Musings of a GIL Dude

Call to action for Verizon and Motorola

2011-08-07T09:17:00.001-07:00

After about a month using the Droid 3 from Motorola / Verizon and comparing it to my prior Droid 1 (which was a Google Experience Device or GED), I’ve got some friendly advice for both Motorola and Verizon. First, here’s a look at the Verizon pre-installed bloatware:

Notice that most of it cannot be uninstalled, and some of it is actually running all the time.

OK, on to the advice:

Verizon

Don’t install bloatware, junkware, trialware, etc. on our phones. For example this ridiculous “City ID” that pops up when you try to make a call asking if you want to pay for their silly service. It popped up on me while making a call in bright light out of doors. I think I answered it with the correct button for “Go Away”, but I could not really read it since phone displays are generally hard to read outside in bright light conditions. I just wanted to make a call. I don’t want to be interrupted by stupid trial ware. Honestly, if we wanted these applications we know how to use the Android Market or the Amazon AppStore for Android to go get them. Since you have chosen to make them un-removable, we can’t get the junk off of our phones. And, if there is an update to one of them in the market, the space for the pre-installed one is still used up since it cannot be overwritten. Here’s a couple of hints:

If you really think these applications are so great, put them in the Android Market and sell them or offer them to people who don’t have Verizon phones. If people really wanted them, you’d make money on them.
If you insist on installing them, they need to be un-installable. Can you imagine what would happen if say Dell or HP or Lenovo installed some crap that we could not remove?
Don’t try to trick people into using VZ Navigator at $9.99 a month when the free Google service meets almost everyone’s needs. Yes, you have a few features they don’t. But, for most people, nothing worth paying for.
People know they can create their own ringtones on their computer or using something like Ring Droid from the market. Don’t try to confuse them into buying them from you.

Do you think I want these applications cluttering my app drawer, using my memory, and sometimes running and using my limited RAM?

Not even a little bit.

Motorola

(This first part about Android skins could apply to HTC with their Sense and Samsung with their TouchWiz as well). So, you don’t believe your hardware is enough of a differentiator. You believe you need to differentiate yourselves with a software “Skin” (MotoBlur or just Blur). Well, here’s some news on that: For technical phone users it just pisses us off and for non-technical folks they don’t even notice the difference. Like with some of these Verizon apps above – if you think Blur is a great differentiator, offer it in the Android Market for other devices and make a few bucks on it. If it is really that wonderful, some people running Nexus devices will buy it. Maybe a couple running HTC and Samsung devices might too. There would be your differentiator right there. The only problem? Oh, yeah – we hate Blur.

Looking at Blur, what does it bring to the table on the Droid 3?

Lots of bugs. Here’s just a couple of samples:

Won’t show pictures of contacts when dialing using Google Voice
AirPlane mode causes random reboots and if you have WiFi and BlueTooth off you can’t even exit AirPlane mode without rebooting
Camera app that doesn’t allow the user to set white balance for outdoors, fluorescent lights, incandescent lights, etc. and causes most indoor pictures to have a terrible blue tint.
SMS timestamps, even on restore from backup, are the time received and not the time sent
Home screen redraw lags (caused by Blur high memory usage and device low RAM)
Undocking from the media dock causes automatic brightness to be turned off

Nice widgets for favorite contacts and calendar
Slow performance

I don’t think anyone minds Motorola spending time developing Blur. However, you should separate this from the hardware device and either:

Pre-install it, but allow removal
Don’t install it at all, but put it in the Android Market. Possibly free for Motorola devices and with a charge for other devices?

Oh, and you should take the few widgets that people do like and make them into real widgets that can be used by all launchers. Sell them in the market if you want.

Both Verizon and Motorola

It is pretty clear with the popularity of replacement ROMs for other devices that users don’t like being tied to this pre-installed junk. We’d really like the ability to run AOSP (Android Open Source Project) deliverables plus the Google apps and Android Market. This should be easy for you to do. If you simply give us an option to choose “Blur + Verizon Bloat” (you can call it something like “Motorola and Verizon enhanced experience” as I know your marketers would want to promote it) or “AOSP” we’d mostly be happy (obviously there is a smaller niche who would still want custom ROMs but less folks would need to try unsupported / unsupportable methods if you offered a working AOSP we could use). Offering us AOSP + Market would allow those of us who want this better experience to have it without warranty killers like overclocking, etc. that come with some of the other ROMs.

Don’t just think about it – make this happen, and do it now.

New Windows Home Server Installed

2011-06-18T13:44:00.001-07:00

Over the last couple of weekends I installed a replacement Windows Home Server. I was moving from Windows Home Server v1 (based on Server 2003) running on an old Dell Dimension 8400 (a Pentium 4 660 running at 3.6 GHz) purchased in February of 2005 to Windows Home Server 2011 running on a newly purchased HP Pavilion 1080-CTO with a core i5-2500s quad core processor running at 2.7 GHz. Yes, the Dell was 6 and a half years old. It had been modified (by me) to hold 4 drives and was pulling between 228 and 288 Watts as measured by my UPS. It was getting to the point where that old space heater was going to die of old age and it needed to be replaced.

Since the new Home Server had recently shipped and was now available through NewEgg, I thought it would be a good time to upgrade from the also dated Windows Server 2003 based Home Server v1. I knew about Microsoft’s oft-decried decision to drop Drive Extender, but thought I could make do with hardware based SATA raid and just go with a pair of 2 TB drives in a mirror set (RAID 1). The old server had two 1 TB drives and 2 500 GB drives and it still had plenty of free space so this should have worked out fine, right? So what did I learn in this process?

First what I learned about HP’s consumer Pavilion line

HP makes it a bit difficult to figure out what you are buying and what is in it. For example, the machine I bought was sold as a “HP Pavilion p7qe series”. It said this on the page I ordered from, the receipt that they emailed me and the packing list that it came with. However, the support site will not admit that this machine exists. I figured I could wait a few days – as they said this was a new product and maybe the support site had not caught up. What I was wanting was to download the drivers required since I was not going to be running the supplied Windows 7 Home Premium. By the time the computer arrived, the support site still disavowed all knowledge of the p7qe’s existence. However, I managed to figure out that the support site wanted me to look up a “Pavilion 1080-CTO” instead. I did this and found only a modicum of drivers. Not even all the ones you would need to load a plain vanilla Windows OS on the machine. I downloaded the 7 or so that were there. It was obvious that HP doesn’t plan to even update these as they were all called “original driver” and appeared designed for you to use to revert to older drivers that came with the machine after some disaster in updating occurred. I powered on the machine, went through setup and proceeded to make sure all the supplied hardware worked. I also copied the c:\swsetup folder from the machine to a USB flash drive in case it had some of the drivers needed.

Everything worked, but it turns out that HP consumer level machines don’t bother to continue the very nice job their corporate focused line does on providing extra screws and mounting hardware. I had a second drive to mount, but could not mount it due to:

No power connector. The power supply in this box has 5 molex connectors, 2 SATA power connectors, and 1 floppy drive style connector. Of course the two SATA power connectors were in use by the existing hard drive and the DVD drive. Shipping a machine like this is silly as new drives do not have molex connectors. It is an option on the HP site to add a second optical drive (although why you would do so is a mystery). If you added it, they would have needed to use an adapter to connect the power. Fortunately a co-worker had such an adapter in his stash, so I used that.
No supplied mounting screws. I’m spoiled here by HPs fine corporate machines where the extra screws needed to add storage are nicely arrayed in the case by default. Not so on the consumer line. I scrounged several different types of screws from the old Dell and got the drive mounted.
No SATA cable. In the old IDE days you used one cable for the drive and most everyone shipped those cables with two connectors on it. In the new SATA days, I don’t think any of the vendors ship you a second cable. Had to get one from the old Dell.

One I got the drive mounted, I went into the “BIOS” (actually UEFI on this machine) and attempted to setup the RAID 1 mirror set. Alas, I could not do so. I’ve done this before on several different work machines so I didn’t think it was just the computer being smarter than me. I looked more closely at that support site now that I knew I could find it by the 1080-CTO moniker. I drilled down on the mainboard. I don’t know why they make their own mainboards instead of using an Intel or ASUS board, but apparently they do. This one was a “caramel” board. It has an Intel H61 chipset. No more information than that. So, I went to Intel’s site and much to my chagrin found that the H61 does not support SATA based RAID. Since I had been using that at work for about 5 years I didn’t think there would be any new chipsets that couldn’t do it but apparently there are. So, the SATA RAID was out. I decided automatic folder duplication would probably work for this and moved on. It wouldn’t protect the OS from a drive failure, but should work for the data.

I went ahead and installed Home Server. During the install it decided that I didn’t have a network connection and wanted me to load drivers. I fed it the USB key I had made and it was happy. Later I had a whole bunch of devices in Device Manager that needed drivers. These ran the gamut from video to sound. I tried the drivers I had downloaded from HP. Unfortunately, even though Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (upon which Home Server 2011 is based) run the same drivers, HP had locked the installers so that they would only extract on Windows 7. Imagine going out of your way – spending money even – to prevent people from running free drivers on an operating system on which they work. Would you do it? Does it even make sense? I can’t see any way in which it makes sense for them to do that. It is almost like these crazy cell carriers who try to prevent you from using the features your phone software originally came with. Hell, if the machine wasn’t working and I wanted to extract the drivers on an old Vista machine so that I could put them on a memory key why should they stop me? Ridiculous. So it was off to Intel, RealTek, etc. to collect drivers. HP – fix this. Make drivers available so that a clean install of Windows has all the drivers it needs and don’t lock them to just a single flavor of an OS. You know as well as I do that Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 use the same driver binaries.

What I learned about Home Server 2011

During the installation I mentioned that it wanted me to load network drivers. Fine, I did that. Then it would only allow a reboot. What? A reboot to load a network driver? I’m sorry – this install is based on Windows PE and you can dynamically load drivers all day in it. Even Windows Server 2003 on that old Dell which required a driver from floppy disk for the ICH6 based disk controller would load that storage driver and go on without a reboot. Not sure what someone at Microsoft was thinking there, but it smacks of just being lazy. Once I got the server up and running I realized that even though I knew Drive Extender was gone, that it also meant that automatic folder duplication – that amazing feature by which each data file is automatically written to at least 2 spindles – was also gone. I decided that I would go with some robocopy scripts to sync the data to the second drive for recovery purposes and resolutely moved on. At this point I was getting a bit frustrated with the new software since it was so many steps backwards, but was pretty committed to getting off of the ancient Server 2003 platform to something that at least supported SMBv2.

Next, I tried to access the Home Server from work. This was something I had done periodically before and it always worked well. I had my machines at home go into sleep mode, but I had written a Wake On LAN add-in for Home Server 2003 and used that to wake them if I needed something that was only available on my home machines and not just on the server. However, this new version of Home Server no longer lets you access the server “Console” from a remote session. (They call it the “Dashboard” now). But you cannot access the Dashboard remotely. After some digging, it looks like I need to write a “Gadget” for Wake On LAN that can be hosted in the Home Server web page. I’d have done that already but the SDK is a crock of crap. The documentation on MSDN isn’t in sync with the downloaded SDK at all – it tells you to install files that don’t exist (they are there, but with completely different names), tells you to do things in the wrong order, and doesn’t really provide a step by step “hello world” example that goes from start to deployed. Oh well, I will figure it out over time. For now, no more Wake On LAN for me.

Next I setup the backup. It was a simple matter to setup my robocopy scripts as scheduled tasks to do the work that automatic folder duplication should have been doing. But, I needed a real backup since there was no hardware based RAID. The new version has a backup – and it insanely requests that you run it twice a day. In fact, their documentation suggests that you tailor it to the needs of “your organization”. Did they forget that this is Windows Home Server and that your organization is your family? Anyway, I originally went with their recommendation for twice daily backups. Then I realized that the backups fail all the time, randomly. This appears to be a problem others share. The backup program was apparently some sort of last minute bolt on that doesn’t work well. In fact, with only 500 GB of data, the backup often takes 7 hours to complete. Imagine if I had maxed it out at 2 TB. Let’s see that would be 28 hours to do a backup. That’s when it doesn’t fail. I found that it fails almost all the time if it runs during the same window when client PC backups happen. Unfortunately the log will just tell you that at least one file wasn’t backed up successfully. It won’t list the ones with problems. So I cut the backups to once a day and moved them to 8 AM. Sometimes they finish at 3:00 PM. Other times they finish in 23 minutes. Other times they fail. Sometimes they run until 3:00 PM and still fail. This part of the product is really bad and needs a lot of help.

The new “Dashboard” is a mess. For example, if you are on the page that shows computers and backups while a backup of either a client or the server is happening the dashboard screen will flicker and redraw (changing your focus each time) so often that it becomes very difficult to right-click a machine and choose something from the context menu. I know it is written in .Net, but my god it is slow – even on a quad processor machine with 8 GB RAM. Apparently the developers don’t use the “InvalidateRect” function when they need to update their percentage complete on the backup and just redraw that small rectangle. Instead, they redraw the entire frame (which is silly and wasteful).

So, to sum up:

No drive extender
No folder duplication
Backup program is broken, and can only back up 2 TB max
No access to the “Console” (Dashboard) from the remote access page

All in all it looks to me like they are trying to kill off the product. Too bad to as it used to be really nice. If it wasn’t for the automatic backups of all the client computers, I would just go with a NAS setup like a Drobo or something.

Gawker sites latest to destroy themselves in search for elusive “new hotness”

2011-02-07T09:31:00.001-08:00

I’m not sure what they were going for, but the Gawker sites (such as Gizmodo, LifeHacker, Jezebel, io9, etc.) have updated to a new format that is just unbearable. They used to have a fairly simple layout where you could just scroll down the page and see all of the articles / posts in a synopsis view and easily decide which of those were interesting to you, middle click the ones that were and they would open in a new tab for your reading pleasure. As all folks have different interests, I would typically find 1 in 6 interesting on say LifeHacker, maybe 1 in 8 on Gizmodo, etc.). Now, with their new layout, they have only one story per page. You have to go through a rigmarole of arrow keys to get to the next story – which probably isn’t even one you are interested in. They’ve added a “pane” on the right side that supposedly shows the latest stories, but lacks the size and impact of the previous blog style (pictures are tiny and synopsis too short). That pane on the right was taking over a minute to load earlier this morning, but it seems like maybe they have it fixed or at least implemented some sort of temporary workaround to get it to load more quickly.

Like the Digg users abandoned Digg in droves with the last redesign (I’ve rarely been back to that site which I used to use daily), it may be Gawker’s time to lose a lot of users. For now, they all seem to be supporting a “classic” view which, while not as good as their original view, is less of a pain than the new view. Classic doesn’t have the large size images and full synopsis that was available on the original sites.

I had tried to post my thoughts on the design as a comment on the Gizmodo article about the changes, but it looks like they removed Facebook Connect yet again (which you don’t find out until you have spent some time creating a thoughtful comment – only to find you can’t actually post it.

Here’s hoping that Engadget won’t follow the trend of making their properties less valuable to users; for now I can still visit that site and get a blog style view that works.

Evil DRM preventing access to our purchases

2010-11-26T16:20:00.001-08:00

The other day our xbox 360 stopped reading disks. It had done this before, but none of the usual tricks (like dropping it from 6 inches) or trying different titles worked this time. It was almost three years old, so unfortunately it was time for a new one. We got the new Kinect bundle with the xbox 360 s 250 GB unit. So far, so good. Next, we needed to transfer all the songs we’d purchased for Rock Band 2, the map packs for various “shoot-em ups” like Call of Duty: Black Ops and the like (I don’t know which titles they bought these expansion packs for, but I know there were quite a few of them). We purchased a transfer cable and transferred “our” content. I say “our” content because apparently it isn’t actually ours. Instead it is “ours” (you say that with those cute little air-quotes). There is some nasty form of Digital Restrictions Management on them so simply MOVING them isn’t enough. You need to “transfer the licenses”. To do this, you go to a flaky Microsoft web site (flaky in that for two days it showed various “not working” messages both from Live sign in, and later from the site itself – only to turn out that it worked in Internet Explorer). We finally got onto the site and found we had 161 items to transfer. We did that. It claimed they would download automatically. 24 hours later – no download. So we had to go to the flaky web site and painstakingly click “add to queue” for each of the 7 pages of items (161 in all). After a bit, it would start saying “queue is full” and we’d need to wait for the xbox to catch up. Since theses were just licenses, the xbox would show it was about to download say 160 MB and then – poof – it would be done since the content was already there. The real evilness of DRM reared its head on several of the titles. These were WORKING FINE before, and in fact one was purchased LESS THAN A MONTH ago. However, these items said “no longer available” when we tried to add them to the queue. Basically, since we’d transferred the licenses they were no longer available to us even though we “bought” (those cute little air-quotes again) them. This is the type of crap that should not be allowed. Any form of Digital Restrictions Management that not only gets in your way this much (if we had to transfer these there should have been a “do all” button and it should have taken 2 minutes), AND prevents you from using what you paid for is criminal. The other strange thing? We had better not accidentally break our xbox in a way that isn’t covered by warranty because we can apparently only transfer the licenses once per year. Why? No idea. It isn’t like we can copy the stuff and have it work. We should be able to transfer it to any xbox (or other platform) we want to.

Microsoft: Where’s my universal updater?

2010-07-07T20:11:00.001-07:00

When running the operating systems that Microsoft hilariously called “hobbyist”, I get a central program that manages updates to all of my installed applications. It looks like this:

Above: A real updater

Now, I’ve heard that Microsoft may build an app store into Windows 8. I imagine (hope!) that it will include updates. But updates are something we need now. With the plethora of application level attacks, especially against Adobe Reader and Flash Player, it behooves Microsoft to make updating easier. Today, I think I have about a bazillion (OK 14) updaters on my system. Some of these run automatically and slow down logon. Others run as a scheduled task “every Saturday evening at 9:11 PM” (Apple) while my computer is asleep and so never actually run. In fact, since users rarely reboot anymore and just use sleep or hibernate many of these “run at logon” updaters don’t keep you very up to date either. Some updaters are built into the applications themselves and don’t pop up until you actually want to do some work in the app. Some, like the Adobe ones, seldom even work.

One good thing came about as part of this last round of Adobe Reader exploits being used by malicious advertisements served up on legitimate sites by ad networks. That’s right: both my boss and my brother in law were infected with unknown variants of some awful fake anti-virus product (variants of aVsoFt AvSuiTe) via drive by installs using a Reader exploit that was patched on June 29th. I had to submit samples to Sophos, Microsoft, and Symantec to get definitions that would detect these (both were different and the def that came out after the first one did not detect the variant a week later). The good thing that came out of it? Other folks who heard about their issues went back and updated their machines! However, they did NOT have an easy time of it. There is no single place to go to check to see “am I up to date?” As I’ve said, the various updaters are disjointed, often dysfunctional, and obtuse. For example some don’t work through authenticated proxy servers. Others try to foist crapware, foistware, and spy toolbars on you in addition to the updates. In all cases, each vendor is re-inventing the wheel (some well, some not so well) on things like update detection, update validation, downloading, and installing.

