Misc. Ramblings

The guy who took the photo on the left used to work for Microsoft. I say used to because he was fired. He was fired, according to his post, for publishing the picture on his blog and describing the fact that he worked in the printshop which is in the same building that MS has their receiving dock. His post, found here, recounts how his supervisor said the post had violated security by describing where he worked (the printshop) and that it was in the same building as receiving.

No, you can't know what specific building that is from what he said nor can you get that information from the photo. So it is not a giant leap of faith to reckon that he was fired for something else other than saying where he worked. One could speculate that MS does not want the world to know that they use computers with operating systems other than their own. I know it would be incredibly petty of MS to fire someone because they have evidence to the contrary, but I have no better explanation.

At this point, nothing can be done for this guy. But think about what kind of company you are supporting when you buy your next PC or piece of software. No, I'm not saying your buying decision should be based solely on politics, but perhaps the day is soon coming that making the right decision and the "politically correct" decision may be the same.

As for me, this is the needle that broke the camel's back (insert disclaimer here). I had been thinking about buying the latest version of Microsoft Office for our office. I am no longer thinking that. We can't yet convert over to OpenOffice, because it is still not ready for our needs, but if this is what happened, and there's nothing from MS saying otherwise, I will not buy another Microsoft product. Ever.

Skype's the Limit. If you are into voice-over IP, and liked KaZaA, you may want to check into Skype (see their site here). Their latest beta (version 0.94) came out yesterday and the best part is that it's free. I haven't tried it myself but it sounds interesting.

Press Zero to Exit. CNN Money has a list of 12 companies and the telephone escape codes needed to reach a person, rather than navigating through a maze of directories to reach the person you need to talk to. I hope someone will expand on this effort and let people know how to get around the various automated systems. In any case, see the post here to view the 12 they have.

Mail

To: Mike Hunt
From: Dewey, Cheetum & Howe
Subject: FW: Danger FYI "Warning. Terrorist plot on 28th."

Don't go to the bathroom on October 31st.

CIA intelligence reports that a major plot is planned for that day. Anyone who takes a poop on the 31st will be bitten on the rear by an alligator. Reports indicate that organized groups of al-Quida alligators are planning to rise up into unsuspecting American's toilet bowls and bite them when they are doing their dirty business.

I usually don't send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source. It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is dating this girl whose brother knows this guy whose wife knows this lady whose husband buys hotdogs from this guy who knows a shoeshine guy who shines the shoes of a mailroom worker who has a friend who's drug dealer sells drugs to another mailroom worker who works in the CIA building next to the brother of the guy who cleans the toilets.

He apparently overheard two guys talking in the bathroom about alligators and came to the conclusion that we are going to be attacked. SO IT MUST BE TRUE!

Have a Safe Halloween and a Great Weekend - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

The Great Shower Renovation is now over. After more than a month of having to use the shower in our front house, I am happy to say we can now use our own shower. The tile guy came back to re-grout the areas that were cracking this past weekend. We then had to wait 72-hours for it to dry before sealing it. A few hours after than and our new shower was ready.

It is so nice to be back to normal again (remember, there's no place like 127.0.0.1). Of course, we will need to do the same thing to our downstairs shower but I think we will wait until after the holidays for that.

Speaking of holidays, you have 56 days until Christmas. Breaking with tradition, I've already sent my first Christmas present to the mainland so I'm pretty much set. ;=}

Lastly, sorry for the late posting yesterday. I actually had it ready but did not have the time to publish it as I was working on finishing up the cleaning of our front house so we can get it rented out. If you haven't read it yet, give it a look.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:04 AM | Permalink

The Internet changes everything and nothing. One way it changes things is that it flattens the landscape. That is, why have middlemen in a world where conversations are now one-to-one? In an environment where I can speak to someone across the globe as easily as if I were talking to a neighbor across the backyard fence, why do I need a go between? If I am a singer, I no longer need a record company to produce stacks of wax. I can burn my own CDs or provide downloads and sell them directly to the customer. In one fell swoop you reduce your costs while increasing your profits by several orders of magnitude (i.e., instead of pennies per album, you are making dollars). In addition, you get instant feedback from your customers. What is selling? What isn't? Why (your customers will make the connection to you whether you want them to or not)? Further, the harder you work and the better you are, the more you make.

What it doesn't change is market dynamics. That is, if there is an unmet need, someone will fill the vacuum and become successful doing it. For the instant availability and downloading of music, Napster; KaZaA; and Gnutella have/had millions of people using their services.

For whatever reason, people want to be able to conveniently and immediately listen to their music in forms and in places that is convenient to them. Whether it is because they don't want to spend the money on buying a complete album when only one song that interests them or because they don't want to spend money on something they can get for free or because they are tired of being pandered to on radio stations that treat them like cows to be force fed through the nose. The business models that filled those needs succeeded. Until, that is, the middlemen fought back.

