Some of you may know I’ve been dabbling in Docker, and specifically its usefulness in a Windows-centric environment. Michael Irwin has run a Docker user group in the Blacksburg area for almost a year now. And to celebrate the first anniversary, he (and a few others) have organized a ContainerDay.

The day consists of 4 talks on Docker in general in the morning, and a workshop and a few blitz talks in the afternoon. The goal is to have every participant go home with a working Docker application. It is geared towards developers, but everyone is welcome.

Sign-up and participation are free, and the location is Torgerson Hall, Room 3100, on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg.

For more information, check out the web page at NRV ContainerDay.

PC Magazine has an article How to Build Your Smarthome: A Beginner’s Guide, describing the various components of a Smarthome. It starts by describing various protocols used to make the components of a Smarthome talk to each other, then touches on the hubs, cameras, controllers, thermostats, lighting, security, and even sprinkler controls.

It’s a great start into the home automation field. However, one aspect of the Smarthome, and particularly the Internet of Things (IoT), is the network security. Most devices used in a Smarthome setup have minimal security features, and it’s rare that any of them get an update after they leave the factory. This makes them the prime target for an attack on your home network.

To keep your regular, PC-and-laptop based, network separate from the insecure IoT network, requires a bit of network knowledge. Steve Gibson of GRC.com has been experimenting with various setups, evaluating each one of them, and has come to the conclusion that the best set up is as follows:

1. Obtain 3 routers. They don’t have to be high-end smart routers, but they have to be routers, not switches.
2. Put one router behind your internet connection (DSL modem, Cable modem, whatever). This will allow NAT translation between the Internet and your home Intranet. We’ll call this router the Master Router.
3. Put the other two routers behind the Master Router. You now create two separate networks inside your home Intranet. Let’s call them Network1 and Network2.
4. Network1 machines cannot talk directly to Network2 machines, and vice versa. So now you can put your insecure IoT devices in Network2, and keep your (more) secure laptops, PCs etc. in Network1
5. If you need more segregation, you can set up a Network3, Network4, etc., depending on how many routers you have, and how many ports are available on your Master Router.

An important thing to remember during the setup is that they have to be acting as routers. Even after configuring them as much as possible as routers, you still have to make sure they act as NAT routers. The trick for this is to set each network up with their own network address. So the Master Router can have an internal network of 192.168.0.xxx, Network1 will be 192.168.1.xxx, Network2 will be 192.168.2.xxx, etc. etc. Each router will have the .1 address assigned, and use DHCP to get its address assigned on the WAN port. It will have DHCP enabled for its network, assigning addresses in its network as required.

PC Perspective has a longer write-up about the “Three Router Solution”, including the thought process leading to the three router solution.

An alternative would be to use a router at the 192.168.0.x network, that will allow you to segment that network in subnetworks. This splits a network (like the 192.168.0.x network) up in smaller subnets, each with separate routing. A cheap but powerful solution for this would be the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X.

Either one of these solutions is a bit more involved than just plugging everything in one router, but it will greatly enhance your network’s resistance against misbehaving IoT devices.

Recently, I installed a fresh (pre-SP1) Windows 7 VM, and it didn’t go very smoothly. After a few Windows Updates I got an update to Windows Update itself (yay!). Unfortunately, after that update was applied, all subsequent tries to run Windows Update and check for updates, resulted in “Searching for updates…” for hours, nay, days.

Several solutions were suggested online, ranging from purging the Windows Update temporary directory to installing a small WSUS server on a USB stick and using that instead of Microsoft Windows as an update source. I even tried to install Steve Gibson’s Never10, since it contained a trigger warning for an outdated Windows Update. It did trigger, it installed an update, but the next Windows Update check resulted once again in a “Searching for updates”. Bummer.

But the following solution found in answers.microsoft.com worked like a charm:

1. Download Microsoft KB3083710
2. Download Microsoft KB3102810
3. Download Windows Update Diagnostics Tool in order to reset Windows Update (support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/971058)
4. Restart Windows
5. Manually install KB3083710 (this results in a Windows reboot)
6. Manually install KB3102810 (this results in a Windows reboot)
7. Restart Windows manually (finalizing the installation of KB3102810 happens after the last reboot)
8. Run the Windows Update Diagnostics Tool
9. Restart computer again and search for updates

The search may take several minutes, so make sure to leave adequate time (I’ve seen times up to an hour mentioned in other forums). My VM is now happily downloading 229 updates, and is 52% complete.

Google is expanding the automation of your home with its Nest products beyond the Nest product line itself.

A range of products, like lights, locks, and washers/dryers, are now becoming Nest compatible. This allows them to react to things your Nest thermostat does, or your Nest camera sees, or your Nest smoke detector… uhm… detects. The video shows lights coming on when movement is detected, or the drier will occasionally re-thumble your clothes where you’re not home.

The Works With Nest page has a list of all the products that work with one (or more) of the Nest products. It also allows you to sign up to keep informed of new products.

Instructable user electronichamsters has a very detailed instruction manual on how to create a home automation system that can:

• Notify you when the mail arrives
• Track your dog’s poop and bark locations
• Monitor for people in different parts of the house
• Check for water leaks
• Alert you when the dog runs away
• Not only check when the washer or dryer is finished, but also if someone has been there already
• Watch the temperature and humidity in different rooms
• etc. etc.

using a Raspberry Pi, a few Arduino clones, some cheap sensors from eBay, and openHAB as the brains of the operation.

Head over to Instructables instructions and get started with a cheap but very advanced home automation system.

Over on MakeUseOf, Mihir Patkar spoke with Ben Stutt of Rock Hill, South Carolina, about his experiences with home automation. Ben has been working with X10 automation since the mid 1980s, and has some very useful information to share.

In a nutshell, his tips are as follows:

1. Start by solving one single annoyance. A porch light, a garage door, it doesn’t matter, but start small.
2. Beginners should use simple buttons, not complex systems and sensors. Similar to #1 - start simple.
3. Always couple a motion sensor with a timer.
4. Prepare for your own laziness/forgetfulness. Make simple all on/all off buttons, and use timers if you only use the device (i.e.bathroom fan) for a limited time.
5. Automation helps in security. Both by having security integrated into the system, and by automatically turning lights on and off, making the house feel alive.
6. X10 is great to set up a cheap Smart Home. Other systems are available, but X10 is by far the cheapest.
7. Powerline systems have their problems. In the US, we have 240V coming into our home, which is then split into 2 120V circuits. This is easily fixed by placing a bridge somewhere, such as a plugin bridge at the dryer outlet. But it’s something to keep in mind.

For the full article, click here.

Yesterday was October 21st, 2015. Yes, the day that Marty and Doc Brown (and Jennifer) travel to, to fix Marty and Jennifer’s kids. Unfortunately, 2015 didn’t turn out like they expected. A couple of surprise guests appear, and one or two shocking revelations about 2015 leave the time travelling duo stunned…

With the release of Windows 10, there has been a huge uproar about the privacy implications when you install it. In some cases Microsoft is accused of stomping over any privacy the user may have, including publicizing all your WiFi passwords to anyone on Facebook.

Of course it’s not that bad. That being said, there are some settings you may want to review, if not alter, to protect data from inadvertently being sent to Microsoft, or used to identify you on other computers.

To help with the various settings, the people behind the isleaked.com website have set up a subsite, https://fix10.isleaked.com/. This subsite describes the different groups of privacy settings, what effect they have, and how to turn them off.

The biggest tip is to not do the Express installation, since this sets a lot of the privacy settings wide open. It’s better to spend the extra 10-15 minutes, and be aware of what pieces of information you’re sharing with Microsoft.

A few weeks ago, Google integrated SMS messaging in Hangouts. I opted in, thinking this would be a good thing - having all messaging in one place.

However, the Motorola Droid Maxx that I’m using has two neat features: a plugin for Chrome called Motorola Connect (allowing me to message from my computer keyboard), and more importantly, an app called Motorola Assist, which allows it to detect when I’m driving and read incoming messages aloud.

Especially the option to have my phone read incoming messages to me was useful, and was now missing. But luckily it’s fairly simple to disable the SMS/Hangout integration:

1. Open up Google Hangouts
2. Make sure you’re on the “main” hangout screen. This is the one showing all your conversations, and a plus sign to add a new hangout
3. Tap on the Hamburger Menu (three lines or dots, most of the time in the top right of the app), and select Settings
4. Select SMS from the Settings menu
5. In the General section, there is an option Turn on SMS. Uncheck that.

Testing a banner post, about the game Grepolis.

Google Now’s voice commands are probably one of the coolest things in the Google/Android world. However, there are a lot of commands, and even Google’s “help” command doesn’t list them all.

Here is a cool infographic to show you a list of almost all voice commands you can give (thanks to Trendblog):

I came across an article recently on how to set up a simple Home Automation system using a Raspberry Pi with an RF transmitter attached to it, and node.js with Angular.js.

It’s fairly primitive in that it is mainly a web interface to some light switches, but has the potential to grow into a real automation system. Keep an eye out for new releases (the author, Dennis Schulte, has given it version number 1.0, since the system is in production! 🙂

Something is on my mind that has only a passing relation to automation, but in the light of the Snowden revelations and the resulting attention to government surveillance, I think it’s important to touch on this.

Today marks the start of Banned Books Week, an event to call attention to the banning of books in the United States.

Yes, book banning.

Why? Because apparently Fahrenheit 451 (a banned book) scares people more as a book than as a scenario. Because 1984 (a banned book) apparently is too violent, rather than scary as a view of a total surveillance state (NSA surveillance, anyone?). Because Ender’s Game (a banned book) contains sex, something that doesn’t happen in our world (wait - didn’t it also contain a fair amount of violence? Oh right… banning books on the ground of violence would be weird, but banning them on the grounds of sex is perfectly reasonable).

I learned about Banned Books Week yesterday in our library, when my daughter asked why there was caution tape around a table with books. I was stunned to find books like A Brave New World, Animal Farm, 1984, The Great Gatsby and many, many more classics on the banned books list.

Although it’s everyone’s right to question books, I feel no one should have the ability to prevent others from reading certain books. Please support your local library and the ALA in the Banned Books Week.

A new Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. Until Microsoft has evaluated all the information, they have released a hot fix. If you are using Internet Explorer (and it seems it doesn’t matter what version, from 6 all the way up to the pre release 11), apply this hot fix in anticipation of the security patch.

This month’s game is Wooden Path 2, a puzzle game. In Wooden Path 2, you need to create bridges between island, by sliding pieces of bridge. You are hindered in the sliding by various obstacles.

And if you get stuck, make sure to check out the solutions for the first two complexity stages (Beginner and Explorer).

A very entertaining puzzle game, with various levels of complexity. Try it out for a fun couple of hours!

Play free games at Kongregate

XKCD has this wonderful chart, showing how long you can spend on optimizing a process, depending on the time you save and how often you do it:

So if you save 1 minute of a daily process, and you spend less than a day on it, you’ll save time in less than 5 years. Glad to know my 1 day effort on automating a daily process was well below the limit (6 days)…!

The following updates appeared on my iPhone last week:

Moves

Motorola’s next phone, the Moto X, is scheduled to be presented to the world on August 1st, in New York.

The Moto X has been spotted in Eric Schmidt’s hands, and last week an invitation-only NDA-covered presentation was held for a select few.

The new phone is completely manufactured in the US (although that probably means that it is assembled in the US, with components manufactured elsewhere), and is fully customizable.

Also, the Moto X is said to be the first Motorola phone completely designed and developed under Google’s leadership over Motorola.

We hope that the Moto X will be the new Google Android reference phone, and will receive updates in a timely manner. The rest of the phone is becoming secondary…

We’re currently transferring domain name managers. Hopefully this will not result in any outages, but it is possible that the website will be unavailable for a short period of time.

Update: it looks like the transfer is finished. Please let us know if there are any issues.

Today Google announced the acquisition of Waze, the social driving app.

Waze allows users to not only get a route to their destination, but incorporate traffic reports from other Waze users, including stopped vehicles, debris on the road, and even police sightings. There is a gaming aspect to Waze, where users get points for miles driven and reporting traffic situations.

