 10 06/06.

Tags: Technology

A couple of years back, I passed up the chance to get one of the first MacBook Pro laptops with an Intel instead of PowerPC chip in it. I purchased a refurbished PowerBook G4 at a huge discount and was very, very happy with the decision.

So for my birthday, my wife allowed me to upgrade my old trusty G4. Apple also decided to nicely cooperate by releasing new MacBook Pros which meant that the now previous generation refurbs went into fire sale mode. Just what I had been hoping for!

I picked up a refurb MacBook Pro 2.6GHz system for $1849 plus tax. A full 33% off the new price from the week before. The system arrived in the traditional refurb plain brown box, but is otherwise pretty much perfect. It came pre-installed with Leopard and after about an hour of downloading updates and such, had a nice and quick new system.

The big motivation to the new MacBook Pro was to leverage virtualization to run Solaris (working for Sun, I really need to use Solaris a lot). I chose VMWare's Fusion product with Solaris 10 Update 4 (Solaris 10 08/07). It loaded up without issues, right off the DVD and I have the virtual machine running as its own separate IP address from my laptop on my home network.

It works so well in fact, that I have removed my old Dell AMD64 dual core system from my desk along with one of its monitors and hooked up the 22" ViewSonic monitor to my MacBook Pro. This has freed up a *lot* of desk space, and will probably save me a few bucks on electricity. I haven't had this much space on my desk in years!

Truly this has to be progress through technology!

Tags: Technology

WARNING: Technical Rant ahead. If you don't care about email handling, skip this entry.

For the last 72 hours, I've been suffering from collateral damage from a massive spam attack.

When you receive spam, the "From" address is almost always fake. Some random domain gets inserted. One of my domain names came up on the roulette of spam death this weekend.

Combined with thousands (tens of thousands?) of stupidly configured mailers, and that amounted to my guess almost 100,000 emails that my poor server was forced to bounce back to the stupidly configured mailer.

Symantec firewalls/anti-virus scanners were the biggest offender. Followed closely by Barracuda firewalls. Followed by Exchange servers. What it appears these servers were doing was accepting the mail, running it through a scanner which determined it to be spam, and then trying to politely return the email to the faked address. Arrrggghhh.... At one point, I was rejecting emails at over 1 per second. I generated close to 200MB of log files recording the mail bounces.

Further, there are just flat out non-compliant email servers out there - those that don't understand 550 5.5.1 permanent failure codes. Those that don't send emails with valid domain names. And so on.

We wonder why the internet is such a mess. Too many systems administrators who shouldn't have a license to be on the internet.

Makes me want to get off.

Tags: Technology

Many folks have wondered when I would cave in and get an iPhone. Oddly, some people *assumed* I got one on day 1. So let's get something straight - I'm not *that* crazy.

That said, the appeal of a handheld device that I could use to browse the web and check email over WiFi at home and when out really got me. Add the fact that I heard that as a *phone*, the iPhone was excellent finally convinced me to shell out more dollars than I should have for the iPhone, protective shield for the screen, and a holster case.

I have not been disappointed with the phone (two exceptions which I'll discuss later).

First, the phone does just look cool. You think it's big, and maybe compared to my Nokia 6126, it is. But not offensively so. The screen is the most readable thing I've used in a long time. Intuitive interface. And the thing has, to me, the best sound quality for phone calls over any phone I've owned in the last 4 years at least. It also holds calls my 6126 used to have problems with, and I thought the 6126 did a great job. I live in a notoriously bad signal area (because all cellular towers tend to point away from my house). This phone makes cell usage usable in the house.

It paired up easily with my Nokia BH-900 headset. Works great. No complaints there. I was somewhat relieved about that - I like my BH-900 very much and I really didn't have the money for a new Jawbone headset (even though I hear those are great too).

As an iPod, I like it very much. I never thought I'd find a use for the YouTube program, but it has come in handy. And of course, because it's an Apple product, it syncs perfectly with my Mac. Movies are also a bit nicer to watch on this device than on my previous iPod. You just have to remember, though, that this is also your phone so if you kill the battery watching a movie, your cell phone is off too.

Battery life is pretty good - 3 days easily without charging unless I'm heavily into email or movie watching....

There are two irritants. The first is ringtones and Apple's somewhat heavy-handed tactics to drum up business from the iTunes Music Store. I have a series of old MIDI ringtones (converted to MP3) that I am just used to. And want to continue using. And find it just very difficult to do so. If Apple offered these goofy ringtones that I like on iTMS, well, I'd probably buy them. But they don't and they go out of their way to keep me from using them. Fortunately, there's iToner which has allowed me to install a bunch of my old MIDI ringtones.

The second is a little more esoteric. iPhone mail refuses to display email messages which were forwarded as an attachment. If someone takes a client like Thunderbird, selects a message and forwards that message as an attachment, the message shows up on the iPhone as an icon named "mime-attachment". The issue is that iPhone mail appears to not understand message/rfc822 message types. This is exceedingly frustrating for me and I have filed a bug with Apple.

