Eye-Glazing Geek Stuff

Technical mutterings

Now relegated to Blogblivion...

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Sadie Good, Briz Bad

I took Sadie with me yesterday, to get her desire to “go” out of her system.  I needed to look at a computer with an apparent malware affliction, pick up a check, mess with servers a little, and I wanted to do a trial install of Outlook 2003 on one workstation that could be messed up without mattering.

It turned out the malware affliction was a variant of this lovely thing.  I had a certain amount of fun, because I located the files that contained the user’s recent web browser keystrokes, including his webmail URL, name and password, and all the most recent actions, including what I had done in the registry and such since sitting down.  I’d heard of viruses or spyware designed to log keystrokes and transmit the info, but I’d never encountered one or seen direct evidence that’s what it was.

When I hit the registry, the most recently modified key was now blank “run once” under HKCU (hkey_current_user), so obviously something had been planted there and had a chance to deploy and clear on reboot.  The run key under HKLM (hkey_local_machine) had five items, only one of them legit.  One of them was winlogin.  It and one other put themselves back as soon as they were cleared.

The file I recognized as not right in processes was ieredir.exe, which I was able to get rid of.  Searching on it later told me this was Briz-F or a variant and allowed me to learn more.

The symptoms he was having were that Firefox would not run at all.  Double-click and it goes away instantly.  Internet Explorer would run but not work.  Other things started hanging and not working, including eventually Word.

Fishing through files on the system, I found it was apparently spoofing explorer.exe with its own version, which would explain a lot.  Ugly.

He went home.  I left it for today, filled with joy at having that much extra to do this weekend.  A cleanup of that sort could take hours.  Afterward I looked at proxy server logs and found since about 10:00 AM the machine had periodically talked to a suspicious sounding .info URL and a URL ending in .org that otherwise sounded like it could be a credit union site.  The latter appears to make you think that it is doing a windows update.

So, remember I had Sadie with me?  She is so good!  It’s as if she has a built-in sense of decorum.  The whole time I worked on that computer, she hung out in that office quietly, chewing on a big pretzel the lawyer gave her and waiting patiently for me.  Periodically one of her admiring public would come to the door to say hi to her.

Then we went over to the server room, which is more of a closet.  She sits in there with me and touches nothing she shouldn’t.  This in a place where she could easily reach out and rip the spaghetti of little phone wires from their contacts.  There’s a toolbox she uses as a chair, and someone left a doorknob kit on the floor next to the door, so she plays with the pieces of that.

Then she got a big purple lollipop from the receptionist on our way down to my office, and for the little while we were there she ate the lollipop and played with her computer and a couple of small toys that live there.

She was sooooo good!  I know she is generally, but it still amazes me.  I still couldn’t take her for a whole day of intense work in the client’s offices, but it’s nice that I can take her for a couple hours or more and not have to worry much.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Home Office Tips?

I noticed in the latest CotC that Dane Carlson had a post titled 6 Tips for Working at Home With Children.  Obviously this is of great interest to me, since I partially work at home, and not just blogging, to the extent that involves money.

Item one was a consideration in selecting this apartment.  It’s also used for the bulk of the book shelves and some storage, and it’s not always off-limits, but I do have an office room with a door that can be closed at need.  I should probably do so more than I do, but most of my work at home is simply being available and able to respond to e-mails.

All too many of those go something like:

Them: “Help!  My computer barfed!”

Me: “What were you doing when it barfed?  What did the barf look like?  Did you try anything to clean the barf up yourself, or to prevent it from happening again?  Isn’t this like the barf that rebooting solves?  Let me know and we’ll go from there.”

Several days go by…

Them: “Hey, my computer’s still barfy.  Please fix.”

Me: “But you gave me no information to even know what to look at.”

Them: “I don’t have time to know anything about how a car computer works!  I just need it to drive me to do my work!  You’re confusing me.”

Tip number two is superlative.  Merely having music is a big help.  In fact, I have long been fascinated by the way music acts on my brain to make me focus.  It is almost like flipping a switch.

Sadly, my headphones died months ago and I have yet to replace them.  I miss them most late at night if I am up and at the computer.  I already sometimes avoided using them so I could easily be called into another room to help with the kids.  But then, that’s not hard core working at home when I can be that available.

One of these days I’ll get a new headset.  It really is useful, and probably worth the money for a better one than I had.  If playing music is like flipping a switch, doing it with a headset is like putting my brain into turbo mode.

The third tip is tougher, because it all depends.  I am on call theoretically 24/7, and in reality 10/5, with certain stuff I can’t do at home done best on weekends and in evenings.  When I am working hardcore at home, it’s usually an all-hours, nonstop as I can handle project, so there goes having a normal schedule.  When it’s lower grade, it’s such a work/home mix as to moot the “work hours” thing.  If I were working more regularly and busily from home, this would no doubt be useful.

Meanwhile, we’ve been trying to deal with the conflict between my combined need and desire to do certain out of the house stuff at all hours, and the need for me to be home by 6:00 PM at the latest as much as possible.  I’m not sure how other people do it, as it would be ideal for me to be home by 5:00 each day so the kids don’t melt down before supper is ready.

When she’s not charmed and amused by my artist-like habits, Deb is driven crazy by them.  Can’t say as I blame her, even as it’s tough to be any other way.