It will be interesting to see what Google will do with Waze. Will they incorporate aspects of Waze into Google Maps, and leave well enough alone, or will Waze be absorbed? Hopefully the community of Waze users will not be left in the cold, like the users of Google Reader were…

A couple of weeks Windows 7 informed me that my hard disk is failing, and that I should back up immediately. Skeptical of Windows messages about things like this, I decided to run Spinrite on the disk. After making a backup with Carbonite.

Apparently I should have not done that. The better course of action would have been to copy the whole hard disk to a new one, and then run Spinrite on the old disk.

By doing this, I apparently pushed the disk just enough so it ran out of spare sectors for relocating bad tracks. I found this out after I got a new 1TB disk, placed it in the same computer, and tried to copy the old disk to the new disk.

Copying the disk turned out to be an adventure as well. At first I tried to do it the old fashioned way: boot in Linux, and run a dd from the old disk to the new disk. This works great on working disks, but failing disks disrupt the dd command…

Finally I ran across CloneZilla and tuxboot. Tuxboot is actually a great utility that lets you turn a CloneZilla Live, DRBL Live, GParted Live or Tux2live installation into a bootable USB or DVD disk, without too much thought. CloneZilla is the open source equivalent of Norton Ghost.

After downloading tuxboot and selecting the CloneZilla Live installation, the download quickly completed and I now had a USB stick to boot from. Taking it back to the PC with the failing hard drive, reboot, and voila, CloneZilla.

CloneZilla has a lot of options, and there are great step-by-step instructions available here. I chose the disk-to-disk clone option, and after tweaking the options a bit, was able to recover most of the hard disk. There were a number of clusters that CloneZilla complained about not being able to recover, but it seems they are not in any files that I use on a regular basis.

Lessons learned from this:

1. Make sure you always have a backup. I use Carbonite, but there are several other great options out there.
2. Use Spinrite for maintenance, and not for diagnoses. It may work in the ultimate attempt for recovery, but it’s better to know in advance your disk is failing, than to be notified by Windows and then scramble around.
3. Don’t use the disk that is failing, get a duplicate disk as soon as possible, and use CloneZilla to copy your whole installation.

I have a small Excel workbook with two Pivot tables, linking each to their own Analysis Services cube. The purpose of these two pivot tables is to daily compare the bookings and shipments data. This involves making a change to the date filter, making sure that both pivot tables use the same date, and formatting the tables to the content.

I finally broke down, and dove into the macro editor in Excel. Since I had no idea how the macro editor works, I decided to record the actions. When I pulled the editor, this is what I saw:

Sub Macro1()
'
' Macro1 Macro
'

'
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable1").PivotFields( _
        "[Calendar Filter].[Calendar Year - Quarter - Month - Date].[Calendar Year]"). _
        ClearAllFilters
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable1").PivotFields( _
        "[Calendar Filter].[Calendar Year - Quarter - Month - Date].[Calendar Year]"). _
        CurrentPageName = _
        "[Calendar Filter].[Calendar Year - Quarter - Month - Date].[Calendar Year].&[2013].&[1].&[01].&[2013-01-03T00:00:00]"
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable2").PivotFields( _
        "[Transaction Date].[Calendar Year Qtr Month].[Calendar Year]").ClearAllFilters
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable2").PivotFields( _
        "[Transaction Date].[Calendar Year Qtr Month].[Calendar Year]"). _
        CurrentPageName = _
        "[Transaction Date].[Calendar Year Qtr Month].[Date].&[20130103]"

End Sub

The important parts are the reference to the date filters in the cube. These will become driven by a variable containing a date. However, the trick is to change the date into strings, and specifically parts of the date into strings. We need the year, quarter, month, and actual date in two different formats. I used two different functions to accomplish this.

• DatePart can take a part of the date, specified by the first parameter.
• Format changes between different data types, like integer to character.

So, to replace the hard coded quarter 4 with the quarter of the date variable, you would use Format(DatePart(“q”,vtDate),”d”). Using these functions, and a few others, I wound up with the following code:

Sub ChangeDate()
'
' ChangeDate Macro
' Update the date in both date boxes to same date (yesterday)
'
' Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+d
'
    Dim vcDateName As String
    Dim vcDateYear As String
    Dim vcDateQuarter As String
    Dim vcDateMonth As String
    Dim vcDateTime As String
    
    Dim vtTheDate As Date
    
' Get Yesterday's date
    vtTheDate = Date - 1
    
' Format the various necessary fields
    vcDateName = Format(vtTheDate, "yyyymmdd")
    vcDateYear = Format(vtTheDate, "yyyy")
    vcDateMonth = Format(vtTheDate, "m")
    vcDateQuarter = Format(DatePart("q", vtTheDate) + 1, "d")
    vcDateTime = Format(vtTheDate, "yyyy-mm-dd")
        
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable1").PivotFields( _
        "[Calendar Filter].[Calendar Year - Quarter - Month - Date].[Calendar Year]"). _
        ClearAllFilters
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable1").PivotFields( _
        "[Calendar Filter].[Calendar Year - Quarter - Month - Date].[Calendar Year]"). _
        CurrentPageName = _
        "[Calendar Filter].[Calendar Year - Quarter - Month - Date].[Calendar Year].&[" + vcDateYear + "].&[" + vcDateQuarter + "].&[" + vcDateMonth + "].&[" + vcDateTime + "T00:00:00]"
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable2").PivotFields( _
        "[Transaction Date].[Calendar Year Qtr Month].[Calendar Year]").ClearAllFilters
    ActiveSheet.PivotTables("PivotTable2").PivotFields( _
        "[Transaction Date].[Calendar Year Qtr Month].[Calendar Year]"). _
        CurrentPageName = _
        "[Transaction Date].[Calendar Year Qtr Month].[Date].&[" + vcDateName + "]"
    Cells.Select
    Selection.Columns.AutoFit
End Sub

Link this macro to a keyboard shortcut and instead of editing two date fields manually, we now only have to use the shortcut to retrieve the newest data.

I installed iOS6 this morning on my iPhone 4.

I’m not sure why.

There are now separate apps for all the stuff that used to be integrated in Music: Podcasts, iTunes U, and I’m sure there is more. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I wish the new apps had at least the functionality of the old Music app. And they don’t.

I learned that the hard way this afternoon when I started working in the yard. To have some entertainment, I always listen to podcasts or audiobooks while working in the yard, exercising, shopping or driving to and from work. So I got out the lawnmower, plugged in my headphones, and tried to listen to my podcasts.

Which had moved.

And no longer were sorted in order received.

And didn’t play whenever I locked the phone.

There were some 4 letter words uttered. Teeth were gnashed. But I settled for an audiobook that I hadn’t listened to yet.

However, it didn’t sit well with me. Why would Apple cripple a perfectly good option to listen to free podcasts? There were rumors on the discussion boards that Apple tried to steer people towards their paid content. But that wouldn’t improve the functionality of the obviously broken app…

Luckily, I ran across a post on Geek News Central, describing exactly this problem: the new Podcast app was unusable for someone who listens to a lot of podcasts. The comments reflected the same sentiment, and people suggested several alternatives for the Podcast app, amongst which were iCatcher and Downcast. I wasn’t looking forward to installing a new app, and setting up all my feeds again.

Then, lo and behold, the very last comment on the post held the solution:

1. Remove the Podcast app
2. Shutdown your iPhone or iPod
3. Restart

And now your podcasts are back in the Music app. Better yet, the playlists you’ve set up with podcasts are populated again!

I hope Apple improves the apps on the next update, because this was a major step backwards.

Years ago, I posted an article about “Kunt U Mij De Weg Naar Hamelen Vertellen, Mijnheer?” (Can You Tell Me The Way To Hamelin, Sir?), a Dutch Children’s TV show from the 1970s. In 2003, the story was converted to a musical.

One very nice person has posted the first hour of the slightly over 2 hours of the musical. However, there were problems uploading episode 7, leaving the viewers hanging. Fortunately, someone else posted the completed musical.

Thank you very, very much. This is a series I watched as a kid, eagerly awaiting every new episode (which was broadcast once a month for most of the series). It is absolutely fabulous to see Loeki Knol retelling her story, of how the children of Hamelin were taken by the Pied Piper, and how they found their way back, as an adult to her daughter.

In a little less than 24 hours, Google I/O 2012 will start with a keynote, most likely hosted by Vic Gundotra. The rumor mill is in full speed, and here’s what we expect to be announced at I/O 2012:

• A Google TabletBuilt by Asus, the price (around 200 dollars) and form factor (7”) seem to put it more in competition with the Kindle Fire than with the Apple iPad. Plus point: a reference tablet for Android.
• Android 4.1Code named Jelly Bean, it is rumored to have a new search bar, and a Siri-like voice activated assistant (Google Assistant, or should we nick name her Gia?).
• Maps on iOSThis will be interesting. Google announced a new version of Google Maps very shortly before Apple’s official announcement that it will replace Maps with its own mapping app in iOS 6. Will Apple actively block Google Maps on iOS, claiming it duplicates functionality in the system? And how will that fly with the European Union’s legislation…?
• Google GlassesTraditionally Google has put together a very nice goody bag for attendees, including phones, Chrome books, etc. It seems everyone is hoping to find the latest implementation of Project Glass under their chairs this year.
• More hardware in the Play storeVery recently, we were surprised by the appearance of a (very old) cell phone in the Google Play store. Expectations are high that the selection of unlocked phones and other hardware will increase. If the cell phone selection increases, how will carriers react to this…?

There are more than likely a few other surprises coming up, so be sure to check out the Google I/O pages (see the widget on the right hand bar for quick access).

Judging by the headlines presented to me by LinkedIn, there are some problems with the LinkedIn security:

Luckily the Top Headlines widget on Linked is not biased… 🙂

Google just announced a new partnership with the NASCAR racing organization. NASCAR will set up a new division, for which Google will supply a vehicle.

Read the full story here.

Google is always looking for ways to make our web experience faster. Today, Google announces a new feature in Chrome that doubles your web browsing productivity!

The feature will be rolled out to Chrome users over the next few days. For more information see http://www.google.com/chrome/multitask, or watch the video below.

Recently a vulnerability in the WPS wireless network setup was discovered. I will not go into great detail on that vulnerability here, but will simply show you how to turn this off on the Netgear N600:

1. Start the Netgear maintenance tool by going to http://www.routerlogin.net. This takes you into the setup tool installed during initial setup.
2. Locate the Advanced Wireless settings
3. Make sure the check box next to “WPS disabled” is checked.

Normally the “WPS disabled” option is checked when the router detects an intrusion attempt, and you can clear it here. In this case, we do the opposite - we disable the WPS by telling the router it is getting hacked.

Microsoft is working on its view of the future. This is a video of how Microsoft envisions Office in the (near?) future, and how it impacts our work and home live. Pay close attention to the recipe the girl selects at the end - it shows the ingredients being displayed on the kitchen counter. What it leaves out is something I’ve seen in another video, where the ingredients are put on the counter, matching the displayed ingredients - and it detects mismatches in the items.

Exciting to see this kind of vision, and I’m really curious how far away this is. We have face to face talk, interactive surfaces, touch screens, etc. Maybe 10 years from now, this will be the norm…

For a year or 2 we have been using flow.io at the company I work at to track projects. About a year ago, we decided to use RequestTracker (RT) to track incoming helpdesk requests, and started incorporating tasks within projects. RT almost replaced flow.io, but it lacks in the visualization of the Kanban process. Rather than building a completely new Kanban board on top of RT, I decided to use flow.io as the visualization tool, and get some measurements thrown in as a bonus.

flow.io has a nice REST API interface, allowing you to get a lot of information about your boards, and create or update new tasks. Deleting tasks is done by updating a task to a status of Deleted, giving you the opportunity to undelete the task. I’ve worked with REST interfaces before, so I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of problems there.

The challenge was RT. RT is written in Perl, and uses something called Scrips to run little scripts when something changes on an RT ticket. Scrips are pieces of Perl code. And I’ve never done anything in Perl before… except for a few Mister House scripts.