The response of the music industry middlemen to this market is to create barriers. Barriers in the form of "copy protection" (AKA Digital Rights Management or DRM for short) such as NetBurn Secure and/or MediaMax (I would include a link to their site but it is so obnoxious and clueless that I can't, in good conscience, do so). Barriers in the form of treating their potential and actual customers as thieves by prosecuting them and hoping to make examples that will instill fear, awe, and yes shock into all who may dare question their power.

Into this mix comes now Apple Computer and their iTunes service (see it here). The service provides 400,000 tunes available for immediate download at a cost of .99 cents each (plus tax). However, all of the music is protected by DRM. Nonetheless, there is a way to convert the files from the proprietary formats.

The instructions below are taken from Apple themselves so one must assume they consider this to be fair use:

If your computer has a CD-RW drive, you can make your own audio CDs containing the songs you add to a playlist. You can listen to the audio CDs you create in iTunes in most consumer CD players and on your computer.

iTunes converts the songs to standard audio files before writing them to the CD. You can fit about 74 minutes of music, or about 20 songs, on a 650 MB CD-R disc. Some discs allow 80 minutes (700 MB) of music.

1 Choose Edit > Preferences, then click the Burning tab at the top of the window.

2 Choose Audio CD as the Disc Format.

3 To have all the songs on the CD play at the same volume level, select the Sound Check checkbox.

4 Click OK.

5 Select the playlist you want to burn to the CD, then click the Burn Disc button.

You can only burn a CD from the songs in a playlist.

If the playlist contains more songs than will fit on the CD, iTunes will burn as many songs as will fit on one disc, then ask you to insert another disc to continue burning the remaining songs. (You can see the size of the selected playlist at the bottom of the iTunes window.)

6 Insert a blank CD-R disc and click Burn Disc again.

If you plan to play the CD on a consumer CD player, you need to use a blank CD-R disc. If you plan to only play the CD using your computer, you can also use a CD-RW disc.

It takes several minutes to burn an audio CD. You can cancel the burn by clicking the X next to the progress bar, but if you're burning to a CD-R disc you won't be able to use the CD after canceling.

If a playlist contains any songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, you can only burn the same playlist 10 times. If the playlist includes Audible spoken word content with chapter markers, the chapters are burned as separate tracks.

For more information about external CD burners that work with iTunes, visit the Apple Support website at www.apple.com/support/itunes.

Note that to convert their protected files you must burn them to CD first. Further, you must follow the instructions above to do it. That is, you must create an "Audio CD" (files have the standard .cda extension) rather than trying to go directly from Apple's format to anything else. Once the audio CD is created, you must then read the files using a ripper (I use AudioGrabber, see it here. But you can use Windows Media Player 9, if you don't mind converting to Microsoft's own proprietary format. Otherwise, you can buy plug-ins for Media Player 9 that convert to MP3). The ripper program would then save the target file from the CD into the format of your choice; such as wav, Ogg Vorbis or MP3.

As a side light to the above post, I did a Google News search. While looking at the hits, I noticed something odd. Page after page of hits with the exact same headline: "Decision coming on technology to prevent internet piracy...". By page after page I mean four pages of the exact same thing. The URLs for most appear to be TV stations. Of the five sites I looked at, all had the same basic layout (three columns with a banner across the top). All had the buttons in the left column. All formatted the AP story exactly the same way. I don't know what to make of this but I don't think it is coincidental.

Whatever the case, the stations are:

WKYT, KY - Oct 24, 2003
WHAG-TV, MD - Oct 24, 2003
WHNS - Oct 24, 2003
WANE, IN - Oct 24, 2003
KRON4.com, CA - Oct 24, 2003
KPLC-TV, LA - Oct 24, 2003
KAIT, AR - Oct 24, 2003
WLUC-TV, MI - Oct 24, 2003
KFOR-TV, OK - Oct 24, 2003 
WHNT, AL - Oct 24, 2003
WBAY, WI - Oct 24, 2003
WLOX, MS - Oct 24, 2003
KWWL, IA - Oct 24, 2003
WSTM-TV, NY - Oct 24, 2003
WTVM, GA - Oct 24, 2003
WQAD, IL - Oct 24, 2003
KAMC, TX - Oct 24, 2003
WMC-TV, TN - Oct 24, 2003
WRIC TV, VA - Oct 24, 2003
WCAX, VT - Oct 24, 2003
KRNV, NV - Oct 24, 2003
WAVY-TV, VA - Oct 24, 2003
KSFY, SD - Oct 24, 2003
WALB-TV, GA - Oct 24, 2003
WSFA, AL - Oct 24, 2003
WAFF, AL - Oct 24, 2003
KESQ, CA - Oct 24, 2003
WTVO, IL - Oct 24, 2003
KPOM-TV, AR - Oct 24, 2003
KTVO, MO - Oct 24, 2003
KVIA, TX - Oct 24, 2003
KCAU, IA - Oct 24, 2003
WHBF, IL - Oct 24, 2003
WISH, IN - Oct 24, 2003
WHO-TV, IA - Oct 24, 2003
WOOD-TV, MI - Oct 24, 2003

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 03:36 PM | Permalink

Read My Lips, No New Tuxes. Ummm, or is it no new Texas? Nope, maybe no new toxins? Nah, it's actually the rallying call of all true Republicans trying to unseat Democrats: "No new taxes." It's what our Republican Governor said just over a year ago when she was running for office. No * new * taxes. Period. End of discussion you money grubbing Democrats who just want to grab money out of our pocket for fuzzy headed social programs.

