All Geek, All the Time

Path Over 2048 Chars Kills Windir Environment Variable

2012-01-16T14:17:00.000-08:00

All of a sudden my cmd prompts in Windows 7 had no PATH environment variable. And when I tried to change my path (Right Click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced Settings) I got a terrible error message about %windir%\systempropertiesadvanced.exe not being found.

Bottom line, if your PATH environment variable is more than 2048 characters it (and WINDIR) stop being visible in many contexts.

I fixed it by manually running c:\windows\system32\systempropertiesadvanced.exe and deleting one entry from my PATH to put me under 2048 chars. New cmd windows work just fine.

Interesting that you can't use the GUI to increase path length above 2048; only badly behaved installers are allowed to do that?

Props to http://www.sheldor.org/index.php?post/2011/03/03/Windows-7-WINDIR-missing-issue for pointing me in the right direction. I haven't found any other acknowledgement that this issue exists.

OCIDescribeAny Can Allocate Memory

2012-01-11T15:29:00.000-08:00

The doc is silent on the matter, but my testing shows pretty clearly that OCIDescribeAny is allocating memory and attaching it to the OCIDescribe in/out param.

So never reuse OCIDescribe structures when making multiple calls to OCIDescribeAny; do OCIHandleAlloc/OCIHandleFree calls for each iteration.

2011 Surrey Candidates for School Trustee

2011-10-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

See also candidates for Mayor and Councillor.

Terry Allen (SFE)

Ijaz Chatha (SCC)

Moh Chelali (SCC)

Sukhy Dhillon (SCC)

Charlene Dobie (SCC)

Pam Glass (SFE)

Elected in 2008; 1st place (out of 6).

Laurence Greeff (SCC)

Paul Hilsdon

Not elected in 2008; 11th place (out of 6).
Not running for council as well this year, as he did in 2008.
Wants to give $500 a year to every student to spend on iPads.
Wants school system to get involved in pre-K child care as a stepping stone to universal child care. Thinks unionized school system will be able to offer child care at competitive rates.
Pro-union, but not enough to get an endorsement.

Malkiat Kang

Not elected in 2008; 10th place (out of 6).

Laurie Larsen (SFE)

Reni Masi

Ram Sidhu (SCC)

Endorsed by STA (Surrey teacher's union).

Ann Van Rhyn

Shawn Wilson

2011 Surrey Candidates for Councillor

2011-10-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

See also candidates for Mayor and School Trustee.

Kuldip Ardawa (SCC, BCNDP)
Immigrated from England 8 years ago, focus on multiculturalism.

Bob Bose (SCC)
Elected in 2008 in 7th place (out of 8).
Wants a "Living Wage" ($18.17/hour) for anyone doing city work.
Focus on transportation and land-use planning, sister cities (paid vacations).
Endorsed by NWDLC.
Wants to spend more money on a recycling contractor that doesn't throw most of the recycling away. Bet you feel good about all the sorting you do now!
Wants to "greatly expand our park system", "work to relocate the BNSF heavy rail from our beaches" which I'm sure won't cost approximately a zillion dollars.

Lawrence Chen

Doug Elford (SCC)
Failed in 1999 bid for council.
Endorsed by NWDLC.

Rina Gill (SCC)
Not elected in 2008; 9th place (out of 8).
Endorsed by NWDLC.

Tom Gill (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Elected in 2008 in 2nd place (out of 8).
Focus on "fiscal leadership", public transportation, young families.

Kuljinder "22" Gill
Convicted of uttering threats and mischief under $5000. Currently charged with impaired driving causing bodily harm, etc. Focus on youth activities, like shooting ranges... 22 = 22 calibre ammunition?
Generally thinks Surrey "sucks".

Paul Griffin
Former Surrey GM of Communications wants more Skytrain in Surrey (rather than light rail).
Wants "windfall rezoning" tax to prevent flipping after rezoning.

Bruce Hayne (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Partner at thornleyHayne, worried about "red-tape" interfering with business formation and growth.

Linda Hepner (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Elected in 2008 in 4th place (out of 8).
Former Manager of Economic Development for Surrey, chaired the George Bush Summit.
On "red-tape" committee and supporter of the Build Surrey Program.

Judy Higginbotham
Under fire for putting "re-elect" on her signs even though she isn't currently a councillor.
Defeated in the last Federal election, wants a halt to tax increases in Surrey.

Gary Hoffman
Not elected in 2008; 16th place (out of 8).

Marvin Hunt (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Elected in 2008 in 8th place (out of 8).
Rubber-stamped controversial casino documents while acting-Mayor.
Supports clean energy and light rail projects.
Once accused of covering up sexual abuse in the church where he was a Pastor.

Bernadette Keenan (SIGN)
Not elected in 2008; 19th place (out of 8).
Opposed Gateway/South Surrey Freeway, involved in numerous union and protest activities.
Green jobs, social justice, living wage, affordable housing.

Mary Martin (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Elected in 2008 in 5th place (out of 8).

Supporter of the giant municipal construction projects.

Wants New York-style "community courts".

Imtiaz Popat (SIGN)
"A queer-community activist long known for his Green credentials" who apparently failed to be elected to the Park Board in Vancouver in 2008.
Wants to make Canada more like the nations immigrants are fleeing from.
More transit, cheaper transit, more recycling programs.

Barinder Rasode (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Elected in 2008 in 6th place (out of 8).
Big on discussing social issues like bullying and domestic violence.
Wants light rail.

Grant Rice (SCC)
Not elected in 2008; 12th place (out of 8).
Endorsed by NWDLC.
Thinks Surrey is taking on too much debt.

Gary Robinson (SCC)
Ex-Surry Councillor, ex-junkie, focus on homelessness and addiction.
Was once homeless, wants more "affordable housing".
Endorsed by NWDLC.
No garbage incinerator, opposes toll bridges.
Opposes BC Hydro Smart Meters.

Mike Robinson
Wants to implement direct democracy.

Stephanie Ryan (SCC)
Not elected in 2008; 11th place (out of 8).

Wants developers to dedicate 10-20% of new development to "affordable housing".
Endorsed by NWDLC.
Wants "living-wage" requirement for city employees/contractors.
Fight fan?

Partap Singh
Not elected in 2008; 15th place (out of 8).

Wants Surrey to get involved in operation of Provincial ERs, private walk-in clinics, trucker parking and to legalize all secondary suites.

Barbara Steele (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Elected in 2008 in 3rd place (out of 8).
As President of UBCM accepted nomination of Gordon Campbell for Order of BC.

Susan Thomas
Wants wards, critical of decision to build new City Hall.

Judy Villenueve (SF)
Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.
Elected in 2008 in 1st place (out of 8).
Wants homeless put in "stable housing" rather than shelters.
Endorsed by NWDLC.
"Pacific Co-ordinator for the Writer's Union of Canada for two decades."

John Wolanski
Wants to tax all the bridges in the lower mainland, and spend that money just as as fast as it comes in.
If elected will donate "10% of my gross compensation" to the Surrey Food Bank.

Steve Wood (SCC)
Wants a city "rental registry" and secondary suite fees to subsidize "affordable housing".
Endorsed by NWDLC.
Wants more transit (including light rail), more "parks and recreation and sports programs" for youth.

2011 Surrey Candidates for Mayor

2011-10-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a lightly annotated list of all the candidates running for Mayor of Surrey in 2011. Feel free to leave links, complaints, or a thumbs up for any of them in the comments.

See also candidates for Councillor and School Trustee.

Vikram J.S. Bajwa

Realtor/Mortgage broker who wants an international airport with in Surrey city limits.

He is apparently promoting himself with a photo that is about 50 years out of date.

Wants inflation indexed taxes, RCMP replaced by municipal police, ward system.

Wants a lot more money spent on the homeless (8M vs current 3M).

Wants to "involve local taxpayers in all projects over $10 million". Developer friends that happen to be local tax payers?

Ross Buchanan

Author and business consultant who believes our tax dollars and Translink levies are being squandered, that developers have too much political influence, and that there shouldn't be any trash incinerators built in the region.

Wants to consider cancelling new city hall construction.

Generally objects to rate of growth in city spending, want more bylaw enforcement.

Touraj Ghanbar-Zadeh

Founder of All Nursing, wants to replace Translink gas taxes with property tax increases, decrease lot size required for chickens from 1 acre to a quarter acre.

Generically critical of Watts, not so big on proposing solutions.

If elected will "cancel the new gas tax". Do we even have a municipal gas tax he could cancel, assuming the council went along with it?

Wants single fare zone for transit.

Clifford Tamuno Inimgba

A model/actor who "likes [his] body". Is the sole member of his own consulting business? Unfavourable reviews by his students at Northern Lights College.

No particular focus to campaign.

Big signs and website for what I assumed was a joke candidate at first, even if that site misspells "Surry" and links to non-existent endorsements.

Wants to streamline Federal immigration policy, have more bus stops, freeze taxes, encourage local banks to make dubious loans.

Very concerned about minorities. Wants to both freeze taxes and massively increase services.

Shan Rana

Wants a ward system for Surrey. Describes himself as a professional activist.

Wants 10 councillors instead of 8, but paid proportionately less.

Dianne Watts (SF)

Endorsed by Surrey Fire Fighters' union.

Brought ex-Presidents Bush and Clinton to speak at 2011 Surrey Regional Economic Summit.

Very big on environmental initiatives, like free (taxpayer funded) electric car charging stations at Surrey City Hall - a nice tax free gift to city employees rich enough to own an electric car.

Hated so much by ex-Liberal (Federal) candidate , ex-SCC Surrey Council candidate Jim McMurty that he's taken to writing deranged complaints against newspapers that claim she lives in Cloverdale.

Takes credit for crazy advance in real estate prices, thinks it's a great thing.

Wants light rail.

Believes Surrey city employees are not overpaid because "We’ve got a collective bargaining process that our bargaining unit is very involved in, and wants to do the very best for the workers." I'm not sure Watts understands the role the city's negotiators are supposed to be fulfilling.

Deanna Welters (SIGN)

Artist who hates Bush., wants "green" infrastructure like light rail.

Wants more public transit, townhome style first floors in new condo developments, and believes something about mature trees but I can't tell what.

Generally an environmental/anti-development focus.

Replacing Toyota Echo Rear Side Marker Lights

2011-09-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

I had to do a ridiculous amount of research to replace some running lights on my Echo, which by all rights should have been a simple job.

Lesson 1:
At some point Toyota (during manufacture or maintenance) put a freakishly large W5W in one socket - now the socket doesn't hold normal bulbs securely enough. The solution (thanks to the guys at Lordco) is to bend out the contact wires on the bulb - that provides enough tension to hold the bulb in place.

Lesson 2:
There are lots of little bulbs that fit the same socket as the W5W. If you read online disussions, talk to the parts department at Peace Arch Toyota, or even the otherwise bright folks at Lordco, it is fine to replace W5Ws with any bulb you feel like. These people will grudgingly admit that yes, there is a brightness difference, but not very much. The 194 was a popular replacement suggestion, in spite of being only half as bright as the W5W. WTF? I don't understand why bulbs aren't labelled with lumens or candlepower, seeing as how that is the most important detail.