Below are the steps I took to make this work. It is a work in progress, and I’ve put it on github as an Open Source project, so feel free to improve it, fork it, or whatever.

1. Set up flow.io to accept REST requests

To accept REST requests, the flow.io API requires an authentication key. One key is already defined for you, but since flow.io unfortunately doesn’t seem to use the https protocol, I suggest not to use that key, but generate a secondary key for these requests. That allows you to delete the key if needed, and generate a new key.

Generating a key is done by going to the console on your flow.io site. It’s either a direct menu option, or go to your account and click on console.

2. Set up a Custom Field in RT

The custom field in RT will be used to store the flow.io ID number, so that you can update the right flow.io card when the RT ticket changes.

This field is also used later on to make sure we do not try to update flow.io cards that do not exist - if the flow.io ID number is blank, we do not have a flow.io card at all.

3. Select your queues that you want to expose to flow.io

You need to add the custom field to the queues that you want to use it in.

Not all queues lend itself to the Kanban board. If you have RT tickets with sensitive information in the subject line, I suggest not to put those on a board…

4. Create scrip

Once you have selected your queues, you need to define a Scrip that allows you to create flow.io cards. The On Create scrip in RT is triggered when a new RT ticket is created.

4.1 Condition

There is no condition. Maybe we should check for an existing Flow-id, but we’re assuming this is a new ticket. So the condition should always return ‘true’ to RT:

return 1;

4.2 Action

For the action part of the scrip, see the github site.

5. Modify scrip

Now that we have an RT ticket with a reference to the flow.io card, we need to make sure that modifications on RT are reflected on flow.io. This is done with the On Transaction scrip, which is triggered on every change made to a ticket.

5.1 Condition

For the condition, we only want to update RT tickets that have a flow.io ID:

return 0 unless ($self->TicketObj->FirstCustomFieldValue('FlowIO-id') != "");
return 1;

5.2 Action

For the action part of the scrip, see the github site.

6. Initial setup

For the initial setup, I went for a manual approach. We had not that many tickets open, and it was probably faster to do this by hand, than figuring out how to do this automatically.

I now regret that choice, since there are some synchronization issues:

• When someone enters a ticket, and immediately changes it to done, this is not detected. A flow.io card is created, and remains in the Backlog column until we fix it.
• When the flow.io webservice is unreachable, RT still thinks everything went fine. And I probably want to keep it that way: RT is leading, flow.io is a representation of RT - to the best of our abilities.

7. Improvements

• What happens when tickets move from one queue to another?
• Merging tickets
• Filter certain types of tickets
• Take the settings out of code and put them in a config file
• Turn the scrips into custom actions in external Perl files

To end SOPA/PIPA blackout day, this beauty from YouTube.

Remember, when SOPA and PIPA are passed, these videos are completely unlawful. You will not be able to enjoy the irony of one of the worst dictators of the 20th century criticize the worst law proposals (so far) of the 21st century. The website you view those videos on will be blocked. This website will be blocked for linking and even embedding it…

We are supporting the January 18th blackout in protest against the SOPA and PIPA acts. On January 18th, from 8AM to 8PM, our site will be replaced by a banner not unlike the one displayed when our site would be subject to a violation as described in the SOPA and PIPA acts.

We believe both the SOPA and PIPA acts are violating the First and Fourth Amendments. On top of that, the provisions in the acts do nothing to prevent malicious websites from distributing the copyrighted software, but affect benevolent sites by way of collateral damage. And finally, the provisions describe ways to try and break the internet structure.

For further information, see the following links:

• http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/sopa
• https://www.eff.org/
• http://americancensorship.org/

Normal operations will resume January 18th, 8PM.

Update: we changed plugins at the last minute, since the original plugin would not allow any access to the site at all…

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

WordPress.com sent me an interesting report on how we did in 2011, and I thought I’d share it with you. Enjoy!

http://jetpack.me/annual-report/21042169/2011/

Google has just released a set of Chromebook videos, just in time for the holiday season. The purpose of these videos is to show how easy a Chromebook is in set up, use and maintenance. I experienced the ease of maintenance this morning, while during a meeting I:

1. received a notification that a new ChromeOS version was available

2. applied the update, which requires rebooting the machine.

3. was back in business after about 15 seconds.

Consider a Chromebook for your family members, who do very little besides surfing the web. I heard Chromebooks work great with Facebook…:-)

For a while I’ve beta-tested a new multi-user game of imagination, called Glitch. However, it was in pretty closed beta, and the company (Tiny Speck) didn’t want any artwork to leak out. So I hadn’t mentioned it before.

But, today around noon, “God” announced that Glitch was leaving beta and opening up to the public! So, I’m finally able to reveal Glitch, the game where you’re playing in the minds of 11 giants, each trying to become the only giant.

The game style is pretty nice, very cartoonesque, and the game itself is an ongoing tutorial driven by quests. But instead of trying to put it in words, take a look at the trailer:

Join me at Glitch, and when you’re there, look up Thrud. 🙂

In honor of Talk Like A Pirate day this upcoming Monday September 19th, Kongregate has started a Walk Like a Pirate quest for 6 badges. 6 different games can earn you a badge, and when you’ve earned all 6 badges, you’ll receive 30 points and the Walk Like A Pirate medal. Hurry, the quest ends on September the 27th!

Do your hands and fingers feel tired after a long day of browsing, clicking, scrolling and typing? Let’s Chromercise to keep those fingers in shape!

The Back to the Future game is now available as a complete set, in two editions:

• A collector’s edition - featuring all 5 episodes on DVD, feature videos and behind the scenes looks, and an extensive production art gallery, for $24.99
• A special Deluxe edition - all the above, plus a cover featuring a young Emmett, Doc, and Marty, a photo album, Doc’s notebook, and a Trixie Trotter commemorative post card, for $44.99

The Telltale page for Back to the Future game has a ton of other merchandise, like a T-shirt, a poster, an art portfolio, and a card game.

Check it out, order a complete set, and tell them you heard about it on Automation Adventures!

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know I’m still alive and hard at work…

I was planning on putting out some posts on how I integrated Request Tracker with Flow.io, but it takes a little longer than expected (my Perl knowledge is growing by the day though). It seems to work now, so keep your eyes on the blog, and I’ll post something next week or so.

Meanwhile, enjoy summer!

I’ve had this tool laying around in my to-do folder for a while now, and today seemed like a good day to take a look at it.

Office Tab brings the tabbed interface from IE, Firefox and Chrome to the Office suite. Instead of the user interface where each document is a separate window, you’re basically returning to the old interface from I think Office XP, where each application within the suite has one window, and there are multiple documents within that window.

The Free version allows you to include tabs in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you want tabs in Project or Visio, you’ll need the Professional or Enterprise version. A complete comparison of the versions is found here.

Office Tab 7 is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and supports Office 2003, 2007 and 2010.

This is what work at Medeco looks like.

UPDATE: This was actually a little test on posting directly from a photo taken on the iPod Touch, and posted to a WordPress blog. Kurt Wilhelm was the unsuspecting subject in this picture.

After about 5 years, I’m in the process of replacing my 3rd generation iPod with a 30GB hard disk with a brand new 4th generation iPod Touch with 32GB of SD. While I’m still holding on to the old iPod, I’m switching back and forth on syncing the iPod and the iPod Touch. Until I got an error on the old iPod that it cannot be synced, because there was a duplicate file name.

The solution is actually very simple. Somehow the file system on the iPod is corrupt, and you’ll have to rebuild it. On Windows, this can be done in two ways:

1. If you plug the iPod in, a screen comes up automatically suggesting you scan and fix this device. Check both boxes to make sure a complete scan is complete.
2. If that screen doesn’t pop up, click on Start, My Computer. Windows then shows you all the storage devices connected to your computer. Right-click on the iPod, and select Properties. In the screen that pop ups, select the Tools tab. On that tab, select the Check Now button in Error Checking.

It may take a long time to scan, but it should finish. When it finishes, unplug the iPod, wait 1 minute, then plug it back in. It should work now. If it doesn’t, open up iTunes, select the iPod in the Devices section, and select Restore. After the restore finishes, do the Error Check on the iPod one more time.

This week’s GotW is specific to the Chrome browser, although there are versions of this game for other platforms (iPod/iPhone).

The Secret of Grisly Manor by Fire Maple Games is a point-and-click adventure. Your Grandfather is reported as dead, but then you arrive a letter from him telling you that the news of his death is not true. You need to go to Grisly Manor, and solve the riddles he left behind to find out the truth.

The game mechanics are pretty straight forward. Unlike some of the other point-and-click adventures I’ve played, there are no tiny spots you have to click on (most likely an inheritance from the iPod/iPhone interface). Each puzzle leads to another, giving you the ingredients needed to solve them.

The graphics are pretty good, and combined with the background music and sound effects give the right atmosphere to the game. If you get stuck, you can Google for the name of the game and find a few walk-throughs.

This week’s GotW is Fantastic Contraption, a puzzle game where the goal is to get a pink ball into the pink area.

You have a work shop area, where you build the contraption to move the pink ball to the target area. When you press the Start button, your contraption takes off and moves by itself (hopefully) into the direction of the target (hopefully).

There are several different levels of difficulty, and the full version ($10) gives you access to more user-generated levels and the ability to generate your own levels.

Hey all, due to the performance issues we had Thursday and Friday, we’re skipping the Game of the Week this week. We’ll get a fresh one Friday the 17th!

We’re experiencing some speed issues with the website currently, and we’re trying to get these resolved as quickly as possible. Bear with us please.

For the last several years, ever since Facebook allowed third-party access to your data, your account with Facebook could have been taken over.

Not by Firesheep (although the principal is similar), but because of the third-party application actually leaking an access token outside of the conversation between you, Facebook and the third-party.

In a nutshell, the sequence of events allowing this are as follows:

1. You’re logged in to Facebook, and want to play a game (start up a third-party application)
2. The third-party application presents a permission dialog page, where you allow the application access to your friends, your personal information, and posting on your wall.
3. The third-party application gets an access token from Facebook, which allows it to do all these things without you having to explicitly give them permission every time.
4. That token is exchanged with Facebook every time the third-party issues requests.

So far it is very similar to the Firesheep issue. However, the twist here comes if the third-party application uses a legacy Facebook API:

1. The access token is sent as part of the URL
2. The application requests resources from another site (such as an advertiser).
3. The advertiser receives the referring URL, which contains the access token.

Now the advertiser has the access token that the third-party application uses, and can use that to do the same actions you allowed that application. Best case it now has a list of your friends, worst case you’ve just given the advertiser the right to post on your wall.

And since requests are normally logged, it is even possible that when the advertiser’s site gets hacked, the hacker finds the log, containing these access tokens, and can do these same actions.

Symantec has identified this issue back in late April, and Facebook has since then taken steps to remedy this problem. However, none of these steps completely remedy the problem until September 1st, when the legacy API calls that allow this venue of attack are disabled, and replaced by OAuth.

So what can you do to prevent your account being used as a beach head of attack?

1. Review what rights you’ve given to what applications, and delete rights you no longer use or think are unnecessary. This is done in Facebook under Account, Privacy Settings, Apps and Websites, Apps You Use.
2. Insist on using HTTPS wherever you can, and think twice about third-party applications that do not support it.
3. Change your password. Changing your password invalidates the previous security tokens.

Symantec states that to their knowledge no Facebook users were impacted by this issue. However, this is a definite possibility of attack, and a few good security principles can keep your account safe (or safer) from attacks.

A Twitter post alerted me that something called “20 Things I Learned” went open source. Curious, I went to check out what “20 Things” actually is.

“20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web” is an e-book created by the Chrome team back in November of 2010. It shows you what the Internet is, and how it’s being used today. It then moves on to the building blocks of web pages, HTML, JavaScript, and the modern browser and how it helps to keep users secure. Finally, it looks towards the future, speculating on new technologies to improve the web experience.

It is a book, and at the same time a showcase of what modern browsers can do: curling pages, use keyboard and mouse interfaces to turn pages and go to certain sections in the book, zoom in and out, and change background colors on the fly.