The fourth tip, well, never really been an issue.  Oddly enough, Sadie seems to have a sense that she should be quiet or go off by herself if the phone rings for me.  The way my office is configured, sound from the rest of the house is baffled even if the door is open, as long as they aren’t actually in the office.  Which Sadie also seems to have a sense of minimal invasiveness about.  She’s funny like that.

As for number 5, good idea, except if I am home it’s more likely to be something wolfed down at the desk.

Ah, and number 6… heh.  I never needed to ask that.  We routinely e-mail each other within the house.  And if I am doing intense, close the door work, all the more so.  It’s just plain convenient.

Other tips?  Good question.  I think you have to be willing to be a little flexible, which makes it easier for everyone to accept it when you really need to be left alone.  I’d say even with door-open work, everyone needs to be aware when to let you concentrate on the task you are enaged in.  For me it’s writing and other creative or technical things that can involve concentration, inspiration, or being “in the zone.” Sometimes I can write an e-mail response to a client having a problem and hold a conversation at the same time.  Sometimes the distraction makes me lose entirely what I was saying and changes the nature of the response.  Sometimes “flow” matters terribly.  Sometimes it doesn’t so much.

I go back and forth on the whole home office thing.  Given the nature of my work, I will always need one to some degree.  The discussion has been whether to go exclusively home, or go more completely home but with some office space somewhere, but not necessarily where and how much it is now.

There are days I’m ready to say “I just can’t do this!” and make sure I always have an office out of the house and spend more time at it than I do now.  There are other days when I can’t believe I’m still spending any money for a “real” office, no matter how nice it is to have an air conditioned place to take us all on the hottest days.

So.  What are your tips for working at home, with or without kids?

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Mmmm… Pizza

Last night was pizza night; our normal Papa Ginos order of a rustic meat combo and large traditional cheese, with the AAA discount.  Val got her first chance to gnaw on pizza bones, and her first taste of pizza cheese, which was also her first taste of cheese, which we decided after her checkup it was time for her to start trying.  She needs the fat and calories even more than Sadie did.

Sadie hadn’t eaten to speak of all day, and kept refusing food.  She’d woken up too early and had a cranky day.  We gave her a primo piece of the meat combo, which she picks much of the meat off of, but she wasn’t that excited by it.  My theory was that she wanted a slice of plain pizza, so I got her one.

To our amazement, for the first time ever she picked up the slice, held it like a big person and started taking bites point first.  This called for the camera!

The camera all too often disappoints me by getting an awesome shot but making it blurry.  I’ll take six pictures of one of them, get one that has a smile or is otherwise superlative, and the camera will have failed me just on that one.  Focusing is automated, which also means it takes the picture when it’s good and ready so I miss an outrageous number of “snap it now before the moment has passed” shots.  Sometimes video recording refuses to turn on at all, no matter how many times I press the button or how long I hold it down.

The first shot of Sadie with the pizza caught an uncharacteristic smile and was a great picture, but so blurry I wouldn’t ordinarily post it, and wouldn’t make a print out of it.  I was so mad I decided to experiment with touching it up.  I use Paint Shop Pro 5.

Here’s the fuzzy original (which actually isn’t as bad as a lot of the ruined ones I get):

Here’s the result of surprisingly little modification:

Click the pictures above for larger instances in a new window.

Still not perfect, but better.  I was intrigued to see what I could do.  Oh, she devoured that entire slice!

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Toto, We’re Not In NT4 Anymore

Kind of makes you wonder when a simple task that wouldn’t take five minutes in NT requires upwards of three hours to figure out and make happen in Windows 2003 Server.  And while my knowledge of 2003 isn’t exactly extensive, I’m not the world’s biggest NT expert either.  It’s just a whole new world, having to deal with DNS and active directory.

My main experience with 2003 before this has been a 2003 SBS (Small Business Server), with a handful of workstations and no other servers.  Brainless?  Maybe not quite that, but not bad.  SBS is cool if it’s appropriate for your needs.  My other experience was assisting with a single 2003 server, replacing a dying Novell server and upgrading twenty-odd workstations.

By rights I’d have long since played with 2003 enough in a lab or in-house network setting to have become more comfortable with it, but that would require more revenue.  I once did the math to figure out what I “needed” to charge per hour to cover everything including keeping up on new things.  It came to $15 more than my normal rate (which is further discounted for the big client), amazingly enough placing it closer to what is normal around here.

Oh well.  Perhaps progress will speed up now that I’ve made a breakthrough…

Saturday, August 26, 2006

DreamHost Strikes Again

I have a business domain that I sooner or later need to have hosted and start moving with for real.

Based on reputation, price and specs, I attempted to host it with DreamHost.  The alternative in mind was GoDaddy, but they have some unexpected limitations.

I got through the signup and they rejected me for suspected credit card fraud, which was completely whacky.  After not-too-seriously considering jumping through their hoops and faxing an image of the card to their billing people, I asked them to cancel my order.  They said:

Your account was disabled for fraud so there is nothing to cancel. The only way to activate your account will be by fax.

Okay, fine, so no business ever transpired between us.

At least as a temporary measure, I’ve been trying to add that domain to my elhide.com account with Hosting Matters.  When I do, it keeps telling me my domain “is owned by another user.” I just now finally put in a support request for that.

Since that didn’t work and I know I’d eventually want it on its own host and all that, I decided to try DreamHost again.  Just not for as large a plan or as long a timeframe this time.

