Pedro Vera's Web Log

We're moving!

2008-09-22T22:44:00.002+01:00

Pedro Vera's Web Log is changing platforms. The new site still has the same URL, http://pedrovera.com/ but it is hosted in the Tumblr platform. I am keeping the old entries here for archival purposes, all new content is at the new site.

New experiment: Amazon Kindle Wiki

2008-09-09T05:09:00.004+01:00

Now that I am starting to get a hang of the Kindle, and my friends are slowly embracing it, I decided it was time to put together some kind of online reference.

The obvious candidate for this is some kind of wiki. I have setup a Google wiki at http://wiki.pedrovera.com to see how that goes. Right now the wiki only holds general information about the device, but it also has a section where you can download my two novels in the Kindle format, plus plain text and PDF.

The Kindle version is far from perfect, mostly because the conversion tool that I used is still in beta. I would really like for Amazon to release the full specification of their digital publishing platform, for example, the proper way to tag for title and author.

iPhone 3G

2008-08-30T16:20:00.001+01:00

The Vera household has been a bit hostile since my dear mother in law came for her yearly summer visit. I love my mother in law, god bless her, the problem is her daughter, that is, my wife.

Whenever her mother is here she goes batshit.

This time the ordeal started because MIL wanted to buy an iPhone 3G for her other daughter, who is already with AT&T in Puerto Rico.

The problem: nobody would sell her one at the upgrade price, she needed the account holder in person.

After a week of FAIL, and without asking me, All Mighty Alpha Nerd and Master of Technical Decisions in the Vera Household, they decided to upgrade Ivette's iPhone 8GB to an iPhone 3G 16GB, then the deactivated iPhone 8GB could go to her sisters. That's a $300 upgrade for a phone that commands more than that on eBay.

I was furious, because as All Mighty Alpha Nerd and Master of Technical Decisions in the Vera Household, I feel entitled to always have the newest toy. I could not tolerate using an iPhone 8GB when my wife had an iPhone 3G 16GB.

No god damn way.

Of course, I couldn't afford to pay for upgrading my own, at least not yet, so I resorted to bitching and moaning. And lecturing.

For example, they went out for a drive and called me in a panic because they got lost in South East DC.

While carrying an iPhone 3G, which has fucking GPS in it.

Yeah, you can feel the rage already. It takes two lousy clicks to find out where you are at:

Click on the maps button

Click on the location button

That's it, you are done. If in range of GPS, it tells you exactly where you are at. Otherwise it tries to use cell towers and known wifi hotspots to give you a circle of uncertainty. The smaller the circle, the better the prediction is. In my old iPhone I had the triangulation peg my location within a car length, which is pretty damn impressive when you take into account what happens to GPS if selective availability happens to be enabled for your area.

After a week of bitching, moaning, pleading, etc. I wore them down and they upgraded mine, so now I also have an iPhone 3G 16GB, and my old phone (sorry Brian) is going to be my MIL's.

Now comes the best part: what the fuck for?

From my desk I still can't get 3G (but the Kindle can see it just fine, thank you). And my wireless access point decided that it won't let me login so I can add the mac address of the new phones, so I am surfing on EDGE while sitting 6 feet away from a wireless access point connected to 16MB cable!

What's different about the new phone?

It's lighter.

The buttons are chromed.

It smudges twice as much as my old one, because the back is now glossy black.

Now I don't have a dock.

And the AC adapter is maybe 1/4th the size of the old one, so it is even easier to lose.

And except for 3G, and it having twice as much storage capacity, and GPS, the device has the exact same feature set as my old phone.

The bill is now magically $15 more per phone.

The camera doesn't have the weird color spot that the old phones have, at least as far as I can tell.

Maybe it is a placebo effect, but normal voice calls are a bit better.

That's about it.

In terms of aesthetics, I still think the original back cover looks classier than the new glossy back. I haven't seen the white phone in person, I imagine it will be the ultimate chick phone (sorry Brad).

Flip Video Ultra

2008-08-30T16:04:00.001+01:00

Now that we are more or less having family gatherings once per month, I thought it was worth it to take another shot at making videos, since there is only so much you can convey from photos.

I was hoping to score something flashy, but the kind of HD camcorder that caught my eye is still in the $1000 range, and that's too damn much.

Worse, most of these videos would eventually end at youtube, so HD was really a god damn waste of resources, even if it was worth it for archival purposes.

Almost by accident, I ran into the Flip Video series. By looking at the specs it did not look like much, a tiny camera, almost no zoom, and one hour of video capacity.

What the hell is that going to be good for?

I got sucked into the reviews big time: pretty much everyone loves the damn things.

Why? Because they are simple, and they work.

Two weeks ago I took delivery of a Flip Video Ultra, it was $117 at Amazon and shipping was free. And that's where the fun started: In two weeks I have shot more video than the total amount of video I shot during the year that I owned my previous camcorder, a JVC miniDV that I sold in pristine condition more than five years ago (it was a year old, yet it had not been used for a full hour of total recording time).

See some of my videos at Youtube.

The reviews are right, this thing is basically perfect for the job. The quality of the video is not stellar, it looks a bit washed out but I was able to clean it up a bit with iMovie 7. Everything else is great. I can take videos of PJ, plug it into my Mac Book Pro and in less than half an hour I have already edited the video and uploaded it to youtube. VLC doesn't like the audio codec, but that's the only thing I have seen so far.

I have seen the output of the camera as:

Youtube, web resolution. Looks as bad as every other youtube video, no surprise here.

Youtube, AppleTV. Looks much nicer.

Youtube, iPhone. Looks fantastic.

AppleTV, h264. Looks very nice, not as nice as Youtube for iPhone.

I haven't made DVDs yet, so I have no idea what it looks like.

So far the videos have been a hit, and even PJ likes to watch himself on youtube, which is kind of funny in a meta way.

The good:

Inexpensive (not "cheap", it feels very solid, a quality product, not a cheaply made piece of shit). < $120 is a lot of bang for the buck.

It does one job, and it does it well.

It's fun to use.

The not-so-good:

I am a moron, because I did not read the instructions booklet I missed that the battery compartment has a lock button, so I spent my first week constantly pulling out the damn door by mistake.

The record button doesn't give enough feedback, so it is hard to tell if it engaged unless you are looking at the LCD.

An SD slot would have been great, but I am not losing sleep over it.

Amazon Kindle

2008-08-30T15:43:00.001+01:00

I was a very early reader. My mother taught me how to read by the time I was four, and I was reading Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne novels before I was out of elementary school. At least in my school district this was a rarity, even in high school when a teacher wouldn't believe me that I had read a novel (I am sure it was by Isabel Allende) on my own, not because I was being forced to.

It got me out of my normal Spanish class and into the "lit" class for a week or so, which was nice.

In US Army basic training you are forbidden from reading anything that isn't published by the Army, and you are handed a paperback, the "Smart Book" (Tradoc Pamphlet 600-4). Whenever you are not doing anything, you better be reading that book.

I carried it on my left leg pocket of my BDUs. On the right leg pocket I carried Clive Barker's Imagica. From 6 feet away it looks about the same size as the Smart Book, and I never got caught reading it. I had the Smart Book since before basic training and was already bored, so I needed the novel just to keep me sane.

Years later, I am still reading nonstop. It doesn't even bother me the cost, since there is always a decent selection of discounted books at every chain bookstore you can think of. The problem is storage.

A book per week habit means a collection of hundreds of books, which basically eat up your living space since you are only reading one at a time. In our case, we have a full wall covered with bookshelves, crammed to the top with 14 years worth of book purchases. And this doesn't take into account the books ruined over the years by insects, water, etc. If we still had them all we would need a second full wall.

And here comes the Kindle. The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader with prepaid 3G wireless connectivity, and integrated into Amazon.com. This means that, without even using a computer, you can browse the Amazon Kindle store from the device, pick the books that you want and they are delivered to your device in minutes. Want to read a sample first? No problem, you can download a sample and pay to turn it into a full version later, and it never expires.

It is being marketed as the iPod of the book world.

It is also ugly as murder, since it is not an Apple product people will bitch and moan about how ugly it is, but the truth of the matter is that once you are reading, you don't pay attention to the device, all that you do is look at the screen and it looks perfect.

People also bitch about the price: $359. What everyone seems to be missing is that this device comes with prepaid 3G cellular connectivity, which is expensive. My iPhone 3G costs $30/month to access the same kind of connectivity. With the Kindle, you pay $359 and off you go. I am sure that at least $200 out of the $359 is due to the prepaid connectivity.

Now, here is the smart thing that Amazon did, that Apple didn't: Amazon stores all of your paid content for you, and you are free to re-download as many times as you wish.

Fried your Kindle? You can pull all of your purchases with your replacement unit, no charge. You can't do that with iTunes and an iPod.

Ran out of space and are too cheap to buy a $8 2GB SD card? Delete some of your books, you can always pull them down again. You can't do that with iTunes and an iPod.

I also like that I can add my own content to the device. I can either plug the Kindle to USB, or I can remove the (optional) SD card. If I plug the Kindle to USB, both the internal memory, and the SD card, show as two separate storage units. There is no science as of how to add content, you simply drag files in the allowed formats into the documents folder in the Kindle or SD card and off you go.

If you want to convert your files to the AZW format, then you can try Stanza, which so far rocks.

Still, there are things that could be better:

The previous/next buttons need more resistance, to account for accidental hits.

The wheel button eats the battery if the device is asleep and the cover is closed.

The retention tab for the cover is a joke.

The rear door opens too easily. At least it needs a lock button.

The two most important buttons, the power and wireless buttons, are in a really stupid place if you are expected to use the cover.

Search sucks.

It doesn't allow you to arrange your books as folders. I added a few dozen files and it drove me crazy trying to figure out what was what.

Those are all minor nags, and Amazon is rumored to be already working on version 2. I would expect Amazon to address some of the usability issues, but one thing is for sure is that there is no way in hell Amazon is going to show up with a $99 Kindle, that is, unless it comes with a cellular service contract for $X/month.

Veraperez.com pwn3d again

2008-08-03T18:14:00.004+01:00

"Fuck me once, shame on you. Fuck me twice, shame on me."
- Cedric Daniels, The Wire.

Veraperez.com got hit with a Google black list again (thanks to Brian for catching this). And for the same bullshit as the last time. Parties unknown inserted an IFRAME with links to malicious code. Google automatically checks for these to protect their users. Anyone seeing Veraperez.com as Google search results is warned that the site links to malware. Anyone using Firefox and attempting to visit the site get a big red nasty sign explaining that the site is potentially dangerous.

On one hand, I can't complain about Google fixing my fuck ups, it beats the hell out of having to explain to my visitors why I let THEIR computers get fucked up by MY website.

On the other hand I am god damn furious that this is the second time in a month that this happens to me with a properly installed Wordpress. Am I the only one?

This time I went as far as to assume that maybe the account password was compromised, so I ended up changing my passwords in a bunch of sites (good luck using a dictionary attack now, assholes). Still, the damage is done, I will lose at least two days of traffic to this bullshit.

If three weeks ago I was concerned about Wordpress, right now I am downright fucking scared of it. I don't think I can justify offering Wordpress to any of my customers when they can run a proper blog off Blogspot with their own domain names and with a hell of a lot less concern for security issues than when trying to run Wordpress stand alone.

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

2008-07-26T02:27:00.000+01:00

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

Word cloud

2008-07-25T15:04:00.001+01:00

Here is the Wordle.net map for this blog:

And here's the one for Veraperez.com:

Frustrated

2008-07-23T16:09:00.001+01:00

We have a code word/meme that is used a lot by #asp regulars, it is used to convey frustration with something that is work related:

This is how I feel right now.

Another seemingly infinite wikipedia session

2008-07-23T05:26:00.001+01:00

I know more than a few people that can't help but get sucked into wikipedia whenever they go there just to check for one specific thing. It scares me because whenever I get sucked in, I blow hours at a time. Here is the result of just two hours worth of wikipedia browsing/reading just for this evening:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia%2C_Pennsylvania

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltpeter_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltpetre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Valley%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah%2C_Nevada

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannack%2C_Montana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feisal_I_of_Iraq

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auda_ibu_Tayi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ferrer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_bridge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Sharif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Delon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_of_Arabia_(film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_town

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Ohio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumont_Reserve_Fleet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Oriskany_%28CV-34%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Langsdorff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spake_Zarathustra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Szandor_LaVey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_Prince_of_Wales_and_Repulse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_battleship_Strasbourg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casabianca_%28Q183%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_de_main

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Normandie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsize

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_French_fleet_in_Toulon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Anton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condor_Legion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Franco

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Romero

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_%28Spain%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29#Red_and_White_Terrors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palacio_de_Lecumberri

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram%C3%B3n_Mercader

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dali_Young_Virgin_Auto.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Virgin_Auto-Sodomized_by_the_Horns_of_Her_Own_Chastity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_universe_%28fiction%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_%28film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

The list is backwards, so my session starts at the bottom of the list with the Watchmen page.

Savage calls autism a "fraud and a racket," the blogosphere calls Savage every name in the book

2008-07-22T17:33:00.000+01:00

And then some.

Freedom of Speech is being able to go on national television, and with no preparation or knowledge whatsoever, state that autism is a fraud and a racket, that 99% of autistic kids are spoiled brats. This is what Michael Savage did.

Freedom of Speech is also being able to say something like this: "Michael Savage is a sorry piece of shit that intentionally riled up one of the most vocal parental advocacy groups in the country in order to gain notoriety." That's what I just did.

You see, I don't have the burden of kindness that my friend Karla has, who wrote a very painful rebuttal to Savage's moronic rant, so I feel absolutely no guilt or remorse about calling him a sorry piece of shit.

I am one of the lucky parents of a child that has just mild autism. PJ doesn't rock himself for hours while staring at space, he hurts himself more by doing something stupid like climbing too high, than by hitting himself. He has made incredible advances in speech, thanks to the priceless help from the Fairfax County (VA) special education programs that he qualified for since he started school. He is emphatic, and most of the times he cheerfully meets new people. But he is still autistic.

My house is in an eternal state of disarray. We clean on one side while he wrecks havoc on the opposite end. He loves pizza, which means that he will ask us to order him two regular sized pizzas, enough to feed two or three people, and he will carry them throughout the house for the next day or so. Oh, and he is one of those people that like cold pizza straight out of the fridge.

When we have fried chicken, he has to be served exactly five legs. Not four, not six, five. He likes to fill up his own balloons with helium, a kit is $24. If he doesn't get at least two of those per week, he melts down.

Oh, yes. The meltdowns. Imagine a temper tantrum where the kid is not trying to blackmail you into doing whatever it is that he wants. A tantrum in which the child has absolutely zero self control. That's an autistic meltdown. PJ gets one or two per day, which is awesome. Almost everyone else I have checked with tells me of days with constant meltdowns from the moment the child wakes up until it is time to bed.

When the poor kids finally fall asleep, you feel sorry for them because you just can see that they are completely drained.

Karla is not exaggerating about the house damages. I also got the broken wallboards and the paint stains. I also got yogurt stains in my ceilings. Oh, and he is an escape artist. I am in constant terror that he is going to take off running and end up under a truck in Wielhe avenue. We have locks in all of the windows, the sliding door to the patio is blocked and the balcony is useless to us. The door has a lock on the chain.

About a month ago I realized that, if you don't count the kitchen cabinets, the fridge and the stove, and a shower sliding door, there is not a single thing in this house that is older than PJ. Everything else, even bathroom cabinets and BOTH toilets, have been replaced at least once in the past 9 years.

One autistic kid in the family is extremely expensive. Two? I can't even begin to visualize that. And PJ has no dietary restrictions, there are many autistic kids out there with serious gastric problems, and that means spending even more money for groceries.

By the way, the end result of this incident with Michael Savage is that he is going to come out and pour his heart out and tell us all how he did not mean to do that, and how he really feels the pain of the autistic parent. And it will all be a crock of shit.