And then for the Tweet that led me to “20 Things”: Google open-sourced the book. The source code is available for anyone to download, and tinker with. It shows the techniques that were used in developing the book (Google App Engine at the back-end, HTML5 at the front-end), and allows developers to learn how to apply the same techniques to their own projects.

All in all worthwhile to check it out, both as a developer interested in the techniques, and a user who is interested in the web.

This week’s game is Penguin Diner 2, a (by the author admitted) rip-off of Diner Dash, and a sequel to Penguin Diner.

It puts you in the shoes (or skates as you will) of Penny, a penguin waitress, who has finally returned home to create the perfect diner. And this involves adding tables, comfy chairs, decorations, speed skates, top chefs, and themes to the diners in various regions of the South Pole.

A funny game, very reminiscent of Diner Dash, but the way the penguin guests attract your attention is the best: a friendly “Helloooo”. Good for a couple of hours of quick reaction fun.

Recently Google Docs added Pivot Tables to the Spreadsheets type of documents, adding a powerful and much-needed feature.

It has most of the functionality PivotTables in Excel has: you can select columns and rows to display, how the data in the table is displayed (Sum, Average, Count), and add filters to it. All this is done with drop-downs and dragging fields around.

One feature I missed during my short forage through the pivot tables is the Collapse All/Expand All: when you have multiple fields selected on either rows or columns, creating a hierarchy, the higher level fields get a little + or - sign next to them. It appears impossible to collapse or expand all on a certain level, forcing you to do it one by one.

A step by step tutorial to Pivot Tables is available here. For those who need a visual to make it all understandable, Google provides a training video:

Note: the step by step tutorial explains how to add a filter to a pivot table, but uses fields that were not available in my version of the sample spreadsheet. Just add a filter on Major, and select Physics as the only value.

This week’s game of the week is Papa’s Taco Mia.

In this game, you win a taco eating contest, and the first prize is… your own taco shop. I know, I’d rather win that car or boat, but no, your reward is working.

In the taco shop, you have to take orders, grill the meat, and finish the taco with the customer’s toppings. The faster and better you do it, the higher your score and tips are.

The game is very reminiscent of Papa’s Pizzeria. No big surprise, they’re both from Flipline Studio. The differences between the two games are not that big, as they even seem to use the same customers in both games. The toppings are a little easier in Taco Mia, but the grilling/baking is definitely easier in Pizzeria.

Give it a try (on both games), and see which one you like better. Happy grilling this weekend!

A promo video from the Google Chrome team, showing how Lady Gaga is using the web to create a larger fan base. It makes you wonder what Madonna would/could have done if the web was in place 20 years ago…

Jason’s Deli is a dining chain based out of Texas, and they have been selected to beta test the Chrome Notebook. Here’s some of the people involved with the test telling about their experiences:

This week’s game came to my attention because a version of this (older) game was released for the iPad.

Paper Train is a combination of puzzle and reaction game, in which you control sets of trains being unleashed on a railroad track drawn on paper. You control the trains by switches and signals, and in some cases there are trains you can’t control at all.

A nail-biting game (will this train pass in front of the other or get hit), that is addictive in it’s “one more try” principle.

This week an older game, that used to be an install. Now it’s available in Google Chrome: Angry Birds.

Rovio stated in the keynote on Google I/O 2011 that when the Webstore would be fully operational, they would make the Mighty Eagle available as well.

I guess that’s all I need to say about that.

Oh! One more thing: there are several Chrome levels built into the Chrome version.

Have fun!!!

I was unfortunately tied up for the whole afternoon and part of this morning with production issues, but here is a little bit of information about the 2nd keynote for Google I/O 2011.

The keynote for Google I/O 2011 Day 2 is centered on the Chrome browser, and the HTML5 push.

• Chrome has now 160M active users (on Automation Adventures, the number one browser is Firefox with 35%, followed by Chrome and IE, both with close to 29%)
• Voice recognition built into Chrome
• Demo with clicker - easy addition of speech recognition
• Demo of Google Translation with speech recognition
• TinkerCad demo of HTML5 and WebGL
• Chrome WebStore In-app payments: 17 million installed, 2x more time spent in apps, 2.5x more transactions. Literally 1 line of code to activate.
• Webstore will expand around the world, available in 41 languages.
• Angry Birds now available in the Chrome Web Store!
• Chromebooks coming next month. Samsung and Acer will be producing Chromebooks, which will be available June 15th through Amazon.com and Best Buy. Available in 7 countries.
• Monthly Chromebook subscriptions for businesses ($28/user/month) and schools ($20/user/month). Also starting June 15th. More info here.

The main focus seems to be on ease of management for the IT department: the hardware and OS fade away by being replaced by the netbooks, and the applications are centralized web applications. The main pain will actually be felt by the same IT department, since a lot of the applications in most organizations are not web based. Virtualization is an alternative there, but I haven’t seen a proven and reliable Remote Desktop or Virtual Machine client for Chrome OS yet. Until then, this remains an interesting alternative to installing a browser on a bare machine…

The first keynote of the Google I/O 2011 focuses completely on the Android platform. Here are some of the highlights.

Android

• 100 million activations
• 4.5 billion installs of applications
• over 200,000 applications
• Honeycomb 3.1 update available very soon
• 3.1 can act as USB host - directly connect USB devices to your Android tablet (camera, keyboard, game controller)
• Also coming to Google TV this summer

Next release Ice Cream Sandwich

• Q4 2011 targeted launch
• Focus on choice of device: available for phones, tablets, and tablets turning into laptops(!)
• New tools to accommodate different screen sizes
• Completely Open Source
• Demo of feedback from position of head vs. tablet, Android’s version of Photobooth. More useful demo: on video chat with multiple speakers system focuses automatically on the person speaking.

Android Cloud services

• Android market expanded to movies.
• $3.99 rental for 30 days
• Ability to make movie rentals available offline (for viewing on for example airplane)
• Available across all devices, phone, tablet, laptop and PC.
• Music Beta by Google
• Makes music available across all devices
• Instant mix based on a selected song
• Adding music over the air - never have to use a cable again, no syncing (hey, Apple!)
• Make Available Offline also available for music
• When getting new phone, all that is needed is signing into Google account
• Rolling out in beta, up to 20,000 songs, free while in beta

Industry partnership

• New platform releases rolling out faster based on new industry partnership
• New updates automatically for 18 months as long as hardware supports

More

• Android Open Accessory API
• Takes openness to a new level by allowing hardware by 3rd parties
• Demo of exercise bike connected to Android phone, automatically starts CardioQuest application, and bike detects that CardioQuest is running and relinquishes control to phone.
• API for Gingerbread and Honeycomb available today
• Starting out with USB, Bluetooth available later
• ADK (Accessories Development Kit) based on Arduino.
• Demo of Labyrinth game where controller is an Android tablet.
• Completely open, no NDA, no fees, no approval process.
• Android@Home
• New protocol to allow devices to communicate with each other and with Android - Partnering with Lightning Science - LED lightbulbs and switches - by end of year.
• Android@Home hub - project Tungsten. Demo of music playing through multiple devices. Combination of Music and @Home to identify music cds and automatically start playing them

Recently I heard Leo LaPorte in one of the Twit Network podcasts talk about Khan Academy. He was very enthusiastic about it, and recommended it to everyone. I followed his recommendation and checked it out.

Khan Academy is a completely free, donation-driven on-line learning resource. It covers an enormous range of topics, from simple arithmetic, through algebra and trigonometry, up to chemistry, history, and physics. The level of these topics also has a broad range, from kindergarten up to an academic level.

There is a certain game element thrown into the mix by keeping track of energy points. Everything you do - watching a video, doing an exercise - earns you energy points. Apart from the energy points, you can earn badges - ranging from correct answer streaks to becoming proficient in all mathematical exercises.

Khan Academy is definitely worth checking out, especially for people who consider themselves eternal students!

This week’s Game of the Week is a nifty little acrobatics game called Stuntpilot.

You’re piloting a stunt plane, that flies through a series of rings. Touch a ring, and you have to bail out of the plane. Each level gets progressively more difficult, with hot air balloons, zeppelins, towers on the ground and more difficult placement of the rings.

A sometimes frustrating game, but fun to spend a couple of hours on.
(Thanks to NotDoppler)

This week not really a flash game, but we’re keeping with the tradition that you don’t have to install anything on your machine.

I ran across Battlestar Galactica Online browsing the SyFy website, and was curious about it. In one word: amazing. This is a MMO game, built completely in a browser, with real-time space combat.

It first lets you choose whether you want to play as a human, or as a Cylon. I chose human, but the Cylon perspective is not that much different, apart from the characters giving you the missions and some flight characteristics of the ships.

The game then puts you in the driver’s seat of a Viper or Raptor, with other spacecraft available later in the game. You get your first assignments from Admiral Adama, and after completing those, you get assignments from Captain Adama and from Starbuck. These missions are intended to get you familiarized with the game controls and the dynamics. Just like in the SyFy series, there is a shortage of supplies, so even fighter pilots are mining for resources. You can reconfigure your plane for each mission, replacing a mining laser with a missile launcher, if you’re going after the big boys.

I haven’t seen a lot of bad things happen when you die, which adds to the gung-ho attitude to dive in and slaughter some toasters, or defeat some evil humans. Loads of fun, both as a quick intermission, or as a long-term commitment (if you earn enough merits, you can command the Galactica!).

Today, SlideRocket announced that they have been acquired by VMWare.

SlideRocket is an online presentation tool, that tries to put a new twist on the age-old and most of the time boring PowerPoint presentation. With SlideRocket, you can easily integrate audio, rich media, and instant feedback to bring a presentation to life.

VMWare is an industry-leading virtualization platform, that has a range of products covering anything from simple workstation to multi-core, multi-disk top-of-the-line server array.

By the sound of the press release, it seems to me that VMWare is trying to expand themselves past their core business of virtualization, and get more into cloud computing. Previous steps in that direction include VMWare View, ThinApp and Zimbra. Hopefully, the estimated 20,000 users of SlideRocket will continue to be serviced by this pretty awesome presentation tool.

Hands of War II is an adventure game, taking place in the land of Tempor. Tempor is torn by a civil war between the Phoenix and the Guardians. The Phoenix want to use a powerful magic stone to exact revenge on the surrounding lands that invaded Tempor, and the Guardians want to prevent more bloodshed.

On top of that, there is fierce rivalry between the three guilds, the Rangers, the Wizards, and the Warriors. So, there is enough room for some serious combat. The player needs to choose which Guild and which Faction he joins, and is then issued quests to fulfill.

A nicely done game, and since I’ve always had a soft spot for adventures, Hands of War is our game of the week.

OK, so we announced about 3 weeks ago that Duke Nukem Forever was really coming out. Now it turns out it is delayed until June 14th, 2011.

I hope this is not setting a precedent. Oh wait, never mind…

Pre-order is still available. And I still am not going to do it!

While I’m enjoying my Cr-48, it has a few drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is that you can’t install any programs on it, other than Chrome extensions and apps. This is a big hurdle towards reading eBooks on the device - Amazon’s Kindle requires an application to be installed on the device, whether it’s a PC, Mac, or mobile platform.

Luckily Google saw this too, and came up with Google eBooks. As most of Google’s products, this is completely web-based. And as thus, it’s easy to see how they can provide a seamless reading experience between different devices: you can read a book on your PC, then continue exactly where you left off on your smart phone.

The selection of books is pretty broad. Google eBooks touts 3 million selections. And not just Computers & Internet, but also Mystery, Romance, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, etc.

I played around with the Cr-48 camera a few weeks ago, and noticed that you can easily upload video to YouTube. Today I noticed it was broken - YouTube said that no camera was detected.

Luckily the fix was only a Google search away. It turns out that on the about:plugins page there are two Flash players shown. Disable the one that has version number 10.2.158.6, path /opt/google/chrome/pepper/libpepflashplayer.so. Reopen the YouTube upload page, and all should be well.

(Thanks to Google Groups, Cr-48 Test Pilots)

Google announced Thursday that they will be bringing Google I/O to the web, naming it I/O Live.