My online scavenging says:

194: 2 candlepower
168: 3 candlepower
W5W: 4 candlepower

Lesson 3:
2003 Echo user manuals say you should be using W5Ws, but the dealership computer says 192. I never found out what candlepower that actually is. (Lordco's computer agreed with the user manual.)

Scammed by Dormaster/Promaster

2011-08-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

I'll start with a few mea culpas:

If I had done minimal research, I would have found the dismal BBB ratings, and allegations of fraud (by rival companies, but a warning sign nonetheless).
I was naive enough to believe it was an honest mistake and that the company would address my complaints. Now I know that the correct response when presented with a questionable bill is to tell the dude to GTFO and let them try to come after you.
I didn't request a written estimate, which BMO MasterCard says might have made them willing to reverse the charges in spite of my stupidly signing the bill.

That being said, this is what the Dormaster experience is like:

You will be given flat out lies about part prices in your phone estimate.
Parts that will almost certainly be required for your job will not be included in the estimate.
The technician (shout out to my man Alan in Burnaby!) will take it upon himself to do an extra $60 tune-up that, in his own words, consisted of tightening some screws.
When you call to complain they will tell you (each time) to expect a call back - it won't come.

One thing I'm still uncertain on is how much blame lies with the technicians (who all appear to be independent contractors) and the dispatchers.

Oh well. Lesson learned. I might not get any money back, but at least I have the satisfaction of throwing another complaint on the BBB pile, and badmouthing them here.

At least I don't have any complaints about the quality of the work.

Update:

As of Sept. 13, 2011 I have agreed to close the BBB complaint in exchange for $20. Which is a far better outcome than I expected although I will still never use Dormaster services again.

I was surprised to see how many false claims Dormaster made in their response via the BBB; is it likely I would somehow be fooled and be more likely to accept their counteroffer? Personally, the lies made me more inclined to fight, but rationality won out. Or perhaps the claims are just an opening gambit in gaming the BBB dispute process, should I have rejected the offer...

Blog Content Longevity

2011-08-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

While pondering whether I should delete any of my long-paused blogs I took a look at the visitor stats.

My "current events commentary" blog, with twice as many posts and vastly more words than this one, was receiving only ~1% of the traffic this blog receives. I would characterize this blog as "stuff that I have direct experience with", with a technical emphasis.

At the time they were both active the current events blog received more traffic than this one.

The internet has voted! I will stick with writing about what I know, and leave the ranting for others.

Google Snooze Fail

2011-08-09T21:49:00.000-07:00

With the release of a snooze feature for Gmail I learned that you can extend Gmail with scripts. I also learned that Google is starting to put less effort into polishing the products it releases.

To install the script you have to create a spreadsheet in Google Docs, open a script editor, copy and paste the script, save the script (but not the spreadsheet?), run an install method, and give the script permission to access Gmail (double the fun if you have more than one Google account logged in at the time).

This was challenging for me, and I'm a software developer!

And then you will get no extra functionality, but you will get error emails every night until you turn the stupid thing off.

Questrade Contact Information Screwup

2011-08-08T09:33:00.001-07:00

Today I noticed that Questrade's address on file for me is only loosely based on my real address. Wrong enough that I would not received my sign up docs if it had been wrong all along.

The response from a Questrade rep:

Questrade would never change your address, but it might have had something to do with our Feb. 6th platform migration.

Yikes. It's worth double checking!

And then you will be treated to the worst phone number entry field I have ever seen. They tell you to enter it in a format that they won't actually accept, and they only allow numbers to be entered even though they initially show a template that implies you need to add formatting characters.

Google Reader's "Like" Privacy Blunder

2010-05-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

Users of Google Reader might be surprised to find out that anytime they "like" a post, they might be sharing this publicly with at least everyone else that reads that post.

I certainly was.

All posts in Reader now come with a list of everyone that likes it - a link to their public Google profile is shown on the post itself.

I don't think this is good default behavior, but the worst part is yet to come. Google requires that you have a public profile in order to use a number of different services - I created mine because I wanted to share custom feeds in Reader. To address privacy concerns, Google lets you make your public profile anonymous; displaying a nickname rather than your real name. This is what I had done.

Well, sometime between me creating my anonymous public profile and Google introducing the like feature in Reader, they de-anonymized my public profile. It was only because I liked a friend's blog post and he emailed me in response that I ever found out.

Everything related to Google Buzz is a privacy disaster.

At least I wasn't 'liking' all the porn they were recommending to me.

The Miracle of VMware

2010-05-14T22:36:00.000-07:00

After a multi-day ADSL outage by the hosting company who's name we shall not speak (fixed only after I remotely diagnosed their improperly configured router from within the affected area, and my partner in crime called them up and yelled at them until they took my diagnosis seriously) it was clear that things had to change.

The server in question is an old Win2K box running some fairly non-standard stuff, so it was either co-location or virtualization. Virtualization of course offers lots of other benefits (like hot failovers and image backups) and I had already used VMware with some success so that seemed like a good place to start.

My first discovery was that anyone who offers a service and won't even hint at the price without making you talk to a sales guy is bad news. They would ask me what my budget was I would respond with "well, according to what I see online the going rate is around $50/month". And then they would suggest that their premium hosting was around $1000/month. Uh, does that come with crack cocaine or something? Sheesh.

So I eventually settled on Redplaid. Great bandwidth on low end hardware with hot failovers for less than we were paying for ADSL. After extensive discussions with their sales and engineering team, who really went all out to get a very small account, I got signed up and haven't looked back.

It is truly amazing. There were some initial technical glitches to iron out, but even in the middle of the night Redplaid support has been super responsive. No more server outages, no more worrying about hardware failure, so good.

And, contrary to Redplaid's engineers' doubts, it truly is possible to run a low bandwidth Win2K Apache server on their lowest end servers. Not even the slightest performance problem noticeable from the outside.

Windows XP Toddler Exploit

2010-02-23T22:38:00.000-08:00

I have noticed something very strange with Windows XP: When you lock out the current user and let a small child wail on the keyboard, bad things happen.

First, the next time you wake up your computer it will take a long time for the password prompt to appear - like a minute rather than instantly. The password prompt will contain a blinking cursor, but it will not have focus - you have to click it with the mouse.

And then there will be all sorts of focus issues with Explorer. Taskbar icons will always be flashing the "something has changed" message, and you will have to click an icon in the taskbar several times to make a program surface.

A reboot solves it - haven't tried simply logging the user off and back on.

You know, this a serious downside of child labor laws - nothing gets childproofed anymore!

Well, Google Got It Half Right...

2010-02-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

Google Reader has started recommending a combination of Christian news and porn to me.

I'm not sure what to make of this interpretation of my online activities.

It definitely limits the locations in which I would feel safe viewing their recommendations though.

Do Not Use PostgreSQL on Bluehost

2009-07-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Argh.

Much to my dismay, Bluehost treats PostgreSQL as a second class citizen. You can't back up PostgreSQL databases using the standard Bluehost tools, and the Export function in the phpPgAdmin tool is non-functional.

If you had shell access (why God why does Bluehost require ID verification for shell access?) you might be able to do backups using command line tools, but I'll never know.

Back to MySQL...

Drupal: Hell Yes!

2009-07-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

Just tried Drupal for the first time. Wow - an hour to get a pleasant looking corporate site up, and another two to get things configured and teach someone else how to create content.

I will never build my own content management system again.

I also took the opportunity to try Postgres and used it as the underlying database, but the Drupal installation was so smooth that I didn't get to learn anything about Postgres.

Inside Job at Save On Foods

2009-07-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

Witnessed something bizarre this evening while walking past the Save On Foods at 152nd and highway 99 in Surrey.

A dark colored SUV stops traffic on the East side of Save On, while the occupants have a very animated discussion. Then the driver jumps out, yanks open the back door, and bodily hauls out the much scrawnier dude in the back. I was sure a beat down was about to ensue, but instead the scrawny guy (who, incidentally, was wearing a golf shirt very much like those worn by Save On staff) mumbles something like "Oh, I didn't know", crosses the sidewalk, walks into the bushes next to Save On, and pulls out a basket full of what I assume to be groceries.

He gets back in the SUV and they all drive off.

I can only assume that one of them snuck the groceries out the side door near the deli counter... I bet if Save On has cameras on that door they would see something entertaining around 6:45pm on July 4th!

Google Apps SPF Checking More Strict than Gmail

2009-06-20T23:03:00.000-07:00

When you host your email through Google Apps, you can create email aliases that are called "groups". Very recently messages routed via those aliases started to silently drop off the face of the earth. The exact same message sent directly to a real account (part of the same Google Apps domain) was received just fine.

The only thing that stood out as interesting was that the successfully received email was marked as a "soft fail" under SPF verification.

Now, these messages are all being routed through Radiant mail servers. Ah good old Radiant. Only several years into SPF being widely accepted and they still haven't published an authoritative list of their mail servers.

So my domain's SPF record listed every other place we might send from, but did not claim this was an exclusive list - hence the soft fail.

After totally botching my SPF record a few times because I didn't remember that "include:"ing domains without SPF records results in automatic fails, I used a "ptr:radiant.net" to say we trust any host that reverse resolves to *.radiant.net. (This is highly frowned upon because anyone can spoof reverse DNS lookups, but it seems like a limited risk for a small domain like mine.)

Anyway, as soon as that change propagated Google Apps started accepting my messages via aliases again. Very curious that they would have inconsistent SPF processing...

The Ineffectiveness of Double Entry Email Validation

2009-06-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

Way back when, pre-2002, I started maintaining an ecommerce website that delivers ordered products via email. This means that customers have to enter their email address during the order process, and that is more challenging than one might expect.

In fact, I recall that the bulk of the customer service revolved around resending orders to people that screwed up their own addresses. Unacceptable! So I whipped up the latest in luser-combatting technology - a double entry email verification system. It was totally vanilla, two entry boxes that got compared (minus whitespace) on the review page.

This seemed to cut down problem users significantly, and there was much rejoicing!

Now, at the time of implementation I added a logging function and periodically reviewed the results to make sure that my syntax validation wasn't too strict. A couple years ago I realized that this data was quite a bit more interesting than I previously thought, and started saving it for later analysis.

Later has arrived.

A short Python script that heavily abuses generators filters out the really stupid attempts and groups the rest into sessions based on difflib comparisons of the email addresses and the log timestamp (one hour cutoff).

I expected to see lots of people struggling with entering an address twice, possibly to the extent that I should not reject them on the basis that it is more important to take customers' money before they get frustrated and give up. Not so at all.

Only 4.22% had any kind of trouble - everyone else got their syntactically correct address entered twice identically on the first try and kept it that way. Huh... that's a lot of users having their time wasted for no reason.
41.92% of trouble sessions gave up and never gave us any money.
Of the trouble sessions, 92.62% had trouble entering the same address twice.
Of the trouble sessions, 33.01% "round tripped", which is to say they finished with two matching email address that happen to match the very first email address they entered. Not helping those guys!
Of the trouble sessions, 4.6% started out with a good double email entry but then sabotaged themselves in some way (we have single page data entry forms...).
Average attempts for a trouble session before giving up: 1.44. So if they don't get it right on the first try, they probably aren't coming back.
Average attempts for a trouble session that eventually results in success: 2.23

A lot of these categories overlap, so summaries are tricky, but one clear finding is that 75% (gave up + round trippers) of the people that had trouble were not helped by the double entry system.