So, what should we do?

We get to continue slogging through these ridiculous hoops to get updated in the short term. In the long term, let’s lobby Microsoft hard to get these things done:

Create a “Windows, Applications, and add-ins” updater and evangelize it with all the ISVs in the Windows ecosystem – small and large.
Publicize how vendors need to create their updates and help some initial volunteers through the process.
Make it secure, but easy and free for the ISVs. They have their own QA / test / publishing rules already – Microsoft just needs to be able to have non-repudiation that the source of the updates is actually the vendor in question. If you can give me 25 GB on skydrive for free, you can give these updates some space too (I know akamai in bulk costs more than what you are absorbing for skydrive but still – this is needed). Get out your wallet.
Make it work with add-ins for programs like Outlook, IE, and Firefox – not just major application installs.
Go do it today; get it done!

Once this service exists, lobby all of your vendors to get on board ASAP. If (for example) Oracle or Open Office doesn’t want to play that counts as a point against them in a product evaluation. If Adobe signs up early and has it working well – that’s a point in their favor when doing an evaluation.

Update overkill

Here’s a sample of the updaters on my machine. This is a simple test machine that doesn’t have a lot loaded. Hard to believe, but it is true:

Perhaps all updates should be through the above interface?

Silverlight needs its own updater?

At least Picasa is up to date!

Paint.Net’s updater doesn’t work through a proxy server

Great, advertisements in the Lenovo updater.

I would be that Oracle won’t sign up to have their updates done through Microsoft. Users however will see that as a strike against them.

As you can see, the Adobe one tries to come with the Google spy bar. Quit that!

Like I said, the Adobe Flash Download Manager fails all the time.

This was the Farmville update and had nothing to do with security.

Note the “foistware” – a lousy browser.

Boy is that a lot of updates and updaters or what? After awhile, you realize that a lot of other applications that you use need updates too, but don’t have an updater at all. Here’s just a few of them from my machine:

Darn, no updates for these.

Wrap up

So why are you still here? If you are with Microsoft, go get started on this now. If you aren’t – find the nearest Microsoft representative and hit them up for this. Feel free to send them a link to this blog entry if you don’t feel like typing it up for them.

Flash: Hey Adobe, learn to write an updater!

2010-07-05T08:43:00.001-07:00

As we all know, Adobe Flash has had more than its share of security vulnerabilities and the concomitant flurry of updates recently. I’ve recently seen several machines where the Flash updates just don’t work. It seems to screw up on all kinds of things:

People tend to only reboot once in awhile now that sleep/resume works well. They’ll now reboot at maybe monthly intervals. Up comes the flash update message and they tell it to update. Who knows what the logic is in the updater, but it will pick one (Firefox or IE) to update. It updates that one and leaves the “other” Flash vulnerable. Fail.
A person goes to the Adobe site to update Flash themselves. After they get through the screen where they need to turn off unneeded security scans from McAfee, spyware toolbars from Google, etc. and actually get the download it wants to install the Adobe Download Manager (or DLM). This wondrous tool loves to install, download the update, then randomly show that it failed. Convince it to try again and it says something to the effect that “no, I said I failed you moron”. So then you try to update your other browser and that one works. But the one where DLM failed doesn’t even have flash anymore. Well, at least it is secure. The other part of this is that Adobe is doing their best to hide the download links for install_flash_ax.exe (ActiveX) and install_flash.exe (NPAPI) so that you can only get things with their busted-ass DLM. Fail.

Please, Adobe: Put the links to the actual EXE downloads back at a higher level on your site with text like this, “In the all to common event that our DLM fails to update your install of Flash, download the appropriate updater here.”

Oh yeah – and fix your DLM. While you are at it, make the updater that appears when users logon to their machine update ANY and ALL versions of Flash on the machine.

Learn to F’ing Drive

2010-06-17T18:40:00.001-07:00

There, I said it. I’ll say it again: Learn to f’ing drive! That’s right – this is directed at 80% or more of you out there. As my daughter graduates from online Driver’s Ed to getting a learner’s permit and signing up for Driver’s Training I’ve been noticing more and more of you out there who, to be kind, need a refresher in said courses. Lots of you want to hit her (no, not that – get your mind out of the gutter). I mean many of you have a plan to hit her car with your car.

Let’s start with a quick quiz:

The lever that sticks out of the left hand side of the steering column is:

It has something to do with the cruise control only; I’ve never used this mysterious lever.
It’s the wiper control. It also turns on my emergency flashers.
It is the turn signals.
It must control the satellite radio or something.

From my observations of your driving skills, most of you probably answered something other than the correct number (number 3 was correct). For those who missed this question, you are supposed to use the signal before making a turn or a lane change. Note that I said BEFORE making a lane change. Not letting it flash once or twice while you are in between lanes, thinking it is oh so cute. Before. Get it right and use it. If your turn signals are disabled, you are supposed to use the alternate hand signals. Some of you know this one – it looks like this below:

Others of you have not quite mastered your alternate hand signals and seem to use the following instead of your turn signal:

I do see this used from time to time although strangely the people using it seem to only manage to get one of their fingers up. They must just be lazy I guess. They do seem a bit confused, too, though because they often stick their head out the window while performing this signaling operation.

Choose a lane and stick with it:

Many of you, especially those who haven’t mastered the simple art of the turn signal, seem to randomly change lanes – seemingly with no cognitive process involved – whenever you feel like it, or whenever the song changes on the radio. Many of you aren’t old enough to have ever gone to a roller skating rink, but if you had you would know that “you are going too fast if you are passing more people than are passing you.” That was a common refrain at the old rink. Even though it speaks of a poor understanding of math (with an odd number of skaters, only one person would be going the right speed and with an even number none would be going the correct speed), it is a decent enough guideline for driving. If you find yourself weaving around: STOP IT, you are going TOO DAMN FAST. Learn what the other drivers around you (who you are passing) seem to have grasped: the proper speed. Get in the correct lane and stay there. Do you have an off ramp you need to take in the next couple of miles? Get to the proper place. Does the freeway split and you have to go towards the left fork? Be in the correct lane. And STAY THERE.

Proper following distance:

Many people out there on the road believe I am possessed of either magic or supernatural powers and can somehow drive faster than the car in front of me. They probably think Angelina Jolie can curve a bullet too. Nothing else adequately explains why they are constantly “drafting” about 8 inches off of my bumper. It is amazing how they believe this – I think they need to take a basic physics course and learn both their reaction time and the distance it takes to bring a car to a stop. (Between reaction time and the coefficient of friction on a good day that is about 345 feet at 65 MPH). The time, in seconds, for them to hit my daughter’s car when following about 1 foot behind when she brakes suddenly? About 0.1 second. Please remember: you need to be back at least 3 seconds and preferably 4. Start counting seconds as the car in front of you passes a stationary object or marker along the road. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand. Most of you didn’t make it all the way to two. Those few that made it to four – congratulations and keep it up. Either that or, more likely, the road was empty.

Turn correctly:

First, don’t cut the corner. On a right turn (left turn for you Brits), you need to keep as close to a right angle turn as you can reasonably do in a car with round wheels. That’s right – get the car out into the intersection before turning. Otherwise you will scrape the curb or hit the parked car around the corner. Also, if you are in an intersection where two lanes can turn to the right into a larger street with four lanes – you can’t turn from the left most of the turn lanes into the right most of the lanes on the larger street. Conversely, you can’t be in the right most turn lane and end up on the left side of the larger street. You can turn into the lanes shown only. See below for a diagram (I can drive, but I can’t draw worth beans!):

Master these simple things: Learn to f’ing drive!

Google Voice: Support? What’s that?

2010-06-05T18:28:00.001-07:00

As with several of Google’s free ad-supported services, Google Voice doesn’t have a support staff. Well, they say they do – but there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that said support staff does any support. They may do a wonderful job of keeping on top of the servers and various components that make up the service (as I haven’t personally experienced the service itself being down when I wanted to use it), but they don’t respond to any help requests from users as far as I can tell.

My Google Voice account works perfectly. My wife’s, not so much. Hers won’t route calls and won’t store messages. For example, if you call her you immediately get the “the Google Voice subscriber is not available” message that you should get only when the subscriber didn’t pick up one of their forwarding phones or when the person is set to “do not disturb”. The call goes straight to what sounds like Voice Mail – it even prompts you to leave a message. Said message never shows up in her inbox though. Her account is, to use a technical term, “borked”. We’ve looked through the help and found the support request form that emails the supposed support staff. We’ve filled that form out with the relevant info four times now over four months. Not once has anyone ever gotten back to us or fixed the problem. I’m forced to conclude that if they do have anyone, that person is either four months behind on support requests or perhaps has been on sabbatical. The unlikelihood of that leads me to believe that Google Voice doesn’t actually have any user support.

It really sucks that my wife can’t use her Google Voice. I’d like to be able to call that number and ring her cell phone and work phone at certain hours and cell and home phone during other hours. That works well for me. But nope, can’t use hers.

BTW, we do know how to use the service and it is configured properly to forward to two phones currently. We deleted all the phones, then added them back and went through the whole “service calls the potential forwarding phone and asks you to put in the security code” stuff for each. There is no schedule currently set and she is not set to “do not disturb”. She doesn’t have a block list and call presentation and screening are set to off. It is as simple a setup as it gets, yet it only worked for one month and has been “borked” since.

I’d imagine other users have had problems getting support from Google too. Perhaps it is time they started charging us a small fee and hired some support staff?

iPAD Makes the Internet Useless for the Weekend

2010-04-04T09:36:00.001-07:00

Boy the newly released Apple iPAD has sure taken over the technology sites on the internet on this launch weekend. Try reading Engadget, Gizmodo, or even BGR. Most (in some cases all) of the articles are about the iPAD. Best apps for the iPAD, your charger won’t work on the iPAD, guy destroys an iPAD with a baseball bat, iPAD optimized porn. OK, the guy with the baseball bat was pretty funny – he probably got tired of the internet being useless all weekend too. But the rest of it? Tech folks, get real. This thing is a 768 x 1024, Flash ignoring, keyboard less, apps more expensive, Star Trek ripping off, expensive magazine reader. That said, if it ran LCARS like the one faked up here, I’d buy it.

For their next Star Trek rip-off, they can make the iCorder (and I’d buy that one too; as long as it could tell me where all those life forms are).

How about on Monday, we get our normal tech sites back on the internet and maybe only one iPAD story per day please?

Firefox 3.6 went crazy

2010-01-25T08:17:00.001-08:00

For several years people have complained vociferously about Firefox and memory leaks. For those same years, I have wondered what they were on about. They’d say things like, “once Firefox gets to about 1.2 GB RAM usage, I have to reboot.” All this time I have been thinking, “what the hell are you doing to get a web browser to that kind of memory utilization?” I figured they were ad-in junkies with fifteen different ad-ins running and that they had a leak in one of them. I only run adblock plus and I had never seen this problem. The other day, Mozilla released the 3.6 version of Firefox and I upgraded immediately. Today, my machine started running extremely slow and very obviously paging to disk. I checked task manager (which took about 30 seconds to start), and to my surprise found Firefox using almost 1.2 GB RAM – just like those other users have been reporting for years. Interestingly, Mozilla’s web site says they fixed many memory leaks in Firefox 3.6. My experience today and the graphic below would seem to indicate that they caused at least one new leak:

Wow! That’s a lot of memory to be consuming on a 2 GB Windows 7 machine! If anyone else is getting this type of result from the new 3.6 I would expect there will be an update pretty quickly.

Customer Torture Part II

2010-01-04T09:57:00.001-08:00

Since I was thinking about the terrible customer service offered by most tech companies these days, I decided to compare the current “customer avoidance” dance that they perform with the tenets of a bygone era (the late 1980’s as best as I can determine based on mergers, company name changes, etc.). Here’s a link to the actual tenets of customer service as posted on the wall at a major company. (Portions of the image are redacted and the title removed so that the company remains unidentifiable). Let’s compare some of these tenets with the way customers are treated today.

A Customer is not an outsider to our business; he is a definite part of it. In today’s world, try to find contact information for a company that will take you anywhere except their marketing department. For example, spend time searching the Dell site for how to email in a service request. Try to search for how to actually use your warranty on HP’s site. It becomes obvious that we, as customers, are no longer a part of tech companies business. We are numbers and any interaction with us is too costly to imagine so they avoid us like the plague and relegate us to phone queues whose options have “recently changed” and whose operators (if you can get through to them) are powerless to actually help anyone.

A Customer brings us his wants. It is our job to handle them properly and profitably – both to him and to ourselves. In other words, not like this. I’d imagine it isn’t very profitable for either the company or the customer for the customer to have to call 5 different “customer service” representatives, all of whom either give different information or make different technical mistakes. It would probably be more profitable for both parties if the customer service people were trained to know when they can handle something or have to escalate (and soft transfer) to a higher level technician. It would definitely make folks like me have more customer loyalty if I knew the company actually cared enough to have decent customer service. I shouldn’t have to think, “ah, damn – I need to call support. Well let me clear my calendar for the next 8 hours and expect my service to be broken for 2 days.”

Retail companies deserve a call out here too as the news seems to be full of items like this where companies seem to be low-balling the pricing in their advertisements to get “chumps” or “marks” (how they must see us in order to act this way) into the store only so that they can push their overpriced “services”. Often times I have heard that although the companies themselves “don’t condone” deceptive sales practices, their quota systems mean sales folks either use deceptive practices like in the Consumerist article linked above or they get fired for not meeting quotas.

Many of these types of business will happily sell you a USB cable for $25.00 that you can get online for $2.00. Now obviously paying for retail space, having stock people, cashiers, and salespeople costs money so that $2.00 cable needs to be more than $2.00 in a retail outlet. The convenience of not having to wait for shipping does need to be worth some price difference. But 1250% markup of an already not wholesale internet price doesn’t seem to be a proper balance of profitability between customer and company.

A Customer is not someone to argue or match wits with. He deserves courteous, attentive treatment. It isn’t only the tech companies that violate this one. A few years ago, I went on a camping trip with my family. Unbeknownst to me, the prior day I had eaten some contaminated food. While on the trip, I got severe food poisoning and was losing fluids at an alarming rate. My wife got on the phone with the HMO’s advice line. She had to call twice only to be told rudely “he has INFLUENZA” and get hung up on. Now, since the normal symptoms of influenza (this is before bird-flu, swine-flu, or other “new flus”) don’t include intense diarrhea, crazy nausea, 5 minute variations from freezing cold to sweating, etc. we knew this was wrong and my family took me to a regional medical center. I was hospitalized, injected with anti-nausea drugs, put on a double saline drip and kept overnight. Oh, and by the time I was examined my temperature was down to 92 degrees and I could no longer move my fingers. Influenza, right.

A Customer is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. This seems like an easy statement to agree with. But the practical treatment of it today seems to be along the lines of “attract as many customers as possible, while doing little to nothing to keep them.” Well, other than doing things like doubling the early termination fees or other things to confuse the customer into staying.

My advice to companies? How about training your support folks and sales associates? Perhaps you could have clear contracts that don’t hide large fees in 20 page agreements that customers are pressured to sign without reading? Maybe rethink spending so much money on marketing, segmentation, and advertising and a bit more on actual customer retention. People shouldn’t have to complain about companies on blogs and twitter in order to get service. That’s right, several companies have staff paid to help get them better PR by going through Twitter and Blogs and resolving the customer’s issue – hoping that they will get better coverage in the blog press because of it when the real issue is that their normal channels such as phone, email, etc. refused to solve the problem in the first place. Think about it…

Customer Torture

2009-12-28T14:40:00.001-08:00

Companies ought to call it what it is. It isn’t “Customer Service” by any stretch of the imagination. It’s customer torture, pure and simple. At this point, companies have given up the old school thinking about how valuable customers are. They must figure that if they treat customers just as crappy as the next business does that the number of people who leave do to the bad service will equal the number of people who join due to someone else’s bad service. A recent example would be the nightmare scenarios two arstechnica staff members went though just trying to move to a new house and get internet connectivity. Take a moment and read those. Can you believe this is the type of service AT&T and Verizon offer? (Cue Andy Rooney: I can.).

I recently bought an HP L2245wg flat panel for my wife for Christmas. We tried to hook it up today. What a mess! Turn it on and it displays a beautiful, crisp image – for all of 7 seconds. Then it displays nothing. Analog, DVI, a second computer – doesn’t matter, it is DOA. But, try to get any information out of the HP web site and you are feeling DOA yourself. Nothing at all about how a consumer who doesn’t have a service contract can get warranty service. No place to file a warranty service ticket unless you are either a business or have a contract. Several links to “contact us” that go to “I’m sorry, this page doesn’t exist” messages. I spent 35 minutes attempting to get something through the manufacturer and finally gave up and filed an RMA through New Egg. Supposedly this monitor has a 3 year warranty but HP sure doesn’t intend to let me ever use it.

Speaking of the Christmas Holiday I was recently in Napa visiting relatives. The “Map for That” from Verizon shows that they have 3G at the address we were going. But they don’t. At least, not usable 3G. Now, maybe Verizon considers it usable when you have to click “retry” 4 times from “no connection” messages just to load the google home page. But I sure don’t. At another location in Pittsburg, CA they also claim to have 3G – but the phone goes to 1X and even then looses its connection all the time. These are places WELL within the coverage zones shown on the “Map”. I spent 30 minutes today trying to find out how to tell Verizon about their coverage area map vs. reality (so they can either fix the map or fix the network), but there doesn’t appear to be any way to report this online.

Anyone else had it with Customer Torture?

You’re a noid and I’m a droid

2009-11-16T08:59:00.001-08:00

Pithy line picked from Star Trek, I know. An update on my Motorola Droid situation: it is working just perfectly. It seems to do everything except BT voice dial. There’s huge threads on that lack all over the place, so no need to revisit fully here. As far as my replacement unit – it has been working just great. Emails, satellite photos, Google Voice integration, YouTube, and the awesome Google Navigation – all working and no more lockups or freezes.

Droid Update

2009-11-13T08:01:00.000-08:00

Well, I was about to publish that the new Droid phone I received (after I swapped out the one that randomly rebooted and locked up all the time) was just perfect. However, 10 minutes ago it wouldn't turn on. I was expecting a text message from a coworker (I had watched him send it) and after 4 minutes or so of not receiving it, I thought I would turn the phone on and look. It wouldn't turn on. Removed the battery and put it back. Still wouldn't turn on. Held down the camera button and the power button until it powered up and rebooted. Then the text came in right away. When this type of thing happens, you can't receive calls or texts - so you are looking at an unreliable phone. Not good!