At the end of the signup DreamHost gives me this error:

“This domain “thedomaininquestion.com” is already in our system!
Please contact support if you’d like to do something with it and you don’t know how.”

Aw jeez.

Their initial, admittedly instant, reply to my missive indicated they didn’t really know what I was talking about.  They’re on the same page now, but jeez.  If HM can fix the problem on their end, I’ll just setup shop there until I don’t fit anymore.

And I don’t think I will ever again entertain the notion of putting anything with DreamHost.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Verizon, D-Link and FiOS… Oh My!

Today I put a network card in my old Pentium 200 so I could transfer files easily, and in a pinch use it for internet if my main computer is ever down.  Annoying with all the reboots and such, but straightforward enough.

In the process, I noticed a computer named “melissa01” using our network.  Not at the time, but routinely since at least August 16th.

It’s probably the new upstairs neighbor, taking advantage of open wireless.  That Verizon promised me would not be accessible by others in or around my building.  They want you to use the D-Link router they provide, and it happens to have both wired and wireless capability.  Yay.

This disturbed me enough to go digging into how to secure things.  To me, there should be an off switch on the router so wireless can be physically, completely disabled if you do not use it.  No such luck.  Nor is there an easy, logical, straightforward answer to how to disable the wireless.  You can’t; you can only make it harder for people to find and use.

I had not logged onto the router before.  I’d thought the installation guy had set the login to something other than the default, and while I didn’t know offhand precisely what the default was, I had a good idea.  After a few permutations it let me in, no problem.

At no time did I change the login or password while poking around in the router.

Based on what I learned, I turned off ID broadcasting by the router, which alone would have probably saved us having the neighbor tagging along.  That lets people sniff out that you exist.

Subsequently I decided to turn of DHCP and assign us fixed IP addresses.  That was how I ran things under DSL, using the DSL modem combined with a Linksys hub.  I’d meant to change to that once we were functional on FiOS, but never got around to it.  That’s another barrier to casual use of the wireless by just anyone.

That earned me no internet access at all.  Figured that was either an artifact of DHCP not having been turned off yet on the router, or my needing to specify DNS on each computer.

Went to log onto the router to change DHCP and… nothing.

Absolutely no combination of default or logical login and password will let me open the router configuration.  Apparently it went all rogue and reset itself to God knows what.  Hey, not the first time I’ve seen the seemingly impossible happen like that.

Set the computer back to use DHCP so I can get online, but all I can figure is now I am going to have to set the router back to factory defaults with the little “in case of emergency” button and then won’t be able to get back online without calling Verizon to tell me what are the relevant settings.

Argh!

And if this is the upstairs people, what a way to make a positive first impression on me.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Poor Pluto

I didn’t see anything seriously wrong with the proposed definition of planets as bodies orbiting the sun and having sufficient gravity to be spherical.

Apparently that was just too controversial, as the official word is now planet Pluto no longer (via Catallarchy).  The article says nothing of the official definition, or whether this is purely arbitrary.  One would hope they applied a definition that would fit in any other solar system, not merely one that says “yo, you guys stay, you go, you lowly Kuiper object you; you make us want to throw up a little.”

If there’s a formal definition that is reasonable and led to the desired result, it probably has something to do with some elements of orbital plane, shape or size.

Funny thing is, there was such a furor over the expansive proposal, this will go over easily.  Had they gone straight to this, there might have been as much furor the other way.

Another funny thing is, now that they’ve defined something easily identifiable by size, shape and orbit - big enough to form a sphere with its own gravity, orbiting the primary - but chosen not to call that “planet,” I wonder if there will be a word for it.

Of course, at a time like this I can’t help thinking something like “that’s no planet, that’s a space station!”

Update:

Here’s a better article, which explains how they got there.  It’s not such a deviation after all, basically adding a clause to the definition much discussed in the past week.  Here’s the definition from the article, with the change bolded by me:

“a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

That even makes some sense.  The asteroid and Kuiper belts are debris fields, apart from Pluto’s crossing with Neptune’s orbit.  The orbits of the eight major planets are clear.

So it is applicable to any solar system, and we do have a new category: dwarf planets, favored by the Snow White Mining and Terraforming Company.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

You Know You Have Kids When…

Snakes on a Plane?  Amateurs.  Here we have crayons in a speaker:

This ancient set of computer speakers I bought years ago for my Pentium 200, after I bought a SoundBlaster Gold card for it.  Since that sound card has traditional speaker jacks and these speakers have the same, the two go together.  I use the speaker cables from a stereo I bought at Zayre in or around 1978.

Because the computer has not been hooked up, the speakers have been kicking around near my desk.  Both kids loved playing with them.

When I went to hook them up the other day, I found the controls had fallen into the case, barely lining up with the holes.  Not useful.  So I opened it up to fix it, and the picture is what I saw; crayons everywhere!  Apparently Sadie had been pushing crayons into the speaker unobserved.  You’ll notice that no crayon is allowed to remain clothed.  The wrappers must be torn methodically off each and every one as soon as possible.  She’s so funny.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Planets Galore

We finally have a definition of planet, and it’s an expansive one.  Space.com calls it controversial.  I don’t really see that.

It’s weird, not thinking of the nine we grew up with, and knowing that there are 12, should be 53 after a while, and may be many more.  At the same time, by defining a subcategory of “plutons,” one can distinguish mostly more traditional planets from the rest, almost creating a small set similar to what we’d have had if the definition had gone the other direction and evicted Pluto.