After the tickets to Google I/O sold out in under an hour, Google decided to do the same thing several other companies (notably Progress with their Exchange conference) and bring the presentations to the web. They will be streaming live video from the two largest conference rooms, capturing the keynotes, but also session from Android and Chrome. There will be real-time captions of the live streams courtesy of Google Translate. And last but not least, you can submit questions directly to the sandbox developers.

Google I/O 2011 starts at 9AM PDT on May 10th.

Last week a few updates came through for both the Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, and for the Cr-48 netbook.

Two major changes made are the change to use the click functionality of the Cr-48 mousepad to eliminate the problems with the tap, and the capability of the Chrome to accept voice input.

The ‘click’ functionality is actually a change to the default settings in the Chrome OS. The initial installation of Chrome had Enable Tap-to-click enabled as far as I remember. The new default for this is disabled, which prevents accidental clicking by resting the mouse of your hand on the mousepad. I feel the disabled option is working a little better.

The biggest thing is that Chrome OS is now capable of speech recognition. Currently there are a few fields that are enabled for speech recognition, mainly simple text fields. This is new functionality being developed in HTML5, and is a preview from the HTML Speech Incubator group. I have the Speechify plugin enabled, which shows a little microphone next to any field that allows speech input. I can’t wait for it to be enabled on multi-line text widgets, so I can dictate blogposts… 🙂

A minor change is the Chrome logo, which has become a little simpler: the old logo sported a 3D look with a small reflection on it, the new logo sports a more 2D look with clearer colors.

ICT MxR lab responded to Google’s April Fools joke by implementing their gesture interface in about one hour. To accomplish that, they used a toolkit called FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit) and implemented the program SLOOW (Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving). It uses the XBox Kinect system to capture the human motions. See for yourself what a simple prank can lead to:

Google announced today that they have selected Kansas City, Kansas, for their ultra high-speed broadband project.

The ultra high-speed broadband project aims to deliver 1 Gigabit/s internet speeds to its users. Kansas City was selected because Google found here “a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community and develop relationships with local government and community organizations.”

Google plans to start delivering the ultra high-speed access beginning 2012.

This week’s GotW is almost a golden oldie, in that it has been around for a while, but still one of the most highly rated games.

Cursed Treasure by IriySoft is a game in the tower defense genre. Its main difference with other games in the genre is its medieval atmosphere. It has a couple of nice twists however, that make it interesting and addictive to play.

The ‘landscape’ has a few extra features, like mountains. When you build a tower on top of a mountain, it has a longer range. The player himself gets stronger - insomuch that the three spells he has available either recharge faster, or have a stronger effect. Experience is applied to one of three groups (coinciding with the three types of tower available) - and each increase has a double effect.

All in all a fun game, that cost me many an hour last year, and looks like it’s making me lose a few this year as well.

I came across this interesting article, arguing why the Internet is not like water or electricity. Basically, the argument is that there is no direct, measurable cost involved with Internet traffic, as there is with electricity or water. Also, the amount of Internet traffic received is not directly controllable - consider the email with a 100 Mb video attached.

I agree in broad lines with this article. If I’m downloading a 1 Gb file, it doesn’t cost my ISP more money than when I download a 1 Mb file. What would cost them (and me) more, is if it want that 1 Gb file faster than what I’m receiving now. So the differentiator between an occasional user and a power user is the bandwidth he uses. And most services, if not all, handle lower bandwidths pretty good: even Netflix is still watchable on a busy network, because it scales back the bandwidth it uses, in favor of a faster response (i.e. same amount of frames per second).

So, added bandwidth requires more/higher grade equipment at the ISP’s end. If I order double bandwidth from my ISP, I assume I’m using twice the amount of room on the uplink, and twice the amount of room on their internal network infrastructure. However, if this is true, why oh why is it still the case that ISPs advertise with “download speeds UP TO 3 Mbps” or comparable. Where is the ISP that advertises with “download speeds of AT LEAST 500 kbps”, based on the amount of equipment and uplink they have. Do they not have enough equipment to adequately support their user base?

And don’t use the argument that the speeds advertised are not sustained speeds. More and more people are using VoIP and streaming video, which are sustained applications. So you’d better make sure you have the sustained bandwidth available.

So here’s a call for the ISPs: what is the minimum speed you’ll guarantee your users? It could be a great advertising opportunity!

OK, we’ll pass on this week’s game of the week, to give you an update on Duke Nukem Forever. Yeah, the game that was in development for over a decade. It is coming. May 3rd.

Seriously.

Don’t believe me? Believe their website.

Although I for one would not pre-order the game…

Here’s the trailer:

It happens to me every so often, that I have to do maintenance on a Linux box, and I’ve changed my passwords around and can’t remember the password I used on that particular box (or even the user name…). I always have to hunt around the net, hoping I find something, so I thought I’d capture it on my own blog:

1. Reboot the computer
2. At the GRUB or LILO prompt, press escape.
3. Go to the line that would normally boot, and press e to edit
4. Go to the end of the command line, and add rw init=/bin/bash to it
5. Press Enter, then press b to boot
6. You should now be entered into a passwordless root shell
7. Either set your password with passwd <username>, or see a list of users with cat /etc/passwd.
8. Reboot again
9. Happy times!

Hope this helps me (and maybe some else) in the future…

This week’s game has become a serious time sink for me. I’ve always loved aerial combat, and Aces of World War II is a good multi-player implementation.

Technically, this is not a Flash based game. It uses the Unity web player to allow for the quick-responding real-time graphics. But that’s just a minor detail…

The game play itself can be infuriating at times. You start out with a fairly powerless plane, the Gladiator Mk. II. It takes over 700 Action Points to get to the next plane - and Action Points are awarded when you shoot down another plane. Your best bet is to get rockets as soon as possible - these are 100 APs, and last for a full day. With a bit of luck and skill, you’ll be able to shoot down a couple of enemies a day and eventually get the TBD Devastator - much more powerful, and very agile.

But before you dive into Dogfights, prepare yourself with some training missions. In the training, remember that rear-mounted guns have a hard time shooting under the plane it’s mounted in. And when you feel comfortable, go ahead and join the Dogfights. Just pay attention to what kind of scenario it is - in Team Dogfights, you can shoot down your team mates, but it doesn’t earn you points, and might piss them off…

There is a total of 44 planes available in the game, ranging from the Gladiator to P-51 Mustang and J7W1 Shinden. The only weapons upgrade available now is the rockets, but more is listed as coming soon, as are upgrades and stunts.

Good luck, happy hunting and Tally ho!

This week’s Flash game is Amea by Godlimitations.

Amea takes you on a journey of remembrance. You play a girl who has lost her memory, and wakes up in a small town that is overrun by monsters. She hears a voice and follows it to find herself in a forest, that is even more overrun. Gradually the characters she runs into make her remember more and more of the past.

The game itself has a good atmosphere, and the choices you make early on can affect you in the later stages. However, if you do chose the wrong spells in the beginning, as long as you find all the runes, you can power level yourself up at the end to defeat the final monster. In all, A+ for the atmosphere and the graphics, but the music can be a little overwhelming, as is the sound Amea makes when she gets hit. Definitely worth playing.

This morning, I saw the following conversation on twitter, between a Blacksburg Virginia citizen and the town’s government. It really made my day. Thanks, @Blacksburg_Gov and @journeyguy!

Oh, and Christiansburg, could you follow Blacksburg’s example? Both on Twittering and sweeping… 🙂

Last Friday, the 18th, Twitter suspended two applications for violations of their policies: UberSocial (formally known as UberTwitter) and twidroyd. It never really stated in public what the exact violations were.

In a thread on Quora the CEO of UberMedia (parent company of UberTwitter) Bill Gross states that the problems involved:

• a third-party service (tmi.me), used to split tweets longer than 140 characters, was posting private messages on a public website
• UberCurrent (another twitter client of UberMedia, for the iPhone) was changing links that were part of an affiliate program to their own
• the name UberTwitter

UberMedia has remedied these problems and now is back in business.

I personally used UberTwitter until I started getting error messages that just said “Forbidden”. Switching to the “official” Blackberry client cured the issue. But I wasn’t the only one using UberTwitter. A lot of celebrities such as Lance Armstrong were using it, and went silent over the weekend.

I’m not sure if I’ll switch back to UberTwitter. That, and the fact that Twitter can suspend clients in a heart beat, shows once again the danger of building your business on another company’s platform. Whether that’s Twitter, or Apple, or Google, or Microsoft…

This week’s Game of the Week is Mooo! from Andromedus, a puzzle game where you have to move the cow to the milk bottle (or vice versa in some cases) to fill the bottle with milk. It’s in essence a physics puzzle game, where hay bails, wooden poles and bombs all work together to get the cow to the bottle, or to keep them apart.

The game is 20 predefined levels, and includes a level editor to create your own puzzles.

As you may know, I do a lot of development in Progress OpenEdge 10, which used to be called Progress 4GL, which has been around for a few decades now. Here’s one of their first, if not _the_ first, commercial, from when the company was still called Data Language Corporation. 80’s style!

I ran across this video earlier, but while browsing around for some more info on the CR48 netbook I ran into it again, and thought I’d share it with you:

Two days ago a non-descript package arrived. Opening up the package very carefully, I found a big, rectangular cardboard box inside, with on it something that looked like an assembly drawing of a mouse trap.

After putting on my Hazmat suit, and telling wife and kid to evacuate the building, I carefully opened it. Inside was a black slab, about 12 by 9 inches inside. At that point I heard “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in the back of my mind. Luckily it wasn’t a monolith, but one of Google’s CR48 netbooks.

So far I’ve been able to charge the battery, take my profile picture, log into our corporate and home networks, and probably screw up the built-in 3G wireless account…

I haven’t run into any major problems yet, apart from the fact that my beloved NotScripts uses a setting in a file on the file system, that is not accessible - all you get with the Chrome OS is a browser windows. But I’ll let you all share in the experience of Living in the Cloud.

Oh, and I apologize for the picture quality - I only had my cellphone available, and the carpet didn’t make for the best background…

So, 2 weeks ago was the last post, ironically enough introducing a new, weekly feature.

And then life happened.

We got into a February 1st deadline at work, which resulted in long hours, only to be interrupted by both my wife and myself struck by the stomach flu that seems to be going around in these parts. Which in turn meant that there was precious little time to write on the blog.

So be it.

But we’re back in full force, and I’ve got some interesting stuff to tell you. One of the news items involves the way I’m writing this blog post - no, not going to tell you, just wait for the next post.

So keep reading and I promise there will be a weekly feature, and more.

Cheers!

I’ve been using several online gaming sites, and thought it may be a good idea to share my favorite games with you.

This week I’d like to share with you Liquid Measure 2. Liquid Measure is a puzzle game, where you need to capture the water released from one or more containers, guide it through pipes, splitters and overflow controls, to finally catch it in one or more buckets of various sizes.

The game takes 31 levels or so, and takes a couple of hours to complete, but provides a nice diversity of problems.

Today’s Verizon event in New York announces the Apple iPhone coming to their network - and they’re ready for it. Unlike AT&T apparently.

On February 3rd, Verizon customers can pre-order the iPhone 4, ahead of it’s general availability on February 1oth. The 16GB version will cost $199.99, the 32GB will cost $299.99. Both models include HotSync, which allows up to 5 WiFi devices to tether to the phone.

The main difference between the AT&T (GSM) and Verizon (CDMA) versions of the iPhone 4 is that GSM allows you to talk and use data at the same time. No such luck on the CDMA technology - so to look up something on the web, you’ll have to hang up your voice call. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, all but dismisses this issue with the remark “I think people place emphasis on different things”.

The Verizon iPhone is also not 4G ready. This apparently would have needed design changes that Apple was unwilling to make.

Personally, I’d like to trade in my corporate BlackBerry and get the iPhone 4 instead. I think a lot of companies will be thinking about their phone strategy in the next couple of weeks, now that there are 2 major competitors to RIM available on Verizon.

Here we are, the first day in 2011, and it’s time to look back at 2010. We’ve seen a steady increase in number of pages viewed over the year, from about 900 pages per month in January to almost 1500 pages per month in December. Year over year however we dropped a couple of percent, having about 14% less visits and page views in 2010 than we did in 2009. Reason for this is a stellar period in 2009, starting in April and ending in early June. We’re coming close to those figures with a few posts in November and December, and hopefully the trend of about 10% growth per month will continue in 2011. Thanks everyone!