It hadn't done this for 24 hours or more after I got this replacement. I started thinking back to what I had changed. This morning, I had added the built in power widget to the home screen - so I could easily turn Blue Tooth off and on (I only need BT in the car). I wonder if this had anything to do with it. I have now removed the power widget from the home screen and will see if it does this again.

Droid Redux

2009-11-11T16:48:00.001-08:00

Well after a hard reset (master reset), the rebooting robot – that automaton of lockups – kept locking up. In fact while driving to work, with the phone sitting on the passenger seat, it rebooted twice. Then once more in my jacket pocket while walking in to the office. I tried to show it to some folks in the office and it locked up and rebooted on them too.

I emailed Verizon customer support back with the news and asked if I could take it to a local outlet to have it replaced. I got some awesome service here and I want to give Kudos to Verizon on this – a rep checked for the closest store, called them and checked availability on the devices, then called me and let me know the address, who she spoke to at the store, and that they had some in stock and currently had quite a line of folks (so expect a little delay). All this from my email note. Well done Verizon.

I went to the store after work and only had to wait a couple of minutes. I now have a new Droid – and I expect this one will work fine.

These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for…

2009-11-10T16:42:00.001-08:00

If my sly waving of my hand before my face while I said that didn’t work, perhaps you are Jabba the Hut. Anyway, I got my Motorola Droid phone yesterday! It seemed pretty nice, but locked up a few times almost right away. After having it for a couple of hours, and only using it with the screen on for perhaps 25 minutes it had locked up 10 times. Sometimes just turning on the screen and attempting to do the “swipe” motion that unlocks the phone would result in a lockup. Other times it would be in the web browser or just at the home screen trying to tap the “settings” icon. It would either freeze for 20 seconds then reboot itself (the bat signal Motorola Logo followed by the Red Eye – which is cool the first 3 times you see it). Other times it would just freeze and I would have to turn it off. On these occasions it would not turn back on without the “hold the camera button pressed while hitting power” trick.

It seems the hardware is pretty slick, and unless the reviews I have seen on this phone are extremely highly edited I must be the only person having this problem. I contacted Verizon support via email and they got back to me right away (Kudos there). The suggestion is to try the hard reset (also known as master reset), then setup the phone again and if it doesn’t work – have the phone replaced for a hardware problem. I’m going through setting it up again now. I’ll post back on progress.

Windows 7 Failed Install Reboot Loop Explained

2009-11-09T07:02:00.001-08:00

As per my previous post, I spent the weekend upgrading my son’s and daughter’s Dell Latitude D820 notebooks. These were running Vista Ultimate 32 bit edition and I was upgrading them to Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit using the in-place upgrade method. I had previously done my own Dell D820 quite some time back. My son’s machine went fine. My daughter’s – not so much. It would start the upgrade, do the Copying Files, the Gathering programs and settings, the Expanding files, the Installing Features, and then at some point during the last phase (restoring programs and files) it would reboot and say “The upgrade was not successful. Your previous version of Windows is being restored. Do not restart your computer during this time”. This was after about 2 hours of “upgrading”. For those who have not been privileged enough to see this screen, it looks like this:

This would be on the screen for about 20 seconds or so, then the computer would reboot and do it all over again – to infinity and beyond as long as the power held out. Once I figured out the cause I reproduced this in a VM and left it doing it all night. In the morning it was blithely rebooting away. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. On reboot, it would show these choices:

Note that there is no “Windows Vista” option – and both of the listed options result in the same thing – that failed upgrade screen.

So, I restored the original configuration of the machine using Windows Home Server. (Yes, we did a backup immediately before starting the upgrade – didn’t you?) The restore took just about an hour and worked beautifully. This was the first time I have actually restored a backup with Home Server and it was flawless.

Now, even the first time we went though the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and uninstalled the few things it didn’t like (Learning essentials for Office, Microsoft Math, iTunes). I resolved to keep trying, so we went through preparing again and also removed printer drivers this time. Started the upgrade and waited about 2 hours. Would it work this time? Of course not. It did the same thing.

Restored the machine again (2nd time). Ran through the uninstalling of programs again, printer drivers again, and this time disabled some non-default services (some Windows Mobile connector ones). Started the upgrade and – same damn thing. This time I booted into WinPE and went through all of the Panther logs (setupact.log, setuperr.log, rollback.log). There wasn’t actually anything listed as a real “Failure”, but I did find one “warning” note about a redirected Documents folder. Just to be clear there are LOTS of warning notes even in the cleanest of installs, but this one made me wonder since the problem was NOT during the install phase. The problem was happening during the restore of profiles, programs, and files.

Restored the machine again (3rd time – way to go Home Server). This time after uninstalling programs, printer drivers, stopping non-default services, etc. I checked the folder redirection. Sure enough – the Documents folder was redirected from the normal “C:\Users\<user name>\Documents” to “C:\Users\<user name>\Documents\Documents”. Yes, that’s right – it was a subfolder of where it would be by default. Thinking “There’s no way this is going to work”, I changed it back to the default and ran the upgrade for the fourth time. What do you know? It worked.

Not content to simply leave it at that, I had to know if this is something that can be reproduced (and possibly happen to other people). So I fired up a Virtual Machine to test it Sunday evening. For this, I used Enterprise Edition as that was what I had handy. The steps were something like this:

Install Vista Enterprise Edition
Create a Documents folder under the Documents folder
Create a couple of files and folders there
Redirect C:\Users\<user id>\Documents to C:\Users\<user id>\Documents\Documents using the “Location” tab on the Documents folder properties dialog.
Apply Vista SP1
Apply Vista SP2
Apply the 31 other updates from Windows Update
Start the Windows 7 Enterprise Upgrade process
During the last phase, it reboots and you get the same problem as we had on my daughter’s machine

I let this go all night and this morning it was still rebooting and saying it was going to put the prior OS back. After several thousand reboots I gave up waiting for it to accomplish this miracle. So, anyone else have this problem? I know I spent mostly all weekend on it with four tries at the upgrade, three restores from backup then a repro in a VM.

Windows Home Server saves the day when Windows 7 upgrades fail

2009-11-08T08:32:00.001-08:00

I’ve had Windows 7 on a few of our machines for quite some time. My wife’s machine got it right after the Beta ended (one of the free copies some Beta participants got), my test / dev machine got an MSDN copy the day it showed up on MSDN, etc. I upgraded my main notebook the first day it was available and I upgraded my son’s notebook yesterday. Then I tried to upgrade my daughter’s notebook. (Mine, my son’s, and my daughter’s are all Dell Latitude D820 machines with identical hardware configuration and Windows Vista Ultimate). Her machine went through the gathering files, expanding files, installing updates etc. just fine. It would get to the last phase where it moves the files back in place and would fail and then go into a reboot loop. It would say that the upgrade failed and it was restoring the previous version of Windows – then reboot in 10 seconds over and over and over and over – well you get the idea. It wouldn’t stop rebooting. This isn’t the “62% hang”, it isn’t the "BSOD” one, and doesn’t seem to have a solution yet.

Fortunately, I always make sure we have a current backup on Windows Home Server. We restored this (first time I have needed to) and it was right back to Vista running fine. Tried the upgrade again (after first making sure the upgrade advisor was green) and got the same problem. Restored from Home Server again and went to bed. This had taken the whole day.

Strange how both of our other D820 machines upgraded just fine.

I am an Idiot

2009-08-11T18:13:00.001-07:00

If you patronize amusement parks, you too are an idiot. For example, today I plunked down $53 for the privilege of standing in line for 2 hours and 55 minutes for a 2 minute and 12 second ride. Let’s do the math here. 2 hours and 55 minutes is 10,500 seconds. 2 minutes and 12 seconds is 132 seconds. So my ratio of standing in the heat in a long line of people to time spent zooming around a roller coater was 98.7%. That’s right – I spent 98.7% of my time STANDING IN LINE (or for those not from the USA – standing on queue). I paid good money for the privilege of standing in that line too. Hence, I am an idiot, doofus, dork, you name it.

In fact, this Monday and Tuesday I have been a double idiot. That’s right – two amusement park visits in two days. Two bad experiences. Let’s see how those visits worked out:

Not Merry Farm

The first visit, on Monday, was to Not Merry Farm – a staple of the Greater Smog Angeles area. This area is so smoggy in fact that on the rare occasion that you get out of line and onto a coaster you can’t tell the difference between the sky and the ground when you go upside down because the sky is almost the color of asphalt. Think of your lungs and stay home. Anyway, we first went to the Not Merry website and checked out any special events. They showed that they were open from 10 AM to 10 PM. A quick check of the full events list for the day showed “yep, open 10 to 10”. Nothing else. At the Not Merry Farms gate, there is no indication of any problems. Yet, you go in and the two biggest attractions – the Coors Light (Silver Bullet anyway) and another big coaster are “not running today”. Also the BMX / Skateboard exhibition doesn’t run on Monday or Tuesday. Since the web site didn’t say this, and there was no sign at the gate saying “the following attractions are closed today” BEFORE you pay your money, we call bullshit on the operators of this park. We actually went there JUST TO RIDE THOSE COASTERS.

So, we decided to eat and then try some of the tamer rides. I decided not to get the pulled pork because they wanted $8.50 for it as opposed to the $7.50 for the cheeseburger – without fries. $4.50 extra for fries. Total for my wife, son, and I for a couple of pulled pork sandwiches, a burger, some fries, and a couple of sodas? $50.57! Can you believe the rip off? I’ve got news for them too – their fries suck. We rode a couple of rides but never got over the disappointment of the two main attractions being shut down.

Sick Flags Tragic Mountain

Mark me down as a double loser. Here in Santa Clarita is where I plunked down $53 in order to stand in line for 98.7% of my time. It’s no joke and no exaggeration. A full 2 hours and 55 minutes in line for the Excema 2 (they call it X2 for short) – and did that ever leave me scratching my head. It was a Tuesday, but the park was full so of course out of three cars they have they were running only one with the other two sitting there on a siding teasing us. There was no evidence anywhere of the little “wait is two hours from this point”, “wait is 45 minutes from this point”, etc. signs that other parks have. So we just melted along in the heat with a bunch of other drones all standing in line singing choruses of “I’ll stand in line and melt with you”. And standing, and standing. To break this down, we arrived at the park at 10:04 (they open at 10), parked the car where the guys in uniforms specified, made our way to the gate, plunked down our $53, ran for the bathrooms (shortest line all day!), then ran to the Excema 2. By this time it is 10:50. We wait 2 hours and 55 minutes, ride for 2 minutes 12 seconds, walk to the exit and it is 2:00 PM already! I guess you could ride the thing 3 times and that would be your entire day! All along the ride they have somebody in marketing’s interpretation of a “Type A Personality” which is NOT what I learned from psychology or from TV (That marketing droid needs to go back to school!). So we gave up on that and went to ride the log ride as it was a hot day. That line was only 26 minutes, with about a 3 minute ride. That brought my total to 97.4% of my time waiting in line!

I did notice that this park would like you to pay an extra $50 to get a flash past which lets you cut in line. Apparently bad manners are OK with them as long as you pay for the privilege. We decided that since they purposely only had one car running on the Excema 2, their business model must be “let’s frustrate everyone into paying for a flash pass”. Everyone else was scratching their heads too.

All in all a staycation would have been better than this, and my lawn would have gotten mowed. I think we should all avoid these amusement parks until they find a way to hold lines to a 30 minute maximum. I’m starting my boycott today.

I paid to stand in line – have you? Better yet, are you going to do it again?

Apple adds Security Vulnerabilities

2009-07-27T08:47:00.001-07:00

Say what you want about Microsoft including Internet Explorer 8 in its Windows Update. At least you already had Internet Explorer installed and IE 8 is a more secure version than what you had. Sending version 8 to computers as part of Windows Update seems a reasonable and necessary thing. What’s Apple’s excuse? Why does Apple want to add security vulnerabilities to my computer and that of my wife, kids, etc.? That’s right: even after many months, nay a year, of outcry about Apple including Safari and MiniMe (sorry – MobileMe) in their “Updates” for iTunes the worm ridden ones are still at it:

Note the title bar says “Apple Software Updates”. Now, sure – they do say somewhat farther down that "Safari 4” and “MobileMe Control Panel” are new software. However, for folks used to Mozilla Firefox updates every few weeks, Windows Updates once a month (sometimes more), and other security updates – this looks like a needed security update. Never mind that its real purpose is to block Palm Pre owners from accessing the iTunes store. Yesterday I noticed my wife running her updates. Yes, she then had Safari and MobileMe installed. Thanks Apple for ADDING security vulnerabilities to her machine!

That’s right: adding vulnerabilities. Check Secunia here and see that Safari has its share of them – some not patched yet. Any time you add new software – especially a browser – to a machine you are adding vulnerabilities. Apparently Apple is so worried about getting some market penetration for their lame browser that they need to attempt to disguise it as a needed update and then must hope to trick unsuspecting users into clicking it. Not cool Apple! In fact, if your darn iPods didn’t require iTunes in order to update them correctly I wouldn’t have any of your software on any of our machines.

Fortunately in this case, Safari was installed for all of 10 minutes. Here’s hoping that Apple will come to their senses and stop trying to pass off this foistware on folks.

Digital Gouging

2009-07-05T18:23:00.001-07:00

An update on our forced conversion to Digital cable – after another 25 minutes on the phone with Comcrap they did indeed get all of the boxes working and no longer showing the silly “problem with your service” or the “available shortly messages from the prior post. Now, we had been assured back when they shipped these 5 boxes to us that there would be no change to our bill. However, we were informed by this agent that not only did we have an additional $6.99 monthly for that second box (you know, the one they advertise that you can switch your “on demand” movies to when your wife or husband is snoring too loud and never bother to mention that it costs extra for the extra box?) but we would also have to pay an additional $1.99 for the silly little DTA box. So $108 extra a year to have one less tuner than we had before this silly conversion. Still Craptastic. It took a couple of hours, but I finally did get up the nerve to take the little DTA from the garage (making that TV back to only getting 2 – 30) and hooking it up to the TiVo. So there is one Comcast DCH70 sitting there hooked to the TV and a DTA sitting right next to it for the TiVo. It was a pain getting the IR receiver to accept the TiVo’s channel changing codes. Fortunately, the code is 10104-B for these Pace manufactured DCX50 boxes and if you peruse the internet long enough to learn how to put the TiVo into advanced selection mode you can select that code easy enough. If it wasn’t for House, Psych, and Burn Notice being on channels that have been “converted” by Craptastic to digital only we would call them up and say come get your stupid boxes. As it is, we will be calling their bilking dept. to find out why they insist on substantially charging more for less service (and asking for our two days of time spent on this back).

It’s Craptastic

2009-07-05T10:37:00.001-07:00

Or is that Comcraptic? I never remember. All I know is on June 29th, we had the TV service we wanted. All 5 TV’s (4 in the house, 1 in the garage for workouts) could view any of the channels from 2 to about 70 or so. The Series 2 Humax branded Tivo could record any channel, and I could watch a different channel by using the tuner in the TV itself. Pure analog bliss. We could get a “season pass” to House on channel 42 (I am still catching up on older years as I just discovered House this year). We could even watch TV in the kids rooms upstairs if we wanted to. It was the American Couch Potato Dream.

Then, on July 1st, (in some areas) Comcraptic decided to change all that. Down came the dreams of watching House chow Vicodin while humiliating some clinic patient. Channels above 39 just up and went away. Not even a “hey idiot, you need a new box now, bwahhhaaahaha” on the screen for those channels. The reason? Who knows – it could be that they want to free up bandwidth on their cable infrastructure so that they can get more people to buy on demand movies. It could be that they just want people to have to pay them more to have more TV’s in the house. It could even be that they want to take over the DVR market from Tivo. I don’t know, and I don’t care. A few months back they had contacted my wife and told her that this would happen. At the time, they said they would send us “boxes” that would allow us to survive the changeover without losing access to Gregory House and Cuddly – oops, I mean Cuddy – in the process. They also stated that it would not change our billing (which was a lie – check our bill and see!)

These boxes turned out to be a couple of DCH-70’s with M-cards in them. M-cards are cable cards that allow multiple streams, but these boxes are locked to one stream. They also had three of the "DTA” boxes which I believe is short for “Doesn’t Televise Anything”, while DCH must be “Disturbingly Crappy Hardware”. We spent a couple of hours hooking all these things up yesterday so we could get back to watching Thirteen spar with House. As with anything to do with Comcraptic, I figured, “It’ll never work”, but tried it anyway.

So, we followed the directions to hook all the stuff up. We wrote down all the serial numbers of the boxes, the host ID’s, and even the MAC addresses. We turned them all on. We went to the website and it only listed the two DCH-70 boxes. Not only that, but they didn’t even show a serial number that was even close to the same format as what we wrote down. It appears that, even though the instructions say to get the serial numbers of the boxes – they mean the serial number of the m-cards somehow. So we clicked to activate them and were rewarded with a “thanks, now go wait 45 minutes” message.

After we waited, and waited, and went to dinner, and waited, we finally decided – OK 6 hours should be more than enough. My wife called the number which was proudly displayed by all of the TV’s hooked to the “DTA’ boxes:

Appearances to the contrary, this means that “at least the device can output an NTSC signal over cable”. Its even a useful one as it gives the phone number. Hurray!

So she got “Agent J” on the phone who said, “There is an outage in your area and it may take 24 hours”. This translates from the fairly opaque helpdeskese into “My shift ends in 5 minutes and I know our shit doesn’t work but I want to go home.”. Needless to say it has been over 24 hours now and it still doesn’t work. The two TV’s hooked to the DCH boxes show this:

We press “OK” and get this rewarding message:

According to the instructions, you press OK and it will activate. Actually no, the instructions say to push the “on demand” button and then go buy an on demand test movie that is supposed to be no charge but will “activate” you. However you can’t do that – you have to get past this blue stuff first – and I think we may have worn out the batteries on the remote pressing OK. It’s nice to know that I can watch thousands of free shows whenever Comcraptic gets around to saying I can though.

Now, the channels seem to work on those two main DCH boxes. At least 2 – 42 or so for sure as I have tried those. But since it won’t “activate” the other three TV’s just say to call Comcraptic. We’ll do that again later, hopefully before shift change is due. If we do get it fixed, we’ll have to then be transferred to the bilking dept. so we can request a pro-rata refund for this lack of service.

Oh yeah – and then I need to go to the store and buy a newer Tivo that can handle a cable coming from the back and getting glued to the stupid DCH box’s infrared receiver so the Tivo can change channels again. At which point I will have ONE tuner instead of two so can only watch what the Tivo records. Progress at its best, in fact, its Craptastic!