The car won't start

2008-07-20T19:20:00.000+01:00

And there I was, with a really sore throat, which made me cough like crazy (and that hurts even worse), when I heard somebody knocking just minutes after Ivette left for work.

It was Ivette.

"The car won't start."

Had this been in the middle of winter, I wouldn't had panicked (it's a no-brainer). But a drained battery in the middle of summer? It opens all sorts of possibilities.

Of course, Ivette being a woman, her immediate reaction was to call roadside assistance. That wouldn't work yet, so I told her I would take a look at the Jeep.

The sonofabitch was dead! The car's power locks would not even work, the only light inside the car came from the odometer, which is obviously powered by a small battery.

Fine, I thought, I'll pop the hood. The battery terminals were covered by neat mounds of acid foam. It looks as if the battery simply blew up from the heat, it was not the kind of acid residue I would have expected.

Fine, I thought, let's get a can of soda. With the terminals now clean, I tried again. Still dead.

Part of me prayed that it was only a dead battery, and not a fried alternator or worse. I called the local service shop to see if they had the battery in stock.

$100, and they would return $15 once we handed back the old battery. Oh, and they did not deliver, there was no way to get the battery unless I went to pick it up. I only have one car, so this is definitely a problem.

Ivette called a coworker, and 20 minutes later I had the new battery. Oh, and it was now over 90 degrees.

Overweight + sore throat + coughing + black car + 90 degrees < > fun

One would think that this is the end of the bad luck, but for some reason, some piece of shit with a sense of humor decided to specify metric bolts that were so close to their English equivalent that it took me almost half an hour to be convinced that I had the right socket.

On top of that, there is a plastic wedge, kept in place with one of the magic metric bolts, that is used to keep the battery clamped down. That bolt was exactly two inches deeper than the extension that I had at hand, so for half an hour (or so it felt like) the wrench was making three clicks per attempt. I was not using my own tools, so I had not noticed that the kit had a universal joint, which was not needed but did add another two inches to the total reach of the socket wrench. I was finally in the game.

It took me over an hour to remove the old battery, and I don't think it took five minutes to get the new battery installed. By then I was already resigned to the idea that the car wouldn't start and I would still need to call roadside assistance.

The sonofabitch started on the spot. It was the stupid battery after all. By then I was so drained that I could barely carry the dead battery to put it in the trunk so we can exchange it later.

By the way, the car is 5 years old, and that was obviously its first battery, so I am amazed that nobody tried to sell my wife a new battery the last three times she had the oil changed. You can always count on them to try to up-sell, so it shocks me that none of them noticed that the battery was on its last legs.

WTF is going on in the US Air Force?

2008-07-19T20:45:00.001+01:00

What the hell is going on in the Air Force? Loose nukes, breakdown of military discipline, top leadership firings, and now they are trying to spend millions because their top generals don't fly with enough comfort already?

Did these dumbasses forget that they work for a branch of the military instead of a Fortune 50 company?

And worse, even after they are told not to do it, they still keep on pushing? What about a half-dozen generals wasting valuable time bickering over the right color shade for the leather in their flying Lazy boy chairs? I flew across the god damn Atlantic Ocean in a C-141 in seats made with canvas or nylon strips. It's funny because this was also the flight where I had the most leg room anywhere, since we were sitting in the cargo bay, and our baggage was strapped down on the floor in the middle of the cargo hold. I had at least one yard from my feet to the closest object.

I flew in the opposite direction in a C-5 Galaxy, the biggest cargo plane that we have. I actually had an airliner-type seat, which faced backwards and was slightly tilted down. It was a miserable flight.

And it was free, since it was a space available flight.

Why are the US Air Force Generals burning taxpayer money in flight accommodations that are even more luxurious than one of our DoD owned small executive jets? And why not keep using the silver bullets?

The silver bullets are small trailers that fit inside most of our cargo jets. A VIP, say Jack Ryan, can sneak into a cargo plane with a silver bullet, where he can work for most of a transatlantic trip and still have a chance to take a quick nap and a shower. The end result is that the VIP gets to use most of that idle time for work purposes, and is mostly ready for action once he lands.

They could have probably bought a few more of those trailers and keep them low profile. The emphasis on this approach is comfort and convenience, not luxurious excess. I am sure the mattress probably sucks, but sleeping in one has to beat the hell out of sleeping upright in a god damn parachutist jumper seat.

If your VIP can remember the specific shade of the color of the leather seats, then he is the wrong guy for the job.

Another thing that is bothering me: why in the fuck are we ferrying around top USAF brass? What is it that they need to do that can't be done with a secure video link? We are not building new strategic Air bases out of the US, so it is not like they need to inspect these (what you need for that is a good civilian engineer). The Air Force is fighting their wars with strategic bombers dropping non-nuclear ordinance, and UAVs that can be piloted from across the world. So, why do they need to go outside of the US? Any why aren't the Army and Marine generals being treated with the same kind of concern about their comfort?

Do you remember the last time a Marine general complained that he did not like the shade of the leather in his Lazy boy chair?

And for the record, I would rather fly in the cargo hold of a C-141 than in a MATS charter jet that feels like it is about to disintegrate as soon as it takes off. The C-141 was louder, but it felt rock solid, while the charter jet felt like it was falling apart.

Don't tell me it is free and then ask me to pay for a different thing as a condition

2008-07-19T16:16:00.001+01:00

Lulu.com is advertising a "limited offer" for a distribution package that includes a free ISBN. ISBNs are usually $125 when you buy them one at a time, and you can only buy them in batches of powers of ten. I thought that it sounded too good to be true, after all, I had to buy my first two ISBNs.

Well, the reason that it sounded too good to be true is that there is no way to get this free ISBN unless you purchase a hardcopy of your book from Lulu.com. If you don't buy the hardcopy, you don't get to move to the final step, where the ISBN is submitted to bowker.com.

No free ISBN for you.

Why not just advertise the package for whatever it costs to print one book? Th end result is the same, but you are not lying to people.

How not to ride a Segway

2008-07-19T13:08:00.002+01:00

Don't do this with your Segway (from The Fail Blog):

Now available in the Amazon Kindle Store

2008-07-19T01:43:00.000+01:00

Both of my novels are now available at Amazon's Kindle Store:

Book #1: Shining Star, first published July 2004

Book #2: Pulling Strings, first published January 2006

If you are either published, or self published, and you are interested in publishing your books through the Kindle, all you need to do is join the Amazon Digital Text Platform. It is free, you retain full ownership of your work, and the royalties are no worse than what you can get elsewhere. I did it because I can't turn down the opportunity to open one more sales channel for my books.

From the technical standpoint, the process is very simple. For each of your books you do the following:

1. Fill a section with the ISBN (as far as I can tell, it isn't mandatory) and a few more details about the book, including five categories plus a list of keywords. You also upload a cover image.

2. Upload your final copy of the book, they accept most common formats. I tried with MS Word, HTML and PDF. I got more control by using PDF. Amazon provides plenty of documentation for those that would like more control of the formatting.

3. Use the book preview utility to verify that the book is rendered the way you want it to.

4. Enter your sale price.

5. Hit publish.

You are done. From the moment that you hit publish, to your book first showing in search results you can expect anywhere from 12 to 72 hours. One of my two books made it to the search results in ess than 24 hours, the second one is up and running but it is not showing up in searches yet.

A cool thing I noticed is that since HTML gives you the most control, you don't really have to waste time agonizing over your layout and then generate the perfect PDF. I was using Open Office 2.4 (had to downgrade from 3.0, it ran like shit even on this Mac Book Pro 2.33) and I remember how much trouble it was to get the stupid formatting of the headers, footers, pagination, etc. done right. Now I know this is trivial, so I can go back to writing and not having to worry about formatting.

Things I did not like:

1. Some things are done with AJAX functionality that actually works better in Safari than in Firefox, a first for me. Uploads in Firefox worked maybe half of the time.

2. The cover upload failed about half of the time.

3. I did not see a way to buy an ISBN. ISBNs can be bought directly from Bowker for $125. You can get them as cheap as $50 from other sources, but then you won't have control over the publisher name listed with the ISBN. I got my two ISBNs through Lulu.com, it was less than $100 each.

Except for those three things, it is pretty nifty.

Veraperez.com is back on business

2008-07-19T01:17:00.001+01:00

After four very stressful days, Veraperez.com is back in business.

The good news is that the Google mechanisms to detect and block malware distribution sites seems to work.

The bad news is that the Google mechanisms that detect and block malware rely on the cooperation of your browser. Safari loaded my site every time, there was no warning. Firefox would not load ANY of the subdomains, or even the control panel. I did not bother to try with IE because I could not risk infecting my XP in Parallels.

Still, I have two huge concerns:

1. How the fuck did I get infected? I was using the most current version of Wordpress, and I never work on my sites from Windows, so how the hell did the IFRAME get injected? Wordpress 2.6 came out AFTER I was informed that the site was infected, and I did not see any security advisory, so I can't tell if it was injected through a direct exploit, or through the comments.

I really want to know what happened, because I know too many people that use Wordpress, including a lot of my customers, and I need to be prepared to help them.

2. The cleanup process is way above the heads of most normal Wordpress users. I am a nerd, and it still took me four days to completely clean the site. I don't even want to think what would happen to the thousands of people that installed Wordpress because it promised them a simple, 5-minute install. On top of this, the Google diagnostics page gives you very little details on what was wrong, or so it seems. All information that I needed was right in front of me, but I did not notice it. Had I searched my Wordpress database for the IP address of the malware site that the IFRAME was loading from, I could have fixed this mess in half as much time.

If you are running Wordpress, and you are stuck with it (more on that later), then search your posts and comments for IFRAMEs, and make sure that you are on the most current version of Wordpress. There should be a feed that tells you when new releases are out, so you might as well subscribe to that too. If you are not using Spam Karma 2, go get it. It's free software, so all you have to do is download and install it. If you are running multiple copies of Wordpress, consider switching to Wordpress mu, so you only need to update one copy.

Stuck with Wordpress: that should be a very small percentage of users. In my case, I need Wordpress because I use a custom plugin for my text link ads. The only blog system that they support is Wordpress, so that is what I need to keep using. If you don't belong to that group, then maybe it is time to consider letting somebody else to run it for you. Wordpress.com has free Wordpress hosting, and Blogspot is not that much different from the workflow perspective. When was the last time that either Wordpress.com or Blogspot botched an install, or got pwned?

Also, just because you use a free blogging account doesn't mean that you can't use a personal domain name for it. I am on Blogspot, yet I am using Pedrovera.com for it. Wordpress.com has a similar feature but I don't know if it is free.

Will the iPhone 3G blend?

2008-07-17T16:45:00.002+01:00

The only reason that I can stomach this is because I haven't upgraded my iPhones to 3Gs:

(found through TUAW)

God Bless The Internet.

Veraperez.com got PWN3D

2008-07-17T02:18:00.000+01:00

Yup, it happened.

It doesn't matter how hard you work at it to keep a site up and running with proper software, somebody always finds a way to go around and exploit it. In my case, somebody, somehow, managed to inject one blog posting with an iframe that points to a known malware distribution site.

Assholes.

The sad thing is that the site was compromised just four days before Wordpress 2.6 came out, not that I know for sure if this new version has fixed that problem.

And people still ask me why I am blogging from Blogspot instead of hosting my own Wordpress. When was the last time that Blogspot was compromised?

Happy Birthday, Trinity!

2008-07-16T14:03:00.000+01:00

Trinity was the first test of technology for a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what is now White Sands Missile Range, headquartered near Alamogordo. Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium bomb. The Fat Man bomb, using the same conceptual design, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a few weeks later. The detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT and is usually considered as the beginning of the Atomic Age.
[From Trinity (nuclear test) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

The threat of nuclear annihilation for us all became real 63 years ago. Since then, we have all been sons of bitches. Mutually Assured Destruction came and passed us. Now we are living in the age of the dumb bomb and the dirty bomb.

And social networks. Just think what a pain in the ass archeologists are going to have 1,000 years from now, trying to figure us out.

Portable paintball auto turret

2008-07-13T21:31:00.002+01:00

Alec Esotérica showed me this abomination:

There is a project page at http://www.paintballsentry.com/.

Yahoo rejects joint proposal from Microsoft, Icahn

2008-07-13T13:16:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you wish for problems to just go away, and it happens for a little bit. Then something like this comes up:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft's latest attempt to buy its online search operations in a "take or leave it" proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.

As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft packaged its latest offer with activist investor Carl Icahn, a billionaire who is seeking to overthrow Yahoo's board of directors in a shareholder meeting scheduled for August 1.
[From Yahoo rejects joint proposal from Microsoft, Icahn - CNN.com]

The whole Yahoo dilemma is turning into a death watch. A really slow one. It makes you wonder if Microsoft is even interested in all or part of Yahoo, or they simply want to create enough disruption to make the company collapse onto itself.

The sad thing is that the damage is already done. Right off the bat it cost Jerry Yang his job, since there is no way in hell that he is going to survive the board of directors meeting. Icahn is only counting his beans, so if what makes sense is to wrap it up and deliver it to Microsoft, that's exactly what he is going to do. If instead makes sense to slice and dice Yahoo, and give Microsoft the parts that they are willing to buy, then he'll do that.

Two outcomes: Microsoft eats Yahoo as a whole, or Microsoft gets the Yahoo units that it wants, and the rest gets spun off (thanks God Flickr doesn't suck!). Both paths mean no more Yahoo.

And if there is a third way out of this mess, nobody has bothered to mention it. I found three quarters that had rolled under my laptop long ago, but I don't think I want Yahoo even if they sell it to me for 75 cents.

Flickr? I'll give them 25 bucks for it.

A long trip

2008-07-12T14:40:00.001+01:00

I spent a few years as one of the thousands of drivers that risk their lives on a daily basis in the Washington, DC beltway. In my case, it also included the Dulles Toll Road, which means an extra dosage of danger. These are very wide, multilane roads, where almost everyone seems to be driving no less than 20 MPH over the speed limit. Risk driving slower than the pack and it feels like they are trying to run you out of the road.

If the weather cooperated, it was not bad. I had a 1993 Mazda Miata LE, basically a street legal club racer. As long as I stayed the hell away from semis and taller vehicles, most of the other cars seemed to see me fine. If they did not see me, I had air horns in the car, which made it sound like, well, a semi.

I also cheated. I was on flex time, so I would start work at the house, until around 9:00 AM. If I took the old Georgetown Pike, I could avoid the Dulles Toll Road completely, while still having a blast. By that time the Pike is clean, and the Miata loved that road. This left me just a few miles of beltway, then off as soon as I crossed the American Legion bridge for more back roads into Bethesda, MD.

In the afternoon I left at 3:00 PM unless we wanted to golf at River Road in Potomac, MD. If I could leave Bethesda at 3:00 PM it meant avoiding the traffic flow issues when River Road hits the Beltway. I could go home and work a few more hours, having spent less than two hours in the day actually driving.

Had I tried to drive at the normal hours, it would have meant up to an extra hour a day just driving.

When I switched jobs, my new office was across the street from a metro rail station. A month later I had given away my Miata to a charity, since I did not feel like paying insurance on a car that was being driven less than 50 miles per month (down from 300).

In this current job I telecommute 100%, I only go to one of our offices a few times per year. Yesterday I had to go to a different office, 50 miles away. 50 miles back when I was in Germany, or during my first few years in Virginia would have not made me blink. That was then. Now? It might as well be 300 miles.

I decided to try to use a GPS receiver, a TomTom One 130. It was the first time that I ever used GPS in a vehicle.

It was awesome. The device was able to predict my arrival within one minute, and I did not get lost until the last 40 yards of the trip because I did not believe that it was telling me to make the right turn that I needed (I was wrong of course). The only problem is that it took me through the beltway and I95, so it was basically white knuckles all the way.