For those who want the definition without reading either article:

“A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.”

Thus our moon is not a “planet,” though it’s often been called that because of its size and its ever so slow drift out of Earth’s gravitational control, because it orbits a planet, not the sun.  Thus Ceres is a planet because it has enough gravity and orbits the sun.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Taiwan: Insect Encrusted Paradise?

Back when I worked in receiving at The Renovator’s Supply, we’d get containers full of boxes of parts from Taiwan, and all you could smell was pesticides.  It was as if the cardboard had been soaked in it, then had a chance to dry during shipping.

By the time we were done unloading, we’d smell of it too.  Ugh.

It was never as bad with any other international shipments, though granted, none were as large at a time.

So it was that I knew the place of manufacture of the two new UPS units I unpacked today at the office, for temporary use setting up new servers, then coming home to protect these machines.  The smell was unmistakable, and more concentrated than I remember it ever being before.

The second one actually had white pesticide residue crusted on the power cord.  Ick.

Soooo glad they’ll have an extensive opportunity to air out there before coming home.  Especially at the rate I am getting these servers deployed, but that’s another story.  Somehow I got the idea it was fairly easy to upgrade NT4 to Windows 2003 Server.  Ha!  I might actually have to buy another computer to use as a bridge unit, and while I could use a new one, now’s not the best of times.  But I digress.

Are insect escapees really that much of a problem coming from Taiwan as opposed to other places?

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Da Girls

So what I’d really like is to spend my weekend with these two:

But I mostly have to spend it with these two:

Oh well.  And off to it…

Monday, July 31, 2006

Heavy, Man

The near-twin servers I will be setting up in the next few weeks arrived today.

151 Pounds each.

Fully crated, anyway.  Boxes were probably 20 of that.

Which still means I can barely lift the servers.  They come surprisingly close to the heaviest known weight I’ve ever lifted, which was 142 lbs when I was in excellent shape.

Anyway, this is the start of my being very busy for the next month.  One will be Exchange Server 2003 and Windows 2003 Server, replacing the NT PDC, BDC, proxy server, and the Exchange 5.5 functionality currently handled on a slightly overloaded Windows 2000 server that never played well with NT.  The other will be Windows 2003 Server with SQL Server 2005, and will replace a Windows 2000 Pro machine hosting accounting software, and a SQL Server 6.5 NT machine.

This should be interesting…

Friday, July 28, 2006

MSDN Library Now Free

Microsoft is now making MSDN Library available as a download.

Large or not, that’s an extremely cool thing.  I like searching the local MSDN content better than searching online.

Via M-Dollar at Ars Technica.

Blogging on the Brain

Randall Parker has some fascinating news on Alzheimer’s.  Sounds extremely promising.  As does the potential of a drug to treat brain aging.

Friday, July 21, 2006

Some Surprises Are Pleasant

Whatever I can say about Verizon’s goofy installation of our FiOS, it did achieve one thing: lower phone bill.

With DSL and unlimited “Freedom” calling, our bill was $102 and change.

When we signed up for FiOS, the same calling plan was being offered for considerably less, but for some reason I thought FiOS broadband would be the same or $5 higher.  Maybe it’s a promotional rate and I’m forgetting they said that.  I only remember the low calling plan and the waived installation fee ($70, as I recall, which is low for the minimum of two hours it takes; generally 4 - 6 hours), because they really want to get it rolled out widely.  Gives them a ready market when they launch FiOS TV in this town, and I figure they’re employing guys to do these “last mile” installs whether they get solidly booked with orders or not.

Anyway, it’s $76.71 for a month, and only $19.95 of that is designated as internet.  Nice.  I wasn’t sure what the deal was from the last bill, which was $78.  I thought is was for a partial month on the old plan, but it may have been part of a month of one and part of a month the other.  I just assumed the bill would have been higher for a whole month, thus waiting until now to see.

Yay for saving money!

Monday, June 26, 2006

This is going to be a problem…

There are nice men here working on the gutters or something today.

Since they needed not merely an electrical outlet, but one with a surface close by to set their rechargable power tools on, guess whose extension cord that powers phone and internet got unplugged by Joe Random Worker.  Because even though there are two lovely outlets near the door - heck, four outlets, two of them not associated with a specific apartment - we have a washer and dryer that are easily confused for workbenches.

So off goes the internet.  Again.  They might have unplugged us if it hadn’t been just a random extension cord, but an obvious-connected-to-Verizon-equipment power cord.  Then again, maybe not.  The fact is, they shouldn’t have done it either way, just as sure as I shouldn’t have to use an extension cord to power the Verizon stuff.

Deb plugged us back in and moved their tools to the neighboring laundry machines, but internet didn’t come back, so I went down, not having correctly understood what she did, which was to leave them alone and plug us back into the 3rd floor power temporarily.  All I saw was that our extension cord was unplugged, again I thought, so I unplugged them, plugged us back in, and duct-taped it thoroughly to dissuade people, which I’d already thought of doing, but only on the other end.

To my surprise, I found the Verizon cord plugged into the 3rd floor and so I plugged it back into the extension cord, duct-taping that.  On coming back upstairs I learned Deb had done that, rather than disrupting the workers, so I changed it back, but it will be taped after they leave and we move it back.