So how does Our Governor propose to pay for her proposed transit system? Yup. Raise the excise tax (not exactly but equivalent to a sales tax in other states). But that wouldn't be enough to pay for the multi-billion dollar project. So she also wants to raise the vehicle registration tax. But that wouldn't be enough either, so she wants to raise the vehicle weight tax. And the gas tax. And car rental tax. And other taxes to be named later (after, one might speculate, the approval of the project has been slipped pass the voters).

There is no magic bullet. This is exactly what I predicted would happen no matter who won the election. The budget, over the long run, can be viewed as a zero sum game. That is, if you want to spend money on a project, you have only three options: take money from existing projects, increase taxes, or do a combination of both.

If this very expensive boondogle should go forward, I will predict now she will do option three because she will have no other choice. The magnitude of the cost (once you figure in the inevitable cost overruns/graft) is just too large for it to be otherwise.

As an aside, the scope of the project includes the hated, view stealing double decked highway now PR spun as a "fly over." Fly over, I like that. It's what airplanes, miles up in the air do. Fly over. It has such a beautiful ring to it. Fly. As in soaring in the sky or as in free as a bird. This is so much better than double decked concrete freeway. Oh yes, this is so much better. Not.

I hate to blow my own horn but...I told you so. The question now is whether any Democrat is smart enough to realize there is an opportunity here? I will make another prediction - the answer will be no. Why? Because never assume any politician will forgo immediate economic gain (think of the money being transferred from everyone's pockets to a few contractors. Who then recycle those funds to the sitting politicians). This will be a cash cow with enough slop to gorge on for everyone, including Democrats. Even as each of them is slowly, one by one, picked off by Republicans talking out one side of their mouth about not raising taxes while out of the other side saying it is necessary and prudent.

Speaking of Traffic. Our City has those new fangled traffic lights that have sensors built in to detect the imminent arrival of emergency vehicles. Said traffic lights then change green so that the emergency vehicle may quickly, and hopefully safely, pass through the intersection. The traffic light sensors detect a pattern of flashes produced by special lights installed on emergency vehicles.

You can now buy such lights for your own car/SUV/truck/dilapidated run-down piece of rust. Imagine that, never having to stop for a red light again! Clear sailing through town! Never a traffic jam to slow your progress! All for only $300USD.

But wait, there's more! The devices, called mobile infrared transmitters (or MIRT for short), are apparently legal (insert disclaimer here) in at least some, if not many, states. See the story here and hope it doesn't get too wide spread where you live.

Speaking of Being Blissed Out. Neowin has screen shots of Microsoft's 4051 build of Longhorn here. Obviously, screen shots can't tell you everything about an OS but it is interesting to look at. Be aware that most of the screen shots are very large (>300KB) so don't do this without a broadband connection.

MT Feeling. MT-Blacklist anti-comment spam version 1.5 for MovableType hit the wire yesterday. Get it here from Jay Allen's site.

Sorry this posting is so late but I tried to get a section on Apple's iTunes up but just ran out of time. Maybe tomorrow. In other news, Dr. K posted. That's the good news. The bad news is the reason he hasn't doesn't so for awhile is he is getting a divorce. Sigh. This appears to be the second Daynoter to do so. Big Sigh.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It was October 20, 1999 that this blog/journal began its life. I had been using the Internet (and bulletin boards before that) for several years and had come upon Dr. Jerry Pournelle's site through my readings of the former dead tree periodical Byte. Once I found his site, it wasn't long before I found the Daynotes Gang. I started conversing with a couple of them and appreciated their openness and willingness to help its members.

I soon began my own journal and was gratified to hear from Tom Syroid that I had been inducted into their august group! It is a bit ironic that Tom has since taken a sabbatical (along with several other members, of various lengths of time: Shawn Wallbridge, Chris Ward-Johnson, Matt Beland, Jim Crider, Steve Tucker, Greg Lincoln, Mat Lemings, JHR, and Jon Hassell. It's nice to see Al Hedstrom back on the run, as it were, with at least weekly postings (or is it weakly? [G] - Ed.))

As I've gotten to know them, through their journals and e-mails, I realized they are a group of terrific individuals. Yes, there have been spats that have caused long-term rifts, but the group continues on (even if I don't seem to get any of the Back Channel e-mails anymore).

As I trod into my fifth year of doing this, I wonder where I'll be in five years? Will I still be typing in this journal or will I have lost interest and regained the time it takes to write these things? I honestly don't know. What I do know it has been an honor to be associated with these gents and I would like to thank each and every one of them. I have learned much and hope, in my own small way, to have given back in at least equal measure.