For the return trip I forced it to ignore I95, the beltway and the three biggest roads close by. The end result? A slower route that was 10 miles short. For the first 15 minutes or so it sent me through back roads with really beautiful scenery. I was a bit concerned that it was driving me in circles, but it was obvious that I was making progress. It sent me through back roads almost all the way to Rockville, MD. From Rockville it told me to hit I-270 (AKA "The Parking Lot") which was empty at that time of the evening, then a few miles of beltway into Virginia.

This is an area that I know well, so I could have driven over I-270 and keep going straight until I hit the Potomac, which would have let me skip all of the beltway on the Maryland side until just before the American Legion bridge.

After I crossed the bridge I skipped the planned route, it wanted me to hit route 7, but I knew that the Georgetown Pike would be empty. The GPS receiver did not struggle recalculating, but it did keep trying to give me ways to re-join route 7.

Not too bad a trip, and even with the detour I again arrived within one minute of the original predicted ETA. After this I don't think I can drive a long distance without GPS. Even if I know where I am going to, it is just too nice to have an accurate ETA prediction based on your position and speed.

Blogo

2008-07-09T04:35:00.000+01:00

This is a test entry made with Blogo.

Things I like/dislike (most of these will be judged against Ecto, my golden standard for blogging):

The preview actually pulls my blogspot template, pretty sweet.
The way that the lists toggle works is a bit confusing.
I don't see an HTML view.
It uses less screen space, yet doesn't feel crowded.

I am going to quote this sentence.

I am really liking the live preview. It's a no-brainer.

I just noticed that it keeps track of multiple images embedded into a post. I have no idea how I am going to make it work with Flickr, but direct files seem to be working.

I just managed to crash it.

I have no idea how to paste html into an entry. I have an image tag generated by Picasa, which is also how it would work in Flickr and Youtube.

Bummer.

What?

2008-07-03T18:53:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Alex Esotérica for showing me this:

Twitter Bashing

2008-07-02T14:11:00.001+01:00

It seems this is the month for the haters to get out of the woods and crank up the bashing against Twitter. It is one hell of an idea, with a horrible execution. The powers-that-be have figured out that instead of letting it crash hard, they can turn off certain features, so the service stays up in a stripped-down fashion. I actually approve of this, but only if it is done by design.

Plus what the hell, it is a business decision, they are trying to trade outages for (user) outrage. People will complain no matter what you do.

There is also a lot of noise making the rounds about their choice for the technologies used to build and run Twitter. I know almost zero about Ruby on Rails, and I am a card-carrying Microsoft-dot-whore that also happens to be a fan of PHP and Perl, so I can't really tell what is going on there except that two of the most powerful websites that I know, Fark and Slashdot, never seem to go down and both are built on older but proven technologies.

It is obvious that they have growing pains to deal with, but I am hoping that this is not the engineers wearing blinders and insisting on a technology just because they want to do it and not because it is the right thing to use.

On top of this, there are also some challengers that are ready to take advantage of all of this turmoil. Just last night I was checking FriendFeed, and I am impressed enough that I set up an account.

I was using a similar service in the past, but it was pure aggregation, while FriendFeed allows me to post directly to it, plus pulling a lot of the stuff I do in other sites.

Kickass.

Am I going to dump Twitter? Nah. I'm a Twitter Shitter, I can't go back from that, and a few of my friends actually started using Twitter just because of that comic. I really like it because sometimes I want to post something here and all I have is a sentence or two, and I don't like to throw stuff in the blog unless it is semi-readable.

Your registrar is ripping you off? Ditch him!

2008-07-01T03:20:00.001+01:00

Some asshat that works at GoDaddy got caught shilling on their domain auctions. This is the kind of crap that gets you kicked out of eBay if you try to pull it off. What the miscreant was doing was bidding on their auctions to raise prices artificially.

And that's not the only complaint. Almost everyone I know has had at one time a domain taken hostage by GoDaddy. For example, they'll keep you from transferring the domain out of GoDaddy. Or they will advertise their prices without some of the mandatory fees, to make it seem lower than their competition. In some cases they will tell you the domain is free if you buy some other service, but then it is almost impossible to transfer out.

Network Solutions was notorious because it was extremely hard to recover login information to manage a domain. I remember a few times when my employer would have to send a stupid fax just to prove that he owned the domain, which was stupid, there was no way that they could prove that the fax was legitimate.

To that add the Domain Registry of America, they harvest addresses off WHOIS, then send you a letter that looks like it is your domain renewal bill, when in reality they are asking you to transfer your domain to their registry.

If you only have one or two domains, you probably couldn't give a shit. But what happens when you are the designated geek that has to maintain custody of dozens, sometimes hundreds of domains? Do you really have time to deal with even two hosed domain names at the same time, and with a registrar that is not exactly cooperative?

Maybe it is time to you to become your own registrar. I have been my own registrar for the past four years, and I couldn't be happier.

How to become your own registrar

1. Find a registrar that is accredited by ICANN and has a reseller service.

2. Setup your front end, which should take you no more than an hour or so.

3. Buy one or two domain names from yourself, so you are familiar with how the process works.

4. Make sure that you have either a Pay Pal account setup for business, or a credit card merchant account. Again, email me if you need to know how I deal with credit cards outside of Pay Pal. For my personal needs, Pay Pal has been more convenient, most of the time my credit card merchant account sits idle.

5. Setup your prices, and don't be greedy. What you want here is to make about $1 over whatever it costs for the domain wholesale, plus any Pay Pal fees. If it costs you $8, sell your domains for $9, not $15.

6. Show your friends that you are now running your own micro registrar company, show them the WHOIS for your two test domains to prove that it isn't a scam.

7. Every time somebody bitches about getting raped by Network Solutions or GoDaddy, tell them that you have your own micro registrar and that you can beat their prices.

With a little bit of common sense, these domains will sell themselves. All it takes is for you to give a decent deal to a few people that have been mistreated by other registrars. You will be surprised of how many people that you know have more than two or three domain names that you just don't hear about.

The next time your boss throws a fit at having to renew a dozen Network Solutions domains in one shot, show him your price list. He'll probably move a couple to you even if out of curiosity. My first big customer was the owner of my previous company. He still renews his domains with me because not only am I much cheaper, but I have never screwed him or had any delay dealing with technical issues.

A friend of mine, a literary agent, decided to get domain names and vanity web pages for his top 15 writers. That's over 30 domain names from just two people.

Next thing you know, word of mouth will take care of it. Friends of friends will come out of the woodwork asking for your services. Since it is going to be small enough, it does not take a lot of effort to manage it, yet it pays itself no matter your volume of business.

Another thing, every now and then your wholesaler will throw in a discount for a few weeks. What you want to do here is try to use that as a hook for more business down the road, so lower your prices accordingly. My wholesaler has slashed the .info domain registrations so much that I can sell them for $2.99 and still make a buck on each domain. Those domains renew a year from now at their regular price, and most people will either pay for them or let them expire, most people won't transfer a domain if they can help it.

If you would like to know about my domains wholesaler just send me an email and I'll gladly show you their site. Their system allows you to resell both domains and web hosting.

The Perfect Storm

2008-06-29T16:59:00.001+01:00

(picture unrelated)

Over the past week or two I have gone through an interesting confluence of issues, all centered around communications.

1. My Comcast Triple Play is about to hit the one-year mark, which means that my rates are about to go way the hell up.

2. My company is deploying Cisco IP phones to all telecommuters. These phones require a VPN initiated at the router, so each of us was issued a Cisco 851 or the wireless equivalent.

3. Verizon is trying for a third time to finish pulling down their fibers so every unit in this building is finally ready for FIOS.

4. I just finished converting all of my home wiring to cat 6, and every device has access and is wired to Gigabit ethernet (not all can support it).

I had expected the Cisco router to be the biggest pain in the ass, but in reality it is a matter of education. I just don't know enough about it, and troubleshooting it takes time. What I had not expected was for my bailout from Comcast to Verizon to turn into a god damn comedy of horrors.

Yesterday, I decided that a company that treats its incoming customers as bad as Verizon does is not really a good way to spend my $150/month for telecommunications and cable TV. The solution is simple: cancel the order and move on.

The problem is that it is not just an issue of killing the order, I still need to deal with a rate increase from Comcast (who, by the way, have exceptional customer service for my area) which is going to leave me paying over $60/month for a VoIP service that is buggy and flaky. Also, *that* part of their customer support is not as good as for their TV and Internet sections.

My caller ID and voicemail work on and off, and opening tickets doesn't help much. I don't think I have lost the voice line once in the past year, but all of those ancillary services have been average at their best, and the web interface is just terrible.

Since I'll have a company issued phone, the VoIP line now reverts to personal use. I decided to switch it to Vonage, only to find out they are not able to transfer my number. No big loss there, I am sure that less than 15 people have that phone number so it should be easy to send them the new number. Vonage is $25/month (actually $30 after you add all of the regulatory taxes) for more features than Comcast's VoIP product, which in two weeks or so is going to cost me more than $60.

Even if my TV and Internet rates go a bit up, I'll still end up paying less by using Vonage.

The first thing that impressed me about the Vonage setup is that it allows for an automatic failover number. If your network goes down, it forwards your calls to whatever number you specify. This is a pretty sweet feature, assuming it actually works. The rest of the web management area is clear and uncluttered, and it is clear of eye candy, unlike Comcast's which looks like they spent more time making it pretty than making it useful.

Another thing I noticed is that some enterprising MBA type figured out a way to blend-in feature up-selling without making it intrusive. Some features are optional, but they are not shoved in your face, instead they are simply listed on the side or clearly marked as optional and available at an additional cost.

If Comcast's only competition is Verizon, and they keep treating new customers the way they have treated me since March, FIOS is going to be a monumental flop. It doesn't do them a god damn thing to have a technically superior solution of the business is not capable of handling the business part properly. When Comcast basically redid their whole cable network in this county, it was transparent to us. One day they simply told us that they have finished to redo everything with fiber to the curb, then offered us digital cable and cable modems.

Zero disruption.

When HD came, it was a question of switching digital cable boxes, again, zero disruption.

When voice came, they simply brought in a voice capable Arris cable modem. It took them about an hour, but most of that time was spent with the tech on the phone to his dispatcher trying to check the phone line. They did not even take out my old cable modem until weeks later.

Verizon doesn't want my hard-earned money

2008-06-28T14:49:00.001+01:00

(picture related)

Like Dolores Claiborne used to say: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you."

I guess since this is fool me thrice, it's the part when Dolores pushed her husband down the dry well.

They did it again: one more time they scheduled to come here and finally pull down the fiber into mine and the three condo units above.

Once again, they didn't show up.

This time I let myself believe they would do it, so I ordered FIOS again. My order was put on hold by the website, and was asked to call them directly.

This is a straight report of the calls I made to Verizon yesterday without any kind of success:

The report is missing a 40 minute call I made in the afternoon, where basically I had to redo my order.

Most of the time spent on the phone in the morning was either on hold or being bounced from office to office. My record for staying on hold was one hour.

So, what happened? Simple, their web ordering system allowed me to request my current landline number to be transferred to Verizon, something that they claim it shouldn't do.

Fine, I said, give me a TV-Internet bundle.

"No, I can't. Bundles must include phone service. You'll have to pay for both of them at regular price." Ouch. The idea was to drop the phone part of the order until the FIOS equipment was installed, then order an upgrade to the triple bundle. Still not the end of the world.

The problem is that my install date is next Tuesday, and the wiring guys did not show up on Friday, so I already know I won't be getting FIOS on Tuesday. Fuckers.

It really makes you wonder what is the point of competing against a company that is so big that they can afford to push around people that are gladly trying to commit to $150 worth of monthly services over 24 months. I wonder how many people are having the same problem?

By the way, here is the mystery of the wiring: I own a condo, and I am on the lowest floor. Our wiring goes top down, starting at the attic and running down each unit's HVAC closet. In order for them to give me FIOS, the fiber runs through my three neighbor's HVAC closet. This means that the condo association management company sends out a memo so all four owners know that a service person will enter their unit on some date for the specific purpose of pulling that cable. If they miss a date, they have to send another memo with enough notice so people can make arrangements in case they can't be around.

This of course could had been avoided when Verizon contracted to have all of our 300 units setup for FIOS. They paid for the work and did not bother to send somebody to make sure that the work was done.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

2008-06-27T01:32:00.001+01:00

Yes it is.

Well, it's done. The SCOTUS has gunned down DC's ban on gun ownership under constitutional grounds. Bang!

This is the first major SCOTUS ruling on the Second Amendment. The argument?

DC claimed that the Second Amendment was meant to maintain militias. Everyone else claimed that there was no such thing, that it applies to everyone.

The pro gun lobby is ecstatic. The anti-gun lobby is shitting a brick.

The common DC folks are wondering when the first gun stores are opening, and what kind of bullshit law they have ready to try to offset this ruling.

Across the river, here in Virginia, business is as usual. We have had Fairfax County Police question citizens that are openly carrying firearms, which is something that is not regulated by Virginia law. The only thing Virginia law dictates is rules for concealed carry and areas where it is unlawful to carry a firearm. These incidents are an embarrassment for the Police because it shows a lack of training on the laws that they are expected to enforce.

What about my household?

My late father was a policeman for over 30 years. I lived at home until 18 and visited from college almost every weekend until I was 21. During that time my father never had to lock his service revolver (mostly snub-nose .38 Specials, last one was a 4" .357).

Why?

He was not worried that we would even look at it. If we did, and did not end up killing ourselves with it, we would get the Mother of All Beatings. As far as I can remember, it was even rare to see him cleaning it if we were around.

After that, I enlisted in the US Army, where I was taught how to kill with an M-16A1 rifle and how to run around with it loaded without killing either myself or one of my squad mates. The training was not particularly fun, but it worked, so it was very rare to see somebody do something stupid in a firing range. I think most of the people that got hurt in firing ranges back then (1992 or so) was from falling into the permanent foxholes in the firing ranges. The foxholes are lined with thick wood, so if you don't break your back or both of your legs, you will still stand a good chance to break your neck or arms on the way down.

Here I would love to have a couple of rifles, but PJ is just too much a challenge when it comes to locking things. If I wanted to own a couple of rifles I would have to find a proper secure location offsite, which means spending money just to own the damn things. It's not worth it. If he wasn't autistic I could try to get him enrolled in a firearms course for children as soon as he met the age requirement, his mother be damned.

Original iPhone warranties about to expire

2008-06-26T13:44:00.001+01:00

TUAW was kind enough to remind suckers (the ones that waited in line for a day or long for the iPhone's first sale) that their warranties are about to expire:

Do you hear that ticking noise? It's your iPhone's warranty preparing to go "boom."
[From Original iPhone warranties about to expire - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Applecare is nothing more than a warranty extension, but it is a necessary evil. Apple is very flexible about selling these to you, so as the article mentions, you have the whole year to purchase coverage.

The problem now is that with the iPhone 3G almost out, many people still waiting to buy the warranty are simply going to skip it since they are picking up a new phone in June. What they don't take into account is that they can probably recover the $60 by the increase in resale value, since Applecare warranties are transferrable.

Ferrari Building a Smaller, Lighter, Quicker Enzo | Autopia from Wired.com

2008-06-25T02:54:00.001+01:00

The go-fast gurus at Ferrari are working on a successor to the jaw-dropping Enzo that could be the lightest, quickest two-seater ever to roll out of Maranello.

We told you months ago the Scuderia's next supercar would be based on the Millechili concept that embraces the "less is more" ethos. Ferrari sees lighter cars as the best way to reach its goal of increasing fuel economy 40 percent and reducing emissions 25 percent without compromising its reputation for performance. The Millechili is a guidepost to that greener future.
[From Ferrari Building a Smaller, Lighter, Quicker Enzo | Autopia from Wired.com]

The factory has been making some noise on this car for a while, but this is the first time that I see mentioned that the car is scheduled for production. If they can pull it off, it shows an interesting shift in their design philosophy.