Cover Flow – lots of notes

2009-06-08T17:37:00.001-07:00

Yes, I know I’ve already told you that Apple hates me and my family. However, they are at it again. The other day, my son mentions that all of his Rise Against albums are missing their cover art – both on his computer and on his iPod. So I fire up iTunes on my computer. Sure enough, Apple has deleted the cover art PAINSTAKINGLY added to 39 of my 160 albums. Yes, 25% of the album art gone – replaced by these:

Yes, Apple must think that we all want 1/4 of our albums to look like this in iTunes and our iPods – it is just so cool looking who wouldn’t want it to look like that, right?

So – I check my backup copies on the server. Sure enough, iTunes has decided to “update” the afflicted files. The modified date/time is much newer than the backups on my home server. Figuring that if I restore the backups, Apple will decide to “update” them again, I resigned myself to going back to albumart.org (which got me most of them) and Google images (for the rest) and painstakingly tell iTunes to USE the images again.

Fun, Fun, Fun ‘til Apple Takes our Album Art Away.

Apple: please learn to write software that doesn’t suck like this. Eating your customer’s data is “not cool”.

Buying shoes – a pain in the sole

2009-05-25T19:02:00.001-07:00

I hate buying shoes. I’m a tightwad anyway, and lately I have been running on the treadmill in my old, old, “basketball” style shoes – the ones that are leather all the way around. The only problem is that they also had holes in the soles and also the insides were so worn out that the plastic inners were showing through. So, I decided it was time to only use those for mowing the lawn and time to get some running shoes for the treadmill.

I went to Sports Authority to look at some the other day. I was amazed at how many brands and models of running shoes they have! A veritable smorgasbord to choose from. The only differentiator seemed to be price and color, because all any of them said was “man made uppers”. Nothing about “stability”, “cushioning”, etc. Nothing about for “over prontators” or “under pronators”, etc. Not only did the boxes and labels on the shoes themselves not say, but there was no literature explaining it either. How the hell was I supposed to pick from this morass? So I came home and looked at the manufacturers web site for one of the brands that was well represented at Sports Authority. I started with ASICS. These folks had a decent site and good information about their shoes and which were meant for which type of foot, etc. However you couldn’t print the list of their shoes with pronation range because they put it in some stupid little sub-window with its own little non-standard scroll bar. (ASICS – fix your site; this is a great resource – we need to be able to print it). So I had to pick a couple of models, print them, and head back to the store.

Well, I found those models actually hurt my left ankle. The right one was fine, but the left on both models hurt. I tried a couple of pair of each to be sure it wasn’t just some strange defect. OK, back to the web sites.

Next, I tried the New Balance web site. Not as well organized as the ASICS one, and didn’t easily offer data on what type of foot/gait their shoes were designed for – you had to dig for it. About this point, I found that the Sports Authority site gave better info on these shoes than the New Balance site. Between the two sites, I picked two more models of shoes and went back.

Of course, the Sports Authority brick and mortar store didn’t carry either of those two models. About this time I was getting tired of this and just picked a New Balance model that seemed to have the right level of arch for my near flat feet and looked to me to be a stability shoe. Bought them, came back and checked the web sites, and sure enough they were the right type.

I got to run in them today for the first time and they felt fine.

But I have to ask: why in the hell do they make this so hard? It should have been EASY to go to any of these manufacturer web sites, click “men”, click “running”, click “compare” and get a printable list of what foot type / gait type each of their shoes is made for and what its key characteristics are. How can they NOT do that? All I can think of is massive incompetence on the competitive advantage they could get by making this easy and by placing such information clearly on their boxes and in stores.

Apple Still Hates Me

2009-04-04T12:23:00.001-07:00

Today I woke the computer from sleep mode a few minutes after I resumed from sleep. My computer usually resumes a little better than I do: most of the time in a happier state and it doesn’t even need to shave. Anyway, this morning after the computer woke up the Apple Software Update came up. I figured, oh, there must be an update for some critical vulnerability in QuickTime! Possibly they released a new firmware version for the iPod and want me to update iTunes. Something at least marginally in my interest was bound to be there, right? Wrong! All they had in the list was a lame-oh also ran browser aptly named “Safari” and some silly thing called the MobilMe Control Panel. Of course I didn’t want to go on Safari as FireFox (default browser) and IE 8 are good enough for me and I sure didn’t want to become Mini-Me or MobilMe or whatever.

Revenge of the turds

So I simply hit the quit button as their disingenuous attempt to get me to load useless crap had once again been foiled. However, they managed to extract their revenge: for the next hour – until I killed it in Task Manager – the Apple Software Update program managed to take an entire core (causing Task Manager to show 50% utilization). Good thing Apple didn’t write it to take both cores or the computer would have become completely unresponsive.

Apple – stop trying to foist your silly crapware on me. I could understand advertising it on your web site. But just because I am required to load your excuse for a media player to manage the music on my iPod doesn’t mean that you should get to advertise junk neatly disguised as updates. Take a hint from say Ubuntu. Their software updates are just patches and upgrades to the THINGS I ALREADY HAVE INSTALLED. Same thing for Microsoft – critical updates and recommended updates are just for what is already installed. Get with the program guys.

I am in Hell, sir!

2009-04-02T18:12:00.001-07:00

Or at least I’ve just been there. Dell Hell that is, and the line from Mr. Christian in The Bounty sums up that mephitic place of perdition nicely. For those that haven’t heard “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” lately, Dell Hell is where you are when your machine won’t work and support doesn’t seem to respond. I’ve actually been there twice recently.

The first time, my son’s machine was going into thermogenic shock. Yes, it was overheating. This was a Latitude D820, and it would reproduce by playing an MP3, booting from a memory key into the diagnostics and running them, or just entering the BIOS screen and moving around between items for 30 seconds. After several emails back and forth with Dell “technicians” (all of which told them the specific of an overheating machine and that it would do it in their diagnostics), I got a suggestion back from them: reinstall Windows. I figured, gee – that may somehow miraculously cure Windows (how I sure don’t know), but it won’t do a whole lot for the machine overheating and turning itself off during their diagnostics. I finally got nasty and sent the “flame note” asking them what part of Windows was running when booted from their diagnostics on a memory key and insisting on escalation to a supervisor.

That got a new mainboard installed. However the problem remained. We then got a new board again, a new fan, a new heat sink, new memory, and a new processor. Problem solved (it was apparently the heat sink all along).

I thought I was out of the Dell Hell, that Latitude Limbo, that processor purgatory. Alas, no – next my machine (an identical Latitude) started on the journey to Gre’thor to see Fek’lhr. I came down to use the notebook and found it on a Blue Screen – something about memory management – and it had hung at 0% on the dump file. I powered it off and it would not come back on. At least the screen wouldn’t show anything. No post test, no logo, no boot, nada.

So I took it out of the dock and opened the screen, but that produced nothing better. It would have on solid green LED, two blinking ones and then would power itself off after 60 seconds. Not good. I look up that particular combo of blinking Christmas Tree lights and it is something to do with memory. So I swap the memory with another machine that is working. The bad machine is still bad and the RAM from mine is chugging along great in the other box. I then try just one stick of RAM (1 GB instead of 2) in mine. Low and behold that works and it passes the diags. Put any 2nd stick of RAM in and the machine is useless. OK, needs a mainboard.

Back to the email with Dell Support. I have next day on-site service so this should be a snap, right? Send them a note on a Sunday (3/22/2009) and again, and again, and then finally get a reply on Friday. Still in Dell Hell like this guy. A couple more emails back and forth and they dispatch the mainboard which gets installed on Tuesday. OK, so that’s 9th day on-site support.

Every been in Glade Gehanna, Trough Torment, or Dell Hell yourself? Well I have! (I can just see Andy Rooney starting out with that one…)

Apple Hates Me

2008-12-29T16:41:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure what I've done to Apple, but whatever it was it must have been something major. They either really, really hate me or iTunes is just a piece of garbage. Heck, it could be both.

For Christmas, the kids, my wife, and I all got new iPod Nano's - the 16 GB Gen 4 variety. These are pretty sweet little devices. I think Apple pretty much knocked it out of the park on the hardware for these new Nanos. However, the software is another story. In fact, the software is abysmal. (Even the OS on the Nano itself isn't perfect as the Nano locked up on me after about 15 minutes of use). The real problems didn't start though until I wanted to actually PLAY some music.

I already had 146 albums on my computer organized in Windows Media Player in pretty standard fashion as Artist \ Album \ Song. Many were MP3, but a few WMA's accidentally snuck in there too. I installed iTunes 8.x and told it to import the C:\users\GIL Dude\Music folder. It complained about the WMA's and said it would convert them (all other players I have used handle WMA fine). It seemed like this worked. The operative word is seemed like. I went ahead and synched my new Nano and that worked fine. I tried the new "Cover Flow" and saw just silly "Music Symbols" and no album art. Funny, every single album there has a folder.jpg, albumartsmall.jpg, and zunealbumart.jpg - iTunes could have taken its pick. But, nope, it just wanted to show silly little music symbols.

Next, I told it to go get album art. This requires signing into the Apple Store (which I did). This also brings up how my kids are supposed to get album art on their machines. In order to create an Apple Store account it requires a credit card. I am NOT giving my card to 12 and 14 year olds. Sorry Apple, another strike. So, it retrieves the album art (supposedly). It turns out that Apple only lets you download the album art for albums that it sells. (No other music software I have used has this restriction). It further doesn't identify some albums well, so you end up with something that looks like this:

Looks like it got 10% of the album art. So, I had to learn to right click the album and hit "Get Info", then drag and drop or paste the album art (that is already in the folder with the album damn it) into a little box, and then iTunes goes and rewrites the mp3 with the JPG file inside it (a huge waste of space since it should only need one copy of it, not one copy per song). So, I go through that, and sync the Nano again. Now the cover flow works! Sweet!

I had helped the kids and my wife get this far too and it was time to take a trip to my Mom's house. We took the Nano's with us. On the trip, we find that many of the MP3's won't play. Generally it was entire albums. It would play 1/2 second of the song, then immediately display that it was at 8 seconds of the song and then stop. If you hit the "rewind" (back) button it would actually then go and play the song. But there was no way to just listen without fiddling and hitting back all the time when it would stop playing. When we got home, we noticed that iTunes had a similar problem with the same files: it would play 1/2 second and then skip to the next song. There was no way to get them to play at all in iTunes.

Jack the Ripper

I had to test each album and found that about 1/2 - about 73 of them would not play. I spent some time searching the Apple support site. I spent more time with Google. I found reports of this on all types of Apple hardware dating back to 2005. Many folks had tried "fixing" their ID3 tags, etc. but there wasn't a consistent fix. I went ahead and used a stripper (no, not that kind - an ID3 tag stripper) to remove the tags from some sample songs and they still wouldn't play. I then resigned myself to re-ripping all 73 albums using iTunes to do it. Remember, these songs played fine in Media Player, fine on Zunes, and fine on a Creative Zen Micro. Only Apple (did I mention they hate me?) wouldn't play them.

So, I start the re-ripping. Apple is really helpful there. You get some strange dialogs like this:

As far as I can tell, this mean exactly squat. If you want me to pick between two options, at least show something unique about them. iDorks!

Another issue I kept hitting is the accuracy of the CD database being used by Apple. It did have some songs and album names correct that Windows Media Player had gotten wrong - but overall it was far worse than Media Player. Apple's DB had typo's galore, as you can see here:

(The correct entry is left there after I copied the iTunes ripped versions.) I had a lot of manual correcting on things like this. Other times, the software just up and did a WTF. For example seemingly randomly renaming items like this:

This last were some of the WMA files it "converted" and nicely jacked the numbering all up.

As if that wasn't enough, I couldn't find some things at first after the re-rip. Then I realized that it decided that both "Night Ranger's Greatest Hits" and "ZZ Top's Greatest Hits" were "Compilations" and should go under "Compilations\Greatest Hits" (yes, the album name was just "Greatest Hits". It actually threw both artists albums into the same folder:

As I said, WTF. As in WTF were they thinking when they built that? So, more manual corrections. In fact, I spent HOURS on manually correcting this junk - all because Apple can't be bothered to play 1/2 of my MP3 files that work on all other hardware.

All told I spent over 30 hours on this (mostly with the corrections - it doesn't take that long to do the rips). So, you get to decide - does Apple hate me or does their software just suck? It's not an exclusive or either, so you have three options:

They hate me
Their software (iTunes) sucks
They hate me and iTunes sucks.

I'm leaning towards the latter.

How green is too green?

2008-11-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

It seems you can't pick up a computer or IT related magazine without having the word green somewhere on the cover - generally accompanied by an article about what vendor xyz is doing to increase the 'greenness' of their product or service or by what provider abc did with their data center to lower the carbon footprint. In general this is great. We get devices that suck less power, operating systems (like Vista) where sleep works better and interim power states save more power, a cleaner planet, etc. That's gotta be a good thing? Right?

That's where my concept of 'too green' comes in. I'm not talking about 32,255,7 although that is too green to. Just like how you can have wood that is 'too green' to burn right, you can have something that is just 'too green' for its own good and doesn't really work right. (In this sense, you can just about think of green in both the 'earth friendly' and 'new' terms and you come out about right - almost like a puppy dog; trying to please but not necessarily doing it right). In fact, that is the topic for this post - we'll call the example today:

Stupid notebook tricks - or the green that was too green.

Take a nice new notebook - say a Lenovo T400 series machine. A nice box certainly. And some of the things I mention here will reproduce on other machines like current HP ones. However, I have personal experience with some stupid T400 tricks, so I will call them out in particular.

Build your T400 with a nice corporate image of Vista Enterprise Edition, complete with the latest drivers in the driver store. Place it on a port replicator and connect it all up. Sign in to your favorite Instant Messaging program (we're still using Office Communicator 2005). Walk away for a meeting. When you come back, the screen is blank. Cool, that's green! Move the mouse to wake the screen up and you notice you are no longer signed into your IM program. If you look quickly enough you see the little 'network' icon in the system tray shows that you lost your network connection momentarily. Hmm. Time to check into that you say? So did I. Next, I set the screen to turn off after just 1 minute. Started up a ping from another machine so I could watch the responses (either ping -t or a custom tool). I also stuck a mirror behind the T400 port replicator so that I could see the indicator lights on the NIC connector. Sure enough, when the screen blanked the NIC lights went out for a second then back on. The PING application noticed - it showed a couple of failures before continuing. Move the mouse, and the lights go off again. The PING fails again, and then comes back.

Now try this same thing when you are undocked (maybe in a meeting using Netmeeting or something similar). In this configuration - undocked - you notice that when the screen blanks nothing changes. That's good, right? We stay connected. But, then you move the mouse to get your screen back and then it disconnects and reconnects. That's got to be the stupidest thing it could do. Leave the network running great while the screen is blank but when the user wants to do some work - let's shut it down and restart it. Did you notice you lost your Netmeeting?

After you start looking into this (I needed a couple of peers to help), you find it is some new 'green' built into the latest Intel networking chipsets and drivers. It only works on Vista, because it relies on being notified by the opeating system that the screen is blank. It's called ''System Idle Power Saving" or SIPS. You can read about it in this PDF from Intel. (It claims that it 'renegotiates' when the screen blanks and again when it comes back on - but you can test this and it only does that in the docked state: when undocked it only bothers when the screen comes back on.) Looking at the charts they provide, it shows that it could go from say 22 mA to 4 mA in certain scenarios. Sounds good until you realize you lose your network connection. What if you were on VPN? How about a WebEx or Netmeeting?

I checked the event log, and like the documentation says it does renegotiate to the slowest it can. When connected to my 1 Gbps hub, it renogotiated down to 10 Mbps. So, if I were to - for example - connect to my machine using Remote Desktop from home and attempt to build a new image and copy it to a network location it would do so at 10 Mbps (because the screen is still blank). That nice new 4.8 Gb Vista image copying at 10 Mbps? Epic Fail.

Now, to be fair - I haven't yet tested what happens when you are on VPN or NetMeeting. I do know that the Intel documentation claims to only do this if the network is idle. They don't seem to define what idle means to them. What it certainly does NOT mean is that 'there are no TCP connections' - because it definitely doesn't seem to care about that. It drops you. Hence the signed out IM program. It may have some arbitrary packet rate that it is figuring 'less than x per second means idle' or some such. Whatever it is doing to calculate idle, I'll call it 'Fail'. It's just too green.

Cue up Captain Kirk and Scotty:

Capt: Scotty, emergency beam out!
Scott: Captain, I canna do it; the transporter system's gone into power save mode. It'll take two minutes to get back ta full power if'n it doesn't blue screen.

You see? Too Green!

The case of the Irritating Ibex

2008-11-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I decided it was time to do maintenance and updates on my test systems. Both the notebook and the desktop are setup dual boot with Ubuntu being one of the operating systems. Both were running 8.04 which had been upgraded from 7.10. The 7.10 -> 8.04 upgrade had gone flawlessly on the notebook, but on the desktop (after an over the network upgrade), Ubuntu decided that my wired Ethernet adapter did not exist. After RTFM'ing noob (searching the internet) I had resolved the problem. I figured this time it would have to be better.

(For those that don't know, Ubuntu's current practice is to name releases in alliteration with animal names. Hence the 8.04 release was "Hardy Heron" and the 8.10 is "Intrepid Ibex").

I started by reading the upgrade readme available here. It seemed that I was going to be OK going to 8.10, as my video card is an nVidia FX 5500 which is not on the list of cards for which support for 3D was mysteriously withdrawn. It claimed that my card would be upgraded to the 173 or 177 driver (whatever the hell that meant). So I started both the Desktop and the Notebook upgrading. There was a simple, well documented procedure to tell the 8.04 LTS version that it was OK to upgrade to a non-LTS new version, and they were off and running.

Painless, right? Ubuntu has a fairly well deserved reputation as being easy to install and working on a lot of platforms (as they are not obsessed with not shipping non-free binaries - hence they have a 3D driver for nVidia included). However, this upgrade was worse than the last one. It installed that new "173" driver for my nVidia card, then promptly told me that it wasn't working.

So, be sure that there is a supported nVidia GPU in the system. Check - I did that before installing. Duh! Like I would wait until after the install to check that. OK, next - ensure that the nVidia device files have been created properly. Great! We'll do that! Uhm, how do we do that? Now, I know that on Linux and Unix IO is almost always to a file but what the heck am I supposed to do to check that they were created correctly? Maybe this should offer to fix it for me? Oh, wait - they have a link to the nVidia Readme. Or not. Instead just a vague reference to consulting the nVidia Readme and not a link. Where is this mystical file? Wait, this was just a less snotty way of saying "RTFM noob" wasn't it?