What I don't have is information on which sessions resulted in orders, or even include multiple orders. Demographics wise, I can confidently say that customers skew to the over-30 side, but beyond that I couldn't say.

I am currently leaning towards completely scrapping the double entry system, and possibly making the syntax validation a warning. This would move a certain number of customers into the post transaction support queue, but would hopefully increase the total number of transactions.

Pre-Rendering to Defeat Ad Blocking

2009-06-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

I wonder why big media companies (like the newspapers going bankrupt because no one will pay for anything anymore) are still offering their content in a form that facilitates ad blocking.

It seems like if you are CNN or the New York Times you probably don't care that much about search engine traffic and therefore wouldn't be punished as severely for doing something like pre-rendering most of your content (with ads embedded of course). It seems to me this would make ad filtering a lot harder - you'd need more than a regular expression to do the work.

You would have to use heat maps to do links of course, but as long as you passed all the links through a redirector it still wouldn't be obvious what links are ads.

Or maybe ad blocking really isn't as wide spread as some make it out to be?

I don't understand why ads on webpages would be fundamentally less valuable than ads in newspapers though... (this is the claim of the dying companies, yes?) Maybe the sheer volume of amateur content is driving rates down?

The Golden Age

2009-06-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

Finally read the last book of John C. Wright's Golden Age sci fi series. I think I picked it up because of an Orson Scott Card recommendation.

Two things really bugged me in this tale of the far far future.

Firstly, the main characters were all massively augmented by technological evolution, yet still plagued by obnoxious character flaws. I would like to believe that the elites of 1000s of years from now will be more emotionally stable than the drama queens of today.

Secondly, the digressions into philosophy as a plot driving mechanism were painful. Much like in Zen and of Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I largely skipped those "deep" sections because I don't care enough to work through the tortured logic. And the idea that anyone would still be arguing on a level that present day readers could understand is kind of silly.

So I didn't actually think much of the story. All that being said, Wright's exploration of property rights and personhood in a society that doesn't require a biological presence is fascinating. Evolution is explicitly by "intelligent design", with individuals modifying themselves or creating "children" based on whatever criteria they want. Clones have a special place in the law, and there are all sorts of interesting rules declaring how much damage to copy can be tolerated before considering the copy a new individual.

Interesting stuff!

thesixtyone is Genius

2009-06-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

After last.fm had the gall to start charging money for their service I had to scramble to find a replacement. Tim Ferris and Kevin Rose talked about thesixtyone in one of their random videos, so I gave it a shot.

Most brilliant interface, EVAR.

They have basically added the MMORPG concept of grinding to music: there are quests to encourage you to listen to different types of music, experiment with features, interact with other users. Completing these quests gives you currency to do other things, including vote up songs you like. And then you get more currency when a song you voted up becomes more popular.

Totally addictive. Thank god it's limited by the number of songs you can listen to in a day! I wonder if they have grand plans for the users that surface who tend to drive music popularity...

Oh, and lots of never before heard of bands and music - some of which is far better than top 40 radio stuff. It took me a while to build up a collection of stuff I really like, but now I have plenty of variety. There is also dinosaur gansta rap and songs about robot pirates. Oh yes.

And if you sign up from here I'll get currency for that too. That's right, they've even built in a pyramid scheme! Fantastic.

Noise Reporting for YVR

2009-06-01T21:38:00.000-07:00

If you live anywhere near the Vancouver (BC) International Airport (YVR) you can now do online reporting of noise complaints. Like for when a plane flies so low over your house it rattles the windows - common in Richmond perhaps, but not cool in Surrey. In theory this will be used to schedule move air traffic away from the people with the most political clout who like to complain about stuff. I hope to be one of those people :-)

It's a pretty nifty interface - you can pick a time in the past and replay old traffic to find the flight that bugged you.

And much to my surprise, I actually got a reasonably custom response to my first complaint:

Thank you for your comments submitted through WebTrak on 28 May 2009.

I have investigated the flight that you specified using our Aircraft Noise Monitoring and Flight Tracking System. The aircraft was a hush-kitted Boeing 727. Although this type of jet does meet the current federal Chapter III noise certification standards, it is one of the older aircraft types still operating in Canada and tends to be noisier than its modern counterparts.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to visit the YVR Noise Office to discuss aircraft operations over your area. In addition, you may also visit our website (www.yvr.ca) for more detailed information on the YVR Aeronautical Noise Management Program.

Secure (Private) Web Browser Caches

2009-05-31T21:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not a privacy nut in any sense of the word. I have stupid and largely unused Facebook, LinkedIn, and "whatever my friends are hot on today" accounts, and I don't worry about the information I'm sharing.

But browser caches are a different story. How can a browser cache that persists between sessions possibly be of benefit to me? Sure there are some minor bandwidth and loading speed gains (if you actually use more than 5 pages a day...). But is that really worth allowing your entire life of browsing be potentially held against you one day? If I see a link that labeled "for the love of God and your eyesight, don't click this", you know I'm going to be clicking it. I've seen things that I wouldn't like to explain to anyone. And doesn't even consider the deviant things I search out! So I have all my browsers set to clear cache on shutdown.

There should be a middle ground. Why do browser caches have to be so easy to browse through? (I remember a game people used to play with other peoples computers - take a slideshow program and have it run through a browser cache - good times...)

My proposal is to encrypt cached content and store a hashed key based on the URL the content was loaded from. The encryption would be based on the URL or something like that as well of course.

You visit a site
Your browser takes a URL and hashes it with your custom salt value.
Your browser checks if that hash exists in your cache.
If hash exists, content is decrypted using URL or something like that as the key.

As long as the key is salted so that you can't do scans for known deviant hashes, this would do a pretty good job of obscuring what is in your cache.

I think this idea is pretty awesome. Please tell me why it is not/is computationally prohibitive.

The End of Contextual Search

2009-05-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

It seems that Google is giving up on advancing their automated search technology.

Submission 1: After largely deprecating HTML meta tags like keywords and description, Google is now requesting that pages include "snippets" for the Google web crawler to use.
Submission 2: Content publishers who display Adsense ads have been requested to manually enter details about their site content.

I thought that the end goal was to eliminate this kind of manual tweaking?

App Engine SDK Timeouts Unrealistic

2009-04-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

My primary irritation with App Engine right now is that long running scripts that worked fine on my machine in the SDK time out in the live environment.

I initially created a page for GiftFinder to load product data from Amazon for testing purposes, then modified it to handle duplicates better and set up as an App Engine cron job (a new feature). The goal is to automatically insert new top products without any intervention from me.

Unfortunately, this job hasn't run to completion once since I installed it. It would be nice if there was a "throttle to realistic speeds" in the SDK so that this could be more easily avoided. I have just made the script a bit lighter - hopefully that will put it under the limit.

GiftFinder: A Google App Engine Test Case

2009-04-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I came up with the idea of a simple web application to help people pick half decent gifts for recipients that they couldn't come with a meaningful gift for. This idea was particularly appealing because of the great capitalist potential.

My initial concept could be summed up by:

Ask questions about the recipient, sort potential gifts based on n-dimensional Euclidean distance from recipient (while database servers catch fire in the distance), and then use the feedback from user actions to adjust the scores for the gifts. Send users to Amazon. Profit!

I am determined to never blight the world with another PHP application and I am also comfortable with Python, so I set out to find an appropriate development framework that supported Python. Bottom line, Google App Engine was pretty attractive for a toy application:

It runs Python
It is free for non-heavy use
It requires no configuration or hardware from me
It scales transparently on the off chance you get lots of visitors
I had wanted to try App Engine for some time

And lo! GiftFinder, in all its (hopefully short term) crumminess, is born!

I plan to blog about some of the different components of GiftFinder in the future, and how the choice of App Engine impacted design. If I get back into the developing mood I will continue to try to improve the app to something workable.

Feedback and questions are encouraged and appreciated!

Firewhat?

2009-04-19T18:11:00.000-07:00

The rocket scientists at AMD have designed their driver download page so that Firefox users get redirected to a "stop leeching" page. This is when clicking through the AMD site.

IE works fine.

Wow.

TortoiseSVN Show Log Brutally Slow

2009-04-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

I don't know if upgrading to the 1.6 TSVN line caused the problem, but suddenly it takes 10 minutes to do a Show Log on the root of a repository, and even more on a small subdirectory. And the problem does not go away after the first successful Show Log, indicating that the log cache isn't working very well.

I worked around the problem by disabling the log cache entirely - things work lickety split now!

Settings -> Log Caching -> Enable log caching = Unchecked

P90X for Geeks

2009-03-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

A while back I read The 4-Hour Workweek. The one thing that really stuck with me was the idea that you should pick an area of your life to improve, and take a concrete action to achieve that change.

How to achieve "living like James Bond" seemed a little nebulous, so I tried to narrow it down a little. OK, I really like how Bond can solve almost any problem with sufficient amounts of violence. That seems like a really satisfying fall-back plan.

So with that thought percolating, I was particularly susceptible to the barrage of P90X ads that have been on TV recently. P90X has a few things going for it that I think made me unconsciously dismiss every other exercise program I have seen advertised:

Not targeting weight loss through cardio
No equipment needed that I didn't already own

Where I Started

Starting Weight: 115 pounds or so, which at 5'7" would put me soundly in the "scrawny" category.

Like many tech workers, my physical fitness leaves something to be desired. My borderline ADD burns up all excess calories so I don't have to worry about getting fat, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince myself that slimness equals healthy. There was an eye-opening moment at my previous job during a fitness challenge: I did 30 crunches to a metronome and was pretty pleased until I saw that it took 60 to even make the top 5.

Even this video eventually stopped making me feel better about myself.

Goal

To be strong enough that when someone complains about the quality of my code I have the (highly inadvisable) option of throwing him through the nearest wall. Clearly some experimentation will be required once I think I've reached this milestone.

The gym manager at work is my height and 210 lbs. Waaaaaay too big. I need to fit through the narrow halls.

Where I Deviated From the P90X Instructions

No change in diet. Thanks to my wife I eat pretty well to begin with, and I am kind of suspicious of what might be in the "recovery" drink marketed with the program. My understanding is that we Westerners massively over-eat anyway.
I have dumbbells with removable plates rather than a set of fixed weight dumbbells, and changing weights as I went added too much time. So I would pick a weight that was comfortable for most everything and used individual remaining plates when that was too heavy.
Didn't keep records, beyond what weight I should use for the entire routine.
Swapped rest/stretch day with Kenpo day. Even after 90 days my legs were always too sore for Kenpo from the Yoga and Legs/Back the preceding two days.
Life interfered a few times, resulting in some unscheduled rest days. Christmas vacation didn't help.
Did not stick to 8-10 reps rule. It turns out my wrists can handle far less weight than my arms, so I stuck with doing more reps of lighter weights. As my wrists stopped feeling as tweaky I very carefully increased the weight.

Initial Impressions

After day one I was too sore to do any more exercise for like four days. Clearly should have taken it easier. The first 7 days took me two weeks to struggle through.
After doing Yoga for the first time in my life, my nipples hurt. WTF? Thankfully that never happened again.
Exceptionally depressing to discover that I can barely do pull ups any more. Took a few weeks to admit I should be using a chair for support, to increase reps.
Aerobic components were hard and didn't feel as constructive as the strength components. I considered dropping them, but eventually decided that being able to throw a dude through a wall was going to be of limited value if I was winded after the first one.
P90X was advertised on TV as "an hour a day". Not bloody likely. Most days are between 1.25 and 1.5 hours.
I find the random crap that comes of out the instructor's (Tony) mouth to be rather endearing. Stockholm syndrome?