This car is expected to be lighter than a Miata. I owned three different Miatas (Miatae?) over a five year period. I drove them hard and often, to the point I would intentionally pick longer commute routes because they would give me a more rewarding drive. The best of the three cars was the 1993 Limited Edition, a 1.8L car with about 132HP and a horribly stiff suspension. The result was a street legal go-kart. And a sore back and neck.

If that Ferrari comes anywhere close to the Miata weight class, with 660HP, it's going to be a monster. Even if it is lighter than the Lotus, its power-to-weight ratio is going to be incredible. Lotus is the benchmark for this kind of design: very light car, with just enough power to hit a particular power-to-weight ratio. Or like Peter Egan from Road & Track used to say, frames that would bend like a banana (he was referring to the Lotus Seven).

One thing that I haven't figured out yet if they will place restrictions on who gets to order these cars. In the past Ferrari has insisted on only allowing orders for their special cars from individuals that will not flip the cars immediately for a quick profit. Or anyone but Eddie Griffith.

Caffeinated moms drink up to keep up - CNN.com

2008-06-24T14:33:00.000+01:00

Americans are consuming caffeinated beverages as never before. In fact, energy drink sales skyrocketed in 2007. The sale of Rockstar, which contains up to 360 mg of caffeine per can, compared with 80 to 150 mg per serving for coffee, rose 38.9 percent in 2007, according to Beverage Digest. Redbull sales rose 19 percent.

All this caffeine consumption has given rise to growing numbers of "caffeinated moms." A study by an independent, nonprofit research group, The National Sleep Foundation, found more than 65 percent of moms drink caffeinated beverages to get through their day.
[From Caffeinated moms drink up to keep up - CNN.com]

Quick, to the Romeromobile!

What I find interesting here is that I consider myself a caffeine fiend, I drink anywhere from three to five very strong cups of coffee per day, plus some soda. Combined with the many years I spent working rotating shifts and my Circadian Rhythm is shot to hell, so I need to take a sleeping pill if I want to go to bed before 2 AM.

And that doesn't even guarantee me that I will sleep through the night.

These women are reportedly drinking whole pots of coffee throughout the day. How the hell can the stomach lining survive that kind of abuse? If I overdo it I get instant heartburn and/or acid reflux.

What I find fascinating is how they are claiming that the disruption on the body, caused by the caffeine onslaught, is entirely temporary and has no long term effects.

Yeah baby.

That said, it is a nice thing that today's moms are turning to caffeine for that energy, instead of crystal meth or cocaine.

Fake Jerry Yang

2008-06-24T14:15:00.001+01:00

Daniel Lyons, the writer behind Fake Steve Jobs, is usually funny as hell. Now he is bringing it up to 11 by having Fake Jerry Yang as a guest blogger. If you thought Fake Steve was funny, this is even better.

It is not better because it is funnier, but because it is so right on the money that it makes you wonder just how many people in Yahoo are leaking information to Lyons. If you got burned by the first dot com bubble, then this is the kind of writing that will split your seams.

It is also a little bit sad. Most of us probably know a former boss that got sidelined without his knowledge. One day the poor guy found himself with no reports, or people simply stopped going to his meetings. And the guy simply kept on plowing. Or doing the same dumb shit that would eventually cost him his job.

Just to start the day, he posted a page where Yahoo employees can quickly make their resignation letters simply by filling a web form. Check it out here.

Bad movie weekend roundup

2008-06-23T16:48:00.001+01:00

This weekend was pretty active, work projects hit the eye of the hurricane, and I had a queue of horror movies to watch:

The Omen Pentalogy:

The Omen: One of my favorite horror movies of all time. It doesn't belong to a bad movie weekend lineup, I only watched it to keep the story line in the proper perspective.

The Omen Remake : It was much better than what I had hoped for. When I saw this movie originally the little kid that plays Damien scared the living shit out of me. He looks even meaner than the original Damien. Julia Stiles did pretty good acting a much older part than the norm (read: not playing a teenager or early 20s hipster).

I really liked what they did with it.

The Omen II: Damien: The worst of the series, but it has a damn good opening.

The Omen III: The Final Conflict: Not as bad as part II, but not by much. Some of the scenes are really disturbing if you are really paying attention (hint: Christ is hung to the cross backwards).

The Omen IV: The Awakening: I like this one a lot because Delia is a mirror copy of a very good friend of mine. I can imagine my friend raising that kind of hell when she was 9 years old.

The Rest:

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane: Really really good teen slasher, with a half-decent plot twist at the end.

Pathology: Disturbing, especially if you have seen the two German Anatomy (part 1, part 2) movies. The subject is different, but both movies have doctors going against their oath.

Dark Floors: This is a gimmick movie, it doesn't make sense unless you know about Lordi.

The Signal: Good old fashioned we-all-are-going-batshit-crazy movie.

Teeth: Damn good movie. A girl is born with vagina dentata. That's all you need to know.

This is probably one of the best bad movie weekends that I have had in a while. If I don't take into consideration the original Omen, the best movie of the weekend was All The Boys Love Mandy Lane.

Dick Cheney is scowling at you

2008-06-22T20:51:00.001+01:00

Is MagicJack the new Sunrocket?

2008-06-22T15:12:00.001+01:00

For those of you that missed that mess, Sunrocket was a VoIP service that promised unlimited domestic and long distance calls in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico for $200/year or less, depending on the promotion. Sometimes you even got a $50 cordless phone just for signing up. The service was provided through a black box, you could either plug it into your home network router, or you could plug your broadband connection into it and use it as a one-port router. I was one of the lucky ones: the day I signed up I was given two years of full service for $200.

The service was great, but it did not seem to take advantage of QoS, so I had to make sure that I was not doing a big download before I reached for the phone to make a work call. Once the connection was using more than 200K or so, it did not really like it and started sounding noisy (one of the basic reasons why my current boss hated that line so much).

Sunrocket crashed and burned. I got about 14 months of service out of my $200, still an exceptional value. I did not want to try another of those outfits, so I simply upgraded my Comcast account to a triple play, which got me a new cable modem with built-in VoIP and proper QoS. It is still a bit noisy, but only when the connection is about to get saturated. What I don't like about the Comcast phone service is that their ancillary services are actually inferior to what I had with Sunrocket. Their voice mail management sucks, and the call history is not always available.

During one of my many insomniac episodes, I was channel surfing when I noticed that there was an infomercial for MagicJack. The beauty of the infomercial is that it was designed to sell the product without really explaining how it works, they just showed you to plug it into your PC, plug a phone into it and use it.

Pure genius.

The other thing is that the MagicJack is much smaller than the Sunrocket device, it is just a little box with an USB plug. People understand when you try to sell them a little box and very basic instructions.

You don't have to be a nerd, just take this box, plug it in, and you are done.

Now I am starting to see reports that they are actually making a killing selling the damn things. Broadband reports started a thread today about the subject, and you can see some more activity at Google News. The funny thing is how very few news outlets are questioning their momentum and if the company can actually make money. I guess we'll see.

I would have been tempted, but my employer just handed me a Cisco IP phone and a Cisco 851 router, so as long as that works without disrupting my home network it will probably leave the Comcast phone to be used for personal calls only.

Drivereplacementoctomy

2008-06-20T21:02:00.001+01:00

I have completed my very first Drivereplacementoctomy, that is, I replaced the DVD drive in an Xbox 360.

This doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but it is. For starters, the DVD drive has an encryption key that matches it to one particular Xbox 360. This means that if you buy the exact replacement unit needed by your machine, it will not work.

How to fix this?

The hard way: figure out a way of pulling out the key from the old drive, then upgrade the firmware of the new drive with the correct encryption key.

The easy way: remove the logic board from the old DVD drive and install it into the new drive. Since the units are identical, it will work.

Some enterprising individuals around here will charge you $50 plus materials to do it the hard way.

Why am I doing this?

Because PJ broke his DVD tray into two, and you can't order replacements (that I know). Ivette of course wanted to buy a new one, since we got wads of $400 lying around. I decided to take a shot at replacing the drive and doing the PCB swap myself. If I failed I could still order a second drive and pay somebody to do the job for less than the cost of a new Xbox 360.

Overall, the process is simple:

1. Tear down the Xbox 360.

2. Replace the PCB in the new drive with the old one.

3. Re-assemble the Xbox 360.

4. Try to play one DVD and one game disc. Pray that both work.

That is about it. The hairiest part? One of the data cables in the PCB are aligned by hand, then held into place with a very small plastic clip. The rest was more tedious than hard.

And what did PJ do when I showed him that he can now play again on his 360, after more than 2 weeks dead? He switched to his AppleTV and kicked me out of his room.

That's parenthood right there.

3 more Yahoo execs reportedly jumping ship

2008-06-20T17:43:00.001+01:00

Yahoo Inc.'s management ranks are rapidly thinning as the Internet pioneer fends off a shareholder mutiny threatening to culminate in the firing of Chief Executive Jerry Yang.

Three more executives have decided to jump ship, according to reports published Thursday by two blogs - AllThingsD and Techcrunch - and The New York Times. The reports were based on unnamed people with knowledge of the departures.
[From 3 more Yahoo execs reportedly jumping ship]

This is the nice thing about being rich. When things don't go out their way, you can pack up and leave, looking for greener pastures (natural turf?).

The company is about to tank because the CEO did something stupid? No problem, just pick up your golden parachute, your stock options and your Elvis jump suit and off you go.

The common folk of course can't do that. They can't afford principles and a mortgage in Silicon Valley at the same time, so they'll probably stick around at least until some sucker pulls their resume out of Monster.com. The only exception for this is of course Jerry, he has nowhere to go.

The Faraday Cage Revised

2008-06-20T14:34:00.001+01:00

Back in March I wrote an article on the challenges of maintaining a reliable wireless network when your building seems to follow the properties of a Faraday Cage. The basic problem was really crappy wireless performance at short ranges indoors. The problem was compounded by having two AppleTVs in the non-Wireless N network, both in streaming mode.

The fix was to run Cat5e cables so everything in the house (except the two iPhones) would run on 100baseT. Only the iMac and the Mac Book Pro had Gigabit ethernet, and 100MB should be more than enough.

It worked. With both AppleTVs running at the same time, both Xbox 360s on XBL up and running, and with bit torrent and the Comcrap phone, the network was completely usable.

This week I started phase two:

1. Replace all wiring with Cat6 wire. Cat5e is fine for up to 1GB, but Cat6 is built to lower crosstalk even more, which will should result in speeds closer to spec than just Cat5e. I replaced every patch cord, regardless of device, this way I will only have Cat6 cables in the house and won't have to bother checking to see if I have the right cable.

2. Replace the current 100MB switch in PJs room with a Gigabit ethernet switch. Since I am the one that rips videos for PJ, I am always moving 2GB or so files between the Mac Book Pro and the iMac, so this makes sure that the iMac has the best possible network connection that it can use.

3. Add an identical Gigabit ethernet switch to the office. This is the bridge between my office and PJs room (2).

4. Every device that was connected to the router is now on the Gigabit ethernet switch.

5. Retire the current wireless G router. It will stay in the network but only as a dedicated wireless access point, it will not be acting as a router. This router is a piece of shit, but it is enough to handle two iPhones that do nothing but check email and an occasional web page.

6. Add a Cisco 851 router. Lucky me, the company paid for it because it is needed for our new Cisco IP phones. Obviously this router should be able to do a much better job handling two Macs, two AppleTVs and two Xbox 360s than my piece of shit Belkin router. Supposedly the Cisco IP phone is not going to be an issue.

Once the Cisco IP phone is operational, I'll move the Comcrap VoIP line somewhere else, maybe the kitchen since I don't need two landlines on my desk. The Cisco 851 is not configured yet, and I am still waiting for my cables, but so far the two Gigabit switches and the Mac Book Pro are doing fine on the current Cat5e, the iMac's patch cord is not as good as I thought it was.

I am sure that the current Belkin router is a bigger bottleneck than the wiring. Funny thing, with everything with wireless disabled, the reception still sucks, my iPhones lose WiFi very easily.

This is what the network should look like in less than a week:

UPDATE (6/23/2008) : Cat 6 cables arrived today. The shipment included a Thank You card and a bag of Skittles. Everything but the Cisco 851 is configured exactly as I designed it.

How the iPhone puts a bomb under mobile networks | The Register

2008-06-20T13:46:00.000+01:00

Amazingly good analysis of the new push notifications service for iPhone 2.0:

If you think everything that could have been written about the iPhone already has been written, prepare to be surprised. One vital aspect of Apple's strategy has been overlooked - with multi-billion consequences for complacent network operators.

Over at Telco 2.0, the blog of analysts STL Partners, we learn that networks who partner with Apple must install Apple gear at the data centre to support its services - specifically, the Push Notification service that wakes up the Jesus Phone. Forget the revenues from sales of extra server gear - the key point is that Apple now sits in the middle of the data stream, capturing the customer's data. The analyst outfit describes the iPhone as a potential "poison" for the networks.
[From How the iPhone puts a bomb under mobile networks | The Register]

I like how they call it the "Jesus" phone.

For three months before and after the launch of the first iPhone, one of the earliest and most convenient excuses to dismiss it out of the business arena was the whole idea that you couldn't push content into it. Who gives a shit how neat this is, it can't talk to Exchange for crying out loud!

Now it can basically replace a Crackberry. Where's your God now?

Subsidizing it by $200 helps too.

Air Force may reopen $35B tanker bid at government bidding

2008-06-19T02:25:00.003+01:00

Congressional auditors urged the Air Force to reopen bidding for a new fleet of aerial tankers Wednesday, finding the service made 'significant errors' in awarding the $35 billion contract to Northrop Grumman.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) opinion is a major victory for aerospace giant Boeing, which protested the February decision to award one of the largest contracts in U.S. military history to its rival. The Air Force said it is reviewing the decision, which was welcomed not only by Boeing, but also by several members of Congress with Boeing (BA, Fortune 500) plants in their states."

[From CNN: Air Force may reopen $35B tanker bid at government bidding]

I wrote back in March about the uproar with the tanker contract. What were the odds that the mighty Boeing defense apparatus was going to simply let this pass and not only let that contract go to Northrop Grumman, but to also open the possibility of Airbus assembling commercial aircraft on US soil. None.

They'll fight tooth and nail against it.

For those of you that missed this whole when it started, here is the short version:

1. The USAF is overdue new tankers, some of which are already close to 50 years old.

2. The USAF has been struggling to get this project going since 2001.

3. First major player is Boeing, who wants to base it on the 767 commercial platform.

4. Second major player is Northrop Grumman, who wants to base it on an Airbus airframe.

5. The contract is worth $35 billion and involves up to 179 aircraft for quite a few years.

6. If Northrop Grumman takes the contract, their new facilities open the possibility of expanding operations to Airbus commercial aircraft, not just military tankers.

7. You can easily guess who is in favor of which contract by plotting current Boeing facilities and newly proposed Northrop Grumman facilities on a map.

That's all there is to it, simple math. The main difference is that Boeing is already here, while Airbus is a foreign competitor.

Firefox 3 Arrives

2008-06-18T12:22:00.003+01:00

With both a bang (from a gazillion people hitting reload and/or check for updates) and a whimper (from the Mozilla servers trying to survive the onslaught).

Fun times.

What most people did not understand is that if they were already running RC3, there was not going to be a real difference between that and 3.0. It would be OK to wait an hour or three before downloading the damn thing. I got tired of using check for updates, so after the first two hours I went to the download page.

And there it was. Basically identical to RC3 as I expected it.

(as I type this I realized that I forgot to upgrade it on Windows, duh!)

I just checked CPU usage, less than 30%, not exactly terrible. The killer feature for me is the awesome bar:

As you type into the address bar, it searches your history. I really love it because sometimes I have to hit three versions of the same URL while working on something (I may be looking at a project's production server, while looking at the maintenance and staging copies at the same time) and it is really sweet to type three arbitrary parts of the url and have the one you want scroll up to the top of the list. I have no idea about who came up with this concept but it is pure genius.