Even worse, on my system I could not even read the dialog as it was positioned off to the left so far that half of it was not even on the screen and it could not be moved (sync problem - it would not sync properly to my 20" 1600x1200 panel). I had to use a different screen just to read the message. Once I clicked OK, it would then show me some options. One of them was something about fixing the problem and reconfiguring. Great! I figured I don't know enough to boot to a console and go edit xconfig.org or some shit, so I would let the GUI do it. That worked great if what I was looking for was a blank screen. However, I was figuring even the normal drab brown Ubuntu default desktop would be better than a blank screen.

I gave up, and decided to try a different video card (an nVidia 6800 GT I had laying around). After finding that the new card took more power than my supply would put out (yes, the power supply actually emitted an over current alarm - a loud screech!), and finding out that the only bandaids in the house were some Disney ones (I always get cut plugging and unplugging molex connectors), I put the old card back in. I figured - I will just update the Windows XP partition and give up for now and re-install Ubuntu from CD (which I had downloaded).

I had already set XP to "standard VGA" in preparation for swapping cards. Since I didn't really end up swapping I just updated XP to the latest driver for the 5500 FX from the nVidia site. That was easy, just run setup. I then thought, well - one last try for the current Ubuntu install. Wham! It came up correctly. No warning about video not working, checking for supported GPU's or running sudo someshit.conf. It's up!

About this time I decided to check the notebook. It had survived the update pretty well. It has no sound now, but otherwise it worked. In fact, it has "some sound". The Ubuntu "enter your ID" sound works, and so does the login sound. But no apps can play sounds. Flash can't, and even the audio configuration applet only plays beeps. I give up on that one for now.

I then wanted to compare round-tripping some docx and xlsx files through OpenOffice with the latest Ubuntu. Whups! 8.10 comes with the 2.4.x branch and not the new 3.0.x series. I went to go upgrade, but Ubuntu won't upgrade it until 9.04. So I thought, the Backports - that'll have it. Apparently I am too early for that. So I went hunting on the internet and found this. Read it and weep. Weep for the "setup.exe" that I downloaded and installed in moments on the Windows XP partition. Apparently to install this Deb package I need type about as much text on the command line as this blog. I think I'll just go play with Open Office on Windows, Ubuntu had sapped enough productivity already this last weekend.

Comcast - royal screwups or just criminals?

2008-09-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

I've heard nothing but bad things about Comcast customer service. I generally haven't had to call them for anything the last few years, so I had no real experience of my own to go on. However, we recently got really tired of having two seperate accounts - one for cable TV and one for internet access (which started way back when it was ATTBI). It wouldn't have been a problem having two accounts, but Comcast's online systems seem incapable of accepting automatic monthly payment when a phone number has two accounts associated with it. We could get on account on auto, but not the other. We just had a simple request - here are our two account numbers that match our phone number and address. Please merge them so that we can automatically pay. Sounds like a 5 minute request, right?

Well - you'd think so anyway. My wife called them and after a few minutes of wading through the phone trees, told me that our internet access would be down for a few "moments". I then heard her let the Comcast agent go. Red Alert! Battle Stations! I told her, "you don't let them off the line until it works because they usually do something wrong and I hear they are clueless." Since I was planning to work from home the next morning, internet access was going to be important. Well, we stopped for dinner and an hour later - no access. We rebooted the cable modem - no access. We could ping Comcast's DNS servers, but not get out to anywhere else. So it was some sort of software block - some blockhead in customer service twiddled the bits wrong.

My wife called them back and got another agent. This agent told her that the people in "billing" went home and there was nothing she could do. We called back. Got a helpful person this time. It took 20 minutes, but he got our access back. Had to refresh the DHCP address in the router - but then it was working. However - open Outlook, and get prompted for a password. Shields Up! Arm Photon Torpedoes! That's right - they deleted all of our accounts as part of this. No more master account (can't logon to to the web pages, can't access email) and all 4 of us had our accounts / access deleted.

Now, we are back on the phone again. The next rep's computer "wasn't working" so she transferred us (it must have been time for her to go home). We are now on the line with YACI (Yet Another Comcast Idiot). I'm sure we will be told that there is nothing they can do and that the people who can do anything just went home. I just can't understand how such an inept company can be in business. It must cost them a bunch to take extra calls (hours now!) when their agents don't handle simple calls without cutting off their customer's accounts. I guess it must just be due to their area monopolies (I am 15,000 feet from a DSL CO). Otherwise, I can't explain it. I'd leave if they weren't the only game in town.

Who knows? I've even heard that you can't get your email addresses back. Maybe I'll end up being JDude123987@comcast.net after this. In fact, I had a picture of myself on my profile that showed up on this blog. It is now gone - it was hosted at http://home.comcast.net. I'm leaning towards criminals.

Update - after that last call the accounts were all restored from backup. So we got our correct email addresses back and even my photo for my profile here on Blogger came back. So, hours later we are back up. A simple request to customer service results in this. I can't even imagine how long we would have been down if we didn't work in technology. For example, if my Mom had this happen - when would she have noticed that her primary account had been deleted and her email didn't work anymore? Maybe the next day or the one after that? I still need to decide the main question though: does Comcast just hate their customers or are they just incompetent? I know, I know, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". But still - it makes you wonder...

Global Accounts Infrastructure Deployment Council

2008-06-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

Wow, that title is a mouthful. It's also where I've been for the last several days. That said, the rest of this post is under NDA. That's right: all two of you who read this can't tell anyone what you read here. Wait - that must have just seeped in from the last several days of presentations - all of which started with some NDA slide or another. After a bit you get tired of hearing about Nonsense Dispersal Agreements anyway. We all know that conferences spew nonsense: no need to have slides about it.

So, this was another conference that tires you out to no end. Reception the first night, then up at 5:00 to do email before sessions, sessions until 5:45, then back on the bus and a dinner from 7:00 until 10:30 then finally back to the hotel and to bed. Next day, up at 5:00 to do email before the sessions and sessions until 5:45 then a steering committee dinner from 6:30 to something late. About the same the third day. At least the stuff is all interesting - it just gets to be tiring after awhile. All that said, I wouldn't change it: we need all that time to get everything in.

One of the funniest happenings was the network there at the Executive Briefing Center. Anyone who has been to Microsoft's Redmond campus lately has probably gotten a print out of an ID and password for accessing the "MSFTGUEST" wireless network. You try to open say www.cnn.com and get redirected to a place to logon - similar to how most hotel networks are setup. Nothing new there. However, in this case - for the first two days - Internet Explorer wouldn't display the site. Firefox would work fine! Now, as embarassing as that must have been for the hosts, it does show that Microsoft does not make web pages that only work in Internet Explorer. It happened to be on Firefox download day, so I needed to use FF 2.014 to connect to the MSFTGUEST network so I could download FF 3.0. That just sounds wrong when you are on an MS network. Worked fine, but then VPN wouldn't work. Its amazing how one of the largest and most successful software engineering firms can't run a wireless guest network that - well - works. Most people using classic VPN solutions such as Cisco, Nortel, or the built in MS VPN L2TP could not connect. Only the people using SSL VPN's or RPC over HTTP (which my company doesn't allow) could get their mail. I finally got in part time by using a Citrix connection to remote desktop. At one point that wouldn't work either and I had to use OWA. I guess they had to take the folks who would normally create a working network and devote them to fixing Vista?

Other than the wireless snafu, the rest of the conference was engaging and fairly interesting (as usual some sessions more so than others). Thanks to Paula, Joseph, and Karen for making the conference a successful and interesting experience.

Tech-Ed and the Case of the Powerpoint Poisoning

2008-06-15T09:59:00.001-07:00

As you know, I attended Tech-Ed (IT Pro version) last week in Orlando, Florida. I made it back, my luggage made it with me, and the airline somehow avoided breaking my three Pat O'Brien's hurricane glasses. Friday night after the sessions a couple of us went to the Hard Rock Cafe out at Citywalk and then over to Pat O's piano bar. My voice is still recovering. I think after the second hurricane and the free MGD that the Miller Lite girls gave us (thanks Rochelle and Kelly!) I had decided that I sounded pretty darn good (which called for the 3rd hurricane). I think the other patrons would probably dispute that assessment however.

This year I was disappointed in that very few of the Microsoft folks that I know were there at Tech-Ed. Even one person who was on the agenda for a couple of break outs was a no show. This seems to be getting worse each year as people either take different positions or leave Microsoft entirely. One thing I wasn't disappointed in was the shuttle buses. Somebody did something right there and we never had to wait long at all. In fact, last year many of us had to wait over an hour at the evening event to get a shuttle home. This time, there were several of each route sitting waiting for us. The ones to and from the conference sessions were likewise very available. That part was well done. The weather cooperated this year too and only managed to rain and thunder while we were in sessions. At one point on the third floor you were hard pressed to decide whether there was a lot of clapping next door or if the thunder was just right overhead. This beat last year again, as last year we got completely drenched at the evening event out at Universal.

I did end up with a case of PowerPoint Poisoning though. It was either that or alcohol poisoning, but I'm going with the PowerPoint as my story. The way this works is they feed you a bunch of food, stick you in a darkened room with an often monotone speaker, and flash slides which are often devoid of any interesting content. It's no wonder that half the room nods off from time to time. I know I did, and I saw a lot of other people in the same boat. There were of course the normal stock of superlative speakers who keep the audience engaged. Folks like Mark Russinovich, Steve Riley, and Mark Minasi - no sleeping in their sessions. Well done!

I also went to a few sessions that seemed to be covering some fairly important things but were very lightly attended. One example was Michelle Abrahams talk on Windows Search 4.0. This session was only a level 200, so it wasn't very technical. However, it covered the just released update to Windows Search that makes the Vista Instant Search feature tons more stable (it used to corrupt itself fairly often if you had a high volume of email). Perhaps people stayed away from the level 200 sessions or just didn't think this was important but it was their loss: this is something they should be deploying - now.

Overall, the sessions were pretty good but I did get a lot of repeat information that I've probably known for years as a veteran of several TAP programs. For instance the same guy was there talking about building Windows XP images and how to replace the HAL - same thing as last year and the year before (fortunately I didn't attend this time, but one of my coworkers did). I thought that both Chris Jackson and Aaron Margosis did a good job with their respective sessions on app compat and LUA issues. My notepad does have a couple of nuggets that I picked up from some of these sessions - so the PowerPoint Poisoning was worthwhile.

Tech-Ed bound

2008-06-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

It's become almost an annual ritual - heading off to Tech-Ed. I got up early this morning to do online check-in to make sure I have the 2nd exit row aisle seat, print out the sunset, civil twilight, etc. from this handy site, print out the weather forecast, my BitLocker recovery password, hotel confirmation number, Tech-Ed bar code, map of the Orange County Convention Center, and more. Did I mention that I'm a geek? Or did you just figure that out yourself?

This year, Microsoft (in its infinite wisdom) cut Tech-Ed into two pieces: a developer focused track (which is over now) and an IT Pro focused track (which I am heading off to). That's right, they broke Tech-Ed. Broke as in "borked". Someone must have decided that everyone has a tidy little job title like "senior developer who writes code and doesn't need to know about infrastructure" and "IT Architect who specifies SQL Servers and Active Directory but doesn't need to know anything about .Net or C#". Living in the real world, I tend to do a little of both. Actually now that I accepted a Team Lead job, a large portion of my time is spent in meetings and managing people / processes, but I still am able to spend some time creating images (IT Pro) and developing code (Developer). Perhaps Microsoft didn't really want to split Tech-Ed out into two: maybe they didn't have enough hotel rooms in the area to fit everyone? Or maybe Universal Studios couldn't stomach the thought of 15,000 drunk geeks walking around taking pictures of the T-Rex just as they went over the edge in the Jurassic Park ride (yes, last year that was me!). Either way, the sessions I will be attending are surprisingly bereft of titles like "Best practices to make your code multi-lingual" (I think they decided that with so much outsourcing half of the dialog boxes in the code we get are English-as-a-Second-Language anyway). Gone are the "Programming for the new Network Stack" sessions - they must have been last week.

Fortunately, they still have the "SOA358 Publishing and Extending Business Rules in Mainframe (CICS and IMS) and AS/400 Programs Using Microsoft Host Integration Server" session which, according to the really nice "session demand" graph appears to have one person attending it (with two speakers no less - I feel sorry for Paul Larsen and Ricardo Mendes). It's funny how I whine and complain that they don't have any of the coding sessions, when one look at my online schedule shows that I have double and triple booked most time slots. I'm actually down to where I must pick between "CLI360 Tricks of the Windows Vista Masters" and "SEC355 Privacy: The Why, What, and How" by seeing which one is being done by Steve Riley (an awesome speaker by the way). I also had to make sure when looking at sessions like "CLI369 Building the Perfect Master Image" that they aren't being done by Johan Arwidmark - a nice enough and very bright guy, but his "ya, I'm here from Sweden to tell you about the Windows PE" just gets annoying. Sorry, that quote is much better when I can deliver it out loud and mimic the voice and delivery.

After all of that going through the schedule and all, I still had several time slots where I have two or more sessions and I will have to decide at the last moment which one to go to. Probably the one by the least used restroom. Speaking of restrooms - have you ever been to Tech-Ed? Geek conferences like Tech-Ed are the only places on the planet where there are lines outside the men's bathroom and not the women's (as the male/female ratio at Tech-Ed is something like 20 to 1). I often find myself leaving sessions 10 minutes early to be first in line - like lining up for "Indiana Jones and the Last Urinal Available". At least they don't sell tickets... yet. If you are coming to Tech-Ed IT Pro in Orlando, maybe I'll see you in line for the John. I'll be the one wearing whatever Windows Mobil Hat, Server 2008 Pin, etc. supposedly will win me a prize.

DC - a Powerful Place

2008-05-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from a successful trip to Washington DC as a chaperone for an eighth grade class trip. Despite my initial thoughts about how I may decide to throw some of the louder ones off of the Washington Monument or push them in front of a bus I actually made it through the trip pretty well. It was one of those regimented, over scheduled, jog through the sites to say you did it kind of trips - the ones that leave you wondering where you actually went by the time you get home and look at the pictures. We left on a Saturday morning at 3:15 AM and returned back on the following Saturday at 1:14 AM.

If you looked fast, you saw basically everything there was to see in Washington DC, and parts of Virginia and Maryland. If, like me, you like to actually READ the placards on the displays and study the fine detail in objects then you would either have to come back on your own or miss the bus. This was the one hour and twenty-five minutes at the Air and Space Museum, one hour and thirty minutes (lunch included in that time) at the Natural History Museum, jog up the stairs to the Lincoln Memorial (at night no less - the pictures suck as we didn't have tripods), the blitzkrieg tour of Gettysburg, etc. Did you get a picture of the Iwo Jima memorial? No, my flash wasn't charged before we had to run back to the bus. The downside of course was the incredible rush to get from place to place without spending any time to really enjoy them while we were there. The upside is that we can say, "been there, sprinted through that" about most of the things in the area. Let's see, my list shows that we saw:

National Air and Space Museum
Museum of Natural History
Newseum
Lincoln Memorial
Jefferson Memorial
FDR Memorial
Washington Monument
White House tour
Capitol Building guided tour
Gettysburg battlefield guided tour
Gettysburg visitor center and museum
Mount Vernon tour
Monticello tour
Vietnam Memorial
Korea Memorial
WWII Memorial
Busch Gardens (yes, a whole 6 hours there riding roller coasters!)
Water Park
Hauntings Tour
Colonial Williamsburg tour
Jamestown tour
Attended President Bush's speech at Arlington Natl Cemetery on Memorial Day (in the Amphitheater - had to get there at 8:00 AM)
Dinner / Dance cruise
Yorktown tour
National Archives

There may have been more; those are off the top of my head. Anyway, it was a bit strange being a "kid herder" (no, not the little goats). We had to make sure they didn't touch the walls or display items in Monticello, hit each other and be loud at the President's address at Arlington, fight about the time to go to sleep, shine laser pointers in people's faces on the bus (yes, they did that on the bus back to the airport - teachers, if you want names, call me) - all the stupid and sometimes evil things 14 year old kids do when they are awake.

Anyway, we made it back - and didn't leave anyone behind. We did have a few stragglers on a couple of occasions - mostly the parents if you can believe that. I guess the worst items were:

Hotel changed the keys from the credit card shaped magnetic ones to an RFID wristband lock during the day and we had to all get new keys.
One hotel's magnetic key lock failed and a person couldn't get some of their items out of the room and we got delayed by 30 minutes (plus the items will have to be shipped back).
Kids fighting with their roommates because many are irresponsible and won't go to sleep and insist on watching TV at all hours of the night.
A couple of kids got dehydrated on the dance cruise and caused a bit of a scare (but they are fine).

On the plus side, tour guides Richard (Bus 1) and Beth (the "cool" bus) did an excellent job with the limited amount of time we were able to spend at each venue, contributing their unique blends of solid historical information and light humor to keep the kids engaged and paying attention (as much as that is possible). The teachers (Bob, Jacey, Shoba, and Pam) did a good job of organizing and keeping the chaos to a minimum although I think maybe a bit more communication with the chaperones so that we can help more would be an improvement for next time. Looks like I'll need to go again in two years when my other kid is in 8th grade.

Here's the President's address at Arlington:

Here's the WWII Memorial:

Here's the Washington Monument shot from the side of the Jefferson Memorial:

Washington DC - how worried should I be?

2008-05-18T18:35:00.000-07:00

I'm scheduled to chaperone a middle-school (8th grade) field trip to Washington DC soon. I've already had trepidations about this as I figured by the end of the week I'd be more likely to push the kids in front of a train than actually try to round them up and ride herd on them. I was thinking that they'd probably be noisy, unruly, and just a bit rude - after all, they are 13 and 14 - the age where they start thinking that they know everything and adults are silly old farts who "just don't get it.".

As if that wasn't enough to think about, now I see that there was recently a scandal on another school's trip to DC. No, the president and the senate left the kids alone. TSA didn't take their iPods or steal their other toys. They didn't get mugged or hit by a car. Instead, the kids allegedy had sex. Damn! I didn't think that I would have to worry about that until 10th grade! Here is the CNN video on the recent brouhaha. There are plenty of sites and bloggers who will tell you all about that trip and what went wrong. I'm more worried about my kid and other charges and how to keep things from going wrong for them. After all, I wonder what happens to an "unsuccessful chaperone"? Banned from the chaperone circuit for life? Expelled from the bus? Registered as a sex offender? More likely, you go down in history as the second doofus to make CNN headlines as your charges also get expelled and people talk about how terrible you must be at your volunteer job.

Anyway, it's an eye opener for me as I didn't think I'd have to be checking the bathrooms and closets on the dance cruise or making sure that there aren't two people under one towel at the hotel's water park. Raging Waters meet raging hormones. We'll be going to the usual places like the White House (Bill's gone, so they should be safe), the various memorials, Arlington National Cemetary (kids - out of the crypt, now!), and everything else all in one week. After a quick visit to some place out of American history, we climb back on the bus and count heads - have to make sure there aren't two in the bathroom!