It managed to come back on after I was done, reset the router and rebooted the computer.  It’s really not acceptable to have to keep doing that because Verizon FiOS installations to apartment buildings in places like Middleboro totally suck in taking the, you know, apartment aspect into account.  If you have DSL you might want to stick with it if you do not own the building or have solid control over where the service might be connected and powered.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Verizon’s Ears Are Burning

Today was our second outage since we’ve had FiOS, the fiber optic internet service from Verizon.  At least this time didn’t require a call to support, but then if they’d not blown me off in regard to my “and oh by the way...” last time, or not installed in a blatently moronic way in the first place, today would not have happened either.

See, when we got our Verizon FiOS fiber optic phone and internet service installed in Middleboro, Massachusetts (if that sounds stilted and overly much info, it’s for the sake of search engines), in a multi-family dwelling, which is to say, a building of apartments on different floors, the dickhead installer, who seemed great at the time, plugged the power unit into an outlook that was clearly marked 3rd floor.  That despite knowing intimately that the installation was for the 2nd floor.

You would think that Verizon and its installers would carefully investigate, consult, ask in regard to what apartment’s power is which, and ensure nobody’s getting plugged into the wrong place.  He never mentioned it, and I figured if he didn’t mention it, it was a non-issue.  Heck, my understanding was that the service would actually have to be plugged into power in my apartment and a place would have to be made for it near where the phone service enters.  Except it enters the cellar.  Where the most easily usable outlet belonged to the 3rd floor, because the 1st floor’s spare outlet the landlord plugged the legally mandated carbon monoxide detector into, the 2nd floor’s spare outlet was occupied by a drop cord and the washing machine power cord covered the “2nd fl” label.  On the other hand, the 3rd floor was vacant so there weren’t even laundry machines making the outlets harder to access, never mind their being in use.

How hard would it really have been to come up here and ask about where it should be plugged in?  How many other places are going to be left with Verizon-induced tenant-tenant or landlord-tenant encounters of the “hey, you’re stealing electricity” kind?  Verizon needs to deal with this, and they need to train their otherwise okay support people not to sound like slack-jawed yokels unaware that installation staff can plug the power into the wrong place and that this just might constitute a problem.  The support person was like “whaddaya want us to do about it?” Thought I should just string an extension cord because that’s all the install person would probably do if he had to come back.  He thought we should be happy that it had power at all, as that’s the important thing.

So back to our outage today.  I was giving some doubtful benefit that the outage was an outage, considering the nasty weather.  I tried all the usual in-the-house troubleshooting.  Then I went to the cellar.

I knew as soon as I saw our hall light was out that the landlord had been here and was probably the problem.  We have a 23 watt flourescent in our hall fixture that is super bright and lights the entire stairwell enough to make it safer all around.  I leave it on at all times, figuring it’s not costly (I didn’t at first; the 3rd floor people started turning and leaving on ours instead of theirs so I gave up).  As far as I know, it is our electricity running it, since there are fixtures logically associated with each apartment, and I am certain there is no “common areas” electric supplied by the landlord on its own meter.  Which makes me wonder who pays for the power to the outside light and the cellar lights.  My guess is the first floor, and I try to act accordingly.  Whenever the landlord comes in to do anything, as has naturally been happening more with the 3rd floor vacant, he turns off our hall light.  Probably reflex.

Sure enough, the thing we’d been half expecting had happened: The landlord noticed something plugged into the 3rd floor’s power that didn’t belong and unplugged it.  And someone had silenced the alarm that sounds when it’s on battery, from the unit at the opposite end of the cellar.  Cute.

This is exactly what I tried to tell Airbrain Dude in Verizon FiOS support would happen if the situation wasn’t corrected.  We would be unplugged and service would be down.  It was so tempting to call support to have them send someone out Right Now when we got unplugged, but I got out my super nice long extension cord and strung that over from our own outlet.  Yay.  We’re back.

So hey, if we get any readers who are with Verizon, you might want to check out what procedures exist for powering FiOS service in apartments where there are “that’s not my outlet” issues.  It really does matter.  Duh.

Monday, June 19, 2006

My First Computer

This was my first computer, called a “PC” for Pocket Computer.  Click for a larger, clearer picture.

This was a Christmas present from my father and stepmother in I believe 1983.  1982 Was the big winter overcoat I still have, that needs to be retired, but has served well as coat, blanket and pillow over the years.  But I digress.

As far as I know, this should still run, except for needing batteries.  It takes a pair of lithiums, which I never got around to replacing when they died after several years.

It has 1k of bubble memory.  They were also available with 2k.  You could use it as a basic calculator, and for things like storing addresses.  You could also program in a modified version of BASIC.  For instance, instead of the entire word INPUT for that command, it was shortened to the letter I.

The most significant thing I did with it was program it to return present and future value interest factors based on inputs then applied to the relevant formulas.  That was pretty cool.

I’d played with other computers before then, starting with a friend’s TRS80 in… 1977?  I believe it was the latter half of 10th grade, but maybe it was later.  He had gotten his parents to co-sign a loan for $1000 to buy the thing, at any rate.  That was probably where I learned the first elements of BASIC, at Bill Knight’s house on the computer.

I got my first computer larger than the pocket one in 1985, as a hand-me-down TRS80 Color Computer 2.  When it died, instead of realizing the way the world was heading, I dead-ended myself into a Color Computer 3 and encountered my first software/hardware incompatibility.  With the 2 I was using a superlative word processing software that would not run on the 3, so I had to spend a bunch of money on more software, and I spent too much on a mouse and on a 5 1/4” external floppy drive back when single and double sided and density were distinctions that mattered.  The OS for the 3 was called OS/9 and was written by some company called Microsoft.