Now finally, here are the top 10 stories in 2010:

1. Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows

Date of article: March 27, 2009
Hit percentage: 8.5%

This article describes briefly how to find the name of a particular service in Windows, to add it to the Nagios monitoring platform. It also sparked a nice discussion over faster ways to determine it.

2. Blackberry not syncing with BES

Date of article: September 11, 2008
Hit percentage: 7.3%

This article discusses a simple fix I found to restart the synchronization between a Blackberry phone and the BES server. Interesting that it is more than 2 years old and still heavily visited.

3. Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc

Date of article: January 7, 2009
Hit percentage: 6.6%

Also an article almost 2 years old, this one describes step by step how to set up a VPN connection under Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve since moved to Windows 7 for my main machine, but still run several Linux machines, both at home and at work.

4. Firefox equivalent of Internet Explorer’s Every Time I visit the Web page

Date of article: April 1, 2009
Hit percentage: 5.3%

Once again, an old article, describing the need I had on a bulletin board monitor at work to make sure the pages were loaded fresh every time they’re displayed.

5. Tomcat uses 100% of CPU

Date of article: March 30, 2009
Hit percentage: 4.8%

I think there’s a trend - the older articles are hit more! 🙂 This one describes what caused my fresh installation of Tomcat to use 100% of the CPU, pretty much 100% of the time, and the fix for it.

6. ICVerify: encrypt request and answer files using EncryptionManager

Date of article: February 13, 2009
Hit percentage: 4.5%

Another article from early 2009 that proved popular through 2010. This describes my problems getting the ICVerify encryption/decryption of the request and answer files working. The key was the fact that the .DLL used was a .NET assembly, and needed to be added to the Global Assembly Cache.

7. Ubuntu 8.10 installation – GRUB error 18

Date of article: January 5, 2009
Hit percentage: 3.2%

Early 2009 once again, and this one describes the problems I had installing Ubuntu 8.10 on an older machine with a large drive, and how to create a boot partition for the kernel.

8. NotScripts – The NoScript option for Chrome

Date of article: August 19, 2010
Hit percentage: 2.5%

The first article in the top 10 that was actually written in 2010! NotScripts is the awesome version of NoScript for Chrome, disabling Javascript selectively per site. It doesn’t have all the extra functionality of NoScript, but gets the job done quickly and easily.

9. Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit

Date of article: October 11, 2007
Hit percentage: 2.4%

And immediately to offset that 2010 article, here’s the oldest article in the top 10. Since Windows 7 makes the installation of the Bluetooth adapter much easier, this may not be on the list next year, but for now, if you’re struggling with Kensington and Windows Vista, this is your article!

10. Sharepoint 2007 Wiki WYSIWYG editor

Date of article: October 13, 2010
Hit percentage: 2.3%

Rounding out the top 10 is another article from 2010, complaining about the lack of browser support other than IE in Sharepoint 2007, while there are so many other browsers these days (in 2010 42% of visitors here used Firefox and 20% used Chrome - even back in 2008 IE wasn’t the #1 browser for visitors here). It sparked some discussion about WordPress and WordOnWiki.

Conclusion

So there you have it: the old articles still provide a lot of visitors. It shows that articles describing a problem and the solution to that problem are long-lived. Oh and if you want to know the top 10 articles written in 2010, here they are:

1. NotScripts - The NoScript option for Chrome
2. Sharepoint 2007 Wiki WYSIWYG editor
3. iTunes 9.1 authorization and Windows 7
4. Windows XP loses the domain controller?
5. Google Chrome for a Cause - donate your tabs!
6. Apple’s FaceTime - the promo video
7. Ubuntu and the Symantec Backup client
8. Google’s Street View cars collected whole emails - so what?
9. Android Multi-Touch tablet prototype
10. Carbonite backup and my floppy drive

I hope to see you all frequently in 2011. Happy New Year!!

Jason Fried of 37Signals presented a talk at Ted this October, explaining why so little work is actually done at work:

A few Take-aways:

• Cancel meetings - and see if work still gets done
• Institute a No-Talk Thursday - nobody can talk to each other
• Rely more on IM, email, and other non-interactive means to communicate to each other

This may be a good time to plug a 37Signals product called Campfire. It enables co-workers to be available for chat, but not miss anything when they’re not in the chat. It’s also a better solution than IM, since it allows easily for 3- or 4-way chats. Last but not least, you don’t need to install every IM client in the world to be available - all you need is a browser.

The movie “Spinal Tap” (1984) is a classic, not in the least because of the hilarious misconceptions of the band members. One of the quotes is Nigel explaining to a reporter that their amps go to 11.

IMDb ran with that, and created the rating page for the movie. And where most movies only go to 10, Spinal Tap goes to…

Thanks to Slashfilm.

Starting today, December 24th, NORAD and Google Maps will track Santa’s delivery route across the globe. If you want to track where he is and if he’s getting close to you, go to www.noradsanta.org, and see a large Google Map displaying Santa’s current location and his next stop.

If you have Google Earth installed, click on the link Track Santa in Google Earth to see Santa steer his sleigh on the web page.

Merry Christmas everyone, and see you all Monday!

TheOpenInter.Net has a quick overview of what Net Neutrality is, and why it is important to you, and to the future use of the Internet. The site is completely done in HTML5, so even iPads can view it without too much problems.

It quickly and simply describes what the current state of the Internet is, what Big ISPs want (bundle services like they are TV channels, charging separately for certain content), and why it is important that they don’t succeed. If a friend of yours has problems understanding what Net Neutrality is, send them there.

Just in time for the holidays, and getting close to the cut-off date for even electronic greeting cards to arrive in time for Christmas, Google present the “Teach Parents Tech” Care Package site.

This site allows anyone to create a greeting card with a number of instructional videos (provided by Google) on a range of different topics, from changing your background on Mac or PC to setting up video chat and sharing photos online. The resulting email is a little bland and not as exciting as the promo on the GMail login page shows, but I think it does the trick.

The only video that’s missing is how to check your email and play videos… I guess a little in-person help may be necessary for some parents.. 🙂

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the original Google Blog article. I guess I’m a little late to the party.

Google Wave is scheduled to be closed at the end of this month. Luckily, there is a place to go for all the gadgets that were written for Wave - and it’s not gadget hell, but Shared Spaces.

Shared Spaces is a Google Labs product, and instead of centering around the conversation like Google Wave, Shared Spaces is more centered around a particular gadget. You can create a space around a map to collaboratively plan a trip, or around a mind map gadget to brainstorm about an idea.

The slideshow below shows a little about Google’s idea of a shared space:

Between December 15th and 19th, Google will donate a small amount of money to a charity of your cause for every tab you open in Google Chrome, called “Chrome for a Cause”. You have to install the Chrome For a Cause extension, and at the end of every day you can choose a charity to donate your opened tabs to. Chrome For a Cause supports the following charities:

• The Nature Conservancy
• charity:water
• Doctors Without Borders
• Un Techo para mi Pais
• Room to Read

I’ve only accumulated 2 opened tabs so far, but I’ll let you know what happens to my tabs… 🙂

For everyone out there who has watched the Back To The Future trilogy, and always dreamed of taking their DeLorean for a spin at exactly 88 miles per hour - but never got the DeLorean: here’s your chance!!!

Telltale Games is scheduled to release episode 1 of a 5 episode game this December. The events in the game take place 6 months after the events of the third movie, when the DeLorean returns to Hill Valley - driverless! Marty has to go back in time and enlist the help of Doc Brown as a teenager, or else the space-time continuum will unravel.

More Back to the Future: The Game Videos

The episode release schedule is monthly, so by May 2011 we should have the whole game completed. The pre-order for Episode 1 is $24.95, and includes a free copy of Puzzle Agent. Hopefully the next 4 episodes will cost less than $24.95 each - that will make the whole game cost a whopping $124.75! Other episodic games like Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness were retailing for $19.95 an episode, making it still close to a hundred bucks. But who wouldn’t shell out 1 Benjamin for the change to drive the DeLorean Time Machine…?

The game will be available on PC, Mac and iPad. I thought I saw a reference to a PS3 version as well, but I can’t find it anymore - maybe that got dropped.

If you’re looking for a gift for that fanatic Angry Birds player, look no further: Angry Birds Plush Toys are here!

All toys are $14.99, and there are 5 Birds and 4 Pigs to choose from. Unfortunately shipping doesn’t start until January, so they just missed the Christmas rush, but still a very cool idea!

EA Sports has recently released their sequel to EA Sports Active, unsurprisingly named EA Sports Active 2. It expands the number of exercises up to 70, and includes a heart rate monitor. Two motion sensors complete the hardware that a player (is this still a game..?) has to strap to his or her body.

Users are able to upload their workout data to a personalized EA Sports Active profile, and share it with whoever they like. The game also features a 9-week workout program and a built-in personal trainer. Additional exercise and mini-workout programs will be available as downloadable content.

If you have the Wii Balance Board, some of the exercises use the board to enhance the experience.

I think the addition of the personal trainer is a great idea, as long as the trainer is not as annoying as the Wii Fit trainer (who sometimes was downright rude). Sharing your workout data may be a good idea, since if you do not exercise, this will show on-line, and be a little like public humiliation for lack of a better word.

The game retails for $99.95, but if you shop around you can easily knock $20-$30 off that price.

Lifehacker recently conducted a set of tests aimed to measure the speed of IE 9, Firefox 4 Beta, Chrome’s Crankshaft (also known as version 10), and Opera 11 Beta. And overall, it looks like the new version of Chrome is a winner!

Firefox 3.6(!) actually beat Chrome 10 in two areas: memory usage with extensions and without extensions. Chrome 8 beat out Chrome 10 in tab loading, and Opera 11 Beta took the lead in DOM/CSS processing (over Opera 10 and Chrome 10).

See the full article at Lifehacker.com for a detailed analysis.

Guiding Tech has a great article about Google Chrome and lists 15 features that you may have missed while working with it, or just plain didn’t know about.

Number 16: right-click on a web page and choose Inspect Element. Extremely useful if you’re developing a website, use CSS and want to know what caused your carefully crafted yellow background with blue letters to turn blue with yellow letters…

This interesting video demonstrates some of the bad things that may happen to your laptop (on a really, really bad day that is), and how Chrome OS saves you from the headaches resulting from those bad things:

So, you’re a software developer, and you’re in a cubicle. You’re on a deadline and deeply engrossed in how the communication driver and the display driver interact with the main program. Then Bill Lumberg comes by to discuss last night’s football game. You just lost track of 5 variables and 2 subroutines, and now need another 30 minutes to get back on track. How do you prevent that?

I run into this problem almost daily (well, not with drivers, but the principal holds true just the same), and came across 3 solutions:

CubeGuard

The easiest solution, yet conveying the message without any doubt: CubeGuard. It is comparable to the crime scene tape, but is set up to be reusable. It fits openings up to 50”, and is available in a large number of standard patterns, and for a surcharge also completely customizable. If you want to send different messages (i.e. “Out to Lunch”, “Working from home” and “Please do not disturb”), you can use the CubeGuard mount and simply replace the message cartridge. One whole set including mounts costs $19.95, and a message cartridge goes for $14.95.

Quartet Workstation Privacy Screen

The Quartet Workstation Privacy Screen goes a step further than the CubeGuard: instead of simply having a message displayed across the entry to the cubicle, it shields the cubicle entrance with a translucent plastic screen. The screen effectively creates a barrier between your cubicle and the outside world, shielding you from people passing by. It comes with a nameplate and a small dry-erase board, that can be used to leave a message for anyone walking by, or provide visitors with a place to leave a message.

The Workstation Privacy Screen comes in a Lightweight version that is 36” wide, and a Premium version that is 38” wide. The Lightweight version is $184.25 and the Premium version is $233.11.

Get a door

The third option is the best, but also the most expensive option: get a door, and walls that reach all the way up to the ceiling.