Results

After a full 90 days of the program (completed over more like 115 days), I have made measurable improvements. I put on somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds, and have become fairly flexible (when I'm not sore from exercising). Cardio routines no longer kill me.

Perhaps an hour a day of any kind of exercise would have had the same effect?

I'm still scrawny, but a much more muscular scrawny. Not so muscular I would dare posting "after" pictures on the Internet though! The weight is more visible in my face than I expected it to be.

Before starting the program I was experiencing shoulder pain, particularly after getting up in the morning. That cleared up after the first month or so.

I also think that I was headed for trouble in back land, what with my acrobatics loving toddler rapidly putting on weight. I feel a lot better in that regard as well.

So success, although I have no idea if it was a reasonable amount of success.

Going Forward

My current employer has a private, very nice, gym on site. I intend to start using it, which will be helpful given that my workout room is being converted into a bedroom to make room for the new baby. I imagine I'll use the P90X routines as the basis for those workouts.

Outbound Traffic Required to Wake Listening Sockets

2009-01-11T19:02:00.000-08:00

This is a real and frustrating ongoing situation for me.

The Players

all-in-one style PC motherboard
Windows 2000
Apache
cheapo router
ADSL modem

The Symptoms

intermittent outages of all services - like the server dropped off the internet
sometimes recovers on its own
always solved by rebooting server
replacing the hard drive and power supply made no difference

Now, naturally, the server is off-site compared to me, and I have limited support over there. In my one physical visit so far, I made the following discoveries:

one network weirdness in the event log, but nothing correlated with the very frequent outages
outbound internet working fine
the logs of the webserver showed that no remote connections had been received for a couple hours before I showed up, but they started coming in within seconds of me sitting down at the computer! WTF?
but localhost hits (from scheduled jobs) were coming in like clockwork during the outage

The "Solution"

It pains me to admit it, but it was late and I was tired. So I decided that the trigger that got the server working again had to have been me trying to browse out. So I made a scheduled job that uses curl to poke another site I own every minute.

And... no outages since.

Perimortem

OK, outbound traffic is clearly kicking something back into gear. The router is a prime candidate, given that it definitely has some sort of capability to open ports based on outbound traffic. This router has been running for years under the same configuration and never made trouble, but the same can be said for most of the other hardware and software.

So perhaps the problem was always there, but there was sufficient outbound traffic to mask the issue? Traffic is down by a fair bit over the last few months, and there are certain kinds of orders that result in extra outbound traffic.

Things probably periodically fix themselves right now because of NTP polling...

Am I missing anything? Other than the router, are there any other likely causes?

I hate hardware even more than I hate software :-p

Outlook is so Retarded

2009-01-05T17:30:00.000-08:00

The latest offense it has committed?

I dragged an email to the root of the mailbox (because I get confused by the 18 copies of the Inbox, OK), and it is just gone. Gone from the folder it was in. Not in the Inbox. Not in Deleted Items. Like it never existed.

Needless to say, Undo did not work.

No 911 with joip in Canada

2009-01-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Much to my dismay, I discovered the other day that 911 does not work with joip! This was during an emergency naturally (which begs the question, how do you legally test your 911 service?), but thankfully there were no consequences due to the delayed ambulance.

The Panasonic Globarange manual clearly states that by providing your address your 911 calls will be routed to the correct network. The joip website allows the entry of Canadian addresses (and explicitly offers Provinces as choices).

A bit of after-the-fact searching led me to an FAQ page that suggests only US joip customers get 911 service.

It has been illegal to sell VOIP services in Canada without 911 services since 1995. We bought the phone from London Drugs, a mainstream retailer, in 2008.

So I have a few decisions to make:

Do I switch phone services? The danger is significantly mitigated knowing the limitation, and there is cell phone in the house too.
Do I report this to the CRTC? Odds as to whether the deficiency is addressed or joip just closes up shop in Canada? Clearly if I switch phone services I don't care about the risk of shutting them down...

Windows Temp Dir Cleanup Script

2008-12-16T21:58:00.000-08:00

Poorly written programs will freak out if your Windows temp directory gets too full. You could also (theoretically) run out of disk space because of temp directory abuse.

Seeing as how Windows has no default cleanup mechanism (beyond the Cleanup Wizard that everybody immediately disables), a run on boot batch file is helpful.

I add cleantmp.bat to the start menu of each computer I use.

del /F /Q "%temp%\*.*"
FOR /D %%a IN ("%temp%\*.*") DO rmdir /S /Q "%%a"

Based on Harry Coal's script, but simplified to be single user and all the extended character set crap converted to 7 bit ascii.

Also, syntax highlighting based on Luka Marinko's post on google-code-prettify. It doesn't do much for .bat files, but is impressive for other languages.

Primus Hidden Fees

2008-11-30T14:43:00.000-08:00

Several months after canceling my long distance service with Primus, I just now received a bill for "Termination Charges".

The current version of the Primus contract does discuss them - several pages into what is otherwise boilerplate stuff - but I don't know if they were referenced in the contract that existed when I signed up.

The main point is that these fees were not advertised up front as part of the price. This strikes me as completely unethical, if not illegal. Even Telus isn't brazen enough to have hidden cancellation fees.

It's not enough money to go to the mat over, so I'll have to be satisfied with complaints here (and to the CRTC). Hopefully it will cause them more trouble than my $8.00 was worth.

(I've considered trying to reverse the automatic charge to my credit card, but this seems like a weak case to spend that capital on... a good reason to not have automatic bill payments attached to anything though.)

Noob Questrade Impressions

2008-11-22T21:40:00.000-08:00

After getting burned by mutual funds at every job that has had a employer matching program, I decided it was finally time to do this right and trade for myself. Time will tell if that was a good choice, but I figure that either I'll trade up my starting pittance into something meaningful or I'll lose it all and stick with paying off my house.

Based on Sacha's reasonably positive comments, I went with Questrade (referred, so hopefully getting my initial commissions refunded...).

The application process was pretty terrible. Dozens of documents to read and electronically "sign". Then I had to mail in some real signatures too. Luckily, they didn't seem to care that I annotated the agreement to indicate that they hadn't given me several of the contracts I was supposed to be signing off on, and that obviously I didn't agree to those ones.

The initial funding was also painful. You don't get access to your trading account until you have fully funded it, and you can't tell how much you have put in without access to the trading account. This mattered because I am far too paranoid to transfer the minimum $1000 without being sure that I am sending the money to my own account. So there were about two weeks of delays while I phoned in every day trying to figure out if my test transfers had worked (due to a stupid choice for the size of the first one, it wasn't obvious what was going on).

But yay! Finally everything goes through and I can make trades, although under yet another username and password - up to three now I think.

The trading interface is the crudest, Web 1.0 thing I have seen in a long time. And they do wacky stuff like list prices for a bunch of stocks I don't care about on the main account page - can't figure out how to change that. But it works, 100% so far.

I'm still a little shaky about the mechanics of trading. A few things surprised me:

There is a very small surcharge for limit orders that cannot be filled against the current bid/ask (at least, that's what it looks like). I can't figure out how they calculate the surcharge, but it really is tiny.
There must be some minimum threshold before an order is reflected in the current bid/ask, because it doesn't seem to change when I place an order between the spread. And my trades don't seem to show up in the charts either - perhaps this is to stop guys from making the charts lie by doing single share transactions at artificial prices?
Questrade does not screw you via arbitrage! I placed a limit order to buy at one price, and actually got filled at a better price (probably because my order was too small to be listed?) - I can't imagine why they wouldn't have taken the difference. Must be a legal thing.
In spite of my orders not being reflected in the current bid, I did see someone seemingly respond to me by canceling and raising their ask right as I was canceling and raising my bid to match his first ask. It looked very much like he was jittering the price in the hopes that someone would make a market order and get caught at a higher price. I just left my bid alone at that point, and it eventually got filled.

Green Lettuce

2008-11-22T17:59:00.000-08:00

Based on Ryan's recommendation, I got some takeout from Green Lettuce in Surrey, BC. Much better than the last Chinese food place I tried!

The House Chow Mein was just OK, but the Veggie Spring Rolls, Veggie Samosas (it's a Chinese/Indian fusion place), and Beef with Broccoli were all solidly in the Good category. Greasily delicious, if a bit over-seasoned!

Stay Away From Golden Panda

2008-11-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

The best thing I can say about Golden Panda Restaurant (in Surrey, BC) is that the food is probably safe to eat. Other than that, mediocre quality at the very best.

I was a little concerned seeing how few actual Chinese people were in the place (given how many Chinese there are in the area), and my fears were confirmed.

Roaming WiFi Piracy

2008-10-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased my very first WiFi enabled device and was shocked to discover how laborious it is to get access to an unsecured, SSID advertised connection.

Nine clicks minimum on my Aspire, which is fairly slow using a touch pad. Specifically, far too slow to grab a connection while bombing down the highway and do something productive with it. Update: A new feature seemingly just appeared in my Aspire: a left click on the wireless system tray icon sometimes shows available connections right there, and allows them to be connected to. So maybe 2 only clicks if you manage to choose a good one on the first try? Still clumsy for my purposes...

I had imagined an option for making it aggresively connect to whatever was available, and relatively seamlessly hopping connections as I moved. There would be TCP/IP complications of course, but for normal browsing type use it would have been OK (I think).

Are there any WiFi drivers for doing this? It seems fairly simple and super awesome.

I think that I might be able to simulate this by carefully adding explicit connections for enough access points along my regular commute - the Aspire seems to do a good job of picking and using known available connections. Will report back after I try it out.

Voice Input Without NLP

2008-10-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

The trouble with visual interfaces has always been, and will remain, the limited amount of screenspace. Combine that with the fact most people can't efficiently use "busy" interfaces, and you have to make some hard choices about what will be presented.

The dream of natural language processing (NLP) is that you verbally state your desire, and magic happens. This would allow the use of all the communication tools we already know. Unfortunately, NLP is fairly tricky in practice because language processing requires a significant amount of contextual knowledge that is hard to program in. So voice interfaces of today tend to simply map keywords to their mouse click and shortcut key equivalents. Which is great if you have arthritis, but pretty slow for everyone else.

I would like to see voice input used as an enhancement to visual interfaces, rather than a replacement for them.

The example that comes to mind is trip planning software; Google Maps for example. In order to keep things clean, they can't present much more than directions, distances, and predicted times. But there is lots of other information that would occasionally be very helpful. The weather, temperature, road conditions, sight-seeing opportunities, you name it. But even a small link to add extra details would quickly devolve into a nightmare of nested menus that would require a fair bit of knowledge of how menu items are grouped. It would be much cleaner to simply say (or type, for that matter) "temperatures" and have that data added to the trip.

This of course adds a pretty significant layer of hidden UI, but that's better than not there at all, right? And command line interfaces have had this problem forever, yet are still used extremely productively for some kinds of tasks. Listing all the supported keywords for a "help" request would give a standardized way of familiarizing one's self with a new application.

