Faster, stronger, longer

As of today instead of being hosted on my server at home with its piddly 600kbps upstream link, this blog is now hosted with a company called DreamHost. So hopefully you should find pages loading much faster and thanks to a 140GB per month bandwidth quota there is less reason to fear the coming of the great SlashDot because that's about 4,000,000 page loads of your average 30k blog entry. If I ever get that many page hits in a month the Google ad revenue should more than compensate for the bandwidth overages. Finally with over 2Gb of storage I should be able to keep blogging from a long, long, time...

I heard about DreamHost through a friend and although their management UI is a little funky they do have some great features, especially an automated backup system that makes it easy to recover your files. Combined with their base package including 3 domains and much more bandwidth and storage than comparably priced hosting I'm pretty pleased so far. The only thing I'll ding them on is spam filtering for email - it doesn't seem to be that configurable and just doesn't work the way I like it (I'm a realtime blackhole list kind of guy if you must know). However, since no one ever sends me email at this domain I don't really care, and I'm going to assume it will get better in the future because ultimately every hosting company finds that spam is their problem to solve as it eats up their bandwidth and profits.

Iraq - testing ground for the wild, whacky and downright dangerous

Remember how they said those high voltage taser guns were like, totally safe? And remember how all of a sudden people, even a police department, started suing the manufacturers because they had been linked with heart attacks and deaths of people that got zapped. And now each taser gun has unique identifying "flack" that is blasted out when you fire it so that whoever used it can be tracked down - and presumably held liable for the damage.

I can imagine the testing they did... get a bunch of animals and maybe a few super fit tough guys to volunteer for a zapping, get some medical opinions that its safe and then role it out. After all its a weapon, weapons don't have to be safe anyway, so what's the point? Maybe they did more testing than this but who is ultimately to say a taser is a safe thing to be zapping people with, never mind the potential benefits (compared with say, shooting the person full of lead). If such a device was being used for medical uses can you imagine it would have to endure some very rigorous testing and a hospital would leave it to life or death situations before using it.

Anyway, I'm not really surprised to read at Engadget that the military is thinking of rolling out a big microwave on wheels to effectively cook people, in a non-lethal kind of way, who are involved in some disturbance. Like the Taser the argument is it is better than shooting people and better than letting a disturbance get out of hand and potentially cause more problems. That's fine, if it's really safe... but I'm willing to guess that the kind of testing that has gone on for this device - on fit military volunteers - is not going to replicate its average in the field deployment situation. Iraqis men, women and children will become guinea pigs for this new device. If it doesn't work they'll suffer but are unlikely to be bringing lawsuits against the US. If it does work as planned the creators will be able to brag about how it was used so successfully in Iraq and avoid a bunch of really expensive testing at home.

Testing new equipment at times of war is not uncommon, heck we did it at Hiroshima and look what happened there. But personally I don't think we should be deploying stuff that we wouldn't roll onto our own streets and to me this looks like a really bad idea as there is a really fine and body specific line better causing extreme pain with radio energy and actually cooking someone's body parts to cause permanent damage - like cataracts and internal tissue damage.

Goodbye teabag, hello teastick

Perfect for this site, Gamila (sounding like, but not quite an annagram of Gmail) has created the teastick. I've used quite a few loose leaf brewing gadgets before and I have to say this one looks the ticket. I expect it wont be long before they create the Teastick II which self cleans via some kind of plunger to eject the soggy leaves.

WinZip training

A few years back during the heyday of my dot com years I joked around with a friend about a ficticious training course we'd run. It was about the time that Geek Cruises started up and we figured what engineers really needed was a no-brainer course held in exotic locations that they could get their boss to pay for. The dumbest product we figured you could offer training for would be WinZip. Then at parties we'd start giving people the rap that we worked for a company actually running WinZip training courses, and for a while it was amazing that some people even thought it was a good idea.