But for now, it is into the breach once more...

InfoWorld's Bob Lewis has an insightful post (see it here) on one person's run-in with office politics. The specific situation is one in which an employee is layed off, but then magically returns when a "special" position is created for the person. This situation is fraught with all kinds of traps that can lead to your own ouster.

Lewis has some good advice - be professional and look past the obvious to the underlying motivations. Of course, this is easier said then done but the successful employee must be able to do this.

PBS columnist Robert X. Cringely talks about the differences between Microsoft and Open Source and why MS doesn't seem to understand what the strengths and weaknesses of each are:

At the core of Ballmer's remarks is a fundamental misunderstanding not only of Open Source, but of software development as an art rather than as a business. Cutting to the bone of his remarks, he is saying that Microsoft developers, since they are employees, are more skilled and dedicated than Open Source developers. They are better, Ballmer suggests, because Microsoft developers have their rears (presumably their jobs) on the line. All those lines and all those rears are part of a road map, he says, and because of that road map the $30 billion plus Microsoft gets each year isn't too much for us to pay, so the model works pretty well.

This is nonsense. It is nonsense because Steve Ballmer, like Bill Gates before him, confuses market success with technical merit. Microsoft's product roadmap is a manifestation of a business plan, and what matters in Redmond is the plan, not the map, which is in constant flux. How many technical initiatives has Microsoft announced with fanfare and industry partners, yet never delivered? Dozens. That is no roadmap.

See the full column here.

There be a Red Storm coming. Cray Inc. announced they will be sell a commercial version of their Red Storm supercomputer that it is building for Sandia National Labs (see the story here). As is the case with more and more supercomputers, this one will use massively parallel clusters of AMD's 64-bit Operterons.

Last Thursday and Friday I was indeed layed flat on my back. Just getting out of bed was an adventure in pain. But things got better by Saturday. Sunday found me doing work around the house. I am back at work today and hope my back holds up.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:01 AM | Permalink

The second annual Dilbert weasel awards are out (see them here). The usual suspects "win" so maybe it's not as interesting as it could be but I did download a couple of kewl wallpapers so maybe all is not lost.

Speaking of which, the President of the United States is arriving in our town tomorrow. Due to security concerns, his itinerary is not being released by the Secret Service. However, yesterday's TV newscast had a programming note saying they would go live at 8:00am tomorrow to show the arrival of an un-named personage. Said personage would then be viewed at the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor around mid-morning and later in the afternoon, be seen at a $1,000 to $2,000 a plate Republican political fund raiser at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The personage would then be leaving for the mainland, in his custom painted Boeing 747, around 7:00 or 8:00 pm that night.

Of course, due to security concerns, it would be inappropriate to release his name or itinerary.

My back has been acting up lately and kicked into full gear last night. It started with a muscle spasm and next thing I knew I could barely walk.

I think it even affected my sleep as I had the Student's Nightmare. You know the one where you forget about your final test in a class until it's already started so you come tearing into the classroom totally unprepared. Well, mine had a slight twist to it, not only did I come in late, but because I did, I didn't get the professor's instructions. Said instructions were that each person had been assigned a different topic to write on. Not knowing that, I did not write on the correct topic.

Speaking of school remembrances, I may have talked about this one before but it seems kind of appropriate so bare with me while I whip it out again. In undergrad school I had to take an introductory class in history. Since it was a introductory level class, and the professor understood it was required of all students, the difficultly meter was set more to the left than the right. In fact, tests were simple regurgitations of as much stuff that you could remember. No analysis. No showing you understood the underlying concepts. Just straight, wrote writing of what you had memorized. The more stuff you wrote, the higher the grade. You didn't even need to write in sentences and paragraphs - bullets or outlines were okay.

As it so happened, I had something like three or four finals in one day and, since I was not the best of undergraduate students, there was no way I could cram for that many classes in such a short time. I mean, there just wasn't enough room in short term memory for that much information so it would just sort of drain out before the end of the day. Fortunately, the history professor had given us a list of five topics that would be covered on the test. Three of the five would actually be chosen by the professor but he would not tell us which five until we were in class. Since I was trying to minimize studying working on assignments that did not return high value for my investment of time, I looked at the list of five, chose the three I thought were the ones the professor would choose, and studied those three. Fortunately for me and my future career, such that it is, I guessed right because if I hadn't, I would not have been prepared to answer any of the others. [Kids, don't do this at home. Go to your friends house instead - Ed.]

I'll be at work today but who knows if I'll make it in tomorrow. If I don't, I probably won't post as I'll be flat on my back in bed.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ian Lind is a former big-J journalist here in Hawai'i. He was part of a dying breed - the afternoon newspaper. While the newspaper he worked for is still around (in name if not spirit), they cut him loose for reasons perhaps only they will ever know or admit.

While we may mourn the loss of his voice in print, he rose again in the form of a blog (see it here). Not surprisingly, he comments mostly on things journalistic but there is more to the man than that.