Questrade Misunderestimates Cookies

2008-10-08T15:55:00.000-07:00

I got a chuckle out of the "cookie" section of Questrade's privacy policy:

"Cookies" are small amounts of data that a web site can send to your browser and store on your computer. Cookies do not contain personal information about you (unless you knowingly provide it).

So, like, if your password shows up in a cookie, it's totally your fault dude!

Random Questrade Trivia

2008-10-06T22:34:00.000-07:00

While trying to figure out who to go with for an RESP for my son, I got some details out of Questrade that might be useful to someone...

Interest rates on cash are the same for RESPs as for RRSPs.
Questrade does not accept third party deposits, which are helpful if you have extended family that doesn't trust their contributions will not end up in the beer fund!
Laurentian and HSBC GICs are available, but must be purchased over the phone for a $25-$30 fee.
It might be possible to purchase GICs even without fully funding the account... they were a little ambiguous with that answer. Accounts have to be "approved" before GICs can be purchased.

Also, they misspell "Questtrade" as the password to their trading platform demo...

On the Road with Acer's Aspire One

2008-09-27T17:12:00.000-07:00

Just before leaving on my current vacation, I bought an Acer Aspire One which I wrote the bulk of this post on. The choice was to either get a MacBook of some sort or a totally cheap notebook. After much agonizing I decided that I couldn't justify the price of a MacBook for what is going to be a way to be productive in some small way while I'm commuting (I'm looking for a new job, and expect to be commuting to it). I am sick of dealing with Microsoft's upgrade cycle (and the extra cost of their OSs), so that left a Linux machine. Dell's new notebook isn't quite out yet, and friends recommended both the Linux and XP versions of the Aspire One, so here we are.

The "toy" interface they provide is damn slick. This is the first time I've used a Linux machine that I thought a non-techy might be able to handle. Nice big icons to regular user software, some of which I'm familiar with, and other stuff that is either lesser known open source or custom Acer stuff. All the laptop system tray icons you would expect. But to be fair, I haven't tried printing anything yet, and that was always a big Linux problem. After connecting to the Internet for the first time I ended up spending an hour or so downloading patches (after being prompted by the update software), mostly performance related. And one crash so far (reboot required), playing some pre-installed open source game.

Email is handled by a custom Acer program that does initial configuration better than any equivalent I have ever used. You enter the email address, and it fills in all the POP, SMTP, and encryption settings so long as the domain is well known. Gmail worked perfectly. Sweet! This feature should be adopted by all email software. After configuration is complete, there is a daemon that checks your email even if the mail program isn't running - look for a system tray icon to appear and start blinking if you have new mail. But no spell checking? WTF?

I love the fact that the "hard drive" is simply an 8GB Solid State Drive. It comes about half full... of stuff... I haven't really explored what is installed beyond the advertised programs. It's sluggish working with big files, but the lack of moving parts is a big plus. Also amusing is the fact that (unlike Linux) Windows XP apparently can't work on the SSD drive because it fundementally depends on being able to move lots of data around.

The Aspire runs hotter than I would like, and the fan is not particularly quiet. OK, you won't hear it over most desktop fans, but you wouldn't want to sleep next to it. And the power converter box for charging runs really hot - uncomfortable to the touch. Aside from the inefficiency implied, it doesn't seem very safe. I wouldn't want to leave the thing unattended...

The touch pad unfortunately ranges from OK to bad. I can't type without brushing the touchpad, particularly in a car, and that means the tapping feature has to be turned right off. It would be nice if there was a dedicated button for turning that feature back on when browsing the web. Also, sometimes it causes unwanted scrolling... I don't really understand how.

The glossy screen is irritating, but not as bad as I had feared. I've managed to use the thing more-or-less in direct sunlight.

It seems that my WiFi expectations were a tad unrealistic, so I'll complain more about the sad state of wireless in another post. My first hurdle specific to this machine is that the wireless system tray icon requires a left click to get to the "add a connection" window, and it took me several days of manually going through the Settings menus before I figured this out. Who doesn't put left-click actions in right-click menus? And then the automatic scan refresh for available networks often deselects your choice before you have a chance to press OK. But I generally haven't had any trouble connecting to unprotected or WPA networks, and the machine seems to automatically pick the most appropriate one you have previously configured. The hardware switch for disabling wireless is a nice touch (assuming it actually extends battery life...).

Once I was comfortable with the basic features, I turned to investigating the under-the-hood aspects of the system. Thank God for the active user community, because it would have taken me a long time to figure a lot of this stuff out on my own!

Shells can be accessed by a menu item in the file browser, or by Alt+F2 and then running a blank command with the shell option checked.
Yum is misconfigured, so you either have to fix that or get the graphical Add/Remove Programs tool accessible. And the latter won't run until you have set a root password, and then proceeds to install all sorts of stupid stuff if you don't search for the specific packages you want. Fortran support for gcc? No thanks.
The 'man' command doesn't work out of the box (it just doesn't exist), and I haven't found a solution to that yet.
No 'locate' command is pre-installed. You want the 'mlocate' package to get that guy.
The Java installation is some open source variety that isn't sufficient to run all Java apps. The upgrade process was a bit of a pain in the ass.
And sudo results in some audit error spam every time. Don't know how to fix that yet either.

But so far it is performing as advertised, and I am getting things done with it!

Going Back in Chrome Clears Radio Buttons

2008-09-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

My first interaction with Google's new browser, Chrome, has not been a positive one. An order on a website I maintain was mysteriously missing a bunch of the normally posted variables, and this resulted in an effectively failed order.

It turns out that if a user changes the default state of a radio button, submits the form, and then uses the back button to return to the data collection page, Chrome helpfully deselects all the radio buttons in the set. So the subsequent submission will simply be missing that set of radio buttons.

All radio buttons that were left in the default position are OK though.

I'm used to writing web pages that protect users from themselves and me from users, but not to protect everybody from buggy browsers...

Costco Photo UI Hell

2008-08-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

There are serious problems with Costco's Photo Center web interface...

Uploading photos results in some of them appearing multiple times in the album, making it challenging to order a specific number of each photo in an album.
Photos in their shopping cart are not sorted by name, so it is hard to find the ones you are looking for.
If you update the number of each photo you want, and then foolishly press "Checkout", your changes will be lost. You have to press "Update Cart" or something like that first.
When changing the photos from glossy to matte, you will be given the convenient option of doing them all in bulk rather than manually for each photo. Of course, this also erases the record of how many of each photo you want.

My wife was seething by the end of the process.

Apple Trailers Without Quicktime

2008-08-19T17:43:00.000-07:00

Apple's Quicktime software for Windows is the source of most of my concerns about Mac OS X. It just blows, and I can't believe the same group of engineers could produce anything of quality.

After running an old Win2k compatible Quicktime Alternative for a while to deal with the incredible unreliability and obnoxiousness of the official software, Apple finally upgraded their movie trailer site to the point where I couldn't view the things at all.

The new official release of Quicktime doesn't support Win2k either anymore, so I decided to give the Firefox plugin MediaPlayerConnectivity a try.

Holy awesome, Batman!

It autodetected my VLC installation - now trailers just pop up in a separate window. And rather than medium size trailers running at 100% CPU usage, I can watch the large versions with roughly 0% CPU usage. Dunno if it was a Firefox plugin issue or shitty Apple codecs, but things are soooo much better now.

Update: Here are the MPC settings I use to get as seamless an experience as possible.

JOIP Voicemail Woes

2008-08-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

After getting a second Panasonic Globarange JOIP handset the voicemail (not the optional onboard answering machine) stopped working.

After a week or two of this (no response from JOIP customer service...) my wife figured out that in addition to enabling voicemail via the JOIP website you also have to enable it in the phone itself. Otherwise the caller just gets a "number cannot be reached" type message.

Not 100% sure that adding the second handset caused this to happen, but the timing seems right.

Hope this helps someone.

ING Mutual Funds

2008-07-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

ING Direct offers relatively simple index tracking Mutual Funds that seemed like a good fit for someone like myself who is too lazy to do their own research, and who also distrusts fund managers. But from beginning to unsuccessful end, trying to sign up for them was a total WTF experience.

My first hint that all was not well? The signup form required re-entry of a fair bit of information that ING should have already known. Except for the stuff they pre-populated with inaccurate data that is not changeable through any existing account tools.

Next came the "investor profile" questions which seemed to lock you into only being able to purchase one kind of fund, irrespective of what kind of external investments you might have. I never managed to figure out if that was a real limitation however, because...

There is no way to electronically transfer money from your regular ING RRSP to ING RRSP Mutual Funds. Trying to complete the paper transfer form I got hung up on the demand that a copy of your "Mutual Fund Enrollment Form" be supplied with the transfer request; since the enrollment had been online, I had no such form, and they already should have had it. I tried to contact them to clarify, but...

Contrary to what the website indicated, their phone support does not work on weekends, and the email contact provided bounced.

So that's that. Maybe I'll revisit once they've worked out the kinks on the first suckers.

Radiant's SMTP Service Has Improved

2008-07-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

Of all the terrible things I've said about Radiant, at least one of them has improved. After Google suddenly stopped allowing us to route mail through them, I was forced to try Radiant again and have been pleasantly surprised that there have been no complaints about missing messages or multiple deliveries.

Broken Keys

2008-06-21T20:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a comment on a suggestion to use a "coping blade" to yank broken keys out of locks (wtf is a coping blade anyway?), I tried using a bent bobby-pin.

Worked like a charm!

Paperclips didn't cut it because they weren't strong enough - the force required to get the key out was more than enough to bend them back straight again.

I Will Derive

2008-05-28T19:58:00.000-07:00

This song is a pretty good refresher if it's been a while since you just barely scraped a 'D' out of Calculus...

Viking Singing Game

2008-05-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

This company knocked off quite a few mini-games in a week, just to experiment. There is some funny stuff in there, but best is definitely the game where you control the height of the flying Viking by singing at different pitches. While wearing a viking hat.

Popen, Pipes, and Deadlocks

2008-05-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

I recently had a phenomenally frustrating time figuring out why a child process started with Popen was mysteriously hanging (but only some of the time). With a lot of experimentation and some seriously outdated Python documentation I finally got to the bottom of it.

This code snippet turns out to only be safe if the child process is not writing enough to stderr to fill that pipe's buffer (size is chosen by the OS, as far as I know).

stdin, stdout, stderr = win32pipe.popen3('child.exe')
output = stdout.read()
errors = stderr.read()

If the child is filling stderr, stdout.read() blocks forever. You are at risk of experiencing variants of this anytime you are handling both pipes in a single thread of execution.

There are two suggested solutions:

Handle the reading of one of the pipes in a different thread.
Redirect both stderr and stdout to temp files on disk and then read them back in afterwards.

I went with option 1, as it seemed marginally less unpleasant, and it seems to be holding up just fine. Immediately after implementing it I discovered, much to my irritation, that the relatively new subprocess module does something almost exactly like that!

app = \
    subprocess.Popen(
        'child.exe', stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
stdout, stderr = app.communicate()

The one thing that isn't clear to me about subprocess is whether is has all the same problems on Windows that other Popens apparently do. Fun for another day...