My first IBM compatible, which for an old-timer is not a strange term to use thankyouverymuch, I bought in early 1988 for way too much money.  It was a Packard-Bell 286.  I think it was 12 MHz.  It had a huge 60 MB hard drive when 20 MB was pretty standard; I at least knew that much.  It ran DOS 3.3, so no DOS Edit, just Edlin or Copy Con.  What I didn’t know was it was nuts to buy an EGA monitor and a machine that required same, as VGA already existed and was the future.  Oh well.

After all that has transpired, I still think of that old pocket computer as one of the coolest things ever.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Wow

We’ve seldom come anywhere close to going over our bandwidth, which over time has grown to 23 GB per month as Hosting Matters has upped it to coincide with changes in costs and competition for hosting.  I don’t really even check to see what it’s been, except incidentally, as today.  I want to host a domain for my nephew, and I was comparing space available under elhide versus AV.  Elhide has this odd problem where it thinks it is out of disk space.  I upload large zip files of pictures, 50 mb or so each, four at a time.  Deb’s father downloads them.  I delete them.  Rinse, repeat.  Last time I deleted them, they didn’t release the space, but they are gone.  So that account is technically fine, if I have HM support do whatever they have to do to make the disk space counter tally properly, but I also have other stuff going on there that maybe makes me not want to host an extra domain.

So I checked AV and it’s so-so on disk space, but instead of almost no bandwidth, we’re already at 60% for this month, which puts us on target to almost exactly use the whole deal.  But… I see that in may we used 27.6 GB out of our 23 GB available!  See, there’s a great thing about Hosting Matters.  Another hosting company might have been all over us, looking to collect the extra charge.

The sad thing is that the next plan up includes 28 GB, which would have just covered that.  We may have to switch.  I can keep the bandwidth partly in control by never uploading zips of pictures to AV, which I do sometimes, though there’s only disk space for two at once.

While I was looking at adding a new business domain to elhide’s space, I was also thinking of getting hosting for that elsewhere, adding another basket for my eggs.  Without resorting to Verizon, Mindspring and Gmail accounts also available but not really used, if HM goes down to a denial of service attack or other serious problem, I am completely cut off.

I looked at GoDaddy, since I have domains registered there.

They are insanely low cost and make HM look stingy on disk space and bandwidth.  However, it seems each e-mail account is limited to 10 MB.  Normally that’s fine, but I actually do need the ability to have my e-mail accounts unlimited in size.  One, I can be e-mailed some rather large attachments.  Two, I download the e-mails in more than one location and leave mail on the server for a specified number of days.  It’s a safety mechanism.

Also, I didn’t formally ask, but I found mention online that a hosting account there is for one domain, period.  I can add a bunch of domains to any given HM hosting account.  Nobody without that is likely to get my business.

Anyway, I’m amazed that our bandwidth has actually gotten that large.  In the past few months we have gone from routinely in the 200-something hits a day range per Site Meter (which misses a lot of actual traffic) to 400-something, some days 500-something, which is a big difference.  We do have photo-heavy content, whch also matters.

Well.  We’ll see what happens.  At least I know to watch the meter.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Some Bill Gates History

Even if you aren’t technical, this Joel On Software piece, My First BillG Review, is well worth reading just for the Bill Gates anecdote and the bit of history.  I may have first read Joel before I ever read my first blog, which possibly makes Joel, not Virginia, Joanne, or possibly Jerry, the first blog I ever read.

Yet I was unaware that Joel was behind VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), or the use of late binding and variants in the VB line.  I am hugely impressed.  With him and with the ability Gates showed in this product review and the management practices surrounding such reviews.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

800-221-1212 and Clicking Speakers

The speakers currently in use on my computer, which in Stoughton were hooked to Deb’s, have always had a problem with static clicks.  They pick up some kind of signal from somewhere and click.  Sometimes a lot.  It’s highly annoying.

We’d not noticed it much since putting them on my machine recently, but in the past couple days it got bad.

In the past couple days, my prepaid Verizon cell phone, a Kyocera going on four years old, started getting repeated calls from 800-221-1212, a number alien to me.  It appears to be associated with one or more airline reservation systems.  They hang up after a couple rings or if I pick up.

The speakers pre-announce the incoming call.

That’s right.  In the second or so before the cell phone rings, the speakers crackle!  Then they continue to crackle through a moment after the call stops.

Apparently the cell phone is putting out RF enough to interfere as it… communicates out?  Back to the cell tower?  In the process of handling the call transaction.  Weird.

Monday, June 12, 2006

I Meant To Ask…

Does anyone have insights into making an office as “paperless” as possible?  A law office, specifically?  Prefereably for smaller rather than larger amounts of money?

In analyzing things, my conclusion is that the biggest obstacle is habits and working comfort, not technology, which just keeps getting better.  To me, if everything will be on-screen, and printing is to be avoided, people can’t have 14” or 15” screens, and seven year old computers that were not the height of available specs at the time.

I know nothing about fax servers, but it seems to me that’s going to be one key.  Then incomings never go to paper, and outgoings can be faxed without the intermediate step of printing.  We already have the Digital Sender that can work with a fax server if you have one, for when there is paper to fax.