Well, if anything this news has given me food for thought. Wait: speaking of food - have to make sure the seafood place isn't serving oysters - can't be having the kids exposed to even rumored aphrodisiacs on the trip. Hopefully the kids will return from the trip tired, sore (from walking - what were you thinking?), and chaste - no belts required. If we are lucky they might even learn something that doesn't involve birds and bees.

Update - May 19th, 2008. What was that about a crash? Well, I can't tell you much as the site this comes from says in its copyright notice that material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed (I guess they didn't realize they published it!) - however it appears another DC trip had their trip end with a tragic tour bus accident (here). As if I wasn't worried enough already. Now I'll have to walk around the bus inspecting the tires before getting on each time.

Yosemite - Vernal Falls Trail

2008-05-04T10:07:00.001-07:00

On Saturday May 3rd, we went to Yosemite National Park. I highly recommend that you don't go there as you might annoy me by making it too crowded. As always, Yosemite was beautiful. It was beautiful before you were born, and it will be beautiful after you die. The pace of change there for the granite, water falls, and forests is on a timescale so far outside that of a human that it seems eternal. The ethereal beauty is likewise timeless.

On this trip, we took the Vernal Falls trail to the top. You can read about the trail here. It rises 1,000 feet over about 1.5 miles, although you actually walk about 1/2 mile from the parking area just to get to the trail head for a round-trip approximating 4 miles. I'd previously been up Vernal falls 13 years ago. At that time, there were a couple of factors that made this trip really, really hard. Back then, it was a wet year in the park and the water was running down the stairs on the "Mist" trail. It was enough to make you think they "Missed" the naming on that trail and should have called it the "feet are under 3 inches of water, drenched to the bone, watch your step trail". Also, I was out of shape on that trip. It was like climbing the face of Kolvir - those of you who have read Roger Zelazny will know about Kolvir. Anyway, this time I was in much better shape and there was a lot less water. You still got wet, but not drenched, and you could keep your feet dry if you were careful. I still needed to put my camera in a large zip-lock bag, but otherwise it was great. This time the trail seemed relatively easy even though you climb 600 granite steps and 600 feet in elevation over the last quarter mile.

What a spectacular view! Yosemite never fails to humble and amaze.

As usual, there were some free-loaders there in the park. It's a $250 fine if you feed them - but enough people must risk this fine that the animals get a lot of handouts. I imagine they don't try to fine the squirrels, and so they swarm all around you and even on you.

Anyway, as long as it isn't a day when I will be there, this hike is strongly recommended. On my days there, you need to stay home!

Lenovo T61 and the "Oh Shit!" moment

2008-04-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

I've used Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks for quite some time and am a member of the team that does hardware evals and image design for a large company that uses Lenovo (currently the T61 and X61 models). My brother-in-law recently bought a T61 15.4 inch model and wanted me to "de-crap" it and set it up for him. Believe it or not, this took about 4 hours of uninstalling the foistware like "90 days" of Norton Internet insecurity, Windows Live toolbar, Office 2007 "trial" version, and several of the "ThinkVantage" tools. Some of the ThinkVantage tools are great - but loading ALL of them really is overkill.

There was a bunch of other stuff to remove as well, and then updating the various "security challenged" and badly designed software like Sun Java (who ever heard of LEAVING versions with known security holes on the system and accessible to code that specifies it when installing a new version. In fact - these jokers from the JRE team don't understand the team "patch" and only do "new versions") and Flash - which seems to have an exploit of the month, and Adobe Acrobat (which puts out security patches and you get to choose between a version that loads files fine, but has security issues and a version that has no known holes but crashes on large files), etc. Also in there was the hour to install Windows Vista SP1 (if you haven't done this - you should: Vista isn't usable without SP1, but once you have the Service Pack it is not too bad).

Finished all that, then realized I had not flashed the BIOS yet. This machine had an older version. So I went to the Lenovo site and grabbed version 2.14 with an April 2nd date. At least I tried to grab it. The site claimed it was there, but just gave an error when you tried to download it. This persisted over night. Today I decided to just grab it from work over VPN as we had started using it the other day. Burned the ISO and booted from CD. Went through all the prompts (yes the computer is on AC power, yes the battery is charged, etc.) It finally said something like "remove the CD and press enter to complete". I did that, and...

It showed a "Lock symbol" on the screen where it would normally have done the POST. This machine didn't have a boot password, didn't have a supervisor or BIOS password, and definitely did not have a hard drive password. What the hell? It didn't like just enter, didn't like just a space, and Lenovo wasn't a good guess either. Where did this password prompt come from? I went to Google and found a few minutes too late that other users are having this same problem. Great! Maybe that's why there was an error downloading the thing: perhaps Lenovo pulled it. It would have been better if they had a "do not use" as then I wouldn't have grabbed it from work. So, after some hair pulling I finally found this on the Lenovo site. I checked the graphic - and sure enough it was the "Power On" one from the very bottom of that Lenovo link.

So, I had to remove the battery and remove the palm rest and the keboard. Lift up some tape, and unclip the system battery leads and remove the system battery (what happened to those "watch battery style" ones with no leads!!!). Put the keyboad and rest back on and power it up like that. This cleared it as the site said it would. Then put it all back together again. Nothing like doing some surgery on a notebook computer on a Saturday morning for NO REASON. Nice QA job on that BIOS release Lenovo. You owe me an hour back.

Give me my music!

2007-12-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

All of us who use the internet for more than just email are aware of the lack of any sense of rationality from the folks known "affectionately" in web forums as the "MAFIAA" - the RIAA and MPAA. Some of their latest blather has been about how the United States spends too much money policing burglary, fraud, and bank robberies to the detriment of enforcing - you guessed it - copyright. (link: ArsTechnica). These are the folks who "make up numbers" (a euphemism for pulling them from where the sun doesn't shine), showing that they lose billions of dollars a year to pirates.

Now, I am speaking as a person who has been firmly in the "moderate" camp. I've never downloaded an MP3 - even when I owned the album. I've always performed the rip myself and never shared them with anyone. When people I know come over with their laptop, I tell them they cannot run Kazaa or any other copyright violation engines. So, as you can guess, I don't think that it is cool to "stick it to the man" by downloading songs. It isn't "theft" as defined in the dictionary as much as the "industry" would like you to believe it is - however it is indeed copyright violation and it is wrong by today's rules.

Now, I'm an old fart - about to turn 41. I have a large collection of old fart music (late 70's through late 90's with one or two from the early 2000's thrown in). Some of it I really like. It starts on cassette tape and finishes up on CD. The CD's were no problem; I had three computers ripping them as fast as they could go a few years back. It's a lame way to blow two days - but hey, not too bad. The Cassette tape - that's another story. If the record companies had any sense, they would allow people with "old fart media" to turn in said media for a nice shiny new CD - for the cost of shipping and pressing. But no, they think I should just buy it again. In fact, the forays that they have made into DRM seem to indicate that they think I should buy it again every time a new format comes out and every time I want to put it on a new device that I purchase. Own a movie on DVD? Want to put it on an iPod to watch? Your choice - buy it again or break the law. Hello? Anyone else think that is ridiculous and stupid?

So, back to those cassette tapes. I have been doing an album or two (three on weekends) per day for a couple of weeks now. It takes forever. And guess what? Want to rip them on a new box? One with Vista (of which I was a beta tester and am generally a fan of and have running on all 4 of our families primary computers)? Nope - can't do that as audio is a protected source. That's right - lots of you know about the HDCP abomination where you can't play high-def content unless your video card and monitor support copy protection - but many of you didn't know that even audio is a protected stream with DRM on it - called Protected Audio Path). That damn DRM that movie and record companies are lobbying (and mostly forcing) Microsoft, Apple, and others to implement is preventing me from using my purchased audio tracks in the way that I want to. So I have to keep a Windows XP box around to run the Microsoft Plus Analog Recorder (which is quite nice; splits tape into tracks automatically and takes input from "what you hear" on the sound card and records it) to get that old fart cassette stuff into MP3 or WMA files that I can play on my iPod or Zune while working out. Of course coming from tape, it is only worth encoding at 128 kb - but it still sounds pretty good - about as good as tape ever did. Again - I have a choice here of spending hours and hours and hours doing this, or going online and doing it the illegal (but fast!) way. I don't fancy having my IP address in any logs anywhere (whether at an ISP or a torrent site or Kazaa or whatever) as a copyright violator, so for me it is the hours and hours method. But it sure is tempting to save all that time.

So - anyone care to tell me why the music and video "industries" won't just let me send them a cassette and send me back a CD for say about $5 for postage and handling? They could keep someone employed doing that and not be losing any money to those rampaging pillaging "pirates" we hear so much about. But no - they make me choose between my time (worth a lot more than the $5 for the time spent on an album) and the less legal route. All in the vain hope that I will purchase the same stuff again every time they conveniently switch media on me.

OK, enough is enough

2007-06-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's been awhile. I haven't had something steam me up enough to get off my butt and write a blog post in what seems like eons. (In internet years anyway - internet years are like dog years times 1024 or something.).

What's got me steamed this time? It's the lack of stability of the combination of a Dell Lattitude D820/Intel 3945ABG/Vista Ultimate. This plain "doesn't work". Not "it just works". No, it just doesn't work. Oh, it seems to. It sucks you in as you setup your network and connect with WPA2. But, soon enough you find that the wireless just up and locks up on you. It may be after the machine comes out of sleep for the 5th time. It may be the first boot. But, eventually you will get into that dreaded scenario where the "Network" becomes the "NetNOWork". This is typified by the "Network and sharing center won't open". Also, that little networky icon in the system tray stops showing the little tooltip with the signal strength and all. You end up having to reboot - and more times than not you have to hold down the power button because Windows hangs on the Shutting Down screen.

So, what do you do? If you're like me you blame Intel and download the 3945ABG driver of the month from the Dell site. Always hopeful, you load that new driver and cross your fingers. But, like you kind of expected, it doesn't work. You have the same problem. So finally today I went direct to the Intel site. What did I see there? A newer driver than even the Dell site had. So what the hell, right? I tried it. Hopeful as always I loaded it up. But, an hour later - same shit different day. WiFi light on the Lattitude went out. Network and Sharing Center won't open. Network is dead. Reboot - great...

Is this so hard? I've got the latest patches for Vista, the latest BIOS from Dell, the latest driver from Intel. Why do these friggin' things hate each other (and me) so damn much???

I wish these things would get back to "it just works".

TANSTAAFL or TANSTAAFG

2005-12-12T04:45:00.000-08:00

My first exposure to the term TANSTAAFL or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" was in Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and again in his later, "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls". Yesterday, I had reason to recall the term - or at least its derivative "There ain't no such thing as a free game".

I had just been up removing spyware from my daughter's computer (again!), when I noticed my son playing that old classic "Elf Bowling 3" from nStorm. I started thinking about when that one came out and whether there might be newer ones available. Later that evening I went to the nStorm site to find out.

Testing Safely
Sure enough, there were two newer versions: Super Elf Bowling, and Elf Bowling Bocce Style. I downloaded them and realized they were installers. The old versions were just exe's that would run without dropping anything on your system. I was a bit put off that they wanted to actually install. So, I installed them on a clean Virtual Machine. The bocce style one wouldn't even run. I've tried it on three machines now (the VM, my son's machine, and a Windows Vista box). It just crashes on start. Nothing to see there - it's junk. The Super Elf Bowling though ran fine. Each version of the Elf has gotten to be more and more just an advertisement for buying unlocked versions of the game. They've had more and more functions not available unless you buy. This one had even more, but if you clicked continue enough times it would eventually let you play a game that was at least OK.

Installing for real
After testing this in the virtual machine, I installed it for my son. Immediately his SpySweeper (http://webroot.com) started complaining about NavExcel NavHelper. Looking up NavExcel showed that it is AdWare capable of hijacking your browser (directing you to places that are not what you typed in) and also showing popup ads. Now, I don't normally install a spyware removal tool into clean test VM's - but this showed me that I should start doing that. I'd unwittingly installed AdWare onto my son's machine! (About this particular AdWare: http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/pest/pest.aspx?id=453074928)

Removed and banned
Fortunately SpySweeper had actually prevented most of the NavExcel thing from installing. It cleaned the rest of it with no problem. Armed with the information from SpySweeper, we cleaned up my virtual machine manually. Who knew that nStorm had morphed from a company that produced cute, free games into a company that distributes AdWare with their new "buy me, buy me" limited games. If they don't want to send out free games anymore - hey, that's cool. But installing AdWare on people's machines is just plain wrong. nStorm is relegated to a memory: we won't be visiting the site or installing anything they produce. The upside is that now my son knows TANSTAAFL and he hasn't even read the book yet!

Software like ET: Phone Home

2005-11-27T08:32:00.000-08:00

I'm getting to really hate all of the software out there that wants to "phone home" (contact a server somewhere) all the time. There are levels to this of course. I think everyone can agree that they hate the crapware / foistware typically known as spyware. But how about other classes? Here's a quick, non-scientific catergorization:

Programs that check for updates for their software
These would be like Quicktime, Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc. I think those yokels need to understand that their junky software is just a small piece of what computer users have installed and we don't want to have their little stub programs checking for updates all the damn time. In fact, if it weren't required by so many web sites and other programs we'd probably prefer not to have the software itself installed. These things annoy the heck out of me, always wanting to update themselves. Wasting my bandwidth for a purpose that just seems to be a bunch of hooey.

Programs like Microsoft's CEIP
What about the ones that do things like the Microsoft "Customer Experience Improvement Program" (or, "we watch what you click")? In the past, these tended to be opt-in, but lately some of them have been on by default. They also have a habit of not clearly disclosing what in the heck they are going to send. Are they sending my menu clicks? Are they sending my files? Who knows with most of them. Maybe the Shadow knows. One of the things I've been evangelizing with Microsoft in particular is that they should never ship one of these things unless there is a group policy setting to turn it the heck off.

Programs that are absolutely Helpless
I think the worst ones are where they try to go online to show help. For example, Microsoft Office Communicator. Seems OK, until you realize that they forgot to ship a help file and it just goes onto the internet to get help. Not cool; not by a long shot. Why should they assume I have an internet connection? I mean the software is designed to be used on an Intranet, not the internet. I've been noticing more and more programs like this - in fact in testing Windows Vista I see that the main source of help (at least the first one searched) is online. It eventually times out and shows you local help, but with a notice at the top that you are not connected and to retry. Guess what? Just try to find the policy to turn that off! So far, I can't find it. There doesn't appear to be one, although there is a per-user setting that changes it to local help only. Get with it MS: create that policy to make help local only!

Programs that "enhance" themselves online
Microsoft Office anyone? Gotta love those task panes always wanting to get content from the internet. Or what about the templates online? You like clipart? Remember when it used to come on a CD? Not anymore: it's online! Ugh!

So, is anyone else worried about all this? Do you have satellite links in your organization? Any microwave? How about lusers using dialup? Do any work in countries where the goverment owns the bandwidth and it doesn't matter how much you pay - you only get so much of it? As Andy Rooney would say, "Well I do." And as your friendly neighborhood GILDude says, "Give me back my bandwidth!"

Visual Studio 2005 and Vista - Clearly a challenge

2005-11-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

Anyone out there used Visual Studio 2005 RTM? Like it? So far I've been quite happy with it, except for an annoying little (minor) quirk where it likes to give the "green squiggly" to certain variables in "Finally" blocks.

How about on Vista? Have you tried to use VS 2005 there? Or perhaps just tried to run the compiled code on Vista? It didn't work, right? I've been fighting this annoyance with some code that I am working on that needs to work on both XP and Vista. Since Vista build 5231 is not very stable (OK, well the truth is not stable at all), I don't want to try to do the dev work on Vista. So I have been building on Windows XP, and debugging and testing on XP. Then I move the EXE over to Vista 5231 and it won't run. It turns out the runtime version of the RTM Visual Studio is v2.0.50727.42. The version on Vista build 5231 is v2.0.050727.20. So the EXE's just crash.

Not a problem, right? Just upgrade the runtime on Vista and it'll work like a champ. Not so fast... Microsoft has made the runtime part of the operating system. So the only way to upgrade it is via an OS Service Pack or patch. Nasty! So, what's a poor enterprising developer to do? Wait for a new build of Vista?

Not likely! What I've been doing is to install the RC of Visual Studio onto my Vista machines. It will run with the version of the runtime installed on 5231. Then, after coding and debugging on Windows XP, I copy the whole project over to the Vista machine and recompile it using the RC version of Visual Studio. So far I've only run into one code change I had to make in order to do that. Opening one of my projects and compiling it in the RC version gave an error on a line of code that the designer had created. The line was:

Me.lvItems.UseCompatibleStateImageBehavior = False

I was able to just rem that line out and the project worked in the RC version and could be tested on Vista.

Kind of a pain to do dev work and testing on both platforms at this point, but at least it is working for me. I can't wait for the next CTP build of Vista as it will be sure to have the RTM version of the runtime and I can quit using the compiler version shuffle to do testing.

Death of a killer app

2005-10-23T08:59:00.000-07:00

The headlines may soon read "Microsoft gives death sentence to killer app.".

That's right: an application used by millions has been given the boot. This application is used today on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. It's very ability to provide services across these platforms has been part of its longstanding appeal. In recent years, Microsoft has de-emphasized it - covering up its UI is different ways. Now Windows Vista has killed it.

What is this mystery application? How did its death come about? And - more importantly - what does it mean to you? It's NetMeeting. Used by millions for that peer-to-peer meeting in an ad-hoc fashion. Used by millions of others in its more recent branding as the app hidden behind the smoke and mirrors in things like Windows Messenger, Office Communicator, and others. That's right: Do you ever hit that "share application" button in one of those tools? If so, you use NetMeeting even if you didn't know it. As for how it died, that's best left to the consipiracy theorists. However, here's a couple of reasons I've heard from various places:

The code was too old and broken to be easily brought forward into Windows Vista
It competes with a forthcoming fee-based Microsoft product and had to be dropped
It couldn't be retrofitted for IPv6 and the new driver model on Vista

If any of those are accurate, it's most likely a fortuitous accident. However, that's what people are saying.

More important than the why question is the "what now?" question. How are people to do any real time collaboration between say a Windows XP machine and a Vista machine? It's impossible; at least using in-box tools. If you want true peer-to-peer like NetMeeting gave you, you need to find a third-party product. Be sure to add the project costs for evaluating, selecting, purchasing, and deploying such a product into the mix for cost-justifying any planned upgrades to Windows Vista. As most people understand, putting in a new OS doesn't happen overnight (unless you have a company of 10 people in which case it just might). So the reality is that people who collaborate freely today will not be able to once one of them is "upgraded" to Vista. In fact, this feature deprecation has the potential to delay (perhaps indefinitely) the adoption of Windows Vista in many corporations.