Gmail Email Routing

2008-04-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

Google bypasses MX lookups when forwarding mail from Gmail account to Gmail account. I discovered this detail in the midst of my emergency mail server transition, and it struck me as interesting even if I can't figure out who this knowledge might help.

This is probably only relevant when you are using Google Apps to host your domain email. Basically, if you have a regular Gmail account set to forward to address@yourdomain.com, forwarded messages will make it to your Google Apps account of that name even if you haven't reconfigured your MX records yet.

Sending emails through Gmail SMTP on the other hand seems to use regular MX lookups. The inconsistency is what strikes me as the strangest... why not cheat in both cases?

I never tested sending via the Gmail web interface before the DNS propagation started to kick in, so that is left as an exercise to the reader.

Friday Nights With Radiant

2008-04-12T22:37:00.000-07:00

Radiant Communications' latest crime against my free time: 'upgrading' a mail server to the point that it no longer accepts mail and also seems to have lost all record of any of the email accounts and aliases I painstakingly created.

After somewhere between 12 and 16 hours after my complaint, they called me up to tell me that it couldn't be their problem because the DNS records show I am using a 3rd party for handling email.

That's right, it took them so long to even investigate that I had time to create a Google Apps account, recreate all my email accounts and aliases, build a new zone record at my domain registrar, and repoint the DNS servers away from Radiant. (Radiant doesn't provide an interface for editing your zone file, so it seemed like I should go all the way rather than just having the MX records updated.)

On the brighter side, Google Apps provides far better email service than Radiant - free spam filtering for one thing. It's pretty cool. If you aren't afraid of messing with your MX data, the migration to having Google host your domain's email (for free) is pretty easy. The only gotcha I found was that the documentation for setting up pop access is a little thin; it turns out that you still use the standard pop.gmail.com servers, but use your fully qualified email address for your login.

Watch Out for Fake Shareaza

2008-03-10T21:32:00.000-07:00

It seems that some diabolical fiends have blackmailed Shareaza's domain name out of the hands of one of the project's main contributors.

Shareaza is one of the last decent P2P apps out there, so this makes me sad.

Especially since the new owners of the domain seem to be a European RIAA-like group that is perpetrating a gigantic fraud on those who fall prey to their ripped-off website design. The "new" Shareaza allegedly convinces users to provide incriminating personal information, takes their credit card information for later billing after a "free" month of service, changes your browser home page, and destroys the real Shareaza installation. Pretty classic malware stuff.

Anyway, this post is mostly to help encourage Google to re-order the search results for Shareaza to reflect reality. If you have control over any websites that link to the hijacked domain, please update those links to point to the real site!

DNS Is Not Rocket Science

2008-02-18T20:08:00.000-08:00

We are nearing the end of day two without InternetSecure's website or order processing services being visible from the internet.

After not warning any of their customers about this outrageous outage, they now claim that this is due to a DNS server migration. Hence the Network Solutions domain parking spam instead of their actual website.

I seem to recall migrating DNS servers a time or two myself, and never having all that much trouble keeping the sites in question online. This a basic test of IT competence, and InternetSecure has failed.

Organic LED Keyboard

2008-02-08T12:18:00.000-08:00

Gizmodo has a very cool video of a new keyboard that has a 48x48 display built into each key.

The price ($1500) is kind of insane right now, but that will come down. In addition to the obvious "custom layouts for niche programs (Photoshop, Final Cut, etc)" use, it would be a handy way to be able to show a user what keys are currently available in the program they are using.

Here is a more general video about it, that doesn't really do the OLED keys justice.

craigslist

2008-01-31T21:31:00.000-08:00

I just completed my first craigslist sale!

What a weird site to have taken off so much. The post editing pages are buggy as hell - if you post a picture the formatting is totally screwed on the review page.

And when I tried to make later edits to my post I was completely unable to see the changes except for at work. This was the case for days, until I deleted the post. I don't know if Shaw is doing some really bad secret proxying or what - clearing my cache and restarting my browser sure didn't help.

So I guess my recommendation would be to always delete and create a new post if you need to make revisions.

Also, it doesn't work quite as fast as I expected (3 days till I got my first call) - I think I reduced the price on my item too soon. Give it at least a week before deciding that no one wants your junk at the original price.

Oh yeah: Everyone who contacted me used my phone number rather than the anonymized email. I suspect that not listing a phone number is a huge disadvantage.

Future Shop's 5 Day Photo Service

2008-01-31T21:26:00.000-08:00

Future Shop has recently switched from 1 hour photo processing to 5 day photo processing. Naturally, they don't tell you this on their website. To make matters worse, you have to line up with all the scammers and angry owners of junk in order to pick up your pictures.

I almost lost control when one of the "service" reps started flirting with a customer who had loooooong finished his business.

Never again.

Wii Hacks

2008-01-30T21:33:00.000-08:00

I kept reading about some guy who used a Wii sensor to rig up some sort of virtual reality headset - I couldn't quite bring myself to care enough to check it out. My loss!

A co-worker finally showed me one of the many demo videos. This is so very cool.

Best Buy Shipping Scam

2008-01-21T21:44:00.000-08:00

The ripoff artists at Best Buy have taken scamming to a whole new level.

Their Canadian website lists a choice of two types of shipping, at two very different prices. And then no matter what shipping method you choose they then sum up the two shipping options and list the cumulative amount on the credit card page.

This behavior comes and goes - it happened consistently for 15 minutes while I struggled to fairly give them my money, and then an hour later when I went to take screenshots for this post the behavior was correct.

If there was more time between my two attempts or this had not happened during reasonably active online shopping hours I might have believed they had patched a legitimate bug, and that their QA team is just incompetent. But I suspect that someone ran the numbers and determined that "accidentally" overcharging for shipping once in a while is more than worth the potentially lost customers.

Also, could they have a smaller, less prominently placed "add to cart" button? Sheesh!

Don't Waste Your Money on Ceiva's Dial Up Service

2008-01-20T17:47:00.000-08:00

Update: Two days or so after posting this, I was contacted by a Ceiva rep offering to look into my grandmother's problems. Within a few more days the frame was up and running - I'm not sure that my complaints here actually sped things up though. So although it did take roughly 3 weeks for all issues to be resolved, it would appear that my initial dismissal of the product and slandering of Ceiva's tech support staff was premature.

Now I just have to somehow overcome my grandmother's irritation that "it keeps repeating the same old pictures" complaint. As if a regular picture frame is somehow better?! Sigh.

Ceiva offers digital picture frames that can either be updated via memory cards or remotely, using a modem. I can't speak to the general quality of the product, but let me tell you that the dial up service is crap.

The entire point of dial up service like this is to be able to rapidly sent digital stills to someone that isn't particularly computer savvy. For that reason, you would expect that the recipient would be able to just plug it into the wall and be done with it.

No such luck.

After several weeks of communications with completely incompetent tech support, the frame has managed to download pictures once.

My grandmother has pretty well lost all faith in her descendants at this point.

Referrer Privacy

2008-01-19T17:59:00.000-08:00

One of the things I think should be added to the (X)HTML spec is is a flag for all possibly foreign content that indicates the web browser should not pass accurate referrer information.

Yes, it is polite to tell the content provider where their visitors are coming from. But if you are trying to run a private site that password protection doesn't make sense for (for whatever reason), you also don't want to advertise your existence by linking to other sites. Specifically I'm thinking of personal blogs - I don't want strangers looking at pictures of my kid just because I linked to something that my extended family might find interesting.

I can't think of anyway this could make the current "hotlinking" situation any worse, and it would definitely help a small minority of people.

Flash 2d Physics Engine

2007-12-25T21:04:00.000-08:00

You can interact with many of the components in the sample as well. My understanding is that this is all Open Source from Box2D.

Static Variables in Class Methods

2007-12-22T20:05:00.000-08:00

I ran into a C++ situation the other day that made me realize I have a complete conceptual disconnect with a variant of one of the language features.

int Counter()
{
    static int count = 0; // clearly a replacement for a global
    count++;
    return count;
}

class Counter
{
public:
    static int someVar = 0; // also clearly a replacement for a global
    int mCount;
    
    Counter() : mCount(0) {}

    int Increment()
    {
        static int count = 0;
        // wtf??  need to use mCount for this to make sense

        count++;
        return count;
    }
};

I never even gave it a second thought when I wrote code (far more interesting than this sample) that assumed the static variables within a non-static class method would be relative to the instantiated objects. And when I figured out why my code didn't work I was stunned, in spite of the obviousness of the error.

I'm still not convinced that my expected behavior wouldn't be more useful, but I suppose it's a little late to be arguing about the C++ spec...

Manulife Has A Sucky Website

2007-12-18T21:57:00.001-08:00

At least the Group Retirement portion is the stink. Let me count the ways:

It only works in IE, and not very well even so - very sluggish response times
It opens each new page in a tiny popup
Back button often doesn't work because of inappropriately POST'ed pages
During sign up it requires that you answer a huge number of questions, including making decisions about which mutual funds you are investing in, and if you take too long it expires your session and you have to start over from scratch
They don't offer meaningful details on most of their investment choices: rates for GIC/GIAs, penalties for early withdrawals from GIAs, fees for mutual funds, etc.
Password is constrained to 4 numerical digits... sure hope they have some good auditing on login attempts

I never thought I would see the day that Fidelity didn't seem so terrible. I suffered through their incompetence for years and assumed it couldn't get much worse than that.

Incidentally, it always cracks me up how you never see anyone promoting mutual funds that have existed for more than five to ten years. Doesn't speak terribly well of the long term performance...

Uh Oh...

2007-12-12T20:07:00.000-08:00

I'm actually wishing that I could remember enough of my basic physics to try and solve this problem. Stupid easily disabled brain!

I WISH Python Was This Much Fun!

2007-12-04T22:04:00.000-08:00

Python really is a nice language, although I remain mistrustful of duck typing and all the crazy runtime data structure modification. I'm in the odd position of liking other languages better theoretically, but in practice never voluntarily choosing to work in them.

I have been contemplating trying to modify C++ to have a Python-like syntax, and see how close that gets me to my ideal language... Or maybe the Delphi trolls are on to something...

Social Bookmarking Support for Blogs

2007-12-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

I have long resisted putting the myriad of "Digg This", "Del.icio.us", etc. buttons on my blogs. Mostly because I am too lazy to keep up with the latest fads, but also because they add a lot of clutter to a page.

Via ScienceText I have discovered a small plugin from AddThis that supports lots of bookmarking sites and will presumably be updated with whatever newest flash-in-the-pan pops up. It was easy to install in Blogger.

One nice feature is that using the button on an article on your main page results in the specific article being bookmarked, rather than your site in general.

They claim to offer usage stats as well - it will be interesting to see if anyone actually uses the thing.

The Kindle eBook Reader

2007-11-22T19:59:00.000-08:00

Via some Caveman comes a video of the "drop test" for Amazon's new Kindle eBook reader. It's pretty neat how much it flexes on impact.

Anyway, come talk to me about buying one when it replaces my phone, PDA, and mp3 player too. I've had enough of single purpose portable electronics.

War Photojournalism and Cameras

2007-11-13T22:28:00.001-08:00

Michael Yon (a photojournalist in Iraq who frequently embeds with the military) has a couple articles up on the cameras he uses.

Neat stuff if you care at all about photography.