Anyway, this should be interesting.  They are using the need to do a major upgrade to try to be forward looking and take full advantage of technology, rather than merely reacting.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

So Yeah, Internet Outage and Verizon Nonsense

The internet went out suddenly today, in the middle of my doing billable work that I have yet to get back to after being derailed.  Based on the position of the D-Link router, I think Sadie touched it directly or by tugging a cable, or maye one of us tripped over a cable and yanked it.  This is obviously going to be An Issue.

I did all the normal troubleshooting, including turning the router off and on and checking/unplugging/replugging the cables.  I am concerned because the WAN port seems to wiggle a bit and feel like the cable to the internet isn’t snug when it is.  I even went to the cellar and outside box to make sure nothing was unplugged or visibly amiss.

I finally gave up and called support.  Bear in mind I had unplugged the power and rebooted the router three times, and checked the cables repeatedly.

Their test showed all was fine but the router was invisible to them.  Reset it again.

I unplugged the WAN cable, unplugged the power, put the WAN cable back better than it had seemed, plugged in the power, instead of no WAN indicator light or one that blinked a lot, it came on solid.  Of course it was working fine then!  Duh, if I’d only thought of doing that myself, I could have saved a call to support!  Oh wait, I did try that myself…

While I was on, I mentioned to the guy that I noticed the OPSU had been plugged into a power outlet that was clearly labeled 3rd floor, the installer never consulted me about where to plug in, and when someone rents that apartment and installed their washer and dryer, there is nothing to stop them from unplugging us from their outlet.

The Verizon guy initially said, “well, as long as it has power...”

Basically I was outside any scope he could have imagined.  Hello!  If you are going to install these in apartments, and you need power to support them, you are going to have to start coping with and working within the scope of where power that is available of and for that apartment.

Bottom line, unless I really want to make a stink, I may as well run an extension cord across the ceiling because “that’s probably all the installation guy would do if we sent him out.”

Maybe.  More likely, he would undo a bunch of staples holding up the tan cable (which goes the whole length of the cellar back to what is apparently the battery backup), snip the electrical ties neatly holding the AC cord to the electical pipe that terminates at the 3rd Floor outlets where the AC code plugs in, unscrew the OPSU, carefully move it across the cellar to somwhere near out outlet, attach the OPSU to the ceiling somewhere, attach the tan cable back to points on the ceiling to the point of departure from its original path, and plug the power into our outlet (or into the power strip I need to hang up there so our outlet can be used for more than one thing).  Probably not much more trouble than hanging up an extenstion cord.  Heck; I am tempted to move the OPSU myself, now that I’ve thought about it.  Long as there is enough tan cable, which I am sure of, given the available length of AC cord.  Worst case, I’d have to put a board between a couple of the beams to screw the OPSU to.

Still, extension cord or wholesale move, this should not be my job.  The guy had to be able to read “3rd Floor” on that outlet.  But it was such an easy spot to install the thing.  I was tempted to go down and look over his shoulder while he was installing it, but I thought it would be nice to leave him alone.

Oh well.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

I Can’t Let You Do That, Rob

I can imagine much better uses for a friendly yet not too bright robot named Amy.  Of course, then she would have to be more than just a program.

At least she’s not a shipboard AI…

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Something Stupid: Not Just for Frank and Nancy Anymore

So imagine you have a network, with various NT4 servers, including a mail server (Exchange 5.5) and BDC named foomail and a proxy server named foonet.  Your internet domain is something like foofoo.com, and for as long as you’ve been connected to the internet, via partial T-1, you’ve had an A and MX record out in the wider world for mail.foofoo.com, which brings you to IIS on server foonet, mainly to use Outlook Web Access.

One of the three drives in the RAID array on foomail starts to die, and space is becoming an issue anyway, so you buy a new server.

Cost being somewhat an issue, you see that you can save $900 by ordering a server with serial ATA (SATA) drives in a RAID5 configuration, rather than SCSI drives as would be traditional.  Then when it arrives, you find out NT won’t support SATA and you have to spend $1200 or so for Windows 2000 Server instead.  Some savings.

You get it all setup, Exchange installed, added to the site, made primary in the site, mailboxes and stuff all migrated, internet mail connector on foonet pointing to it, and it’s great.  Since it has more disk space then every other server combined, and you’ve had several gigs of docs stored in a temporary location since server foodocs died, you even migrate the documents to the new server.  Which turns out to be the brightest spot in all of this, making access to them far faster.

Subsequently, there are lots of RPC errors in communication between the new server, named simply “mail” because you can’t reuse foomail and descriptive simplicity seems sensible, and the rest of the network, mainly foonet.  The very manner in which internet mail transfer functions also spontaneously changes to something that seems worse, but at least seems to work.  Perhaps particularly telling in retrospect, OWA wouldn’t work until I increased the timeout to five minutes.

Sybari Antigen works great on the new server, too, continuing to kill infected e-mails and purge out banned attachment types with utmost reliability.

Sybari Antigen with Spam Manager runs on foonet to do the spam filtering, and that doesn’t go so well.  It stops catching everything reliably.  The product is so outlandishly good that virtually no spam ever got through before.  There is good reason Microsoft became first a customer of Sybari after lab tests showed no other product came close, then bought the company.

Worse, periodically it stops all e-mail flow to and from the internet, eventually getting to where the only resolution was completely removing and reinstalling Sybari’s software, and hoping it would last more than a few weeks this time.  When we renewed the license in March, we went to a newer version and that was even worse.