Funny, I checked my Windows version again, it is showing as 3.0, not as a beta. I have no clue how and when it was updated since I haven't run the damned thing in days.

I tried to use Foxmarks for centralized bookmarks, but it is a worse solution than Google Bookmarks (which requires the Google Toolbar to be of any real use). I actually managed to export my Google Bookmarks into Safari, then into Firefox and finally into Foxmarks. Firefox 3 choked bad simply by dragging more than a dozen bookmark folders. After an hour of fighting it, I deleted the extension, cleaned the bookmarks and resumed using Google Bookmarks and the Toolbar.

As for performance, it is hard to gauge since this is a dual core CPU, but at least I can tell it isn't choking the machine or eating up all of the memory. With 5 tabs open it is hovering at 30% or less.

Tiger beats Mediate in U.S. Open thriller - SI.com - Golf

2008-06-16T22:59:00.002+01:00

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- With a throbbing knee and a pounding heart, Tiger Woods made one last improbable escape Monday and won the U.S. Open in a 19-hole playoff over Rocco Mediate, his 14th career major and maybe the most amazing of them all.

One shot behind on the 18th hole after a collapse no one saw coming, Woods birdied the 18th hole to force sudden death at Torrey Pines against a 45-year-old with a creaky back who simply wouldn't go away."

[From Tiger beats Mediate in U.S. Open thriller]

I almost feel sorry for Rocco Mediate. He stood to either win the US Open, and not get credit for it since Tiger Woods, on one good knee, chased him all the way to a Monday playoff sudden death. Or he would lose the US Open to Tiger Woods, who chased him all the way to a Monday playoff sudden death.

It's just not fair.

I can almost visualize the alternate headline:

"Tiger almost beats Mediate in U.S. Open Thriller"

Instead of:

"Rocco Mediate beats Tiger in U.S. Open Thriller"

Makes you wonder if the next installment of EA's Tiger Woods game will allow you to play while limping. I honestly hope he fully recovers, he has been my Golf hero since I started my 12+ year quest to break 100 (or hell, to even out-drive Ivette).

Honda rolls out fuel cell car

2008-06-16T14:06:00.003+01:00

TAKANEZAWA, Japan (AP) -- Honda's new zero-emission, hydrogen fuel cell car rolled off a Japanese production line Monday and is headed to southern California, where Hollywood is already abuzz over the latest splash in green motoring.

The FCX Clarity, which runs on hydrogen and electricity, emits only water and none of the gases believed to induce global warming. It is also two times more energy efficient than a gas-electric hybrid and three times that of a standard gasoline-powered car, the company says.

[From CNN: Honda rolls out fuel cell car]

I guess this answers the question of current interest in mass-producing fuel cell cars. At this stage this is mostly a marketing exercise: get a handful of high-profile customers that happen to have access to hydrogen, charge them an almost all-inclusive $600/months and let them drive the cars around California for a year or two.

My original, completely uneducated guess was that we would start seeing mass-produced fuel cell vehicles in about ten years, which is not a hell of a lot if you take into account how long it takes to engineer a brand new car from scratch. You can bet that Honda is already planning two cars ahead, so expect a second vehicle based on whatever they learn from fielding the FCX Clarity to be offered in 2-3 years tops.

The problem is that in two years either gas-electric hybrids will not be novelty items anymore, or gas prices are going to plummet and nobody is going to give a shit until the next oil crisis. If the hybrids take off, it will hurt any movement to increase hydrogen distribution channels. If the oil prices plummet, everyone is going back to SuVs.

Five ways to tell your dad you hate him (by buying him a Sony PS3)

2008-06-15T23:25:00.002+01:00

Somebody at PC World has been smoking the reefer:

If you thought the PS3 was dead in the water, it might be time to reconsider that assumption. We've had a chance to re-look at the PS3, and now feel that while Sony might not be king of the hill just yet, they're at least back on the mountain ready to take on the other two contenders. Here are five reasons we think you should take another look at the PS3 if you're a home gaming console fan. While others are scrambling to still find Nintendo Wii systems for Father's Day, you can march in and grab a PS3 right off the shelf and know that you may have just gotten a better gift.

[From Five Reasons to Get Dad a PS3]

Why the hell would you get your dad a PS3 instead of a Wii? And you dare list affordability? Are you shitting me? Buying him a 360 shows him how much you really care about him (even better if you get him a decent sound system and no less than a 32" HDTV to go with it). If you really love him, you would have scoured town until you found the damn Wii.

Hopefully with Mario Kart and an extra wheel.

Giving him the PS3 is as transparent as when AJ Soprano gave Carmela Soprano a Matrix DVD as a gift. You are hoping he will get bored of it in a week, after which it can be conveniently transferred to YOUR rig.

Goodbye alt.*

2008-06-15T16:40:00.004+01:00

Photo by esther-

Verizon will drop alt.* from their Usenet servers:

Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee.

[From Verizon offers details of Usenet deletion: alt.* groups, others gone]

And so it starts. There's a pretty good slashdotting on the subject here.

Why? Because of the new pressure from New York to have ISPs cut access to child porn sources. At least, that is their excuse. It is obvious that cutting alt.* will free up quite a chunk of bandwith. Not everyone is going to be crazy about shelling out an extra $10-$20 for third party access to these newsgroups, so usage should go down.

This of course offends the Slashdot crowd: how dare they cut access to alt.binaries.pictures.purple.bunnies just because somebody found child porn in a few newsgroups out of the five million available?

It could also be part of a multi-pronged assault on piracy. Cut off alt.binaries, kill P2P by only cooperating with legitimate companies willing to deal with the P4P initiative and suddenly it becomes extremely hard to pirate a song or a video. Legitimate users of P2P should be OK, as long as their legitimate source (say, somebody trying to download an official Linux image through bittorrent) is part of P4P.

Or they'll simply figure out a way to force every god damn file to be signed, so it would be impossible to upload a file unless it holds incriminating information.

Who the hell knows?

The one problem this is not going to fix is child porn. As long as there is demand for it, people will figure out a way to get it.

As for the goat photo, it is an inside joke at #asp. It involves goats, Slashdot and New York City.

Happy 233rd Birthday, US Army!

2008-06-14T20:40:00.002+01:00

U.S. ARMY SEAL
Originally uploaded by armedwolf

The US Army is 233 years young today. See more at http://www.army.mil/birthday/233/

Knockout

2008-06-14T17:18:00.001+01:00

ali_knockout
Originally uploaded by adnilemeus

Ecto is not the one left standing on the ring.

Broken embeds in Ecto 3.0b47

2008-06-14T17:08:00.003+01:00

I just wasted close to one hour trying to embed a stupid YouTube video. Ecto simply refused to let me do it.

The offending video in question:

The Blogger online editor gave me zero grief inserting the standard embed code as suggested by YouTube. I guess this is it for Ecto until they get their act straight. Too bad, I really like it and have used it for quite a while.

Stupid spammers

2008-06-14T15:13:00.001+01:00

Some dumbass piece of shit decided it would be fun to use one of my commercial addresses as the from: address for a spam barrage. Thanks to said dumbass I had to change all of the email addresses used by Gopedro.net, this should not affect most of my customers but there's no way for me to know for sure.

While I was fixing that mess I decided to tweak some of my prices:

The promotions are explained here.

Interest-free loans, courtesy of your tiny vendors

2008-06-14T14:06:00.001+01:00

This is one of those times when Dilbert is really funny for the wrong way. I have been in the position of that tiny company, and I can tell you, it isn't pretty.

Sometime around 2001, call it two jobs ago, I saw that particular situation unfold. We had probably 100 people or so in our branch, probably 400 people in total. The big company (I won't call them a "Dilbert" company, they were anything but stupid) slowly increased the due policy for invoice payments. They had 22,000 people just in one of the divisions we did business with.

If you don't know what I am talking about, it is common for companies to invoice each other with terms like "net 15" or "net 30," which means that the invoice will be paid in either 15 or 30 days.

The bastards moved up to net 45. We said sure, whatever. Net 45 it is. We were living the high life of the dot com boom, who gives a shit if our receivables from our biggest customer slows down his payments?

Then the bastards moved up to net 60. Well, times are hard, it's all good. "They are bigger than us, and we have more clients, at least it's steady revenue."

Then the bastards moved to net 75. This is what is known as the shit hitting the fan. The layoffs started more or less at that time.

Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8

2008-06-13T21:06:00.001+01:00

Although Beta 2 of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 isn’t due out until some time in August, Microsoft is cautioning Web site owners now that they need to be prepping now for possible problems the new, more standards-compliant browser may cause.

As part of this week’s IE June Security Update for IE8 Beta 1, Microsoft introduced a new tag, “IE+EmulateIE7″ — which it is counting on to head off some of the incompatibilities the company is anticipating could occur, based on feedback it received from IE 8 Beta 1 testers.
[From Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8 | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com]

Big trouble ahead for all of us whose livelihoods depend on writing web applications that will render properly in the worst browser used by the biggest amount of our users: Internet Explorer 7. Somewhere out there a miserable bastard still has a user breakdown with a majority of IE6, I don't feel sorry for him: better him than me.

It's funny because this whole standards compliance switching is not much appreciated outside of the circle of people that have to make the damn websites look OK. There are even morons suggesting that there is no point on upgrading. They don't understand that there are millions of people that don't even know what a web browser is, to them the internet/web is the blue IE icon on their quick launch bar and desktop.

They have no clue about Firefox, and of course they can't tell the difference between IE6 and IE7 because either they don't know or they don't care.

Us, on the other hand, are in trouble. Every time we see something render right in IE and wrong in Firefox, we say fuck it, this is a corporate app, they are locked into IE. But what happens when everyone gets migrated over the weekend to IE8 and suddenly (thanks to the strict standards compliance mode) everyone sees the app look as crappy in IE as it did in Firefox.

Suddenly it looks like Firefox was right all along.

Right now I can tell I am going to have serious issues with two things:

1. The menu controls that ship with ASP.net 2.0.

2. The way fieldsets render in non-IE browsers.

I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Yahoo says talks with Microsoft are dead - U.S. business- msnbc.com

2008-06-12T21:30:00.001+01:00

Yahoo Inc. has ended all talks involving a business deal with Microsoft, burying any chance that the software maker might revive its attempt to buy the Internet pioneer.

The development, announced Thursday, is expected to lead to an advertising partnership between Yahoo and another rival, Internet search leader Google. That alliance is expected to be announced after the stock market closes.
[From Yahoo says talks with Microsoft are dead - U.S. business- msnbc.com]

I guess this is when the shareholder rebellion starts and people start betting pools to see who guesses how long before Jerry's head is stuck on a pike. Hopefully by the time the shit hits the fan (again, it comes in installments) maybe they figure out what to do to keep Flickr alive and autonomous.

And Microsoft is not going to fare any better, they are still catching flak for starting this mess.

What the hell is wrong with Verizon?

2008-06-12T01:31:00.000+01:00

Verizon spent millions wiring Fairfax County (VA) for FIOS, then spent god knows what wiring my condo complex (~ 300 units) so each unit would have the fiber running all the way into the wiring cabinet. Ordering FIOS would involve having a technician open a closet in your condo unit, slap two boxes in the wall and connect them to the fiber already there.

The problem is that they somehow forgot to check on the work. After spending so much money doing the wiring, they did not bother to check if their contractors did the work. Instead, they assumed it was done.

I ordered FIOS months ago and was asked to wait a month for installation. On install day, the technician figured out that the cable was never pulled down, and proceeded to bail out after giving me a number to re-schedule.

I called Verizon, which explained I would need to wait yet one more month. I hung up.

Months later, I got a memo from my condominium homeowner's association:

"Please be informed that Verizon will be on the premises on June 6 to finish wiring some buildings, including yours."

I thought awesome, now as soon as I see them finish, I can call and reschedule my install.

It did not work exactly like that. The wiring crew worked until lunch, then left. They never entered my building. So here I am, hating Comcast, but not being able to order FIOS.

The Mac Crying Game: iPhone 3G version

2008-06-11T02:51:00.001+01:00

There is grand tradition amongst us Mac fanboys that we celebrate twice per year: the whining right after either Mac World Expo San Francisco, or the World Wide Developers Conference.

I like to call it "The Mac Crying Game."

This week's installment is very special, because the iPhone 3G is out. It is even more special because it seems like Fake Steve Jobs celebrates this holiday too.

The most common complaints so far:

OMFG! Why am I limited to AT&T? That's such bullshit!

$200? Do we look like we are made out of money????? (this is $200 cheaper than the previous model)

What? $10 extra for the broadband part of my wireless plan? That's such bullshit! (ahem, I did this actually)

Only black or white? I want one in pink! WTF Apple??????

Only 8 GB of solid state memory for $200? WTF?

Plastic body? Helooooo? What's wrong with this picture?

Why Apple doesn't make a clamshell? Duh! Who wants a phone so big????

What? I can't buy one to unlock it so I can run bash on mine? This is such bullshit man, BULLSHIT!

Why is the camera still 2MP, where's the flash? where's the zoom? My $200 Sony cybershot has face AND smile recognition!!!

Why is 3G still slower than my WiFi??????

Why is AT&T not subsidizing the handsets?

What the fuck do I need GPS for?

What do you mean I have to pay for the apps? I already paid $200 for the god damn phone!

And so it goes.

Even if I complained earlier that on the long run, the $200 cheaper iPhone 3G costs more than my current iPhone, I would still love to have one. On the first day it sells, there, I said it.

You think the whining is ridiculous? Wait until the week that it starts selling, it is going to be full-out insane. Batshit loco insane.

Oh, and this is the weak crying game season, just wait until MWSF 2009.

Moog shows a guitar with infinite sustain

2008-06-10T19:58:00.001+01:00

Wired has an article on this amazing guitar here.

Clever phone math

2008-06-10T18:08:00.001+01:00

Classical Algebra
Originally uploaded by blkmage

The new iPhone is $200 cheaper than my old one, a steal, right?

Yes, but in order to get the new iPhone with my current iPhone plan, I have to spend an extra $10/month.

Old iPhone = $400 + $20/month @24 months = $880 above what would cost me to use a $0 subsidized phone over 24 months.

New iPhone = $200 + $30/month @24 months = $920 above what would cost me to use a $0 subsidized phone over 24 months.

Cheaper my ass!

Strategery

2008-06-10T02:51:00.001+01:00

Strategery
Originally uploaded by Alex Musil

Testing Flickr integration with Blogger.

I wonder what line feeds will render like ...

iPhone: Now with 3G, A-GPS, half as expensive

2008-06-10T02:35:00.001+01:00

In less than one hour, Apple managed to cut the resale value of my two first generation iPhones to less than $100 each. Ouch.

The new iPhone has 3G, real GPS in addition to its cell-based locator, and costs just $200. Sonsofbitches!

Do I want one? I have had my iPhone since December, I find it to be pretty much perfect, and the one thing I wanted to see was GPS. GPS is here, so yeah, I want one. I imagine I should be able to offload mine for $100, even if to be used as an iPod Touch.

Dubious ratings

2008-06-08T20:49:00.001+01:00

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

I completely protest that rating. It says I used the word "hell" 5 times and "suck" one time.

Had that thing been anywhere close to accurate it would had rated it as NC-17.

Bosses Nuked, Some Air Force Missileers Cheer | Danger Room from Wired.com

2008-06-07T03:35:00.001+01:00

Defense Secretary Robert Gates didn't just kick the Air Force's two top leaders to the curb yesterday. When he fired chief of Staff General "Buzz" Moseley and Secretary Michael Wynne, he was telling the service that the long, slow decline of its nuclear corps is officially over.