Seam Carving

2007-11-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

This is truly one of the most awesome things I have seen in a long time. Seam carving, also known as liquid resize, retargeting, or content aware image resizing allows you to resize an image in such a way that only the least significant information gets dropped (or duplicated). The result is more clarity in the important area of the images.

The video shows how this technique is brilliant for breakups (and you need to edit the offending party out of all your photographs). Or perhaps if you foolishly allow yourself to be photographed with someone that will hurt your political career...? This was my quick and dirty test using Liquid Resize - I think I could do a much better job the second time around.

Via Mythic Flame.

Does a 3rd Monitor Make You More Evil?

2007-10-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

The first Dilbert strip in a long while that has made me laugh. Possibly with a hint of evil genius, given my two monitor setup at work.

HxD - The Grandaddy of Hex Editors

2007-10-03T20:04:00.000-07:00

HxD is the craziest hex editor I have ever used.

Aside from handling monstrously large files with ease, HxD even opens entire disks/your RAM as a searchable and editable(!!!) file. Apparently it is pretty effective for retrieving things from corrupted media (like flash cards).

Highly recommended, even though not being Open Source I suppose there is no guarantee it isn't sending spam from my computer right now...

Miro First Impressions

2007-09-15T19:51:00.000-07:00

On the recommendation of Surveillance State I am trying out Miro, an RSS eating BitTorrent client that automatically downloads new episodes of whatever you want.

The main problem I have run into so far is instability. Lots of crashes, but in particular the RSS service recommended by Surveillance State (tvRSS) causes non-stop crashes under Windows 2000. TV Freedom is far more stable, and integrates better with Miro too (single click downloads).

Miro also feels extremely sluggish on my somewhat dated machine.

But the concept is cool (if not particularly new), and I'll be trying it out this season (rather than recording the shows on lame VHS).

Why Heat Is a Problem in Freezing Space

2007-09-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

Via Double Blind comes a writeup on the problems spaceships have dissipating the heat they inevitably produce. The context is hypothetical space warfare, but the challenges will be relevant to any future space exploration.

Nor is this something which can be solved by better design. Even if every energy mechanism on the ship operates near the theoretical limit of efficiency, there will still be a lot of heat generated. It is physically impossible for any device to utilize energy 100% efficiently without producing any waste heat at all. The Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't permit it. And as a practical matter, human engineering rarely comes even close. In many systems, 30% efficiency is considered superb, and in some systems it can be as bad as a couple of percent. All the rest of the energy becomes waste heat.

Therefore, warships will require large radiators, and since they will potentially have to dissipate megawatts they'll be very hot during intense operations, likely glowing in visible frequencies.

The same author started with an equally fascinating brief history of naval warfare.

Trickery at Shell Gas Stations

2007-08-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

Pumps at Shell stations are not labeled consistently; sometimes the price/octane level goes up left to right, and sometimes right to left. I refuse to believe that this is an accident.

There are two plausible explanations:

The back to back pumps are mirrored to reduce the amount/complexity of pipe that needs to be used. Those pumps are not all that close to each other though - I'm not convinced that there would be enough of a savings to warrant that design.
Shell has built the increased chance of people mistakenly choosing the premium gas into the business model. It is entirely possible that low octane users (the poorer, presumably stupider ones - like me) are more likely to make this mistake, making it a net profitable situation for the stations. Or else so many more people are trying to buy low octane that even at equal mistake rates it is still profitable to encourage confusion.

I will investigate further as to whether there are other symmetries in play here...

Multi User Touch Screens

2007-08-25T23:27:00.000-07:00

Finally, a touch screen interface with applications more compelling than "messy photo sorting". Pretty cool how the apps support cloning a view and handing it off to other people.

What bothers me about this "advanced technology" is that the really exciting stuff could have been done years ago (and has been, in many cases). Basically this is putting collaborative workflow on a gigantic touch screen - the touch screen is a neat trick, but hardly necessary for this to be useful.

Where are the collaborative apps for my desktop PC?!

Almost As Good As "My Scene is Rendering"

2007-08-14T21:52:00.000-07:00

Apple's Least Polished Service

2007-07-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

Apple is famous for elegant and intuitive interfaces, which makes me wonder how Apple Trailers is so overlooked. It's like the ugly stepchild or something.

By the time a trailer is posted to their RSS feed there is roughly a 25% chance that the trailer won't actually load for you. If this is the case it usually shows up in the next couple of days. Sometimes it is because the embedded .mov simply doesn't exist, other times it is because the provided links point back to the page you are already on.

On top of that, the fact checking, spelling, and grammar in the text descriptions of the movies are terrible. You are lucky if the actors' names and major plot points are listed correctly. Some of the descriptions I have read were written in English, yet had no meaning.

It seems bizarre that Apple wouldn't at least have a proofreader on this public face for their company and products.

Hosting With Radiant Communications

2007-07-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

Radiant Communications is a prominent web hosting/ADSL reseller in the BC Lower Mainland. I have purchased ADSL service and a static IP from them for eight or nine years now in three different locations.

My experience with Radiant has been a mixed bag. Only my laziness and a perceived lack of alternatives keeps my business with them.

The Good

On the one hand, they offer affordable prices for pretty decent uptime. When outages do occur (like right now), they tend to be much wider in scope than just you - as I write this their corporate site is gone along with my own, and they are not answering their tech support line (and have not provided an automated status message, which is irritating).

Their tech guys tend to be pretty helpful as well. I have had no trouble getting SPF records updated at a moment's notice, and as long as I explain things carefully I can usually convince the junior guys to perform more advanced maintenance for me (in fact, I think I once convinced them to configure the reverse DNS for what I now believe to be a shared IP address in such a way that it would only benefit me - whoops!).

The Bad

Radiant's email services are inexcusably bad.

Spam filtering costs some ridiculous amount per month per email address (I'd provide a quote, but their site is down...). I have had to forward everything through Gmail to get a decent spam/ham ratio.
The outbound mailservers are garbage. If your message actually gets delivered, it will often be delivered multiple times (weeks apart). Once again, using Gmail as a smarthost has proved to be far more effective than using the provided service.
The webmail interface is godawful ugly. It's like the last 5 or 10 years of Open Source development has passed them by.

In addition, pointing your domain at Radiant DNS servers means effectively giving up any control over your domain. No automated interface whatsoever is provided for managing your DNS settings (hence all the communication about SPF records).

The Ugly

After roughly 7 years of being a customer, the credit card on which automated payments are withdrawn expired. I did not think to notify Radiant of this, and so they found out when they tried to run that fateful month's charges. It just so happened that the primary contact phone number they had on file was also out of date.

What did they do when the charges were declined? Use the white pages to look up a more current contact number? Send a letter notifying us of the problem (ADSL after all - they certainly had the correct address)? Send an email to the domain that their DNS servers provide info for (and there is contact info on the website as well)?

No, they just cut service and waited for us to call them. Thanks for nothing.

Penny Arcade Video Game Trailer

2007-06-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

If this game is anywhere near as good as the Penny Arcade comic strip it is going to be genius.

Testing Cross Browser Compatibility With Browsershots

2007-06-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

Browsershots lets you submit a web page to its pool of machines for test renders. Assuming that the demo pool isn't totally overloaded (as opposed to the normal mostly overloaded state), you get back screen captures of your page as it looks on various platforms and browsers.

Many browsers and platforms are represented - for example try out Safari 1.3 on Mac, or Iceweasel 2.0 on Linux.

Fixed vs Variable Price Natural Gas

2007-06-10T13:03:00.000-07:00

I have received pitches from representatives from two different natural gas resellers recently. The Lower Mainland BBB claims that people are getting pretty upset with these companies, and if my experience is typical I can't say that I'm particularly surprised.

The Superior Energy rep was the most weaselly (and incompetent). His only promotional material was a Terasen Gas "Customer Choice" pamphlet that he scribbled (unreadable) notes on. He went straight for the "look at how much it costs to fill up your car - what are you going to do when gas prices double?" angle, and didn't seem able to understand why that was not a particularly compelling argument. I felt bad for the lady next door who he claimed as a victim (peer pressure!).

Energy Savings BC on the other hand sent a guy who was at least marginally better trained. He stuck with a much more conservative sales pitch: can't promise giant savings, but won't you sleep better knowing that your gas costs for the next 5 years are limited? etc. He wasn't sharp enough to recognize the fact that I know a whole lot more commodity pricing/speculation than him though, and rapidly became quite obnoxious while pushing his "just sign up and you can cancel anytime before November if you change your mind" line. I sent him on his way, as I imagine all of my neighbors did: on top of caming two weeks after the last guy, I imagine the fact his price was a fair bit higher than Superior's didn't help him much.

For the record, there are only two legitimate reasons for considering fixed natural gas prices:

You can afford the fixed price rate, but couldn't afford any fluctuations above that. This is analogous to buying insurance for something you can't afford to replace, or a fixed rate mortgage. You are paying a premium for stability.
You have good reason to believe that the fixed price has been set incorrectly, and you want to take the gas company's money. But unless you are planning to blow up a refinery, what are the odds that you can price natural gas better than one of these big companies?

On the Abuse of SSL

2007-06-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is at its core a pretty solid technology. It is clearly good to encrypt your banking information, and given a cost free choice, more encryption is better (on an individual level at least).

Whoever is responsible for SSL including identity validation through Certificate Authorities is a bad, bad person. Certificate signing (even ignoring sloppy authorities that issue questionable certificates) has never been a useful way for normal people to determine if they are communicating with a trusted party. Firstly no one really pays attention to them, and secondly no amount of certificate reading can help you if the site has been directly compromised.

And because browsers perpetuate this stupidity by popping up giant warnings for self-signed/expired certs we have a small cartel of SSL providers that can charge outrageous amounts of money for the privilege of providing encryption to your customers.

At the very least there should be an SSL light option where no claim of identity verification is made, but warning free encryption can be provided. These free certificates would massively encourage the protection of personal data during transmission, keeping your 12 year old neighbor from learning far more about you than you would really like.

Trust verification should handled by user feedback driven mechanism - see your built in browser tools (Firefox Phishing Protection for example), or third party plugins like the Netcraft toolbar. These are far more likely to successfully warn you that you are on an unsafe site.

Facebook's "Friend Request" Interface Stinks

2007-05-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

While the jury is still out on Facebook's lasting power, it has impressed me enough to start complaining about it. My primary beef with Facebook is the crudeness of the tools for finding and connecting with friends.

First of all, choosing "Find Friends" from the "Friends" menu does not provide a choice for just searching by name. For weeks I assumed that this was some amazing attempt at privacy protection and was frankly kind of disappointed to discover that you can search by name, but you have to use the generically labeled search field in the upper left.

Secondly, when you are invited by someone who only knows your email address (even if you have linked this address to your account already!) you are asked to make a new account to become their friend. No option is presented to attach them to an existing account, and once you log in you can no longer view the request. If there are too many matches under that person's name, your only option is to copy the id (i=xxx) from the request link into a profile view page URL. Then you can properly add them as a friend.

It's like their UI guys have never actually used any of these features...

That being said, I think Facebook has perfectly captured 99% of what normal people want from blogging and social sites (like LinkedIn). I have reconnected with loads of (good) people that I had completely forgotten about.