For instance, check out his galleries of photos here, here, and here.

But before you think Lind has gone soft in his old age, follow this link here to more muck raking e-journalism than you can shake a stick at.

While I get the impression that Lind would like to be part of big-J journalism again someday, I think he is nonetheless savoring the twists and turns that life has placed in his way. May your path have as many turns.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:53 AM | Permalink

For your CSS/HTML Geeks out there comes this list here of effects using the aforementioned stylings. One highlight is how to create shadow lines with CSS (see it here).

How's Your Eye-Hand Coordination? Here's a simple Flash demo that you can run when you have a spare moment. The goal is to throw the wadded up paper into the trash bin. The complicating factor is a fan blowing at varying angles and force. Note that the demo includes sound so you may want to mute that before going here.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:45 AM | Permalink

Bidirectional, multiplexed backplane exhaustion. Yet another IT excuse generator can be found here. I was going to make a snide remark about our IT people being too dumb overworked to use one of these things but that would be mean. So I won't.

Not much going on in the Seto Shack today. We're still waiting for the plumbing contractor to finish the replacement of our shower/tub that started on the 17th of last month. I knew it would take longer than the contractor said it would but its been one month and it's still not finished. Sigh.

By the way, note to fellow Daynoter Brian Bilbrey, I keep forgetting to tell you that, if you haven't already, to evaluate your car insurance now that you are getting a house. I know it sounds strange to say you need to take a look at your car insurance but when you think about how a home is probably the most expensive asset most people will have and therefore want to protect from people going after in a law suit, it becomes clear that you want enough coverage on your car should you ever be, God forbid, in a collision. Otherwise, the asset that people may go after is your home. Not a Good Thing.

So, word to all new home buyers, if you haven't already, make sure you have enough insurance on the car.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:40 AM | Permalink

Firebird Rises. As noted in Tuesday's post, the Mozilla Firebird browser 0.7 was released to the masses (get it here). Note that they've instituted a reverse lookup to the domain you are coming from (for security purposes, wouldn't want just anyone using Firebird). For most people, this will not be a problem. However, it is a problem here because our idiot poor, overworked IT staff doesn't know how to setup domains/DNS correctly. So I ended up using PuTTY (get it here) to securely login into Pair (my web host), then used the text-based Lynx browser (get it here) to pull down the file. I then used WS_FTP LE (get it here) to get the file from Pair to my PC. A little complicated but there you go.

Wink, Wink. If you are in PC application support, you probably could use something that demos mouse movements or allows you to show screen shots with custom callouts or balloons. IF so, check out Wink (see it here). You can output to Flash SWF, EXE, PDP, or HTML. The best is it's freeware.

The Need for Speed II. So you think you have a fast Internet connection eh? Well, try transferring a CD with 60 minutes of music in one second. The Swiss CERN has a link to CalTech that runs at 5.44 gigabits per second. That's gigabits folks. Per second. See the story here.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:48 AM | Permalink

Awe and Shock. This report here says a company has come up with a math processor that does 25 gigaflops. They go on to say if you stuffed a PC with 24 of these things (pretty hard to do in many PCs since you would reportedly need six PCI slots, something rather rare), at a cost of $25,000USD, you would have a desktop computer equal in power to one of the top 500 in the world. Or not. Depends on whether they actually produce any silicon.

Excess and Stupidity. If four is okay, six is good, eight better, and 12 the best, then what do you call a car with 16 cylinders displacing 13.6 litres? Call it a Cadillac. That last bastion of incredibly bad taste has a concept car (see it here) that puts out 1,000 hp/745 kW. I am at a loss of words for describing how ugly this car looks so I will say no more.

Speaking of Retro. Ford is creating a replica of their storied Le Mans winning GT40 and calling it the Ford GT. This one has half the cylinders and half the horse power of the Cadillac but will probably run rings around the Caddy due to its lighter weight and much better handling. See the Ford here.

AWGTHTGTATA. Not if you know what that means you don't. If you don't, feel free to check out yet another listing of Internet acronyms here. B4N.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:24 AM | Permalink

MovableType has finally commented on the record about spam in MT's comment section (see it here. The short of it is they are working on something but in the mean time they are recommending Jay Allen's MT-BlackList (see it here). Fellow Daynoter Phil Hough (see his site here) is also recommending the Black-List but has this link here. Both seem to go to the same place so use either one.

Phil reports the module is easy to install and seems to work quite nicely. Until MT themselves come up with something, perhaps this is the way to go. Before I can do that though, I'll need to reload the Perl scripts so it may be awhile before the comments go live again.

Mighty Mozilla. Be on the lookout for the 0.7 release of the Mozilla Firebird browser (see this page here). The site says it will be released "~ October 14, 2003" which happens to be today. This point release is way late (see the original Mozilla road map here which has "ideal" release date of 3 September. Of the three previous release dates, none have been so late as this one.) so one has to speculate whether the recent changeover from Netscape funding to a foundation threw a monkey wrench into the works.