Ironically Geek Cruises went on to do really well - and I mean really well - and WinZip ended up plunging into oblivion partly becuase almost no one who used it ever paid for it, but mostly because Windows XP has, since 2002 provided the same functionality completely for free. Its amazing how few computer users seem to realize that, and many are still doggedly using their WinZip and ignoring the "Evaluation period expired" dialog box every time.

Now an equity firm Vector Capital has purchased WinZip obviously thinking they can make some money from it. I wonder if anyone ever bothered to tell them that WinZip is now obsolete? Even though WinZip is still downloaded 500,000 times a week I'm expecting those people to wise up real fast when Vector tries to get some money out of them, or perhaps causes that evaluation period to really end after 30 days. Some of the other things I've seen WinZip doing just don't make sense - a plugin for Outlook that automatically compresses your attachments? Sounds like a good idea, but don't they know how many corporations automatically block or strip all .zip file attachments, being one of the most prevalent vectors for viruses?

Or Vector already know that WinZip is a dead duck but they are just planning on selling WinZip training classes in exotic locations. Maybe they should partner with the Geek Cruises guy and work something out? Alternatively they can turn free WinZip into another god-awful platform for ad-ware and make a bunch of money from people like that.

Got spyware? Get new PC!

Oh the posts are just rolling in today... here's a great story about someone who bought a new PC because their old one had spyware. I guess that person didn't know about reinstalling the OS from scratch. For many that's just too complicated even if HP makes it relatively simple. For whatever reason Dell continues to ship reinstallation disks that require hours of work to recover your disk to a non-shipping state (it wipes out all their super-duper Dell diagnostic partitions).

Anyway, as someone who has done a bit of professional IT support for regular Joes I can attest that this story is almost certainly true. I helped one guy who had a Sony PC and was asking me, completely straight-faced, if it was salvageable, or whether he should just "send it back to Sony". Its true that I spent an entire day working on his two home PCs to erase all the spyware - my first big spy-ware removal job. It cost him about $250 for my time (quite cheap actually compared to commercial services), but he was happy, very happy - and he didn't even loose any of his personal data. The funny thing was that he'd recently purchased DSL from SBC and his wife was convinced she still needed to keep paying $20 a month to AOL so she could read her AOL email.

Its really quite sad how hopelessly lost your average adult consumer (9-year old Microsoft Certified Professionals aside) is when confronted with even the most basic computer problem. Sometimes I really just want to pack up all my delusions of being a software engineer and take up home PC support full time.

The answer - but its not 42, more like 9

On one hand Bill Gates is saying there is no magic answer to the tech worker shortage, and on the other CNET News is reporting that a 9 year Arfa Karim in Pakistan has just become a Microsoft Certified Professional. However she isn't even the youngest recipient of the certification, India's Mridul Seth is said to have gained it at age 8 in November 2004.

So perhaps Gates is right - there is no magic solution, just a perfectly mundane everyday solution - bring back child labor. It even makes economic good sense: if kids can qualify as MCPs by the time they are high school age they can spend the next ten years of their life working. That will bring young workers into the social security payment bucket soon, allow them to amass retirement savings sooner and hence due to cumulative interest reap much higher retirement benefits, and by the time they are 20 they will have saved enough money to go on to finishing off their education, much the wiser about the realities of working life.

Get ready for a sub 4-foot IT worker to appear at your door any day soon...

Blogger float bug fixed

I noticed today that Google have finally fixed the problem with use of "float" in blog templates. They added a formatting setting called "Enable float alignment" which somewhat confusingly should be set to "No" if you template includes floating divs. Too bad I had to discover this by myself because they didn't actually send me an email to let me know it was fixed.

Cellular carriers dragging their knuckles on SMS blocking

Okay, time for a rant about some really dark times in the cellular networks.