Cubicles are not a good setup for a software development environment. The cubicle was set up in the 1960’s, to allow for easy information sharing. In today’s world the problem seems to be oversharing of information. And it doesn’t have to mean that everybody works with the door closed and nobody can see what others are doing. Joel Spolsky from Fog Creek Software describes how their new office combines everything a developer could ask for in the Bionic Office.

You may not have to go that far (although your developers will love you for it!!), but think about the environment they work in and how it can affect their productivity. Any investment will pay off quickly!

This Saturday December the 11th LTZ organizes an iOS Development Code Kitchen, hosted by one of LTZ’s chief developers, Mike Ziray. The code kitchen will be held on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, and is free of charge!

Join them in a day-long, hands-on iOS experience. Unfortunately I can’t make it this weekend (we have major maintenance scheduled on our database environment), but I’m looking forward to the next code kitchen.

One thing to put on your right-after-christmas wishlist: the iPad 2. Foxconn is rumored to have been notified they will ship Apple’s iPad 2 within 100 days - i.e. by the end of February 2011. Initial shipments should be reaching 400,000-600,000 units.

The iPad 2 will probably sport a front-facing camera to allow FaceTime and other video applications, an improved display copying the Retina Display of the iPhone and iPod, and a lighter body offering better mobility. If Foxconn will indeed start shipping iPad 2’s by February, the official launch will most likely be by April 2011.

NimblePros has a 2011 calendar available focused on Software Craftsmanship. The calendar focuses on principals in software development, in the style of the motivational posters.

The 2011 calendar features: Single Responsibility Principle, Dependency Inversion Principle, Common Closure Principle, Common Reuse Principle, Boy Scout Rule, YAGNI, Eliminate Waste, Shipping is a Feature, Don’t Repeat Yourself, Interface Segregation Principle, Liskov Substitution Principle, Open Closed Principle.

Each calendar is $15.95, and quantities are limited!

Finally, an end to the senseless loss of work hours all around the world!

Makezine has a report on a demo from MIT Media Lab‘;s Fluid Interfaces Group. The group has created a Chrome Browser extension that uses a gesture interface to control a standard browser with the Microsoft Kinect controller. See the video below for a demo:

DepthJS from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.

OK, airport security is important. But can we please get some airport security instead of just airport inappropriate touching and voyeurism?

See in the video below how Adam Savage gets the full body scan, but his bag with 12” razor blades gets completely ignored…

Kevin Rose of Digg and Diggnation fame has put together his 2010 Geek Holiday Gift Guide. There are some interesting gadgets on there, but I was missing both the Boxee Box and the Logitech Revue Companion Box with Google TV.

Kevin is donating all the proceeds from his Amazon affiliate links to his Charity Water account, so if you’re fancying one of the items on his list, please use the links.

I’ve been planning on writing an article about the various Facebook games, and the different techniques they use. Well, it seems that Brian Meidell has beaten me to it, at least as far as FarmVille is concerned, with his article “What I learned from FarmVille - So you don’t have to play it”.

Brian describes the various techniques FarmVille uses to draw in more players, with the only objective of getting a fraction of them to pay for FarmCash. This is their source of income, which tops $500 million a year, and gives the company a value of about $5.5 billion (larger than Electronic Arts!).

The other games I’ve sampled, from both Zynga and My Playdom, such as FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Market Street, and ESPNU College Town, all use the same tricks as FarmVille. Yes, there are small variations, such as having a limited amount of energy as opposed to having a waiting period while crops grow, but the end result is the same: about 2-3% of the users pay for the rare currency (FarmCash, Crowns, Horseshoes, or whatever they are called).

The most interesting aspect is the fact that none of the games are extremely rewarding, but all of them play on the compulsion factor: your friends need help, you need to ask your friends for help, etc., creating a spiral of interdependency of the players. And if you forget to play, there’s always the helpful option of receiving reminder emails (with a small gift included).

Read Brian’s detailed analysis, and be amazed…!

On this week’s Twit guest Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing mentioned a new website she came across named Damn You Autocorrect!

It shows the sometimes hilarious auto corrections (apparently only iPhone auto corrections) that happen when you don’t pay close attention to what you text.

Be careful, not all auto corrections are Safe For Work…

Oh, and besides that, you have to listen to Twit episode 274. If only to hear Leo LaPorte talk about Donkey Love. And that’s not an auto correct!

Yesterday Apple announced that the Beatles are on iTunes. Finally.

And after complimenting Apple’s marketing campaign on their really convincing commercials, I think this one falls flat on its face:

“In 1964 the band that changed everything came to America. Now they’re on iTunes.”

What exactly is the message here? It took 46 years for the Beatles to be available on iTunes? Or the fact that you have 13 albums on line?

Amazon’s MP3 download section shows 790 results for the search “Beatles”. And if you really wanted to listen to the Beatles on your iPod but didn’t want to buy it from Amazon, just bring out your old Beatles CDs and import them into your iTunes library.

News? Maybe. Front page news? I don’t think so. Move along everyone, nothing to see.

Update: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this is NoNews: see this Joy Of Tech comic.

I recently came across a tool called Google Refine. This tool (formerly known as Freebase Gridworks) can take large amounts of data, and analyze the contents of different colums. Recently Google released Refine 2.0, and added extension architecture, a reconciliation framework and lots of new transformation commands and expressions.

With Google Refine you can import, analyze, transform and export raw data. It’s basically an ETL tool, but with a lot of features that are only available in commercial ETL tools.

The example video below shows how a set of contracts are analyzed, and how the different spellings and representations of “Firm Fixed Price” and “Time and Materials” are cleaned up and combined - comparable to the “refining” of raw materials.

The most awesome feature I’ve seen so far is the possibility to make a change to your raw data, and undo everything all the way up to the original import of the data. Considering the amount of data that can be manipulated with Google Refine, that’s pretty impressive!

Refine 2.0 can import data in the following formats:

• TSV, CSV or values separated by a custom separator you specify
• Excel (both .xls and .xlsx)
• XML, RDF as XML
• JSON
• Google Spreadsheets

and it can export your results as:

• TSV
• CSV
• Excel
• HTML table
• User defined formats, by using a Template Exporter. There’s a default of JSON and a tutorial on exporting it as YAML.

There is also an option to link your Refine data to other data sources, currently limited to web services supporting the Reconciliation Service API.

Google Refine is open source, and does not run on one of the Google servers, but locally inside your network. So any sensitive data will not leave your network!

There is a bill floating around Congress, that can have large implications on the freedom of speech and opens the door to government censorship. This bill is called COICA, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. The title presents a noble cause, but the real meat is in the details.

COICA creates two US attorney general controlled blacklists: one mandatory, and one “strongly suggested”. ISPs are required to block traffic going to any site on these blacklists. And although the purpose is to block access to piracy sites, it would basically be a government controlled list of which sites US citizens are not allowed to visit.

There are several problems with the bill and the processes described in it:

• There is no due process to be put on the list or get removed from it. If I would piss off someone in government, or with the right connections in the US Attorney General’s office, I can find my website blocked.
• There are existing ways to take down sites that do illegal things. If you’re distributing illegal copies of software, there are provisions in the law to shut you down. The bill itself refers to a Trademark act dated 1946
• If I wanted to get to a certain site, I could set up a proxy in another country, and bypass the blacklist completely. That is, until that proxy is blocked.
• If www.badsite.com is blocked, there is nothing that would prevent the owners from setting up www.badsite1.com, www.badsite2.com, etc. So it would immediately bypass the blacklist, with only minimal disruptions in their ‘service’.

Apart from these problems, there are several bad implications of this:

• It only hurts people who follow the law. Like I said, if I want to get to illegal content, I’ll bypass it by using a proxy.
• It gives the Attorney General a power that’s comparable to China’s blocking of parts of the internet. And we all know how good that works…
• It is driven by commercial interests (think RIAA) and not so much public good (although we’ll hear the child porn argument before the day is over). Right now the focus of the bill is copyright infringement. But to get the bill passed quickly, there may be additional targets named: Child Porn, Porn in General, Gay Porn, Sites That Oppose Government Actions, etc.

Demand Progress is discussing COICA, and encourages people to sign their petition. Tim Berners-Lee is speaking out against it. Steve Gibson is dissecting it in Security Now episode 268.

It seems like this bill was driven by the then-upcoming mid-term elections, but don’t let your guard down when Congress resumes in January!

In May of this year Google announced that their Street View cars, who also collected WiFi data to assist in positioning your smart phone etc., had captured some of the unencrypted data that was received. In that announcement they stated that they only received fragments of data. Last week, they announced that in some cases whole emails were captured.

Of course, their official reaction has to be “we’re very sorry, we shouldn’t have done this, and we’ll get rid of it immediately.” But remember what they captured - unencrypted data, being broadcast by people who probably didn’t even know they did it. In fact, I think Google did them a service, by pointing out that their “private” data was being broadcast in the clear in a radius of about a city block. And apart from that, think of the data that an ISP sees and can capture (or allow to be captured), even if you use encrypted WiFi: all the data that Google has captured, emails, URLS, etc. and then some.

It seems to me the same knee-jerk reaction that happens with Street View pictures, especially in Germany. Although all the information Google collects with Street View is publicly available for anyone at the same position, it suddenly becomes a major issue when Google collects it. Oh, and the “opt out” where Germans can tell Google not to show their house in detail on Street View - another knee-jerk. Have all these people removed their address from the phone book, so they can’t be identified in that way? Did they smudge their license plates, so no one can trace them that way?

So, how can you prevent Google Street View from capturing your data? Two ways:

• Enable encryption on your WiFi network
• Use a secure web protocol to communicate with the network

Enabling encryption on your WiFi network has to be done on all devices. Your router determines the level of encryption, and all devices connecting through WiFi have to support that encryption level. Don’t use WEP, but opt for WPA2 without TKIP (AES only).

Using a secure web protocol is simply using https where possible. Sites like Google Mail support this, and even Google Search can be run over https.

I’m not a Google Fanboy, although I use several Google products daily. But this seems like singling out Google for things that are common occurrences, or for things that can be easily prevented.

So, how did I do for the event? Let’s revisit the predictions:

All in all, 4 1/2 out of 7. Not a bad score I think, considering the craziness of some of the rumors.

The rumor mill is buzzing for tomorrow’s “Back to the Mac” event. And we have a few lined up for you, from “very likely” to “highly unlikely”.

Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”

The new version of OS X will be announced, and it will be called “Lion”. This is a safe bet - the invitation sports a lion peaking around an apple.

Likeliness: Very likely. Just look at the invitation fercrissake!

Updated versions of iWork and iLife

If a new version of OS X is announced, it normally is accompanied by a new version of iLife and iWorks. On top of that, the German version of Amazon.com announced iLife ‘09 for sale with a release date of 10/20/2010. Coincidence? I think not.

Likeliness: Very likely, based on the fact that a new OS is very likely.

A smaller version of the MacBook Air

An 11.6” MacBook Air version is expected, in addition to the current 13.3” model. There is even a leaked photo to “prove” this.

Likeliness: Likely. There are too many rumors, and even though the picture may be doctored, it’s another hint.

Facetime on Mac

Assuming the new version of OS X and the new versions of iLife/iWorks are coming, wouldn’t it be nice to have Facetime included? It would be the logical extension of the phone paradigm, where the handset calls the “home base”. And since Facetime doesn’t use the cellphone network but requires a WiFi connection, it would be a small step.

Likeliness: Likely. And fun too!

iPhone on the Verizon network

More and more rumors of the iPhone going to other networks appear as AT&T’s exclusivity ends. Verizon is the most mentioned name. And although this may change one of the strengths of the iPhone (surfing the web or using the data connection, while talking on the phone - which seems to be impossible with CDMA), it makes more sense to put the iPhone on Verizon than on T-mobile or Sprint. Why? AT&T’s network can barely keep up with the iPhone traffic - put it on a network that’s as larger or even larger!

Likeliness: Likely to happen, but probably not the focus of an event named “Back to the Mac”.

The iMac Touch is announced

There have been a few rumors about a larger touchscreen version of the iMac. And although Apple has the technology, it would mean a second OS with touch screen capability, competing for roughly the same market segment as the iTouch and iPad. At a higher price point.