I am hopeful that Apple will open up the iPhone to developers. This may sound silly, but it would be nice to get a game of solitaire on this thing....

People have also complained about being limited to using EDGE only instead of WCDMA or "3G". For me, this isn't so much an issue - when I'm surfing or reading email, it's usually from on a WiFi network. If I'm truly out and about, I'm usually only checking mail or trying to do a few specific things (like check flight arrivals) which really aren't bandwidth intensive. I also do wish Apple would get a Flash viewer on the iPhone as well - if only so some websites don't come up completely blank (that said, that's poor coding to me anyways, but...)

8 out of 10. This is the only first generation Apple product that I can say that so far I've been this happy with.

Tags: Technology

So in my previous entry, I talked about a reported 1954 article from Popular Mechanics about the future of the home computer.

Turns out, as pointed out by my friend Fourth Breakfast, I was duped. It's a fake picture. See the referenced note about this picture at http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

I don't tend to fall for these too often, but every once in a while, it happens. And here I was thinking that big wheel was to open the beer fridge...

Still, I don't want one of those consoles in my house for the same reasons I wrote before!

Tags: Technology

A friend of mine recently forwarded me the picture below (with caption). It's from a 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics.



If you can't read the caption, it says "Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 30 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve those problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran (sic) language, the computer will be easy to use."

There are times I think my laptop is too big. Then I look at this and stop complaining. Think of how much *power* that thing would consume.

Then again, for those that have seen my basement, I already consume plenty of power as it is on computing devices...

Tags: Technology

Don't faint - two postings from me in one day.

Apple yesterday started taking orders for Leopard - their newest version of MacOS X. They also announced that those who purchased systems on October 1st or later could obtain an upgrade for only $9.95.

Immediately, people who bought their new Macs right before October 1st started to whine.

I had for many years used a story that was taught to me as the "Fallacy of the Beard". Or, more simply, at what point does a beard become a beard? One hair? Two hairs? 100 hairs? The "just one more" argument. At some point, you just have to draw a line and declare the beard a beard.

I learned today that that story (or logic) is called a "sorites". I was pointed to a website http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ which describes the term in more detail.

So to all your whiners out there -- tough. Read the URL. Apple drew the line. Get over it. Just like all of you who whined about the iPhone price cut.

And something new learned. And from now on, instead of explaining the story, I can just give them a URL!

Tags: Technology

I have recently discovered that there are a lot of very stupid email administrators in this world.

In the last two days, two of my domains have been pummeled by large numbers of emails to non-existent people - the apparent result of sites trying to bounce undeliverable messages back to forged email addresses.

What these sites are doing is accepting inbound emails without question, then running them through some sort of filtering device, usually something like a Barracuda Spam Firewall. The filtering device determines the email is either undeliverable or inappropriate. Fine. The problem is the stupid device then tries to *return* the email to a forged sender. Which is some random victim domain.

This is just an entirely stupid way of doing filtering. One should filter before accepting the mail. If you don't like what you're getting, reject the original SMTP transaction with a 500 series or 5.x.x (permanent) failure code. Once you accept it, it then becomes your problem. It shouldn't become mine. All you are doing by trying to bounce it back to forged email addresses is doubling the traffic generated by the spam.

I need to go find a technology-less deserted island and go hide...I can't stand the stupidity of some of the stuff I see on the internet these days. Doesn't anyone understand how this stuff works anymore?!?!?!

Tags: Technology

Saw this today on an email list at work (and this does *not* apply to me):

Three things are certain:
death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred?

Tags: Technology

In a previous posting of a similar name, I talked about a company, LetsTalk.com and how a unique email address I had created for use with dealing with this company had been leaked somehow, and I was receiving many spam messages from them.

As a statistic, I recall that I counted an average of over 400 blocked spam delivery attempts to that email address alone per day over a 4 day period.

I contacted LetsTalk.com through their communications web page. And got nothing. So after a week, I contacted TRUSTe.org per LetsTalk.com's privacy statement and filed a complaint. Here's how things went:

TRUSTe made an initial return contact within 24 hours asking me if I had been infected by a virus/trojan/malicious website. I responded that since I use a Mac, there are no known malicious viruses circulating for it, that most Malware doesn't work on Macs, and I have standard NAT and firewall security. I will admit it's not bulletproof, but, my point to TRUSTe was if my system had been compromised, I should have leaked the hundred or so other unique email addresses as well, and all those were silent. TRUSTe agreed and forwarded my complaint to LetsTalk.com

TRUSTe enforces responses times and acts as a facilitator for the whole complaint process, and after about 10 days (and me sending in logs, spam samples caught in my spam filter, etc.) LetsTalk.com delivered a report where they showed that a third party they had hired to scrub their advertising email lists had leaked out all the email addresses to be scrubbed.

So, on one hand, it's bad that the info leaked. But on the other hand, they did find the source (or so I believe since the spamming has stopped), and they indicated it was email addresses only. No other information reportedly leaked.

LetsTalk.com was responsive, asked appropriate questions, and at all times seemed interested in resolving the complaint. Refreshing and appreciated. TRUSTe's system also appears to have worked well - less than 2 weeks to resolution once I contacted them.