But I am getting unintentionally long-winded here.

Yesterday I installed HP Digital Sender 4.0 software, which had to go on the server named mail because it has to be on Windows 2000.  It gave me trouble.

It asked me to pick a server to configure, defaulting to the one it was on, and displaying the name mail greyed out.  Going with that, it failed, unable to find server “mail.” I ended up choosing the option for another server, getting the IP address of mail, and entering that.  In the end scanning the the Digital Sender 9200c didn’t work anyway, apparently because it won’t scan to a network location - all configured and enabled - if you have not setup the e-mail portion of things, even if you are never going to use the e-mail part.  Either that or it couldn’t see the server or who knows.  I have to return to it and puzzle it out.

In the process of trying to install the Digital Sending software on mail, I noticed something.

The NetBIOS computer name, for backward compatibility, is indeed “mail.”

It also asks for a “primary DNS suffix” for the computer.  I had, apparently based on something I picked up in my travels, filled that in as foofoo.com, and that makes the server think that its full name is:
mail.foofoo.com

Doh!

Can there be a crazy conflict between external and internal DNS as a result of such an overlap?  Apparently there can.  To me it could explain everything.  Especially since the server it interacts with most closely, foonet, to the wider world is mail.foofoo.com.

I still have to make the relevant change and experiment with it, but… jeez!  What was I thinking?

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Doh!

On my way out, I ran into the lady downstairs and we ended up poking around the cellar, looking at the flooding and talking about her desire to have a lot of their old junk hauled away.

Apparently the landlord hauled away some junk behind the building that has been there three years.  In the process, from an entirely different spot he took her plastic cooler cover that very effectively prevents the corner near our laundry machines from leaking when it rains.  Oops.  But I digress.  And that didn’t leak much, compared to the two inches or so of water under the electrical panel.

So while we were down there, I noticed yet another brand new Verizon “box” associated with our change to FiOS (fiber optic).  I’ll have to take pictures.  There’s the stuff on the outside of the building.  Then there is a big box with a green LED under our circuit breaker box, which has tan CAT5 cable coming out and going up to the ceiling and the across the cellar, and to all appearances has an electrical cable hardwired into it, but it’s not clear.

Turns out at the opposite end of the cellar, attached to the ceiling almost above where the 3rd floor people’s washing machine would go, there is a small beige Verizon box with a green LED on it.

From one end comes a power cord, plugged into the outlet that is clearly labeled 3rd floor.  This is a problem, only mitigated so far by that apartment being vacant.

I am irritated because that will have to move, which means my having to call Verizon and tell them they screwed up our otherwise perfect install.

Out the other end of that box comes tan CAT5 cable, heading back in the general direction of the back of the cellar.  Power to ethernet?  Hello?

I need to trace it, but one cable goes out the cellar and up the side of the building, and as far as I can tell, there is only one cable from the back of the cellar, turning a corner and going out and up.  Where does the rogue cable from the Verizon electrical theft box go?

Jeez.

Oh well.  At least I learned she has no problem with my putting a bright 23 watt curly bulb in the main cellar light socket so we can all see better.  And she suggested we put a picnic table and Sadie’s sandbox in the most prime part of the backyard.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Trying to Understand Microsoft Licensing…

Can make your head explode.

How many client access licenses are needed?  User or device CALs?  Are there fries with that?

Argh.

It reminds me of a conversation we had last night about how absurd it is to tax income, and how complicated and excessive the tax code and variety of taxes are.  I pointed out that all I have to do to know something is wrong with 15% just for Social Security is to remember that the amount I perceive as appropriate for a flat tax rate for everything is maybe 15%.  But I digress.

What’s really annoying about this whole buying and licensing server software thing is they’re going to make me have to speak to an actual sales person.  I hate it when that happens.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Exchange Migration

Before I even give the client prices for servers and software, I am trying to get an idea just what will be involved and whether there are any showstoppers in doing the upgrade and migration I have envisioned.

I was pretty alarmed when I saw that there is no direct migration path from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, and that you had to either go to 2000 first or use something called exmerge, which I have never used.

It also sounded like Exchange 2003 is so tied into Active Directory that I’d maybe have to worry about having any remaining workstations that are not running Windows 2000 or XP.

The weird thing is that reading all this material; the KB articles and whitepapers and such, it’s like studying.  Or even a bit like programming or doing accounting work, where it works best if you “zone” and otherwise is marginally productive or doesn’t “stick.”

So.  Anyone have any thoughts on whether such an upgrade might be as painful as I fear?  It’s only a single Exchange 5.5 server, not counting the proxy install for the sake of the internet mail connector.  There are about 50 people, plus a variety of other mailboxes, and residual mailboxes of people no longer there, some of which could perhaps be purged.  The network is NT4, with a PDC and BDC, plus the other, standalone servers, and the Windows 2000 server where Exchange currently resides.  Another goal is to upgrade to Windows 2003 and no longer have NT running the network, but obviously to do so as gracefully as possible.  Ironically, this is probably a bigger change than when I migrated them from Novell to NT, which was easy because they were able to overlap, and because Exchange was new in conjunction with that.  But I digress.

I just don’t want to order a particular server and software combo, only to find that I am unable to port things to it fairly readily.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Windows Vista Review

Kurt Hutchinson at Ars Technica has an excellent, detailed review, with lots of pictures, of Windows Vista Beta 2.