Hallelujah, says one Air Force nuclear missileer.
[From Bosses Nuked, Some Air Force Missileers Cheer | Danger Room from Wired.com]

This is probably the less cryptic article about this subject that I have found over the last couple of days. The infighting between the fighter and nuke camps is interesting, it almost reminds me of what the US Navy went through right before the Pearl Harbor attack.

Back in the day there were two camps: the Battleship Admirals (the establishment) and the Aircraft Carrier Admirals (the newcomers). The Battleship Admirals saw the political dangers of the aircraft carrier, it would eventually become the center of the standard Navy battle group arrangement, instead of battleships. So their solution? They fought it like hell.

Pearl Harbor came, and most of the battleships were sunk. The aircraft carriers were away, so WWII in the Pacific was an aircraft carrier war. The end of WWII saw the rise to power of the Aircraft Carrier Admirals.

Now we are going to see a showdown between a camp that is holding weapons they can't use (the nukes), and a camp flying jets that have no real adversary, so many question why we need to buy so many.

Air Force officials ousted over nuclear gaffes - CNN.com

2008-06-06T15:48:00.001+01:00

The top military and civilian leaders of the U.S. Air Force were forced out Thursday over the handling of nuclear weapons, the Defense Department secretary said.

Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne resigned over the department's concern over two incidents, including the August flight of a B-52 bomber that flew across the country with nuclear weapons.

"Focus of the Air Force leadership has drifted" in terms of handling nuclear weapons and equipment, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

In August, a B-52 bomber flew from North Dakota to Louisiana with the crew unaware that six nuclear-tipped missiles were on board. Four officers were relieved of duty afterward, including three colonels.

Gates also cited this year's discovery that components designed to arm and fuse nuclear warheads were accidentally shipped to Taiwan in 2006.
[From Air Force officials ousted over nuclear gaffes - CNN.com]

And here I was worried about airmen and pilots pounding the ground with the Army and the Marines.

What we have here is an exercise of politics as usual. Fire the top guy(s) as a way to tell the people that actually run the show to get their act together and fix whatever needs to be fixed.

The bigger question here is why, after all those very public fuckups, did the USAF "drifted" in their focus? There was a tradition of hardcore paranoia (in all services) when it came to nuclear accountability. Now we are flying nukes without knowing, we are shipping restricted components to an enemy country and there are security guards playing video games in their cell phones instead of paying attention to their god damn jobs.

How come we never hear of a Marine pulling that kind of stunt during guard duty? Training. I have no clue how the Navy and the Air Force do it, but both the Marines and the Army burn into your head guard duty as one of the more basic soldiering skills.

Top two Air Force officials resigning - Military- msnbc.com

2008-06-05T19:49:00.001+01:00

WASHINGTON - The nation's top two Air Force officials are resigning, and military sources told NBC News Thursday that they were being forced out.

At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said President Bush knew about the resignations of Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, but that the White House “has not played any role” in the shake-up.

Moseley, a general, is the Air Force's top uniformed officer. Wynne is the top civilian official.
[From Top two Air Force officials resigning - Military- msnbc.com]

Oops.

The article later claims that they were given the choice between resigning or be fired.

So here we are, six months before a major leadership change, with all of those soldiers and Marines killed on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are shaking off the USAF leadership? What the hell was so wrong that they had to push out the top uniformed and top civilian officials of the service? It's not like they were asked to give their pilots rifles and rucksacks and send them to ride resupply convoys in Iraq.

It isn't about axing the F-117 as an excuse to free up funds and ask for even more funding for the F-22. So what else is left?

Gamers Like In-Game Ads, Claims Microsoft -- Video Games -- InformationWeek

2008-06-04T14:20:00.001+01:00

Gamers enjoy in-game ads, according to Massive Inc., Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s in-game advertising subsidiary.

Massive commissioned media research firm Interpret to survey gamers and found that they will accept online ads, within limits. For Microsoft, not to mention Google, which bought an in-game ad company of its own last year, this is good news to have paid for, particularly given that social network ads have been something of a disappointment.

“Gamers are open to advertising if it’s done tastefully,” said Grant Johnson, chief client officer and founding partner of Interpret. He characterized gamers as similar to other online consumers in terms of their receptiveness to ads.
[From Gamers Like In-Game Ads, Claims Microsoft — Video Games — InformationWeek]

If the game is realistic, sure. as long as the ads are part of the game environment, not interruptions.

What I don't understand is why am I paying $60 for a game that has paid ads within. At the very least they should let us switch them off (replaced with fake/funny ads like Grand Theft Auto 4) or maybe give us Microsoft Points if we leave them turned on.

Of course, this is not going to happen.

Liberty City Police Face Allegations Of Incompetence, Brutality | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

2008-06-04T11:39:00.001+01:00

LIBERTY CITY—With the city in the midst of a record crime wave, concerned citizens claim the Liberty City Police Department has done little to prevent the constant car chases, ongoing gun battles, and overall atmosphere of violence that pervade the area.

"I used to feel safe in Liberty City, but lately, it's been total mayhem," said night-shift worker Lola Del Rio, who spoke to reporters while sucking nervously on a red lollipop. "In the past week alone, I've been carjacked twice, run over 10 times, and witness to a half-dozen gunfights that ended with automobiles exploding. What are the police doing to stop all this?"
[From Liberty City Police Face Allegations Of Incompetence, Brutality | The Onion - America's Finest News Source]

Brilliant piece by the Onion. In one single article they managed to explain pretty much everything that happens in Grand Theft Auto 4. My favorite is the mention of Lola del Rio as a "night shift worker."

Editorial: Caps are welcome - They just need to be structured to meet needs - dslreports.com

2008-06-04T11:31:00.001+01:00

I see that the mainstream press has picked up the "blogging" condemnation of the Time Warner experiment with tiered pricing, and usage caps. My own view on this probably counts for little but since dslreports.com is a "blog" as well perhaps I should set out "our view" for the record: Caps and tiered prices are overdue. The backlash against them at best misrepresents technical issues, and at worst is self-serving.

Clean fast bandwidth is not an inexhaustible resource. I want my ISP to deliver maximum speed without any perceptible congestion, and with minimal latency. I want them to invest heavily in their infrastructure to ensure they can meet the speed and latency targets morning noon and night. When an ISP engineer says that metering and caps are necessary for quality service, I believe them. Any customer of a data center understands the equation: they understand that BOTH speed and monthly usage are key factors in pricing. US ISPs, due to inheriting dial-up pricing plans (effectively included caps due to very low speeds) have been missing one pricing factor, to the detriment of the majority of users and the benefit to a minority.
[From Editorial: Caps are welcome - They just need to be structured to meet needs - dslreports.com]

This editorial is a great piece of work from a source that has a hell of a lot more clout than what they are willing to acknowledge. And it is right on the money: not only are caps the way to go, but we are going to hear a lot of noise from the same kind of abusers that these caps are designed to discourage.

I am with Comcast right now, and have been for about eight years. For a long time we heard of people getting their service mysteriously cancelled by Comcrap without the company ever disclosing what the cap actually was, except that it was excessive usage. People don't understand that broadband costs money, if a few saturate the service then it makes everyone else see Comcast as slow.

Of course, the whining is going to rage, but hopefully the end result will prove them right. You would have to pull a lot of video in order to hit the proposed 250GB limit with Comcast. If you are the kind of guy that is pulling above that, and Comcast offers you a $10 hit for every extra 10GB above the cap, you should be happy.

What about legal downloads? A full DVD is 4.7GB, so if you had a legal service that let you pull DVD video at full resolution, you would be able to watch 53 full DVDs in a month before hitting the cap. Comcast and others will probably make arrangements with the legitimate sources, like Netflix's instant play and the Apple iTMS so this content is cached within their network so it would not count against the cap.

What about software and other legitimate sources? The Australians have successfully proved that you can cache these at a local level, so you should be able to grab your Linux ISOs without problems.

Who is left? P2P. P2P is going to be left hanging out to dry, especially since the major broadband providers are already moving on with a newer generation, P4P, that will allow them to lock out the undesirables like The Pirate Bay, etc.

What we won't see is a price drop. What is their motivation to lower prices when even with competition present they simply nod to each other and keep the prices artificially high? We have FIOS available now, but the pricing is almost identical to cable. One would think that a new service would have to offer a lower price point to compete, since the feature set is almost identical.

Read the editorial, it is good stuff and you will be hearing a lot of bitching and moaning about it over the next week.

Tin foil hat watch: Titanic Was Found During Secret Cold War Navy Mission

2008-06-03T18:26:00.001+01:00

The 1985 discovery of the Titanic stemmed from a secret United States Navy investigation of two wrecked nuclear submarines, according to the oceanographer who found the infamous ocean liner.

Pieces of this Cold War tale have been known since the mid-1990s, but more complete details are now coming to light, said Titanic’s discoverer, Robert Ballard.

“The Navy is finally discussing it,” said Ballard, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island in Narragansett and the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration in Connecticut.
[From Titanic Was Found During Secret Cold War Navy Mission]

Somehow the tin foil hat brigade is going to find a way to give a negative spin to this story.

The story, in a nutshell:

1. Scientist(s) have a cool robotic sub.

2. The US Navy has two missing nuclear subs.

3. The US Navy pays scientist(s) to look for the nuclear subs.

4. The scientist(s) mention that RMS Titanic happens to lie between the two sunken subs.

5. The US Navy basically could care less as long as the mission to look for the subs is completed first.

That's pretty much it.

GM to close 4 factories, may drop Hummer - Autos- msnbc.com

2008-06-03T14:57:00.001+01:00

WILMINGTON, Del. - General Motors is closing four truck and SUV plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico as surging fuel prices hasten a dramatic shift to smaller vehicles.

CEO Rick Wagoner said Tuesday before the automaker's annual meeting in Delaware the plants to be closed are in Oshawa, Ontario; Moraine, Ohio; Janesville, Wis.; and Toluca, Mexico. He also said the iconic Hummer brand may be discontinued.
[From GM to close 4 factories, may drop Hummer - Autos- msnbc.com]

Natural selection at its worst.

Are we repeating the late 70's? After that fiasco we should have learned that size doesn't matter, but the running costs do. When the big SuV shift started a decade ago, we had plenty of time to push for efficient engines powerful enough to push the damn things. Instead we said screw it, the market can bear it.

The problem is somebody forgot to look ahead more than a few years. You can't expect to pour millions into a bunch of factories, retool them for SuVs and trucks and not worry about how long it will take to recover their cost. Did anyone bother to study the market the way the Japanese and the Germans do?

After getting their asses kicked by small vehicle makers, the least they could do was pay attention to how they work. Take a look at the Japanese car makers, how many carry full-size SuVs? What is the proportion of SuVs to smaller vehicles? What's the average fuel consumption of theirs versus ours?

Notice that the argument here is not the usability of the SuV. We need the damn things, same as we need full-size trucks. The problem is that the US car industry as a whole was reckless on its long term view of the market.

The end result is that now it is going to be harder for the people that really need these SuVs to get what they need at a proper price. It also means loss of jobs in two american factories (screw Canada and Mexico).

Of course, there are good news too. I am sure that if you go on the market for a used SuV you can make a killing. I always wanted a big sonofabitch, like a Suburban or a Tahoe, but they are too expensive, and they are gas guzzlers. In another few months I should be able to walk into a used car dealership and have them beg me to take a nearly new Suburban for a killing. Of course, I'll have to be careful with the gas, and the hippies will probably key it and spit on it.

Photo Credit: Photo by edenpictures, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Which Sports Car Are You? (Version 2.0) personality test

2008-06-03T01:39:00.001+01:00

I'm a Ferrari 360 Modena!

You've got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You're sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you're expensive and high-maintenance, but you're worth it.

"Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Thunderbird still sucks

2008-05-25T18:41:00.000+01:00

The last time I used Mozilla Thunderbird it was in Windows, I was trying to stay away from Outlook. Eventually it was so infuriating that it drove me back to Outlook.

That was over two years ago.

I also tried to use Mail.app but the problem is that it doesn't play nice with Outlook. My boss uses Outlook, that means *I* have to make sure I send the emails so he can see them OK, not the other way around. There is a weird incompatibility between Mail.app and Outlook due to Unicode: sometimes Outlook can't tell that the message should be set to Unicode.

The only fix I know is to add a Unicode character to my signature, which would force the whole message to be Unicode and Outlook will see it properly.

I switched back to Mail.app a couple of months ago because I did not wanted to keep Parallels open just to reply to work email, and the Unicode signature hack more or less worked, but I found another problem: many times I was replying to emails thinking it was in rich text mode, when in reality it was sending the email in plain text, something that dear leader hates.

This week I finally broke down and tried the newest Thunderbird. To my dismay, it could not even import emails from Mail.app, and their instructions on how to do it by hand were completely and absolutely wrong. After three or four days I found a program that lets me export Mail.app mailboxes one at a time, then a Thunderbird extension that can read these exported files.

The end result? I got all 25,000 or so emails, but once again, I hate Thunderbird.

Search sucks.

The preferences suck.

It took me over five minutes to find out where the hell to change my signature.

My signature comes out as plain text no matter what. If I add html markup to it, it encodes it. If I try rich text, it encodes it.

No smart mailboxes!

I could go on.

I even tried Mailsmith, but it is god damn ugly, and it won't do html emails. I hate Eudora with passion, there is no way in hell I am going to use that voluntarily. And I can't use my favorite email, Gmail, because when I use impersonation Outlook says "email sent by user@gmail.com on behalf of user@domain.com."

What else is out there for 10.5? Even if it costs money, I just want something that works at least as good as Mail.app but with less html email drama.

28 Free On Demand Video Services Later

2008-05-22T15:57:00.001+01:00

Watch 28 Days Later for free at Hulu:

Un-freakin-believable.

Korean War executions unearthed - Asia-Pacific - msnbc.com

2008-05-19T14:57:00.001+01:00

Not exactly how I expected to start my Monday news reading:

DAEJEON, South Korea - Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
[From Korean War executions unearthed - Asia-Pacific - msnbc.com]

I don't know how it is done in other countries, but in the United States it is common practice to seal certain classified materials for 50 years, to make sure that those involved are either dead or at least gone from government service by the time the material is released to the public. 50 years used to be enough, but nowadays it feels like just yesterday, so it wouldn't surprise me if the powers-that-be are already fighting to increase that limit to 75 or more years.

The sad thing is that whatever uproar this could create is going to get drowned by politics, the end result being that nothing will be done about this. After all, our position will be that we didn't do anything, we just saw it and decided to shut up (plus what the hell, the Democrats were in charge). The North Koreans will say they didn't do anything, it was THEIR people that got executed. The South Koreans will try to blame the North Koreans for it, or ask why the Americans did not stop them.

Happy Birthday HijiNKS Ensue!

2008-05-11T18:47:00.001+01:00

One of my favorite web comics is one year old today. Happy Birthday!

In Memoriam: Dell Computer

2008-05-11T17:52:00.001+01:00

Fake Steve Jobs wrote a fantastic essay on why Dell is on its way down:

To think Michael Dell can do at Dell what I did at Apple is like thinking that if you give Michael Dell a striped shirt and put him in Picasso's old studio and let him buy supplies from Picasso's supplier then you'd have another Picasso. No. Apple is just that -- it's my paint store, the place I get my brushes and canvases and frames and smocks and the metal or clay or whatever Picasso used to make his sculptures. Apple is the loft where I do my work and make love to my nude models. Figuratively speaking. It's the kitchen where I pose for wacky photos with loaves of bread.

The truth on Dell? Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It's DEC and DG and Apollo. It's a flower that bloomed and now must die. It's roadkill. It's mulch. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a good thing.
[From Fake Steve Jobs]

I have a love-hate relationship with Dell computers that goes back more than ten years. It always frustrated me that their servers and desktop machines were so good, while their laptops, well, at least every single Dell laptop I have ever used, are shit. My last Dell laptop was less than one year old when handed to me at work, it was twice as thick as my previous laptop, a 15" Apple Powerbook G4. It also weighted about 10 pounds and its battery was already fried. The LCD screen eventually died, but at least it was replaced under warranty. The chassis CREAKED (I had an Apple iBook, which was mostly polycarbonate shells around a magnesium space frame, and that damn thing was sturdier than the Dell).