In this case the jaded, "Where do you want to go today?" seems to be a rhetorical question. Instead, Microsoft's taking you where they want you to go - into a brave new world where you have to spend money to collaborate.

LUA, UAP, and the restricted token

2005-10-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Is your token chokin'?
With Windows Vista, you now have UAP or "User Access Protection", sometimes known as PA or "Protected Admin". What does this mean in a practical sense? Well, for instance let's say you take a domain account (or a new local account) and place it in the Administrators group. With all prior versions of Windows based on Windows NT, that would be it - that user would be an Administrator when they logged on and could install all the spyware and trojan horses they wanted. When they clicked on "<SomeFamousPersons>Boobs.jpg.exe", it could do anything it wanted to the system. The least likely thing it would do is display what it sounds like it would in the title, right? Now, your account won't really BE an admin - at least not all the time.

A different style of logon
The login process now creates two tokens. The normal one that in our sample case would have granted admin rights (this one is held onto by the kernel and used when you need to elevate), and a new token - based on the standard one - that is used for UAP. This new token has the Administrators group set as a restricted group or "deny only". So if you run "whoami /groups", you'll see "BUILTIN\Administrators S-1-5-32-544 Group used for deny only" (I chopped a bit of extra text out of that to simplify it, but it's clear that the token has been restricted. If you were to then run a command prompt elevated (by right-clicking the shortcut for the command prompt and choosing "elevate"), you'd get a different token. Run the "whoami /groups" again and you'll see that you now have "BUILTIN\Administrators S-1-5-32-544 Mandatory Group, Enabled by default, Enabled Group". As you can see - a different token.

All of the whining on the newsgroups and other places on the net that reduce to "my account is supposed to be an admin, but it can't do anything" are about either bugs or design elements with UAP and the restricted token. Take for example control panel applets. By the time we see final versions of Vista, the built in control panel applets will either prompt for elevation immediately when they are opened (if they have to; generally if all of their functions are administrative), or they will be re-factored to seperate any admin-required functions from their "per user" functions and will show a lock symbol and button to "enable" the admin functions. You'll need to click the lock and either hit ConsentUI (for users who are in the Administrators group but have the restricted token; this is just a "is it OK to do admin things" dialog), or hit CredUI (this is for folks who are not admins; they can then enter alternate credentials if they have them in order to elevate).

I know today there are a huge number of scenarios where this just isn't implemented yet, or doesn't work. Many are due to "we haven't gotten to that yet", while others are just plain bugs. One of the first things I happened to encounter was when I logged on as a standard user, then needed to do some administrative work. I used my trusty method of starting a command prompt as the standard user, executing "runas /u:\ cmd.exe". When I got my new command prompt, it should have admin rights since that domain account is my admin one and is in the administrators group. When I tried to run something that was on the standard user's desktop (by CD \users\...) I got access denied! But I was an Admin! Not anymore, Vista says. My runas had activated my restricted token. Not the most usable thing; the only reason I had done the runas was to get credentials that had admin rights. This, and other scenarios are ones that we need to see fixed before Vista RTM's. Today, with UAP on the only account that never gets a restricted token is the builtin adminstrator account. That one, in our environment - following best practices, is scrambled. Both the name of the account and the password are 25 random characters and nobody knows them. No escrowing them, nothing. Domain accounts are used for all admin tasks.

Come on Microsoft; step up to the plate and get these scenarios working.

Those of you who managed to get through my previous posts know that I was working on the ability of my service to be able to use WTSQueryUserToken to get the user's token so that it can execute code on behalf of the user. This works (finally). Anybody care to guess which token is retrieved in this way? The restricted one? The regular one? Well, I've tried it - and it is the restricted one. So if the user is an administrator, they won't really be until they've hit ConsentUI and agreed that your code can perform administrative tasks.

OK, I C how it is...

2005-09-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

So, it turns out that creating a service that uses RegisterServiceCtlHandlerEx in VB.Net is in the realm of the "not really possible". It's impossible, except as a theoretical case where you re-write service base yourself. So, I had to "C" the light and just write a darn service from scratch using my arch-nemesis C.

Interestingly enough, I went ahead and started the service using the sample service provided by Microsoft in the Platform SDK. Believe it or not, that one uses the older RegisterServiceCtlHandler too instead of the Ex version. But, it wasn't much work to update their handler routine and rip out the named pipes demo stuff and just make use of their service shell. Saved me a bit of time anyway.

Now, the interesting thing is: this thingy works. Oh, I went through the normal crash, crash, crash while I figured out how to get my pointers in a row and remembered that C doesn't initialize your variables to nulls for you (nasty bug when I was trying to strcat to a non-initialized string and kept overflowing my damn buffer just like Microsoft). That's all just due to my relative unfamiliarity with the C language itself. However, I perservered and got the damn thing running.

On the home front, I just had my new Dell (new to me anyway, I bought it in Feb 2005) crap out on me. I have 5 Dells in the house, from an old XPS-T 850 Mhz P3 model to this new one and this is the first to up and crap out. I blame Maxtor. Their drives seem to be the only ones that ever fail. I bought this machine with the dual SATA drives in the mirroring or RAID 1 configuration figuring I could go a bit easier on the backups with TWO drives looking out for my important stuff. Sounded good at the time. So, the other evening we had some power lags or whatever they are - maybe brownouts is the term. This is where the lights go down a little dimmer for a second or two. We were watching a DVD and the TV and DVD player never had a problem. After 3 of these "lights down" events in 5 minutes, my wife and I went to turn off our computers. Both run through this huge (really about 60 pounds) power conditioner with a gigantic transformer and all in it. Mine then has a UPS connected to it too. So we shut them down. We left the kids machines up.

So, guess which one bit the dust? Yep, the NEW one; the one with the power conditioner AND the UPS. I boot it up in the morning and the array shows "degraded" and one of the drives shows "Error Ocurred". I let it boot, and it comes up with one drive. So I get on the Dell tech chat on another machine to get support. They want me to run diags. But I don't have the CD. So I download it. It wants to make a boot floppy. But the machine didn't come with a floppy drive. Ugh! So I made a boot CD and ran the diag only to find, yep: unrecoverable read error about 5 minutes unto the read test. So Dell agrees to send a person with a replacement drive. So far so good.

Then, I figure I should boot back into Windows to take a final backup from my one good drive. I boot and now the array says "failed" and shows BOTH drives with an error. It says I can pick one to mark as "normal" and it can correct the problem. OK, I figure this one is easy: pick the one that worked a little bit ago. BBZZZZT!!! Wrong answer. Ever seen "can't find NTLDR"? Well I have! So I give it 5 minutes to cool off and boot again. Back to both drives with an error and that helpful message that it can fix this. OK, why not - I pick the other drive. Hey! It finds the boot loader! Ever seen Galaxy Quest? You know the line: "Then it exploded"... Kind of like this... NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt. Damn! OK, so now I know. The mirroring bought me all of one extra boot - which Dell used up by making me boot into the diagnostics. I was so pissed by this time I didn't even call Dell and ask for TWO drives until the next evening.

I'm still waiting on the drives. Then it gets fun: you get to press F6 during the Windows install and have it ask for a floppy disk (in that drive that doesn't exist). Fortunately I have an inside source: a hardware god at work named Kevin that can loan me a drive to get through that idiotic thing where the F6 to add a driver ONLY recognizes a floppy disk. Hopefully in a few days I'll be back up and running...

Winlogon and Vista - stuck in the mud again

2005-09-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

If you've been following my trials and tribulations with the changes to Winlogon in Windows Vista you know that winlogon notification packages are no longer supported. If you haven't been following this - then get with it and read the back issues.

In my last post on this topic, I mentioned that I now had basic rights elevation (as LocalSystem) working and was going to move on to replace the winlogon notification functions. Well I hit a nice big fat stumbling block on that! It turns out that in order to register for winlogon to provide your service with notifications of changes like logons, logoffs and the like you need to register to accept SERVICE_CONTROL_SESSIONCHANGE. To do this, you call RegisterServiceCtrlHandlerEx with one of the flags having the SERVICE_ACCEPT_SESSIONCHANGE bit set. I've been doing this in Visual Basic.Net so that it can be maintained easily in the company. I've done very little work with C (only a couple of smaller project like my original winlogon notification package and a windows password filter), so I don't really want to dig in and create a whole service using C.

It turns out that the thoughtful folks at Microsoft designed the .Net Framework to call RegisterServiceCtrlHandler instead of RegisterServiceCtrlHandlerEx. I'm going to presume this is so that it works on NT 4.0, since the Ex version is available on Windows 2000 and greater. This, like the bit about not supporting reg_expand_sz in the framework, is a killer. It means I can't find a way to get the VB.Net "Windows Service" base class "servicebase" to call the "ex" version of the API and hence I can't receive winlogon notifications. I'm waiting on a definitive answer back from Microsoft (it seems some of the folks "in the know" were off gallivanting at the PDC this past week). However it is looking more and more like I am going to have to hack this together myself in C instead of being able to rely on the .Net Framework for the plumbing stuff and just do the business logic and a few API's like you should be able to do.

This seems to be a recurring theme. The .Net Framework has all these cool classes that all almost let you do something. They tend to just fall short of the mark at actually letting you do something useful. You almost get there, then find limits. For instance, in VB.Net 2003, you can do cool owner draw menus and put an icon on them. Great! Now, try doing that with a TrayIcon. Oops! It won't work. Again, you almost get there. Anyone else have these same frustrations? Anyone else find they call Windows APIs in VB.Net darn near as frequently as they did in VB6? I know I sure do, but then again I am usually doing something like calling the security APIs which haven't really gotten much treatment at all in .Net.

Even more important: Anyone out there know how to get VB.Net to use RegisterServiceCtrlHandlerEx in a Windows Service and get access to the additional notifications? Post a comment with a sample if you do...

Spyware, Adware, and PUS oh my

2005-09-12T13:09:00.000-07:00

Last night I was working quietly on my computer when a voice of sheer terror rang out from upstairs - "Dad, I need your help right now!!!". Not wanting to match the raw power of my daughter's screech, I calmly typed into Windows Messenger, "Please stop screeching and what is the problem?". I recevieved back, "My stuff is all rearranged and there are extra ones. And popups". Oh, boy sounds like Spyware I thought to myself. I typed back, "OK, I will be right there."

Girding for battle, I marched resolutely up the stairs steadfast in my belief that this would be a short, satisfying encounter ending in the well deserved death of YASP (Yet Another Spyware Program). Little did I know that these vermin and the a$$holes that create them are getting a bit smarter at avoiding removal. Last year I had an outbreak that cropped up on my son's machine after he made the mistake of letting a friend visit some stupid video game "cheat" site (one of these places that lists the cheat codes you type into video games). That one took a bit of work since two of the processes kept starting each other up if you killed one - but all in all took only about 30 minutes. This one got downright nasty.

First, the machine is at Windows XP SP2, is current on patches and does have SpySweeper on it. Running Spysweeper showed about 4 pieces of software. A manual look through task mangler showed at least 10 processes that were surely spyware. A partial list: InSearch.exe, MediaAcck.exe, thin-138-1-x-x.exe, svcproc.exe, vidctrl.exe, MediaAccess.exe, command.exe, jdzryj.exe, wintask.exe, casclient.exe, gms2.exe, and a scourge called "NewDotNet_36_8.dll" that had inserted itself in as a network provider. I didn't even bother looking up all of these, but some of the names were: Surf Sidekick3, CmdService (the one that launched command.exe), Casino Client.

Not being an expert on Anti-PUS (by the way, PUS is "Potentially Unwanted Software"), I figured it would still be no problem since I am pretty damn savy with Windows in general. I knew that some of these would have two components and re-launch themselves if killed, but I went ahead and started killing things with task mangler to see which ones were going to do that. After I found the EXE's that were re-starting, I decided to try a trick that I thought up on the spur of the moment - setting the ACL with a DENY on execute for the user ID I was logged on with and then killing the damn thing. (Please - I told you I am not an expert - don't tell me about your web site that has had this technique on it since 1999. I believe you, however it's still possible for others to discover the technique on their own, OK?). Well - that worked for some of them. One of the other ones (I think it was Surf Sidekick 3) noticed the ACL change and immediately threw out the ACL and replaced it with one that had only Everyone Full Control and of course it got launched again.

Next, I decided to clean any that I could out of the registry and reboot. I had put a deny execute on NewDotNet and several others. I cleaned out all of the registry entries from HKLM\...\Run and HKCU\...\Run, set items that were BHO's (Browser Helper Objects) to disabled and all that fun stuff. Rebooted, and presto - we were down to three things. CasClient was still there, Surf Sidekick 3 was there, and while NewDotNet was not running it's absence had made AD functions not work correctly (could no longer do ACL tricks with domain accounts as the lookups woudld fail even though GPO and mapped drives all worked). I then ran a "netsh int ip reset" or whatever that command is that removes the network add-ins and then ran the NewDotNet uninstaller. That issue was resolved.

One of the harder ones was the command.exe program. This was setup as a service! First time for ME to see spy/ad ware that was smart enough to do this. I tried to stop or pause the service, but the sneaky ba$tard$ had coded the service such that those control codes were not valid. So I tried to terminate the program and got access denied. I then used a sneaky trick to pull up a cmd.exe prompt as local system, and used "TaskKill /f /im command.exe" to nuke it. Then used "SC.exe delete cmdservice" to remove it from the registry's service database. Deleted the file, rebooted again and that one was sent packing.

Then I had to get nasty. About then I went to find my daughter and told her that it was down to this: Either I could kill the remaining vermin with WinPE or I would re-image her machine. I stalked down to my office to get a WinPE boot CD - not defeated but now knowing that this was not going to be the short battle I had anticipated.

I booted to WinPE and deleted the offending files. "Try to start back up now, you pile of rubbish!", I exclaimed. I then mounted up the HKCU registry hive for my daughter's account and the HKLM\Software hive for her machine into the WinPE regedit. It took just a couple of more minutes to hunt down and destroy the few remaining registry entries for this stuff.

I rebooted one more time and installed the latest version of Firefox and set it as the default. I gave my daughter the instruction that she is not to use Internet Explorer to work around a page that doesn't work in FireFox without checking with me first!

Elapsed time: 2 stinking hours! All wasted on this crap. Boy, if we knew who the developers for this stuff were - it sure would be satisfying to get back at them some way.

Winlogon and Vista - seeing clearly (as clear as mud)

2005-09-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I was posting on the trials and tribulations I've been going through in trying to replace the functionality of a Winlogon Notification DLL and a third party product for rights elevation. After some helpful pointers from Microsoft, I now have a minimalist version of this working. It's been painful, but instructive. The main things that were missing were the dwFlags of the STARTUPINFO structure was not set to STARF_USESHOWWINDOW (all that means is 1), and in the client piece I needed to set the "Global\" prefix specifier in front of the name of the memory mapped file I was using. In Windows XP you didn't need to do this because everything essentially ran in session 0 and hence defaulted to Global. It was only if you were doing something for terminal services that you needed to watch out for the proper use of "Global\" and "Local\" for your kernel objects (like memory mapped files).

Thanks to Eric for straightening me out on those two issues.

So far, the replacement service does a nearly adequate job of replacing the third-party rights elevation tool. I still have to incorporate a callback in the service to get notified of winlogon messages so that I can finish the functionality of the rights elevation (noticing a new user logon is important there) and add the piece that replaces the Winlogon Notification DLL. Remember, those DLL's got notified of startup, shutdown, shellstart, logon, logoff, lock, unlock, screensaverstart, screensaverstop and about 2 others. Under Windows XP, we used our custom notification dll to be able to run arbitrary code either as local system or as the end user during any of those events. (by arbitrary, I mean an administrator could make registry entries to cause code to run).

I'll post updates on how the additions to the service come as I add them.

If there's smoke, then there's fire

2005-09-03T16:55:00.000-07:00

OK, time to rant again...

<rant>
Does anyone else have any problem with all these people who smoke just throwing their burning cigarettes out the car window? I live in a state (California) that is able to boast one of the lowest percentages of smokers per capita in the US (which has a lower percentage per capita than many places in Europe and from what I understand all of Asia), yet I still see numerous people ignore those ubiquitous signs along the highways that say "Unlawful to throw flaming or burning objects...". It's as if these people (shall we call them inDuhviduals like Scott Adams) can't recognize that these signs are talking about cigarettes. They also ignore the signs that show that littering is a crime worthy of a $1,000 fine - in most jurisdictions more than a speeding ticket or a red light running ticket.

On my way to work (at 4:15 am) I generally see about 150 cars (tops) on my 38 mile drive. Only a few of those cars have the pleasure of being the car directly in front of me, or in the lane next to me where I can see the driver window. But, even with this small sample I see usually 2 to 3 cigarettes flung from windows every morning. On the way home - when it is light - I see the burned areas alongside the road that these inDuhviduals seem to delight in creating. I also see more of these scofflaws throwing out their unwanted stubs. Of course then, at that time that same commute is riddled with cars - just about the worst traffic in the area and we are going about 5 miles per hour - so at least I can yell at the jokers.

I also see in gas stations the way these folks seem to think it is acceptable to just open their door and dump their ash tray on the cement. I guess with the scarring of their lungs from the cancer sticks it would be too hard to walk over to the garbage can that is right next to the damn gas pump and dump their ash tray.

Any ideas on how to combat this?

Have a web site that we can post license plate numbers to of cars we see with people doing this? When you get reported a couple of times you get a ticket?
Design cars so that the windows won't roll down when there is cigarette smoke in the car?
Something better?

What's your favorite thing to yell at these people when you see them?

</rant>

Logon's long gone

2005-08-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

Admittedly most people never find the need to write a Winlogon Notification DLL. However, if you were tempted to: stop. Microsoft no longer supports them in LongHorny. Yes, they had a good run beginning with Windows 2000, continuing into Windows XP and Windows 2003 server. But, like many things where Microsoft just up and decides that "those darn developers out there crash our crap too much" they've pulled the plug on Winlogon Notification DLL's. Apparently too many people didn't free their pointers or something and caused Winlogon crashes. GINA's have been pulled too, but I imagine the GINA's of the world will unite in protest - maybe even the Regina's too.

So, if you want to acheive the same results that you used to be able to do with a Winlogon Notification DLL what's a poor developer to do? Never fear, some more difficult code is here! Instead of simply running a CreateProcess with the lpDesktop parameter of the StartupInformation structure set to "Winsta0\Default" like you could in the Notification DLL, you now have to create a service. The service must be setup to handle SERVICE_ACCEPT_SESSIONCHANGE and has a callback to get notified of logons, logoffs, etc. Now, due to some further changes in Windows, services can't easily put things on the user desktop. Simple things like what SMS does - deliver packages to the user desktop running as Local System are now more difficult because if you just launch them on WinSta0\Default they will run on the "services" session and not on the user console.