In any case, the latest release should be out soon so keep checking the download page here if it's not there already.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:18 AM | Permalink

There a buzz going on about the 16-year old teenager from England that sings soul music like it hasn't been sung since the 1970's. Her name is Joss Stone (see her site here). If you are into the likes of Aretha Franklin, then you owe it to yourself to listen to this young woman. Then watch the video on her site and be prepared to be blown away by how such a soulful sound could come out of someone so young.

Be aware this is straight from the heart soul music. It is not over produced and is definitely not for everyone. But as I said, if you are into soul, check out Joss Stone.

Cracking Up. I was sealing the grout of our new bathroom tile when I noticed several small cracks in said grout. I'm going to have to call the contractor to have him take a look and see what can be done. Sigh.

Mail Call

From: Gary M. Berg
To: Dan Seto
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 2:10 AM
Subject: MT comment problems

I happened to get a pointer to this in a newsletter today Lockergnome, I think):

http://cheerleader.yoz.com/archives/000849.html

From: Dan Seto
To: Gary M. Berg
Subject: Re: MT comment problems
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 06:44:36 -1000

Thanks Gary, there are several different ways of hacking MT to try to reduce spam. As is suggested on the site, MT itself needs to get into motion to implement and support their own solution as the quality of various hacks are, shall we say, uneven.

---

From: Al Hedstrom
To: Dan Seto
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2003 6:40 PM
Subject: MT Spam

Dan -

Check out http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/09/killing_comment_spam_dead. Maybe not a complete solution, but ...

From: Dan Seto
To: Al Hedstrom
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 9:37 AM
Subject: Re: MT Spam

Thanks Al. This looks better than some of the other solutions people have come up with but I'm not so sure a blacklist is the way to go. I'll re-read the site to be sure I understand what they are doing but I would really rather have MT themselves come up with something that they would support.

In either case, I still have my email address there so if anyone wants to email a comment they can do that.

From: Al Hedstrom
To: Dan Seto
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 7:05 AM
Subject: RE: MT Spam

Understood. And all I can offer is commiseration!

I see a lot of other MT blogs struggling with the same problem. The MT folks offer nothing - not even notes on research/tests?

Just curious.

From: Dan Seto
To: Al Hedstrom
Subject: Re: MT Spam
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 07:09:37 -1000

Nothing official on their site (at least nothing I could find). There is a lot of message traffic in their forums but nothing that I found that suggests MT is working on a solution that will be incorporated into an update. On the other hand, I can't imagine that they aren't doing something.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:27 AM | Permalink

Spamming MT. I got more spam in the "Comments" section (I use MovableType (MT), the content management system for my blog) yesterday. This, even though I had turned off comments so it should have been impossible to create anything new. So I made some other changes to try to keep the spammers away. Unfortunately, this means past comments will no longer be viewable.

I am very disappointed that MT has apparently done nothing so far to close these obvious security holes. Others, stepping in to try to solve the problem for MT, have added modules that blacklist IP addresses but as we know from trying that with e-mail, you are fighting a battle you can't win because the addresses will change as fast as you can block them. As Simon from American Idol would say; "Pathetic."

But what is really strange is I don't know why spammers are focusing on blogs because, so far, the comments are showing up in posts months old. Hence, no one would see them unless one were to go back that far and, in any case, I delete the spam within 24 hours. So, it is highly unlikely anyone would read any of their drek, even if they wanted to.

However, if the spammers leave any more comments I will stop using MT and go back to how I did things before as this is really making me angry. They have no right to post their commercial crap on MY site. I decide what is posted here, not them. This shall not stand.

Speaking of Spammers. Wired has a chilling story of how a Polish group of hackers is claiming to provide untraceable websites. Don't ask me how they are supposedly able to do this since, as far as I know, this shouldn't be possible. But apparently, if the story is correct, they have a way of screening their spam sites from the usual tools used to identify who is behind a site (e.g., traceroute and whois). See the story here.

Almost Home. The repairs to our bathroom is almost complete. The painter came and repainted the drywall of the ceiling below the shower that leaked. Then, the floor guy came to patch in some flooring where the old shower/tub used to be. The last thing to do, which has not been scheduled yet, is to patch the scratches the tile guy put in to the new tub when he was setting the tiles.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I'll be at home tomorrow. The plumbing contractor will be sending people to fix the vinyl flooring, paint the drywall, and patch the scratches put into our new tub by the tile guy. We hope these people are professionals but given the performance of the other sub-contractors I am not very hopeful it will turn out that way. Sigh.

In any event, it is unlikely I will be posting tomorrow unless something really, really big comes up.

Good Stuff for Geeks. If you are in PC support and want a small utility that tells you what the Microsoft error codes are, then this one is for you. It's called "Error Messages for Windows" (full marks for originality) by Gregory Braun and can be downloaded here. You can either type in a specific error code and get what each means or you can get a listing of all error codes and print them out.