Still, it bothers me to see the company sucking on it, because they are my preferred source for cheap and reliable servers.

Transmission Bittorrent client, now with built-in IP blacklists

2008-05-10T15:40:00.000+01:00

I was delighted to learn that the new version of Transmission now supports black listing using the Bluetack level 1 list. What this means is that with the black list engaged you will not get hit by scan attempts from certain known IPs that frown on Bittorrent usage. This was already available through PeerGuardian, but it is nice to have it built into the application.

Assholes of the Week: The Myanmar Ruling Junta

2008-05-10T15:21:00.001+01:00

YANGON, Myanmar - Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.

The United Nations sent in three more planes and several trucks loaded with aid, though the junta took over its first two shipments. The government agreed to let a U.S. cargo plane bring in supplies Monday, but foreign disaster experts were still being barred entry.

State-run television continuously ran images of top generals — including the junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe — handing out boxes of aid to survivors at elaborate ceremonies.

[From Myanmar junta hands out aid boxes with generals' names - Yahoo! News]

This is far beyond irrational. First their country gets slaughtered by a natural disaster. Then they refuse the free flow of aid workers, and refuse the shipping of help shipments. Why? Probably paranoia that the powers-that-be are going to try to use the disaster as an excuse to topple the junta.

Then they allow aid flights, but confiscate the material. Why? This one puzzled everyone, until now. The aid was eventually distributed, only plastered with pro-regime propaganda.

This is just plain dumb. All they had to do was allow the shipments, then after the aid was distributed use their monopoly on communications to claim that it was the regime that helped their people. The UN gets to help people in need, the local ruling group gets to save face, and the victims get some relief. Everyone wins.

But no. With fatality figures approaching the 500,000 mark in a country with an estimated population of almost 48 million, these people decide to run a political exercise.

Assholes.

The sad thing is that with China sharing a 2,000 Km border, it makes you wonder why the Chinese haven't sent a subtle word to these people to get their acts together and stop drawing so much attention to the area. They are just probably straddling the fence, seeing how this mess develops to see how THEY can take advantage of it.

(dumbass) Yahoo CEO Yang is now on the hot seat

2008-05-05T00:58:00.001+01:00

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang has gotten what he wanted: a chance to prove his company is worth more than the $47.5 billion that Microsoft Corp. offered to buy the Internet pioneer.

It will be a daunting challenge, as Yang will be pointedly reminded Monday when investors are expected to show how little they think of Yahoo without a takeover bid on the table. Faced with resistance from Yang and the rest of Yahoo's board, Microsoft withdrew its offer over the weekend.
[From Yahoo CEO Yang is now on the hot seat - U.S. business- msnbc.com]

Let the lawsuits begin.

Jerry Yang just turned down an offer to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion. This was the second offer, which was still lower than what he counter offered to the original bid. Microsoft walked away, since their second offer was already a stretch.

The anti-Microsoft camp is delighted, being too god damn stupid to realize that this could easily be the end of Yahoo as we know it. On Monday morning Yahoo is going to take a nasty dive, which will trigger the first shareholder lawsuits against Yahoo for not doing what was in the best interest of the shareholders. Microsoft is going to recover a little bit from the egg in their faces from three months of saber rattling.

And the next high profile company that receives an unsolicited offer from Microsoft is going to be a hell of a lot more receptive about it than Yahoo. The problem right now is that even if somebody were to step up and offer more than the $47.5 billion for Yahoo, it would be a stupid deal. There is no way the company is worth half of that.

MADD v. Grand Theft Auto IV

2008-05-03T14:34:00.001+01:00

GTA 4 barely launched and the politics have already started. The problem is when good intentions clash with misinformation. I support MADD 100%, they are one of those precious few special interest groups (yeah, MADD is an interest group) that are no brainers: drunk driving kills.

The problem this time? Somebody at MADD did not bother to play the game before they put out their official stand against the game. Had anyone bothered to play the game first, they would had noticed that "drunk" mode in GTA 4 is a complete pain in the ass. I tried it last night and for the first few minutes I could not even play, the screen shook so much that I was a hair away from motion sickness. And even after the character felt like he had sobered up, within seconds of getting into the car it was already surrounded by cops. I don't know how the hell one can hit drunk mode and actually drive more than a street or three.

Been there, done that (no t-shirt yet)

2008-05-03T14:20:00.001+01:00

Dilbert is (c) Scott Adams.

Gladly this doesn't happen in my current job but I clearly remember that situation right around when the dot coms were in the free growth stage.

Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs

2008-05-02T16:16:00.001+01:00

I bought my first DVD about 10 years ago. At the time, they were a technical marvel:

* 8.5 Gigabytes per side

* 720 x 480 MPEG-2 video at 30 frames per second

* Dolby Digital (AC-3) or Digital Theater System (DTS) digital multichannel sound

Today, those specs are rapidly becoming pedestrian in the face of high definition cable, broadcast, and Blu-Ray discs. A few of the video sharing websites offer something perilously close to DVD quality already.

I say the DVD is the new MP3. We’re going to start tossing these things around like candy.

Unlike audio CDs, DVDs are already compressed digital data. You could extract the files from the DVD as-is, and play them back to your heart’s content. No re-encoding required. But like The Six Million Dollar Man, we can rebuild them better than they were before. Video codecs have advanced tremendously since the heady days of MPEG-2. These new codecs take a lot more playback horsepower than MPEG-2, but offer comparable quality in about one-fourth the size. We can turn our digital DVDs into better digital DVDs through superior computer science.
[From Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs]

The article is right on the money. I am going through that exact experience: I have tons of DVDs scattered all over the house, and (exercising my fair use rights) I am slowly converting them to h.264 for our two AppleTVs. Once you get used to picking your DVDs off a menu, there is no turning back, especially if you use MetaX to pull the DVD’s cover and main information off Amazon. It looks no different than browsing for movies through the iTunes Music store.

The main problems to doing this are logistics:

1. Using my particular settings for Handbrake, it takes about 1.5GB of disk space for each hour of DVD video. Thanks God 1TB external drives are affordable now.

2. Limitations of the Mac Book Pro Superdrive. It is a bit too slow to do a real time rip + encode. That means using Mac The Ripper first, to rip the movie, then Handbrake to convert it to h.264.

3. Some DVDs are using protection schemes that are not part of the DVD specification, so these may not be ripped consistently. Not the end of the world, all it means is I have to keep the DVD at hand instead of buried into a closet.

4. I have a hardware accelerator for h.264, but it doesn’t allow me to do AC3 passthroughs. This means if I want to use the encoder, I will lose 5.1. Not cool.

5. 3GB per movie is kind of large when you are trying to move it across a home network to a different machine. My piece of shit wireless G router would choke on it, same router with everything on 100MB ethernet seems to work OK. I expect this to stop being an issue once I upgrade to wireless N.

The Other New iPhone?

2008-05-01T14:32:00.000+01:00

Remember last year, when a little-known company named Uniea announced new iPod nano cases—with correct physical dimensions—before the new iPod nano was ever shown? As we mentioned shortly afterwards, readers were quick to slam Uniea and its mock-ups, but the cases proved perfect fits when the new nano was released. Now, there are all sorts of friend-of-a-friend stories swirling around about the second-generation iPhone, and perhaps not surprisingly, they contradict one another.
[From The Other New iPhone? | iLounge Backstage]

We are now in the minor Apple rumors season, which is the month before WWDC (Major Apple rumor season is the 5-6 weeks before MWSF). The current focus of the rumors is the second generation of the iPhone. We already have plenty of noise making the rounds about the subsidized phones, so now the focus is in specific leaks about changes to the design of the device. It is still a little too early for leaked photos, that's not going to happen until about a day or so before WWDC starts.

WIth the leaked templates we'll have 3D mockups in about a week (the 3D mockups are another tradition since there are always plenty of talented Mac-using artists with the skill and imagination to put together some fantastic what-ifs).

Five minutes after the iPhone presentation in WWDC, the Mac Crying Game starts yet once again.

AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone

2008-04-30T14:26:00.000+01:00

AT&T (T) is planning to put some extra shine on the even sleeker new Apple (AAPL) iPhone. When the 3G iPhone is introduced this summer, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone sales partner with Apple, will cut the price by as much as $200, according to a person familiar with the strategy. AT&T is preparing to subsidize $200 of the cost of a new iPhone, bringing the price down to $199 for customers who sign two-year contracts, the source says. Apple is expected to have two versions of the new iPhone, an 8-gigabyte-memory and a 16-gigabyte-memory model with price tags widely expected to be $399 and $499. AT&T and Apple declined to comment.
[From FORTUNE: Techland AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone «]

I want to say that I'll believe this one when I see it, but it is just too god damn attractive. I have with AT&T for years (well, with the company that keeps getting renamed and remerged and it is currently called AT&T) and we have two iPhones, so the contract shove is not that big of a deal. Plus we can still sell our current 8GB iPhones to somebody that wants to run them unlocked for at least $200 each.

This is of course relying on the reports that the phone will include true GPS. 3G by itself is just not enough motivation to ditch our first generation iPhones so early, and the slimmer casing is a non-issue, since we don't mind the size of the current casing.

Politics are funny

2008-04-27T15:35:00.001+01:00

These are my results from the survey at http://www.politicalcompass.org :

The idea here is that a left/right plot is not good enough, and that the historic left/right alignment is actually an economics measure, so they added the second variable for Authoritarian v. Libertarian. It gets interesting because the survey is designed to take into account your subconscious efforts to tweak your answers so they fit what you think is your political stance. I tried to, and I failed.

This is their sample plot with some historical figures for comparison:

UPDATE: Brad just answered the survey too.

South Korea to use cloned dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives

2008-04-26T11:14:00.001+01:00

INCHEON, South Korea: The country that created the world's first cloned canine plans to put duplicated dogs on patrol to sniff out drugs and explosives.

The Korean Customs Service unveiled Thursday seven cloned Labrador retrievers being trained near Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul. The dogs were born five to six months ago after being separately cloned from a skilled drug-sniffing canine in active service.

Due to the difficulties in finding dogs who are up to snuff for the critical jobs, officials said using clones could help reduce costs.
[From South Korea to use cloned dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives - International Herald Tribune]

I had tuned out these cloning-related news in the past because they all seemed to focus in pure academic research and the morons that oppose it without as much as trying to read the description of what is it that the scientists are trying to do. I have no idea if this is the first mainstream announcement about cloning animals for a practical purpose, but if it is I hope they get away with it.

Of course, this is the kind of thing that we can't do in the United States. Even if the dogs in question were trained as guides for the blind, or as rescue dogs, a political element in this country will effectively seize the opportunity to crush the scientists simply to make a few cheap headlines.

This is a real world application to a controversial scientific discipline, not one more attempt of soulless Science trying to destroy God, or whatever the hell is it that these people think cloning is all about.

I am eagerly awaiting for South Korean scientists to find the perfect pig with the perfect body composition for maximum bacon processing. Then it can be cloned and we can solve world hunger with delicious bacon.

I have The Moose

2008-04-25T03:02:00.001+01:00

In programming circles, it is common to keep a small stuffed animal to be kept by whatever team member has done something gloriously stupid. Some places use a Big Mouth Billy Bass, but most of my friends use a moose. Whenever one of us screws something up big time, we request possession of The Moose.

Today I took a double possession. The first incident involved a boolean function. Here is more or less a breakdown of what I did:

[20:40] <VP|bofh> function returns true/false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> function uses sproc to return true/false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> sproc uses a record count to decide true/false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> zero records = true

[20:40] <VP|bofh> > zero = false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> the ACTUAL function returned zero records = false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> > 0 records = true

This basically means that my true/false function was returning false/true instead. This ate two hours of work last night, and another hour this evening.

The second incident was subtle. I had a sequence of events:

1. Check authentication status

2. Check secondary authentication status

3. Execute a function

4. Execute another function

5. Execute another function

6. Auto-login

And it wasn't working. Since I was still reeling from the boolean error, I started adding breaking points and checking every line of code. One hour into it, I found the culprit: when I copied the function I needed to use for step #4, it had a built-in self-authentication check, which made sure only logged-in users could run the function. This meant that even after I had checked the two authentication methods, I had a rogue third check within my code that was raising all sorts of hell.

So now I have The Moose.

Photo Credit: Photo by grizzbass, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

What Happened In Piedmont

2008-04-23T16:19:00.001+01:00

There is an Andromeda Strain remake in the works, this time as a miniseries. It is one of my favorite Sci Fi movie/book pairs, I really hope they don't screw it up.

A cool thing I noticed already is that they are going the viral marketing route for the promos, since there is already at least one fake blog that is clearly part of it.

Moo

2008-04-19T04:25:00.001+01:00

Slow news week, so here's something that Alec Esotérica sent me:

I am under the influence of prescription narcotics (got snipped on Monday), so I have no idea if the video looks *that* weird to somebody with a clear mind.

Oh, the Irony

2008-04-15T10:20:00.001+01:00

So here I am struggling with post-op recovery, insomnia and probably sleep apnea, and I ran into this:

Image Credit: Comic by xkcd, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

MetaX

2008-04-13T16:14:00.001+01:00

It is obvious that my most common complaint about the iTunes and AppleTV platform is encoding issues. Still, there is a second aspect that most of us find annoying: proper tagging of media files.

iTunes simply can't deal with all of the tags that can be used in the movies that it can play:

1. You can't toggle video type.

2. You can't add a rating. You can add your own rating, but you can't mark a movie as PG-13, etc.

3. There is no way to mark a movie as multiple volumes. TV shows have seasons and episodes, movies don't have parts.

4. You can't change the artwork of movies with AC3.

I bet there is more, but those four are the most obvious. I was able to deal with #1 through an AppleScript, but until today I had no way to deal with the rest in a mechanical fashion. Today I learned of a donationware application, MetaX, that does most of that work. I just tested it with a half dozen movies and so far the results are beyond of what I expected.

Not only will it allow me to deal with these issues, but it automates them by both allowing a queue, and implementing automated lookups to both Amazon and the Internet Movie Database.

Kickass.

It even fills the description fields, ratings, etc. The only problem is that in the interest of paranoia, it rewrites your video file, then after completion it deletes the old one and adds the new one to iTunes. It makes for a slow queue, but at least if it fails you won't lose the original file.

The Reluctant Shopper

2008-04-12T18:07:00.000+01:00

Over the past week or so I have been pushed to do something that I really despise: I am the designated shopper in my household.

Ivette has been sick for almost two weeks, and it got to the point where she could barely leave the house. She does all of our shopping, the only time I go to a store is to pick up something very specific, like a computer-related item, a book, etc. Before last week I was averaging less than one trip to the supermarket PER QUARTER.

Not anymore.

It only took me a day to figure out why I never go shopping: because I really despise it. I hate the parking lots, the stores, the crowded aisles, the merchandise selection, the checkout process, etc. Basically everything.

The worst thing is that no matter how much I insist, either Ivette can't put together a shopping list if her life depended on it, or she does and I can't find half of the things she asks for.Or worse, she won't believe me when I claim that I did not find the item:

Me: I couldn't find the Cascade dishwasher pellets with bleach.

Her: You sure?

Me: Yup, all I found was the ones with Dawn.

Her: Those are the ones you idiot!

Me: Nope, they said Dawn, not bleach.

Then two days later I found the real item: Cascade dishwasher pellets with bleach AND Dawn. Victory!

Then there's the weird. At Target there's this weird pecking order thing, for example during the afternoons women shoppers frown at men of working/married age shopping for household items. They look at you like you are some kind of intruder, or that you are doing something wrong, like keeping your woman chained to her bed, or worse.