So how do you get them onto the user desktop?
Well, to quote Microsoft: "It becomes more difficult if you want to start LocalSystem code on the user’s “Default” desktop. That’s actually something that we would strongly discourage because of things like shatter attacks. So if you are calling CreateProcess and specify Winsta0\Default as the desktop, that won’t work as is from a service. It is still possible to do this, but as mentioned, that approach is strongly discouraged for security reasons..". It's always funny to then tell them, but you sell a product called SMS that does this. Anyway, since I still need that functionality I need to write this service. Besides isn't William Shatner getting too old to attack things anymore?

Can we get there from here?
It turns out that you need to do things like create a Security Descriptor (which is no simple task for VB.Net people like me), Duplicate the token, modify the token to be associated with a different session, and then call CreateProcessAsUser using your newly minted token (no, not a fake video game token; just a fake Windows token). All this uses some of the obtuse security API's that most people hope that they never even have to read about, let alone understand. So, I've done that (read about it, don't understand it). The good news is that it doesn't crash. The bad news is that it doesn't do much of anything at all. When debugging it under Vista, it shows "True" for the result codes of all of the calls. In fact, I even get a PID back in the ProcessInformation structure after the call to CreateProcessAsUser. The only problem is that the app never starts, even though I get thread handles, process handles, PID, etc. and a true result code. Boy this was simple before! Now its quite complicated. I'll let you know if I ever get this working. So far this has left me wondering if a shatter attack is what happens to your monitor when you get frustrated writing code for Windows.

AD, LDAP and the urge to merge

2005-08-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been working on code (don't call it a script - this is real code) to "migrate" user profiles to a new domain as part of a merger. Both companies have large Active Directory infrastructures, but one had to be chosen as the "post merger domain". However, it isn't physically possible to re-image everyone's machine the same day and just magically have them all logging on to a new domain as soon as regulatory and stockholder approvals are done. During that interim state that comes after the approvals, but before everyone is in one happy domain - there exists a need for certain tools.

Let's say that a user from company A is has a machine in domain a.company.com. He logs on to that same domain. However, after the merger he wants to logon to company B's domain - b.company.com. Put up the requisite trusts, migrate the groups and accounts with SID History and he can certainly do that, right? But - what happens to his "My Documents" folder, his application configurations and special toolbars, and most importantly of all the pictures of his kids that he uses as a screensaver? Logon to a brand new domain - you get a brand new NT profile, right? All that other stuff is MIA.

Enter profile migration. As I'm sure everyone knows, Windows NT based systems like Windows 2000 and Windows XP store pointers to your profile on disk. Browse to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and you'll see what I mean. Each SID shown there is the SID of a user (or system account). Under each is a "ProfileImagePath" that shows where the NTUser.dat (current user registry hive) and application settings, "my documents" etc. live. So, assuming the correct SID History migrations were done, all you need to do is get the NEW SID into the registry here and copy the info from the OLD SID over, reboot the machine and have them login with their new account. Presto! Their ugly kids are still on their desktops! The trick, when working with non-Admin accounts is to actually GET the new sid in there and copy the data over.

First, you need to locate the NEW account. Realize that in a large merger it is very likely that you will hit at least some name collisions between the two domains, so you can't just assume that user A\username should now logon as B\username. You have to find them by sid history since their new account may be named something different. I first tried "LookupAccountSID" since it was a Windows API call that was kinda short (unlike the horrible "ConvertStringSecurityDescriptorToSecurityDescriptorW" - how's that for a verbosity monstrosity, huh?). LookupAccountSid seemed good since it is documented as being able to lookup by primary SID or SID history. However, in practice - since you will need to have a trust up - it finds the old SID back in the old domain, even when you take pains to force the lookup to happen on a DC in the new domain. So, scratch that one.

Next, I thought I'd try LDAP instead. Turns out that LDAP is really only good at searching string data. So, when you have a blob type object like a SID, you have to mangle into a strange looking string first that looks something like this: \00\05\01\EA\... To do this, pass the SID pointer to ADsEncodeBinaryData which will convert it to a "funny string" for use in an LDAP query filter. Now, you can try something like "(ldap://dc=b,dc=company,dc=com");(&(objectClass=User)(sidHistory=" & sSID & "));name,samAccountName,ADsPath;subtree" to lookup that pesky primary SID from domain a.company.com in domain b.company.com. Except - you can't!

Nope, you can't make that query. Remember, the computer is in domain a.company.com, the user is logged on with their old account in a.company.com, and if you try that LDAP query against the domain that trusts yours b.company.com you get a "table does not exist" error. Thanks AD!! Thanks LDAP!! Nope, you end up having to first call DsGetDcName to find a domain controller in the other domain and send the LDAP query directly to it like this: "(ldap://somedomaincontroller.b.company.com);(&(objectClass=User)(sidHistory=" & sSID & "));name,samAccountName,ADsPath;subtree". Now, you've got the ADsPath of the user, you can use GetObject to get that user object, grab off the primary SID of the user, convert it to a string and... Whoops, you don't have Admin rights so you can't just pop that into the registry...

Now, what you have to do is ask the user for their password in the new domain and call CreateProcessWithLogonW to run your code again as the NEW user - passing in the old SID as a string on the command line. (Hopefully your user didn't run your code from a mapped drive: the reason for this is left as an excercise for the reader). Make sure to use the proper parameters to cause a user profile to be created. This will create those entries needed under ProfileList in the registry. Now that they exist, you just update them. Meanwhile, the first copy of your program is waiting for the second new one to exit. Since you have the old SID from the command line, you simply replicate the ProfileList values from the old to the new in the registry. Then the second copy can exit. The first copy might not have rights to create the new entries, but it DOES have read access. So the first copy reads the entries to make sure that they are correct. Now it can notify the user of success, inform them that they must logon with their new account and reboot the machine.

The user logs on with their new account, sees their ugly kids on their desktop and all is right with their world. They never knew the work that their friendly neighborhood geek had to go through to make this stuff work. They probably think the feature was built into Windows.

The slide show that wouldn't quit

2005-08-06T18:50:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the event with Microsoft in Redmond that we have been asked not to blog about. So I certainly won't blog about the content of those sessions; that stuff is still NDA. However, I can certainly talk about how the sessions themselves went. I was pretty excited after the first day of seeing the unmentionable product. There were a lot of PowerPoint slides, but there was also some live demo. The live demo goes a long way towards proving that there is actually some code written and a product will exist soon (the demos hardly ever crashed).

By the end of the second day, I was beginning to suffer from that oft endured PowerPoint poisoning. Yes, that state you get into where there have just been too many slides and you stop paying attention to them at all. By the third day, it got worse and I was thinking, "Just give me the bits and stop with these presentations; I'll test the thing myself." (OK, so I had to skip out on the last two sessions - I have a feeling I would have left those ones saying "Just kill me".)

It's funny how the PowerPoint poisoning was made worse by an internal Microsoft competition. They were competing to see who could make the best "PowerPoint animation" (I don't think I even heard them say "The best use of a PowerPoint animation"). Now this thing was multi-track with up to 5 sessions going at once. I could only attend one at a time, so can't pretend to judge them all. But the animations made me think of that scene in the movie Galaxy Quest where "Crewman number 6" (Guy) asks the characters "Have you ever watched the show?". I was thinking of these MS PM's - "Have you ever used PowerPoint animations?" I mean most were rudimentary. The way they were plugging each one we needed to have someone with a buzzer and have Tommy Lee Jones (Men in Black II) come out and say "This one's an example of 'Go home and do it again'." Anyway, they were "Not Guud" (as Jim Carey would say in Bruce Almighty).

Now that I have begun to recover from the PowerPoint poisoning I have begun getting very excited to get hold of the product that was being shown. I think it must have been the coolaid. I had heard you weren't supposed to drink it...

By the way, thanks to some Microsoft folks who made the trip quite interesting (in no particular order): Sloan, Tony, Nick, David, Iuliana, Ronna, Dan, Maria, Joe. Thanks - you guys rock.

The View from afar

2005-08-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

I've been attending a session at Microsoft this week that the attendees have been asked not to blog about. So I won't. However, there have been some discussions with other attendees that have nothing to do with the actual sessions that aren't covered by the prohibition against comment. So those are fair game.

Yesterday, I got the chance to catch up with an influential IT person from a really large company and chat about Vista. He was concerned that there really weren't enough business drivers for moving his machines over to Vista. We talked about the important fixed features like the improved cache manager / offline files that brings all documents that you open on the network local and manipulates them on your local drive (a big win for slower links), the destkop composition engine and the ability to run applications at different apparent resolutions, etc. However, at this point there still isn't enough Vista "there" for him to be convinced. Not being an MS evangelist (at least not being paid to be), I was pretty much done. We talked about Vista being the right answer for new hardware purchased in 2007, but that was as far as he'd go.

Sounds to me like MS needs to pump up the marketing machine and make any wins that are there in the product more obvious to IT managers and CIO's. If they don't, there will be a hard sell getting senior management to approve upgrading.

LUA LUA, oh baby - you've got to grow

2005-07-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned, I've been playing with the OS formerly known as Longhorn. One of the key deliverables this time around is that it is now supposed to be actually possible to run as a "User" or in LUA (Least-privileged User Access or Limited User Account depending on who you talk to) mode. With LUA, apparently we won't all laugh when MS publishes a security bulletin claiming that if we were running as a limited user, we would not be vulnerable to a certain issue. Today we all do laugh as next to nobody actually runs as a LUA user (outside of kiosks and the like) because nothing works correctly.

So, as part of the testing I tried to change the Time Zone. Nope, NADA, not gonna do it. Since the TIME can be security critical, but the Time Zone itself CANNOT (on NTFS, file time stamps are stored as GMT and the display in explorer adds offsets for the current time zone, also Kerberos uses GMT and ignores time zone offsets) it should be something that a LUA user can change. After all, when they travel from the US to Kazakhstan their appointments in Outlook should show in local time - not 12 hours off from local time. So changing the Time Zone is a fairly critical operation for people who globe-trot.

Lest you ask - I did go through the policy settings and found that although there is a setting to allow either just Administrators or Administrators and Power Users to change the system time - there is nothing about the time zone and lowly LUA folks.

Come on MS - let's not screw this up yet again. We really do WANT to run as LUA users. Let us do it this time.

The Horn of Plenty?

2005-07-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

Recently (like most of the rest of the IT universe) I've been playing with Windows Vista™ Beta 1 build 5112. The OS formerly known as LongTime, ah, I mean LongHorny, er make that Longhorn. Actually, they might as well have kept the name since IT geeks like me keep working with it until the cows come home.

A couple of cohorts and I have tried it on about 7 different hardware types so far. We've seen a couple of blue screens, some installs of various programs that make Vista reboot over and over, some annoyingly large icons on the desktop (that are nigh impossible to shrink down to regular old 32x32 size) and a virtual plethora (yes, that's for you Steph - think I wasn't paying attention to your presentation? Call my picture stuffy and get razzed, right?) of other issues both minor and major.

So far the biggest let down has just been the lack of features. You name it and feature X is shipping in the "Beta 2 timeframe". That and I think I'd kill for a working VPN client about now. Oh, and maybe some Anti-Virus that works - right, that would be good.

So I brought a notebook home running Beta1 to show off (damn, I'm a geek) and my wife and kids got that "oh, no, here he goes again" expression on their faces and came up with any excuse to get the heck away from me and the shiny new OS. You know, the "I have to take the garbage out", or the "I had better go do my homework." Is it just me, or could it have been the large icons that scared them off?

So - good experiences with Beta1? Bad ones? I'll be reading about them and publishing more of the things I run across here.

Do you see OWC?

2005-07-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

From the rant of week dept...

Recently we've been pushing sites on our network to hurry up and deploy Office 2003 already. Our original image was built with Office XP and we have had the 2003 version availble for the users to install for almost a year. It won't be mandatory until later this year due to corporate politics. However, one of the fun things we've been encountering is the lack of consistency provided by Microsoft in their OWC or "Office Web Components". Office XP shipped with "OWC10" which has a unique CLSID and does not have a version independent ProgID. Now Office 2003 Standard comes with OWC11, and Office 2003 Pro - mostly because the MS Access team couldn't get their act together - comes with OWC10 and OWC11. Guess what? OWC11 has a new CLSID and still has no version independent ProgID. So to instantiate them, you have to use the actual CLSID. It's created a problem for those folks who actually used the Office Web Components to do spreadsheet type things on their web sites. They end up having to change their code on their production sites to do an instantiation of the CLSID for OWC11, then check the object to see if it is == Nothing. If it is, try an instantiation of OWC10 instead. Seems a bit silly - and unfortunately the people who built the pages are never around anymore so maintenance can be iffy.

Why Microsoft, why? Why can't you create version independent ProgID's for these things like you do for say Excel? It's almost like the OWC team likes to physically hurt their customers (similar to Dilbert's boss). Couldn't those folks have just went into dentistry or something and let people who actually like customers write the OWC code?

Virtual History...

2005-07-24T12:47:00.000-07:00

Well everyone is talking about the supposed "Google Maps killer" Microsoft Virtual Earth. As many people know, it was up for several hours to test the production servers and is coming back Monday. I took a few moments to check it out, and came away with a sense that it is really more like virtual history; at least in the satellite imagery department. This is due to the obvious age of many of the satellite (or aerial) images available. As many noted, this seems endemic to the service and not just to one or more particular areas. However for my own home region it is at a minimum 10 years out of date (and in black and white or greyscale) while the analogous Google satellite image (same approximate size and exact same region) is in color and seems to be from about 18 months ago. A couple of schools, a Wal-Mart, an Orchard Supply, a Water-Park are just a few of the things missing from the Microsoft Virtual Earth satellite image.

Earth to Microsoft: It's all about the data dummy! You can stick a great UI, perfect UX, etc. onto the thing - but at the end of the day you need to have great data or nobody will use you a great deal. Hopefully that's something they'll get right soon. Although for now I can enjoy seeing my home region as it looked in days gone by...

While on the ranting path...

2005-07-23T18:39:00.000-07:00

Our company setup a deal with some people that provide little clip on pedometers (with our company name on them) and a web site that allows you to track your steps as miles on one of several famous paths. You go to the web site to sign up for the free deal and they send you your unit. So far, so good.

One of the first things you are supposed to do is calibrate your pedometer to your "steps". Now, one of my friends at work went into a whole spiel about how the mile came from the Romany military where 1,000 steps was a "mil" which became a mile. Pretty cool, and neat to learn some history as part of this. He mentioned that the way they counted was each time their right foot came down was 1. Great. So I look through the manual that is telling us to set the thing to low sensitivity and then take 100 steps and see what it says. If it is saying something too low, up the sensitivity. OK, fine. Not hard. But first, how about if you define a step? Turns out that I couldn't find out from their manual OR their web site what the heck a step is (each time you put a foot down or each time the right foot comes down like those Romans). So I finally find on their web site - not the definition of a step - but a statement that 2,000 steps is roughly a mile. OK - so now I know - I have it set wrong because it is counting like them pesky Romans. My friend had his set that way all weekend. We had to re-calibrate the things (again not hard).

But --- how hard could it have been to put in that darn manual or even on that web site what the heck they counted as a step? Come on, that's pretty lame.

So, anyway the family and I took a nice walk this morning before it got hot (It's 106 now) and I got in 11,147 steps. Measured the way the web site people want it.

Update: OK today the thing started counting about twice the steps it should have and I had to change the calibration again. It is still clipped onto the same shorts in the same spot as it was yesterday - but apparently that isn't good enough. Seems these units aren't very good at counting steps...

There oughta be a Law...

2005-07-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

<rant>

So what is it with these non-techie internet users anyway?
And the companies that "provision" them (set them up to be pwned)? I've gotten tired of hearing from people that take their corporate notebook or corporate home machine (you know, the one the team I am on worked hard on creating a solid image for), and try to load PPoE or some lame ass cable company software on it. Fortunately most of them fail as they aren't administrators. Some folks however have gotten admin rights and screwed up their machines royally loading this crap.

Then comes the really unpardonable part - the installer hooks them up on the raw naked internet. No firewall, no NAT router, just "we like SPAM and you'll be sending it in 10 minutes". Sometimes the user does this hookup themselves. Don't these people realize that this is dangerous? How many of those same folks would leave their car parked and unlocked at night in an inner city? Why haven't they "gotten" it yet that you have to treat the internet the same way?

I mean come on - a basic Linksys or Netgear type NAT router is what $39? Is there some reason the installer doesn't bring one with them? Or build NAT into the darn cable/dsl modem? If the user does install a firewall and the ISP's service in the area goes down - what happens? The user call some tech support script reading drone in some other country who tells them they have to disable their firewall and anti-virus.

Let's examine a few other things people want to do:

If you want to drive a car in most places, you take a written test and an actual driving test so that they can confirm that you actually do know you aren't supposed to speed up and go through red lights, cut other cars off, get drunk and drive, etc. Flunk the test, no drivers license.
If you want to operate a HAM radio, you take a written test, and... - hey seems to be a theme here - you need a license for this stuff and you have to be tested to get one.
If you want to be an internet user, you get out your wallet and give some money to an ISP. Wait a minute? That's IT? Where's the mandatory testing?

The problem becomes more clear. We let people (synonym Idiots or as Scott Adams says "InDuhviduals") connect up and start surfing with no actual knowledge of correct or safe behaviors.

Any takers? There oughta be a law...

</rant>

RSS Bandit

2005-07-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

I'd been using SharpReader for quite some time for RSS feeds and had been pretty happy with it. I had just "stumbled" into it when reading about MSDN RSS Feeds. SharpReader was the first one on the list, so it had to be the best, right? Well today my buddy at work Josh pointed out RSS Bandit. It seems to be a more friendly UI and the way it hosts the browser in its own tabs "holds" the UX together better than SharpReader does. If you've been using SharpReader, you may want to give RSS Bandit a try.

Testing the System

2005-07-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

OK, I just wanted to see if I was able to email in a blog post. It is supposed to work - but who knows: I might have set the thing up incorrectly. We will see if it works.

What's in a name?

2005-07-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe after a couple of years of "Windows Longhorn" and "...in the Longhorn timeframe" that it is now Windows Vista. We're already seeing all the jokes about "Hasta la Vista" and how one of the meanings of Vista - "A distant view or prospect" means it will be even later than expected.

It'll take some getting used to - I seem to remember that Windows XP seemed like a really stupid name too when that first came out. Of course at that time, Windows XP was a lot closer to shipping when it changed from "Whistler" to "Windows XP". Names like that just make you think that Marketing (for most companies, not just Microsoft) has a two drink minimum.