Sun's StarOffice 7 Office Suite is set for release next week Tuesday (14 October). But you can get the evaluation version now from Sun here. StarOffice, as opposed to its little brother OpenOffice, is not free. The MSRP is $79.95USD. Only you can decide if the benefits are worth the cost so try the evaluation version to find out. Or not.

Over at ThinkGeek, they have the perfect thing for CubicleWars: the wireless color mini video cam mounted on one of the tracked rovers (see it here). Just the thing to scope out what's happening around the next bend.

If that doesn't get your geek meter pegged, then check out the Lian-Li PC case with a built in aquarium (see it here). I kid you not. An aquarium built into the aluminum PC case. The kit includes fish, air pump, cathode light, and mounting accessories. Water not included.

And finally, for the US Geek who just has to know what time it is comes the Casio Waveceptor wristwatch that receives its time signal from the atomic clock in Fort Collins, Colorado. You have to be within 2,000 miles of the atomic clock to get a signal but if you are, there aren't too many watches that will be more accurate than yours. At least, not at $39.95. See the watch here.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:24 AM | Permalink

Reverse Engineering. Windows is rife with ways to install viruses but probably the easiest way is to trick the gullible into installing it themselves. For example, over the weekend, my inbox was filled with e-mails supposedly sent from Admin, Security Support, Network Security, Security Division, and Security Department. Of course, none of these we sent from any such organization. Of course, all of them had payloads packed waiting for me to click on them to unleash their viruses.

For your information, some of the subjects of these e-mails are: :Undelivered Message: User unknown, Bug Announcement, Current Net Update, Last Microsoft Security Patch, Latest Pack, New Upgrade, and new internet critical update.

I'm sure the regular readers (all 12 of you - Ed.) of this page are not fooled by these people but maybe you can spread the word and help the less fortunate help themselves by not falling for these e-mails.

Engage. Most 'net savvy folks realize by now that the guy who played Ensign Crusher on the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation bears no resemblance to the character he played. I mean, he's an actor. Actors play parts that are not necessarily similar to themselves. So it should not come as a surprise that columnist Dan Gilmore has a nice write-up (see it here) on now author/actor Wil Wheaton (see the Wheaton site here).

InstallShield Bug. A bug that I had heretofore not seen cropped up yesterday. It seems there is a problem with the InstallShield program and MS Outlook/Outlook Express. When you install a program with InstallShield, the progress bar may proceed until it reaches 99% and then seem to hang.

Letting it sit there for a couple of minutes may have the install start up again but another work around is to shut down Outlook/Outlook Express (and any mail proxies you may be running). I don't know why this occurs, only that yesterday was the first time I've seen it.

In any case, keep this in the back of your mind if you should have problems with InstallShield.

And Finally. For those of you in California, it's election day. As always, get out there and vote early and often. If nothing else good comes out of this, it does hold politicians accountable and responsive to the people. So make yourself be heard.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:06 AM | Permalink

Below are some quick comments about things I have either not said anything or very little for various reasons.

Re: Outing of CIA Operative. Not everything that needs to come out about this incident of naming a CIA employee has come out. So perhaps it would be a good idea to name an independent investigator to look at this. What I can say for sure is just because someone works at Langley does not mean they are not working under cover. There are many operatives at Langley who never go to foreign countries but are nonetheless put in mortal danger when their covers are blown. Hence, to say that she worked only at Langley and therefore, by definition, can not be working under cover is naive at best. At worst, she and the people she ran could now be in danger. One can only hope no one, in any administration, would be so immoral and cynical as to put someone in danger for political gain.

Re: California Recall Election. I am pro democracy. I am pro referendum, initiative, and recall. Further, I believe that the answer for any problems with democracy is more democracy. So how do I square that with the circus that is California politics?

I have no good answer for this. But I think one of the lessons of this recall election is that 30 percent is too low a number to start a recall. One has to wonder how it is 30 percent of the electorate can nullify the will of the 51 percent that elected the Governor in the first place?

Secondly, what future governor will ever make the hard, controversial decisions that is best for the state knowing he or she will be recalled by a vocal minority? Conversely, politicians do their best to avoid making decisions anyway and, to a great extent, the problems the present governor is dealing with came from previous decisions not made. But I think this situation is made even worse by the lessons of this recall.

As an aside, I am sickened by the dirty tactics displayed against one of the candidates. I don't think it is a coincidence that the alleged charges of sexual harassment have come out a mere week before the election. I don't think it is a coincidence that the charges come so late in the campaign as to not give the candidate time to adequately respond. Whether or not the charges are true, to wait until the very end to come out with this dreck is despicable and, I think, could very well back fire on the people who are making these charges.

I don't know what the answer to all this is. The problems that whoever is governor of California has will not be solved by 30 second sound bites or slick campaign ads. But I know this, if the citizens of California don't solve this soon, things will only get worse. A lot worse.

Re: US Baseball. CUBS WIN! CUBS WIN!

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:01 AM | Permalink

It's Friday and I'm going to be reformatting my hard drive to get rid of the last vestiges of the bug filled Novell Netware client. I suspect the slow down in speed I'm experiencing is related to the hard drive read cache either being disabled by the client or at least substantially curtailed by it.