Today I discovered something really pathetic about US cellular network carriers - they claim that are not able to block SMS messages (i.e. text messages) sent to a phone. More to the point they charge me for receiving those messages. Some some juvenille or idiot picks a random phone number decides to start spaming it with text messages and the network claims there is nothing they can do except change the phone number. So not only do you get whacked with paying for the unwanted messages, you also have to endure the inconvenience of changing you number, with no guarantee it wont happen all over again.

Landline companies long ago figured out how to block specific numbers and certainly would never get away with billing you - and not the sender - for unwanted calls. Even the postal service figured out from day one that it couldn't get away with charging people to receive their mail - they long ago worked out how to recoup costs of delivering mail from outside their network i.e. another country. So considering how long SMS has been around and how its delivered by entirely digital means its truely pathetic they didn't implement blocking SMS (even if you have to call them to do it) from day one.

Given how actively they market texting to everyone and his dog, but most partically kids with nothing better to do than send messages all day, and give how carriers make a fortune from this service I believe this is the best ever case for a class action suit I've ever heard. Its well know in Europe that the US phone networks are extremely retarded in many respects - how many Americans are aware that if you have a cellphone (mobile) in Europe and someone calls you then you don't pay a dime for receiving that call - just like with regular networks. Its the caller who is billed extra for the airtime which is just as it should be. With such a system I would also not be billed for receiving a text message - also the way it should be.

Basically by selling phones and services that are unable to block text messages from specific numbers (or voice calls for that matter) and then charging me for it its like Microsoft shipping an OS with no firewall and no antivirus and no antispyware and then charging you every time you got a bad packet, got a virus or picked up some spyware. Can you imagine if the postal service decided to start charging you to receive mail, and then was unable to block unsolicited mail? Guess how long that service would last.

Like I said, unless networks do something about this really quickly I'm guessing some class action lawyer is going to jump on this real soon and guess what - its going to cost the networks billions if not trillions (like the case against the fax spammer). I suggest some really hefty punitive damages be awarded too because when I search online I find loads of people complaining about this and how they have been hit with huge bills because some person decided to spam them via text. The only recourse suggested by the carriers is always change your number or file a harrasment charge against the responsible party. Well that's certainly the cheapest solution for the networks isn't it... and guess what its they one where they continue to make money on their created problem.

Busted for drinking from the font of open WiFi

So Benjamin Smith III parks his car, sucks down some free WiFi bandwidth coming from an unsecured home network, and promptly finds himself busted by the local cops (called in by Richard Dinon, the owner of the aforementioned wireless network).

Here's my take on it - if your WiFi network spills out onto public property and is not secured then its fair game. Its like leaving your hosepipe spewing water onto the sidewalk on a hot day. If someones comes along and drinks some of the water should they be arrested for stealing the water? Here's another example - you errect your big screen TV by the window, put on a DVD and leave the drapes open for all to see from outside. Or maybe you crank up the hifi and leave the window open and your neighbors sit outside and listen to your music. All these are instances of someone polluting a public commons (sidewalk, visual spectrum, audio spectrum) with their private paid for resource (water, video, music), yet none would normally get a second thought, certainly not a call to the local cops. If not enjoyed or utilized by people outside of their private space the resource goes to waste, and regardless its prescence in common space is basically a nuisance.

Now I'm sure someone is going to suggest that this is different because the guy didn't just passively "enjoy" the WiFi, he actively utilized it and in effect caused the network owners router and ISP to do work for him. I have three answers to this.

Firstly I would say that would be difficult to prove. For one the default WiFi configuration for Windows XP would be to automatically associate with a strong open WiFi network and automatically get an IP address assigned by that network. Did Smith actively use the network - is there a log of packets sent and received beyond automatic behavior of any PC turned on in the area.