Maybe there's hope yet for the internet...

Tags: Technology

One of advantages to having your own domain *and* running your own mail server is that you can create as many email addresses as you want on your domain. So some time ago, tired of the spam thing, I started tracking "who does what" with my email addresses, by assigning each contact with a new company a unique email address.

There are few surprises. Shortly after linking my Safeway grocery card with my United Airlines Mileage Plus account, my United Airlines address started receiving emails from Safeway. I posted my address on my high school's alumni website and immediately began receiving emails telling me I had just inherited $2 million dollars. Harvesting bot. Things like this make sense.

Other things are surprising. Like receiving male enhancement spam at an address reserved for transactions with legit companies. Today's example is LetsTalk.com - a popular cellular phone service reseller. While their service when I placed my order with them was excellent, the fact that my LetsTalk specific email is now receiving massive amounts of spam doesn't reflect well on the company and raises concerns about their security practices. I've fired off a letter to the company and we'll see what we get back.

Other sites that I have, in the past, tracked to email address leaks are such popular sites like classmates.com (though I haven't received email to that address in a few years now) and one of my *former* banks. That latter event was quite interesting, especially since I proved to their security officer that the breach was coming from a compromised PC *inside* their corporate network. They lost my business not so much because one of their PCs became infected, but because their security officer was so cavalier in handling the manner (oh, your email is not private information, I can find it anywhere on the web).

The bottom line - as has often been pointed out, your information is not as secure as it seems.

Tags: Technology

I decided to upgrade the system I use for primarily work at home to something newer. 3.5 years is an eternity in PC technology, so I saw what seemed like a nice cheap system with which to upgrade. This was a Dell Dimension C521 w/ a dual core AMD64 Athlon processor (the 4400 series so 2.3 GHz), 2GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, and an nVIDIA built-in graphics controller. For $560 (before tax) it seemed like a nice system which would be a nice boost in performance for not much money. Given that I would then use my old system to replace Andrew's 7 year-old $399 Dell Special, it seemed even better (Andrew's system is so old, it won't even run Windows XP).

Unfortunately, one of the conclusions I've arrived at is that I hate Windows Vista. First, there's that ever irritating Windows issue of needing to get a new driver. Everything needs a new driver. And not every thing has a Vista driver. Arrgggh.

Next, realize that I work for Sun. One of my goals is to run Solaris on this thing. Multi-OS booting on a PC used to be pretty straightforward under Windows XP. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Windows Vista, which seems to insist on being in charge of things. It's not straightforward at all.

To get Vista to dual-boot with Solaris, fortunately, someone wrote some very nice (if somewhat complicated) instructions on how to accomplish this. With these instructions as a guide, I'm making progress. Now just need to get audio working, and the network working....

Keep your eyes on the Blog for more updates.

Tags: Technology

A couple of interesting websites with videos I've found today.

The first one begs the question "Does it spill your drink when you get a Blue Screen of Death"? Click here for the first video.

The second one gives me a chance to answer a question I've been asked a bunch lately - did I get an iPhone. The answer is no. But if I did, I certainly wouldn't treat it as seen in this video. Click here for the second video. Warning - not for iPhone owners that are faint of heart.

Tags: Technology

So tonight, a thread on an email alias at work had me do a speed test on my cable modem. I used the speed test at Speakeasy Networks (my former ISP whom I had to give up because I moved to an area they didn't service). I was a bit surprised. 14729kbps down and 1562kbps up. Wow. Almost 15Mbps/1.5Mbps. This is about twice what I was getting a month ago.

My suspicion is that since Verizon is on the verge of digging up our neighborhood for FIOS, this is Comcast's answer - boost their speed.

While I love the speed, we'll see if the infrastructure stays any more stable. That's been my biggest gripe with Comcast. The intermittent service interruptions....

Tags: Technology

The blog should now be fixed.

Maybe it's because I'm not plugged into the right developer network, but it turns out the problem was an incompatibility "feature" with the new web publishing software I use - RapidWeaver.

The issue was the theme (or the magic that formats the web page so nicely). The new version of the software required some modifications to the theme. Without them, the really odd side effect was that my archive files (the links that allow you to see my previous postings by month) didn't get named correctly. And my blog entries had this text at the top of the posting. Updating a file called Theme.plist in the custom theme seems to have resolved the issue.

So much for transparent upgrades.

Version 3.6.1 of RapidWeaver does seem to be a nice improvement. It appears to be faster and the blog feature is a lot more flexible than in previous versions. I especially like the ability in the RSS Feed to always publish the last 4 or 5 entries. I was annoyed at the beginning of each month when all previous entries got reset. There are some bugs in the new version, but things otherwise seem happy. Hopefully it stays this way.

Tags: Technology

The blog section of my website is not happy. I appear to have either a self-inflicted wound caused by upgrading to a new version of my web publishing software, or I've stumbled on to a bug. So please, no emails. I know about it...I'll post when it's fixed!

Tags: Technology