Comic Review: Tag & Bink Were Here

2007-05-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

The premise of Tag & Bink is that the same two half-wits were present for almost every major event in the Star Wars universe.

Flunking Padewan school, they become soldiers in the Rebel army before fleeing a losing battle dressed as Storm Troopers. From there they stumble from one outrageous scenario to the next, usually disguised as someone that got screen time in one of the movies.

It's all pretty clever. If you are familiar with the movies you will probably enjoy the comic, but there are a few references to characters that come from the many Star Wars books that have been released in the last 15 years. Having read only a few of those books, there were a couple characters that I didn't recognize.

Restaurant: Bob's Subs in Richmond

2007-05-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

Restaurants like these make one wonder how there can possibly be world hunger. Sure, you'd die of heart failure after a couple of months eating at Bob's Subs, but you'd be fat and happy.

I had a 6 inch 'Super Sub' (under $6, as I recall), and I swear to God that more steak fell off the sub than I ate, and I still could barely walk out of the place. You could feed a family of 4 for $12 there.

Bob's Subs - It's a remarkable eating experience.

6390 No. 3 Rd.
Richmond, BC

Coquihalla Highway

2007-05-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

At $10 a car, wouldn't you think they could afford to paint some lane lines on the Coquihalla? It was definitely disconcerting the first few times it switched back and forth between 2 and 3 lanes with no visual cues on the pavement.

On the other hand, this is the first highway I have ever driven on where my car (a little Toyota Echo) basically couldn't reach high enough speeds to make driving not completely boring... Between the steep steep hills and all the passengers it was hard to keep up with the 110 speed limit, let alone go any faster.

Symptoms of Mercury Vapor Poisoning

2007-05-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

A remarkable first-hand account of what it is like to be exposed to high levels of mercury for an extended period of time. It ain't pretty!

With me the situation began with slight intermittent headaches and mild drowsiness, which increased gradually, over the years, to constant nervous restlessness and "jitteriness." Head-pressure impaired the ability to think. It worsened and finally became an almost uninterrupted vexing headache (sits mostly over the eyes). I had strong vertigo, which was occasionally connected with visual disturbances (unclear and double vision). Soon the upper air passages were involved as well. This started with a slight transient nose cold. This was followed by a constant "stuffy nose," which later turned into severe nose, throat and sinus infections. They were followed, one by one, almost without interruption, by pussy, often bloody, mucosal discharge and scabbing, frequent sore throats and ear aches connected to auditory loss and loss of smell (some sense of smell remained; e.g. cyanic acid). There was a distaste for tobacco smoke. During the last years prior to recognition of the poisoning, there were added signs: a strong flow of saliva, a sour, insipid taste in the mouth, infections of the eyes and oral mucosa. There were little blisters, sensitive and sore areas on the tongue, the palate, the gums and the insides of the lips and cheeks. There was reddening of the gums and slight bleeding while brushing the teeth. There were toothaches, receding of the gums and formation of "pockets" and temporary loosening of individual teeth. The mouth and tooth signs revealed themselves only (in part they only reached their peak months after recognition of the poisoning) because, since my youth, I have been taking good care of my teeth (among other things nightly long rinses with 1 and 1/2% hydrogen peroxyde solution and sodium bicarbonate). If this hadn't been the case, I might possibly have become aware of the cause of my problems through mouth infections.

Other signs were: Mental weariness and exhaustion, lack of inclination and inability to perform any, particularly mental, work, and increased need for sleep. There were tremors of the spread-out fingers and also sometimes the eyelids. There was pain in various locations of the body, tearing in the back and limbs, and pressure in the liver area. At times, there were disturbances of stomach and intestinal activity, loss of appetite, sudden bladder pressure, isolated bouts of diarrhea, which occurred without other possible causes. There were sudden blistery rashes, e.g. on the insides of the arms and thighs.

The most depressing accompanying sign relating to mental work was the diminshment of memory. My memory, which had previously been excellent, left more and more to be desired and became worse and worse until, two years ago, I suffered from nearly complete memory loss.

Via Double Blind.

Yahoo's Unholy Absorption of Flickr

2007-04-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Yahoo decided that it didn't want to miss out on the whole "Web 2.0" thing. Rather than try to build its own groundbreaking applications, it just threw gobs of money at the problem and purchased Flickr.

So far, so good.

But then some genius in marketing decides "Hey, if Flickr is part of Yahoo, we should really integrate the login procedures. Then people will see how committed we are to Web 2.0!"

Okay, this doesn't have to be a disaster...

Until a clever but short-sighted co-op student is tasked with the integration. He starts out right, allowing logins with either your Yahoo account or your Flickr account, all the while encouraging you to migrate to a merged Yahoo account. But he makes a very strange choice at this point. If a the Flickr account is tied to an email address that is also tied to a Yahoo account, you must log in through Yahoo.

Hmmm... what happens if you don't actually remember the password to that Yahoo account? Time for password retrieval - no wait, they want to know your birthday and postal code. Too bad you signed up with fraudulent information!

So apparently that account is lost forever (unless like me you randomly stumble onto your old Yahoo password - long after creating a new Flickr account of course).

The most galling part is the Flickr Uploadr utility has remembered your old Flickr password, and still works fine! So they haven't fully disabled the old accounts, just enough to make life miserable...

Furnace Ignition Problems

2007-04-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

Apparently it is not at all normal for a furnace to take several minutes to ignite after your thermostat kicks it into gear. After a year of occasional multi-hour delays in ignition, I had convinced myself that a minute or two was completely reasonable.

Not so. After a pretty damn expensive visit from a repair guy (ended up replacing both the igniter assembly and the gas valve) the thing now starts within seconds of thermostat signals.

Incidentally, I am pretty happy with the guy that did the repairs. Unlike the last time I had servicing done, this time I made a point of finding an authorized repair shop. I have a Heil, which is apparently a rebranded ICG, which can also be found under the Sears/Whirlpool, Keeprite, and Tempster names. Sears disavowed all knowledge of ICG though, so I just went with one of the companies listed on the Heil website.

If you are in the Greater Vancouver area and have a similar furnace, you might want to give these guys a try:

Artisan Plumbing & Heating
604-298-5100
Tradesman: Danny A.

Getting pam_auth Installed

2007-04-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

Method 3 from the official installation instructions is not quite right. pam_auth.so is not found in ext/pam_auth/, but in ext/pam_auth/.libs/.

Like many PAM projects however, pam_auth looks to have been abandoned years ago, so I don't think the documentation is likely to be updated.

Defending Source Code From Malicious Additions

2007-04-14T04:20:00.000-07:00

Bruce Schneier has posted a note about a recent successful sabotage attempt against the US Navy.

I don't really think that Schneier actually read the story, but nevertheless, I am going to critique his concerns.

Yeah, it was annoying to find and fix the problem, but hang on. How is it possible for a single disgruntled idiot to damage a multi-billion-dollar weapons system? Why aren't there any security systems in place to prevent this? I'll bet anything that there was absolutely no control or review over who put what code in where. I'll bet that if this guy had been just a little bit cleverer, he could have done a whole lot more damage without ever getting caught.

Firstly, the article says that they saboteur was the owner of the contracting firm hired to maintain the software. So it isn't the case of a "single disgruntled idiot" so much as a "single treasonous supervisor" (who got a pretty light sentence, all things considered). And he didn't get caught because he wasn't clever enough - he got caught because his sabotage worked and he fled the country!

All that being said, this seems like a good a time to discuss source code security in general.

The software development through deployment process typically goes something like this for these big systems (ignoring audits, which are probably not done enough):

Software engineer writes/tests code.
A second engineer reviews that code.
Build team adds reviewed code to build.
Quality Assurance confirms that only reviewed code has been added to the build.
QA retests the built software (using a well defined set of tests).
Product is delivered to client who typically runs their own tests or supervises QA while they run more tests onsite.

This kind of procedure is fantastic for catching mistakes, and is also pretty good at stopping malicious actors. Unless you have a case of someone incompetent doing the reviewing, malicious code isn't getting in through regular channels. I can only think of a single major weakness in this process: if you are delivering executables as well as source to the client, the build team could easily create compromised executables to be delivered with untainted source. Assuming the change isn't immediately catastrophic and doesn't intersect with QA's (publicly known) tests, QA simply has no chance of catching this kind of problem. So you need to have the build process supervised somehow so that a single person couldn't execute the crime.

The biggest security problems in software development falls under the IT domain. A short list of the weaknesses IT may have:

Is the source code repository writable by developers/anyone at the filesystem level? If it is, it is pretty easy to make unauthorized additions, framing anyone you like.
Is the review database secure? Simply attach your changes to someone else's already approved review and you are in.
Does anyone have root access? Yes, of course they do, probably lots of administrators in a big company. By definition, root users can do anything, and alter the logs to hide any evidence of it - I am not aware of any operating system that performs black box style recording of all actions taken. The best you could really hope for would be a journaling file system that wouldn't accept any monkeying without being taken offline. Even then, a single root user could probably do the work secretly if they timed things well.
How solid is your IT audit trail? Probably non-existent. As above, I am not aware of any operating system that performs meaningful logging of user actions, and certainly not in a way that can't be tampered with by root users. So you probably won't even be able to find out who did the dastardly deed.

It seems to me that in order to have true confidence in the security of any software development it has to be possible to create accounts that require more than one person to log into them. For example you might need two or more root administrators to log in as root, and then corporate policy would be for all of them to remain present until the system is logged out. Now you can trust your logs again. And perhaps each admin would have a console to approve each action taken before it is executed.

But since I don't believe there are any operating systems with this functionality built into the core, good luck stopping tampering by a dedicated hostile. In light of that, it becomes imperative that the client performs detailed software reviews and builds the product from the delivered source. And that isn't going to be cheap!

Facial Replacement In Blades of Glory

2007-04-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

Will Ferrell and Jon Heder didn't do any of their own skating in Blades of Glory. Instead, real skaters were filmed who then had their faces replaced with those of the actors.

New Layout and HTML Graph

2007-04-07T17:43:00.000-07:00

Per this previous post, here is the HTML graph for this site that results from the upgraded Blogger layout. There's a fair bit more going on, even taking into account the addition of two more ad blocks (which don't provide any meaningful income by the way - getting some interesting statistics that I'll write about later though).

Timely Replacement of Stove Elements

2007-04-07T16:03:00.000-07:00

Being a new first-time home owner, I never worried about things like burner elements before. It took one of our elements becoming totally flaky (required jiggling to work at all) to get me to investigate replacing it.

It turns out that if your elements don't glow red within a few minutes of turning them on max, they aren't running at full efficiency. New burners have made a huge difference in our cooking times!

Bluehost: You Get What You Pay For

2007-04-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

Given the price, Bluehost is fairly stable and has good enough uptime.

But they suck for lots of reasons:

You don't get a dedicated Apache error log, so you can never be sure which errors are actually coming from your site.
Bluehost likes to do upgrades to core pieces of software like PHP.

Not only do they not ask your permission, but they don't even bother to tell you in advance. So when this upgrade (hypothetically of course) breaks preg_match, your site goes down and you have to spend all night tracking down the problem. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

They won't give shell access without a faxed copy of your driver's license. God only knows why.

Google Gulp

2007-04-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

Those Google guys have way too much time on their hands! This page detailing the launch of a new Google drink was an April Fool's joke a few years back.