Secondly even if Smith did actively use the network rather than just "enjoying it" passively, couldn't one argue that an open network is effectively entrapment? It is the WiFi access point setting that by default means "let anyone join my network with no restrictions". No encryption, no authorization and its usually labelled clearly as "Open". All WiFi setup programs produced in the last few years make this abundantly clear and strongly encourage people who don't want to share their network to use WEP or better encryption and access control.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I look at an open WiFi network like a computer that is hooked up to the network and then the owner runs a webserver on it. If you don't explicity add access control to your webserver your machine is then considered fair game for HTTP requests which cause packets to go onto your local network, cause your machine to expend CPU cycles and use up some of your ISP bandwidth allocation. Indeed if your IP address gets onto Slashdot your machine will probably go flatline as it is bombarded by requests. If such access was deemed illegal then it would, for instance, become illegal for search engines to index web sites by iterating over the entire IP address space, and domain name space looking for web servers. They would actually have to be granted permission to send a HTTP request to my server. But the reality is, that on the internet if you service has no access control it is considered open. It is my understanding that unless the accessor actively employs techniques to defeat security controls, e.g. password cracking, then they are not actually hacking.

Smith could also use the argument that he had no idea that he was using someone elses network, especially if it had a default name like "linksys" or "netgear". You might be surprised but a good number of people by WiFi clients and WiFi enabled devices thinking that WiFi is just "out there" and is free and freely available. That's often how its sold - "oh, WiFi is everywhere - coffee shops, airports, libraries - everywhere!". Its basically like giving people P2P software and telling them music downloads are everywhere. For Smith ignorance is bliss. It may not put him in the right, but it sure gives him some class action clout. Although wireless routers and access points always labor points about securing your network from unwanted external access I've yet to see one that had a warning about not accessing open networks.

Finally, anyone running a WiFi network in the neighborhood of any other WiFi enabled device will cause that device to do work at the media access level. This is how WiFi devices cooperate to share limited bandwidth of a common resource. So if Smith is busted then can I be busted for running a very busy WiFi network with a number of access points in my neighborhood and so precluding others of some access to that WiFi bandwidth? What if my network is stronger than all others and eats up all the bandwidth and causes other access points and devices all around to be doing lots of busy work ignoring my packets?

Basically I say unless Smith was truely trying to gain access to unsecured resources on the owners network then really he's not doing anything more illegal than looking into your neighbors yard, or enjoying the smell of their BBQ on a summers day. But once you walk into the yard, jimmy open the garden shed and take their lawnmower - well that's another story!

Goodbye sleep, hello fist fights

I'm loosing track of how many times I've said in-flight cellphone use is a bad idea, but it looks like the lure of money is pushing airlines and cellphones companies to make this happen. I've personally yet to meet anyone who thinks this is a really good idea but I do have a suggestion... maybe they can beta-test the concept on those high flying wheeler dealers up in first and business class? These are supposedly the time-is-money I jus-godda-tell-yer BUY-BUY-SELL-SELL clientel that airlines will be targeting for this service.

Let them see how nice it is to hear some awful cellphone ringer blasting the latest ditty in the middle of their slumber. Previously I'd only ever thought about the typical cellphone blather masquerading as conversations we'd all have to endure. But think about it - a few hundred bored people in a plane with nothing better to do use the cellphone. Those ringers are going to be going off the hook, it'll be worse than your local cinema on a Saturday night. Don't put your faith in noise cancelling head phones either, they aren't going to save you from obnoxious cacaphony of ring tones - they are good for the roar of jet engines but not designed to cancel music and pure tones. So all those folk "up front" are soon going to find out that all the reclining seats, foot rests and liquid slumber aides in the world wont let them get a good sleep any more. They might just as well be back in cattle class with the rest of us.

As ever my suggestion for in-flight cellphones is DONT and if you really have to, then put in a real sound proof cellphone booth and charge for that. You know this isn't really about passenger convenience, its about money - airlines and cell carriers are booth going to make a ton of money with higher rates for their sky bound callers. So if they are making money why should other passengers with no interest in this enterprise suffer? Hence I say, send them to the cellphone booth and put an extra busy/vaccant sign up for it just like you do with the restrooms.