In any case, if it wasn't for our bug filled, expensive, and bloated Lotus Notes, I wouldn't need to access the Netware servers at all. In fact, if the sloths hard working individuals who run the Domino server would just turn on POP3, and maybe the web interface, I wouldn't need the Netware client nor the Lotus Notes client because I could use OpenSource IP compliant web apps instead of proprietary crapware (Perhaps there is a connection between business monopolies and quality of output? - Ed.).

So I will be offline for the better part of the day as I reformat and reinstall what I need.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:22 AM | Permalink

JavaScript is a tool that some programmers use to build web sites. However, as with most tools, they can be misused. I don't know the exact number, but there appear to be numerous JavaScript-based security exploits. Said exploits take advantage of "features" that may include the running of arbitrary code.

Hence, many security minded users simply turn JavaScript execution off as this is the only way to have a 100 percent barrier against this kind of exploit.

So, what is a JavaScript programmer to do? If you use JavaScript you are guaranteeing a certain percentage of your site visitors will not be able to use your site as you intended it. For a commercial site, this translates into lost business. As Martha would say, this is not a Good Thing.

One solution is to use the tools that XHTML and CSS have.

For example, this site here created accessible image tab rollovers without the crutch of JavaScript. Now, I am the first to say that using CSS opens up a whole new world of browser incompatibility. But what it doesn't do, as far as I know, is open your PC to l33t hax0rs to ownz U.

I am glad that people are making imaginative use of the tools to work around JavaScript. I wish more would do the same. If they did, the cyber world would be a safer and more accessible place.

Mail Call

To: Dan Seto
From: Sjon Svenson
Subject: Novell ...
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 05:11:58 -0700 (PDT)

Novell ....
I think I now know what you mean. I took my PC (NT4) to a client that runs a Novell network. Of course I couldn't connect so we called a support guy from the client. He started installing a netware client. For some reason that didn't turn out right. Yep, by noon I was back in the main office with a PC where no one could log on to anymore.

ps. I'm not on my own box now so I don't have your eMail address (I don't even have a mail-client installed). And I don't know it by heart. But hey, you have a 'contact me' on your page so I pulled your address from the HTML source. Yep, simple and easy ... I did crack it without using tables or looking up codes though ^__^

Kind regards,
Svenson.

---

From: Dan Seto
To: Sjon Svenson
Subject: Re: Novell ...
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:29:02 -1000

I think the problem with Novell goes back years to the DOS wars when they tried to compete against MS DOS by pushing, I think DR DOS. As I recall, MS did not take kindly to that and thereafter refused to help Novell with the code needed to access MS networks.

Unless I'm wrong, it was about then that MS started writing their own client. As it turned out, MS did a better job of reverse engineering the Novell client than Novell did of reverse engineering Windows...

Glad you were able to decipher the encoded mailto. It usually works just fine when you have a default mail client installed and click on the link. Otherwise, as you probably saw, if you hover your mouse cursor over the link, it's almost readable (it's encoded to try to slow down the spammers).

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 08:47 AM | Permalink

Segway Lite. This guy here decided he wanted a Segway but didn't want to spend $5,000USD to get one. So he built his own.

Ctl-Alt-Del. This guy here was the guy who gave the world the three fingered salute. The article is short but gives some general background into the man who came up with the common key combination that everyone now uses.

Novell 32 - Dan 0. My problems with the Novell client continue. As a review, we have servers running network operating systems (NOS) from Microsoft, Novell, IBM, DEC, and Wang (Last time I looked, there were about 50 servers, including IBM mainframes.).

Each NOS has its good and bad points. But each requires the loading of client software to login and interact with the server. Some of these clients are fast and easy to use. Some aren't.

Up until one of our servers was converted to Netware 6.x (the latest version), I used the Microsoft Client Services for Netware (CSNW) that comes with Windows 2000/XP to access our Novell Netware servers. The MS client is fast, bug free, and works great with Netware 4.x and 5.x.

Compare this with the official Novell client that is full of hundreds of bugs and causes all manner of problems with my copy of WindowsXP. For example, boot time is increased by a factor of at least three. Accessing Netware servers went from almost instantaneous to 20 seconds. Running applications, especially MS Office (what a coincidence - Ed.) on a Netware server is a great excuse to go get a cuppa while you wait for the hour glass to clear.

Once the Novell client is installed, uninstalling does not clear the problems. The only thing to do is to reformat the drive and install everything, except the Novell client.

But in my case, if I don't use the Novell client when connecting to a Netware version 6.x server, the MS CSNW does strange things. While you do get logged in, drive mapping does not seem to occur. Yet, if you manually map a drive to a volume, the other drives magically appear. I don't know why this is happening but I guess I'll be reformatting my drive and starting over.

All I can say is Novell makes a terrific network operating system. But their client software blows chunks leaves much to be desired. Sigh.

Aloha!

Posted by DanS at 09:15 AM | Permalink