Then there's the pharmacy. The moron that laid out the store did not allow for room for the two lines, so you spend most of your time moving back and forth to allow shopping carts to roll by. Yes, because everyone that walks into the store decides that she HAS to roll her cart thru the god damn pharmacy line even if she needs nothing from that corner of the store.

Two weeks with the ElGato Turbo.264

2008-04-12T17:48:00.001+01:00

It's been close to two weeks since I purchased my Turbo.264 and have managed to push about over 100 hours of video through it, equally split between TS_Video and transcodes from DivX. Almost every night for two weeks it has run nonstop doing TS_Video folders, and at least 2 hours every morning doing transcoding.

The good: it really works. Even at its busiest, it will run on real time (24fps or so for most video) while CPU utilization is very reasonable. The fastest I have seen it encode was 50fps for a WMV transcode for the iPhone (all my other encoding is for the AppleTV). Funny thing is that during the WMV transcode it could not recognize that I have a registered version of Flip4mac.

The bad: it is at the mercy of the software that you use. The application that ships with it slaughters DVDs. I have seen many instances of audio tracks our of sync. It botches the aspect ratio. It can't deal with most TV season DVDs. And no AC-3 passthrough.

Roxio Popcorn 3 is a little better. I haven't seen it screw up the aspect ratio, and again: no AC-3 passthrough. I don't understand why this is a problem since all it has to do is take the sound as is, it won't need to transcode it. It can handle DVD chapters and TV season DVDs a lot better. The in-progress status is not as good as the one with the application supplied with the Turbo.264.

After the first week or so I realized that I could still use the dongle for transcoding and leave the TS_Video jobs to run overnight with Handbrake. Handbrake on this laptop when it is idle can easily run over 30fps, which is not exactly terrible.

I still think it is a great buy, and if you don't care about the AC-3 passthrough then it is even better (for example, if you are watching AppleTV and you are using only the component cables). Just make sure you try Popcorn 3 before settling on the default application.

The Craziest Thing Gary Busey Ever Snorted Cocaine Off Of

2008-04-07T14:41:00.001+01:00

Best headline of the day, courtesy of Wired Magazine:

"I was interviewing him once and asked him, what's the craziest thing you ever snorted cocaine off of? He couldn't think of anything, but afterwards his publicist called me and said, you know that question? And I thought, oh man, they want me to pull the question. But no, they said that Gary remembered he had a better answer for me."
[From The Craziest Thing Gary Busey Ever Snorted Cocaine Off Of | Game | Life from Wired.com]

You gotta read the article, it did better to wake me up than my first cup of coffee of the day.

Hollywood legend Charlton Heston dead at 84 - CNN.com

2008-04-06T08:01:00.001+01:00

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Actor Charlton Heston died at Beverly Hills home at the age of 84 Saturday, his family said.

art.jpg

Heston was suffering the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

Heston, known for portrayals of larger than life figure including Moses and Ben Hur, was suffering the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

Heston's wife of 64 years, Lydia, was by his side at the time of his death, according to the family statement.
[From Hollywood legend Charlton Heston dead at 84 - CNN.com]

The god damn dirty apes never got to take away his guns, no matter how hard they tried.

Heston is one of my favorite actors of all time (both Omega Man and Soylent Green are in permanent rotation in my household). Good Night, Funny Guy.

Adobe to Mac-Bound Artists: No 64-bit Photoshop CS4 for you

2008-04-03T21:04:00.001+01:00

(the Soup Nazi, picture related)

Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop

Posted Apr 3rd 2008 1:00PM by Mat Lu

Filed under: OS, Software, Developer

Adobe's announcement that Photoshop CS4 will be 32-bit only on OS X has the Mac web buzzing today. Accusations of blame are being shot at both Adobe and Apple by various pundits (though notably not by the companies themselves). Fortunately, some of the better Mac pundits are also weighing in with interesting opinions on this development.

Over at Ars, John Siracusa has penned an interesting historical account of the relationship of Adobe and Apple, and the Carbon API which is at the center of the controversy. He somewhat grimly sees this Photoshop development as the furthering of bad blood between the two companies and suggests that "the real storm may be yet to come" as Adobe and Apple clash over Flash and Air, etc. (witness the Flash on iPhone kerfuffle).
[From Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

I think somebody at Adobe forgot who butters their bread. They still have the balance sheet mentality of picking which side of the house will bring the best short term return, screw the other side. The problem with this is that they are missing out on the opportunity to exploit on the newest bang-for-the-buck shifts between PCs and Macs. Had they decided once and for all to drop Carbon, they could have used that risk to show off to their users what the can really do. It would not surprise me if the Mac 64-bit version would slaughter Vista, but it would surprise people spending $4000 on high end PCs only to find out the same money could buy them a monster Mac rig.

Idle

2008-04-03T19:09:00.001+01:00

Waiting for a med switch consult.

An Open Letter to Verizon's FIOS division

2008-04-03T03:15:00.001+01:00

(picture related)

A month ago I decided that it was time to put Comcast to rest and move on to Verizon FIOS. There was nothing really wrong with Comcast, but the FIOS offers were simply unbelievable.

Yeah, I'm an idiot.

I ordered 15MB/15MB Internet service and was told that my delivery/installation appointment would be one month away. My appointment was today.

For the past month I was getting automated recordings from Verizon at least every week, reminding me of the installation date. I even took the afternoon off in advance, since I expected it to be distracting enough.

Then the shit hit the fan.

For starters, the installer was over an hour late. Once he showed up, he proved to me within minutes that he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. He insisted on going to my master bedroom closet, even after I told him three times that each of the 300+ units in our condo complex uses the HVAC closet as the communication lines tunnel, all lines enter each unit through the HVAC closet.

The installer got a little hostile, and insisted on checking the deployment box outside. Before I could open my patio door, he had walked out of the building and tried to walk around, which is really stupid since that had him walk 10 buildings down the street before the first opening that allows access to our back yards. Dumbass.

After some lecturing, he told me there was no way in hell he could get the job done. The fiber was in the attic, four stories above, and he would need access to each of the units above mine so he could pull the cable down. He also needed a power outlet in the HVAC closet, since there was none his solution was to run a power cord out of the closet, stapled to the god damn ceiling, across and into my living room and plugged into one of the outlets in my living room.

Dumbass x 2.

I offered him to get the engineering/facilities guys for help. After all, we have an agreement that allows them access to any unit for this kind of emergency. No, he replied, he would absolutely refuse to enter a unit unless the owner was present.

He ranted for a few minutes while Ivette was having the engineering guys get permission to enter each unit. She even got them to put a proper power outlet inside of the HVAC closet, something the Verizon guy did not think about. He left before she was back. Before he left he handed me a phone number to call to re-schedule.

It took one hour, and four calls, to make it to the point in which I could pick a new appointment.

"The next appointment we have available is April 27."

Let me get this straight: I had to prequalify to order this service. I ordered this service on March 1st, 2008, and I have to wait two months to have it installed because Verizon did not finish their cable runs as they should had?

Why the fuck do I get letters from Verizon every two weeks begging us to switch to FIOS?

I told her sorry, that's not going to work. Please cancel my order. It took another half hour, and two people, before I was done with the cancellation process.

Now, I am willing to allow the one-month wait to install the service, but them walking in here and deciding the place is not wired is just bullshit. If they know they are going to run a 4-6 hour service call (their estimate, not mine) then why the fuck can't they send a guy sometime in the four weeks before, to do a site survey?

How to do a timesaving FIOS site survey:

Hand a qualified tech the address for a potential installation.

Tech drives to the address, then asks the customer to allow him to walk through and look for the wiring cabinets, closets, etc.

Tech inspects the point in which FIOS hits the property and sees if there is any work left to do before he can do the end user installation.

Tech says goodbye and goes to the next address.

I imagine that for most inspections the tech can be done in 15 minutes or less. If he didn't find anything wrong, he can write a service note for the actual installer, to save him the hassle of figuring out where the cabinets and the entry point are located. If he finds something wrong, he has plenty of time to arrange for Verizon to fix whatever needs to be fixed.

Instead, we have technicians running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Assholes. And worse, they try to make it look like it is the customer's fault that there is a problem.

As soon as I was done with Verizon, I called Comcast and had them upgrade my Internet tier to 16MB/2MB, a $10 upgrade. This 16MB is before any speed boost. The funny thing is this is the third time in less than two years that I ask for the upgrade. For some reason they keep dropping it from my bill. The guy from Comcast was extremely nice, even after I told him that I almost deserted to FIOS.

"Uh, you don't want to do that."

Speed tests throughout the evening show me pulling 22MB/2.7MB. Fuck You, Verizon.

Questions for Verizon, not that I give a shit anymore:

Why does it take a month to schedule an installation in the wealthiest county in all of the United States?

Why are multi-unit dwelling deployments not going through some kind of quality assurance process? At the very least, Verizon should send somebody to make sure that their wiring contractors are deploying the right equipment.

Why not spend some money to train your customer support personnel?

Would somebody post a memo that just because a phone number is used for the account it doesn't mean the phone is a Verizon account?

Do you find it acceptable to have technicians that refuse to listen to knowledgeable customers? Especially when the customer has information that can make the installer's job easier?

How come Comcast has service appointment time guarantees and you don't? Comcast techs (at least here) are very timely and courteous. Your installer was sort of an asshole.

If a customer calls complaining about a fucked up installation about waiting for a month, is it wise to tell said customer that the next available appointment is almost a month away? Shouldn't this be a red flag situation to try to appease the customer by trying to right a wrong and come up with a better service appointment reschedule?

How come you guys spend so much money sending those begging letters without checking if the service is really available at that unit?

How come you guys spend so much money on marketing and can't afford a site inspection ahead of an installation appointment? I am guesstimating an expense of up to half a billable hour per each installation, which is already budgeted at 4 to 6 hours.

How come Verizon doesn't talk to condo associations and their engineering folks to preempt deployment issues at large condo complexes? All it takes is to send one engineer to visit each condo area and take a look at the possible floorplans. A recent college grad should have been able to come here and, in less than two hours, visit the three standard unit layouts, and maybe write a half-page cheat sheet to be used for any FIOS deployment to any of these 300+ units.

ElGato Turbo 264: First Impressions

2008-04-03T02:25:00.001+01:00

There is a downside to having an AppleTV, iPhone or video capable iPod: converting videos to a compatible format is always a hassle. There are plenty of applications to handle this problem, no two of them are alike.

I have tons of DVDs, ripping them turned out to be quite the adventure. I did the first few dozen or so one by one, with Handbrake. I wouldn't know until I got an AC3 receiver that I ripped all of these DVDs wrong and will have to eventually re-rip them because the default Handbrake conversion for AppleTV converts the AC3 tracks to AAC. Ouch.

VisualHub is great, but it is slow. It doesn't have a pause button, which is really stupid: if you have a big batch of files to convert and you are using too much power, you can't pause the job, you have to kil l it, then remove from the queue whatever is good to go and then start again.

I didn't know I could use Handbrake to process files from a DVD already ripped. The time needed to rip a DVD with Mac The Ripper, then convert it for the AppleTV with Handbrake is usually less than if you let Handbrake do the whole job. More ouch.

Roxio Popcorn, for some really fucking stupid reason, won't allow you to pass-through the AC3 from a DVD, instead you are forced to convert to AAC. The interface *is* better, and it queues nicely, plus it has a proper pause feature. And it allows for hardware acceleration.

That's when I learned that ElGato has a hardware accelerator for h.264. I spent a week or so scouring the web for reviews and hate posts about it, and overall it seems to have a good reception. It is universally accepted that if your mac is not very new, the performance improvements are dramatic. But, what about recent fast macs?

After grinding through about 15 hours of video, I can tell that even in a Mac Book Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, 3GB RAM, Leopard, and while Time Machine is running, iTunes is streaming to my AppleTV over 100BaseT, and Parallels Desktop is running XP Pro over a Cisco VPN, it is running a hell of a lot faster than VisualHub.

The best part is that the resource utilization of the Turbo.264 application is very low, most of the time I can't tell it is running. The USB dongle with the hardware encoder doesn't even get warm. Right now I am seeing consistent 40fps or better encoding (the source material is 29fps, if you can't crank out at least that much, it means it will take you longer than one hour to encode one hour of video). In real life this means that I am cranking out avi/divx to h.264 conversions at about one hour of encoding for every two hours of video input. I imagine this is going to depend wildly on the source material.

So yes, even if the machine is fast, you can at your very worst expect it to use very little resources to crank out the same workload that would usually max out a multiple core mac.

The Rat in the Dishwashing Machine

2008-04-02T14:03:00.000+01:00

So I reach into my dishwasher machine, and I see a frickin rat in the cutlery caddy:

I was of course half asleep, so it took me a split second to realize it was nothing more than a butter knife from a Ratatouille dinner kit.

Pedro Vera's Web Log

We're moving!

New experiment: Amazon Kindle Wiki

iPhone 3G

Flip Video Ultra

Amazon Kindle

Veraperez.com pwn3d again

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

Word cloud

Frustrated

Another seemingly infinite wikipedia session

Savage calls autism a "fraud and a racket," the blogosphere calls Savage every name in the book

The car won't start

WTF is going on in the US Air Force?

Don't tell me it is free and then ask me to pay for a different thing as a condition

How not to ride a Segway

Now available in the Amazon Kindle Store

Veraperez.com is back on business

Will the iPhone 3G blend?

Veraperez.com got PWN3D

Happy Birthday, Trinity!

Portable paintball auto turret

Yahoo rejects joint proposal from Microsoft, Icahn

A long trip

Blogo

What?

Twitter Bashing

Your registrar is ripping you off? Ditch him!

The Perfect Storm

Verizon doesn't want my hard-earned money

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Original iPhone warranties about to expire

Ferrari Building a Smaller, Lighter, Quicker Enzo | Autopia from Wired.com

Caffeinated moms drink up to keep up - CNN.com

Fake Jerry Yang

Bad movie weekend roundup

Dick Cheney is scowling at you

Is MagicJack the new Sunrocket?

Drivereplacementoctomy

3 more Yahoo execs reportedly jumping ship

The Faraday Cage Revised

How the iPhone puts a bomb under mobile networks | The Register

Air Force may reopen $35B tanker bid at government bidding

Firefox 3 Arrives

Tiger beats Mediate in U.S. Open thriller - SI.com - Golf

Honda rolls out fuel cell car

Five ways to tell your dad you hate him (by buying him a Sony PS3)

Goodbye alt.*

Blogroll

Happy 233rd Birthday, US Army!

Knockout

Broken embeds in Ecto 3.0b47

Stupid spammers

Interest-free loans, courtesy of your tiny vendors

Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8

Yahoo says talks with Microsoft are dead - U.S. business- msnbc.com

What the hell is wrong with Verizon?

The Mac Crying Game: iPhone 3G version

Moog shows a guitar with infinite sustain

Clever phone math

Strategery

iPhone: Now with 3G, A-GPS, half as expensive

Dubious ratings

Bosses Nuked, Some Air Force Missileers Cheer | Danger Room from Wired.com

Air Force officials ousted over nuclear gaffes - CNN.com

Top two Air Force officials resigning - Military- msnbc.com

Gamers Like In-Game Ads, Claims Microsoft -- Video Games -- InformationWeek

Liberty City Police Face Allegations Of Incompetence, Brutality | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Editorial: Caps are welcome - They just need to be structured to meet needs - dslreports.com

Tin foil hat watch: Titanic Was Found During Secret Cold War Navy Mission

GM to close 4 factories, may drop Hummer - Autos- msnbc.com

Which Sports Car Are You? (Version 2.0) personality test

I'm a Ferrari 360 Modena!

Thunderbird still sucks

28 Free On Demand Video Services Later

Korean War executions unearthed - Asia-Pacific - msnbc.com

Happy Birthday HijiNKS Ensue!

In Memoriam: Dell Computer

Transmission Bittorrent client, now with built-in IP blacklists

Assholes of the Week: The Myanmar Ruling Junta