Likeliness: Unlikely. It would mean touchscreen capability in OS X, or replacing the OS with iOS. And I’d rather have a $500 iPad in the kitchen than a $1500 iMac.

Apple buys Facebook

I just heard this rumor this morning. And yes, Apple has had a fabulous quarter, and yes, I think the fact that Ping has no link with Facebook pissed off Steve Jobs. But Facebook was valued at over $11 billion early this year, and it’s unlikely to have devalued. So say we’re looking at $15-25B. That’s about 5-10% of Apple’s market cap - a significant chunk of change. And would Microsoft let that happen? Chairs would fly…

Likeliness: Very unlikely. And once again, nothing to do with “Back to the Mac”.

Netflix has been available for a couple of months on the Nintendo Wii, but up until now you needed to insert a disk to browse the list of movies and play one.
In today’s press release, Nintendo announces that it is now possible to install a Netflix channel in their Wii Menu. The new Netflix channel is free of charge, but requires a Netflix subscription of $8.99 or higher ($7.99 in Canada).
This change will greatly enhance the usability of the Wii as a Netflix appliance. All we have to do now is turn on the Wii and go to the Netflix channel, instead of making sure the right disk is loaded. Kudos to Nintendo and Netflix for making this possible!

As you may have noticed, we’ve completely redone our layout.

The previous template had some serious issues with some of the widgets we were using on this site. Wave plugins would flow over into other posts, and recently our ads started floating into places they shouldn’t. There were some other minor annoyances, but the fact that elements of the website started showing up where they didn’t belong, was the last straw…

The current theme is based on the Genesis framework, and allows for a lot of flexibility in the layout. We’re still working on the various parts we want to show on the homepage and the articles, and the colors of the site don’t completely match those of the plugins, but we’re working hard on getting all of it done by this weekend.

Let me know what you think of the new theme, and if you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Enjoy the site!

Well, that was a very underwhelming experience. First of all, the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t work at all in Chrome (or Firefox, or Safari, or any other web browser, besides IE). Second of all, these are the options I have after switching to IE:

So what do we have there?

• Cut, Copy and Paste
• Clear Formatting
• Undo and Redo
• Insert Table and 4 table maintenance buttons
• Insert HTML link
• Insert Picture
• Edit HTML code
• Font and Font size
• Bold, Italic and Underline
• Left, center and right alignment
• Numbered and bulleted lists
• Indent and Unindent
• Text color, Highlight color
• Left-to-right and Right-to-left

And this is what I have in the WordPress editor:

Which is:

• Upload/Insert Image, Video, Audio, Media, Gravity Form (the last one through a plug-in)
• Bold, Italic, Strikethrough (hey, no underline? Wait for it)
• Bulleted and numbered lists
• Quoted text
• Left, center and right align
• Create or break link
• Insert “more” tag
• Spellcheck toggle and language selector
• Toggle for full screen mode
• Kitchen sink switch (“on” to display the second row of icons)
• Formatting (H1-H6, Paragraph, Address and Preformatted)
• Underline (Ah!)
• Align Full
• Select Text color
• Paste as:
• Plain text
• From Word

• Remove formatting

• Insert/Edit embedded media
• Insert Custom character
• Indent/Unindent
• Undo/Redo
• Help
• Google Wave (through a plugin)

There are so many WYSIWYG editors available, how come Microsoft decides to ignore half of the users in the world, even though they claim that in Sharepoint 2007 “new features such as wikis, blogs, and RSS would make us very attractive for Internet facing sites.” Not if you’re not supporting more than your own bug-riddled browser. And how about updating that functionality in the 4 years it has been out now, and the browser landscape has changed considerably?

Nice going, multi-billion dollar company. But since this is Microsoft, I’m afraid this will be our corporate standard… sigh…

Through InfoQ I came across this awesome presentation by Dan North about how to progress from beginner to expert, and how that cycle continues (even after reaching expert level).

Just a couple of tools I’d never heard about:

• Hudson - A continuous integration tool, for Java projects, that allows easy integration of changes into a project, and easy retrieval of a fresh build.
• GROW Framework - A coaching/self-help tool. GROW stands for Goal, current Reality, Options, and Will. In a nutshell, it lets you evaluate what you want to do, how you want to do it, and apply yourself to doing it.
• Six Thinking Hats - A thinking tool for group discussions and individual thinking.
• Clojure - A strange mix between Java and Lisp..?
• Open Spaces - A meeting/discussion technique to discuss various topics, in a sort-of ad-hoc conference way. Open Spaces last from half a day to about 2 days.
• Ivy - The Agile Dependency Manager (and that’s all I have for now).

Sometimes you wonder why there are cases for smartphones and music players. And then comes a video along that explains it all….

OK, thanks to Steve Gibson tweeting an article in ReadWriteWeb, my weekend is ruined. A Wall Street Journal editorial claims that according to a business professor and a former book editor (Ron Adner and William Vincent), ads in E-books are the next big thing.

Sacrilege, right? Ads in books were never done, according to the editorial, because “there is no guarantee of when or whether the book will sell”. But with E-books we can have more timely and more reader-focused ads. Fantastic! Right?

I don’t think so, Skippy.

If I buy a book, I pay anywhere from $10 to over $100 (depending on quality of book, both physically and content-wise). Putting ads in a book that I’m already paying for is comparable to putting an ad in the middle of the movie that I just bought on DVD. Or an ad in the middle of that new CD. They’re annoying, because they distract from the story, music, or other activity I’m engaging in.

One argument used why ads in E-books may succeed is that tech giants like Google are already adding ads to content. But you cannot compare free content (search results) with paid content (books). What works on one platform will not work on another. We live in a world where people pay $0.99 or $1.99 to download an application to their smartphone, just to have no ads. So now we’re going to create a model where I pay for the content and are exposed to ads?

The article in ReadWriteWeb also states that E-books are not a possession, since you cannot share them with friends, or that the seller can make the book disappear from your library. Give me a break.

First of all, the only time E-books cannot be shared with friends is if the book has DRM and has a flag set that specifically prevents that from happening. Apple’s iTunes has DRMed songs that can be copied, but have your signature in them - so mass distribution is not a good idea. On top of that, there are plenty of DRM-free publishers out there. They allow you to share a book - without any technical barriers. Second of all, the seller that did make a book disappear (Amazon and the books “1984” and “Animal Farm”) received a storm of critique, no matter how legally justified and compelling the removal was. They vowed never to delete a purchased book again.

Ads in E-books? I think it’s an extremely bad idea. It’s an old media idea, where you try to get as much money out of a product, instead of trying to make a product that is actually appealing to the customer. Go read “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis for some tips on that idea. And no, I didn’t get any money for that “ad”.

Tuesday the 18th of August a Google Chrome plugin called NotScripts was released that makes controlling which JavaScripts, IFrames and plugins run in your browser a whole lot easier. NotScripts is developed by Eric Wong on the Optimal Cycling website.

Before this plugin, you were forced to use the Chrome Option to disable JavaScript, and selectively allow sites to run JavaScripts. However, when you enabled it for a site, everything that that site sent to you was enabled - including potentially harmful third party sites using JavaScript. It is possible to dive into the settings and enable some sites while disabling any malicious websites, but it was far from user friendly. I desperately missed the NoScript from Firefox. So desperately, that in some cases I went back to Firefox to make sure I wouldn’t be exposed to any JavaScripts I didn’t like.

After installing NotScripts, a little pyramid icon appears in your address bar, to the left of the bookmark button. Clicking it shows a list of all the sites that try to run scripts on the page you’re viewing. You can enable them one by one, or temporarily allow scripting globally. When at least one site is enabled, the pyramid now gets a green square over it.

The installation requires you to modify a file deep in the bowls of your computer. The file contains a password used to encrypt the settings from NotScripts, as they are stored in an area accessible by any site you’re visiting. So to prevent tampering with the file, it’s encrypted. I think in later versions this may be controlled with a settings option, to make it user friendlier. Then again, this is a one-time option, so it’s not too invasive.

NotScripts is open source and is released under the GNU General Public License v3. Development is continuing (version 0.9.1 was released the 18th, one day after 0.9.0!), and the author is asking for donations to continue development.

Download Squad reported Wednesday that Google is rumored to be building a Chrome OS tablet with HTC. It’s supposed to launch on November 26th, Black Friday.

Although that sounds like good news, I’m kinda disappointed that it’s not going to be an Android tablet. After the recent Android tablets from third parties (most notably/notoriously the “KMart tablet”), I hoped this rumor would be Google’s tablet version of the Nexus One. Google is now trying to cover the same market (tablets) with two different platforms (Android and Chrome OS). I think that could be a serious mistake: developers already have to choose between iPhone/iPad and Android, and now you’re adding a third platform in the mix. And that new platform is from the same company as one of the previous choices.

That doesn’t mean I’m not excited about the news. I hope it’s true, and I guess I’ll have to start saving up my money for Black Friday (or Cyber Monday).

Ah, if only we had a more user friendly message to alert us of a virus… instead of “A virus has been detected in gloob.dll”…

Something like this perhaps…:

One of the best chances for third party equipment to open the cable channels was the CableCard. However, implementation of third party devices that support CableCards, and the support from cable companies, were less than enthusiastic. I had very little success in using my TiVo series 3 with a JetBroadband cable card.

Now the FCC issued a Notice Of Inquiry seeking input on a new technology to open up cable channels to other devices, breaking the settop box monopoly. Engadget has a nice summary, with the non-surprising camps: Sony, TiVo and the Consumer Electronics Association make up one side, the NCTA (National Cable & Telecommunications Association) and the MPAA make up the other side. We won’t give away which side is in favor and which side is against.

But is this really the future of watching television in our homes? Since the NOI is the first step in a long process, we won’t see anything for years out of the FCC. By that time, the group of people watching TV in different forms (i.e. not through a settop box) will have grown even further. So any legislation coming out of this FCC process may be applicable or affecting only a small group of people who use old standards - similar to requiring the broadcaster to switch to digital broadcasting. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be watching Hulu, Google TV and Boxee Boxes, and ignoring whatever “new” technology the cable company tries to sell us…

In TWiT Leo and friends mentioned the two videos made by a Best Buy (ex-)employee, describing which wrong arguments people use to chose an iPhone over an HTC:

And then of course, there are also the equally wrong arguments to chose an HTC over an iPhone:

P.S. Wonder how these movies are made? Check out Xtranormal!

I just got my invite to join in the alpha preview of Digg version 4.

The new Digg is a huge improvement over the old version, in that you can now concentrate on what your friends digg, instead of what everybody in the world diggs. This is reflected in the new home page, which focuses much more on the social aspect of Digg.

The center of the page is taken up by the stories being dugg by your friends. The right side bar is showing the top stories as dugg by your friends. And your friends can also be people you have interest in or whose opinion you respect (think of for example the old Screen Savers cast - Leo LaPorte, Patrick Norton, Martin Sargent, and oh yes, Kevin Rose…).

It looks great, and hopefully I’m not breaking any non-disclosure agreements by posting about it. If you want to sign up for the new Digg, head over to new.digg.com and put your name on the list.

I ran into an interesting problem last week with some Virtual Machines. I’ve set up 3 different machines, each running Windows XP with a different version of Progress (10.0, 10.1, and 10.2), to test how our application works under the various Progress versions and to develop with some of the latest tools (I love the Eclipse interface! 🙂 ). However, for some reason last week all the virtual machines, plus the virgin Windows XP install, decided to show me the following error message:

Windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found.

Since I was rolling out a change to a web service running under 10.1 at the time, I was not a happy camper. It took me the better part of a day to try and come up with a solution. Unfortunately, none surfaced, even after some helpful hints from our systems engineer (“Did you reboot?” - “Yes.” - “Must be a Windows patch.” - “I have had no new patches in the last week and half.” etc.). The weekend came and went, and today I was back at the same problem. Ruling out anything general (like the domain controller actually being down - we could log in to everything except the VMs), I started scouring the Internets. And lo and behold, back in 2006 someone else had the same problem. With a regular XP machine. In a Windows domain. Wow!

In a nutshell, it comes down to the fact that the domain controller is confused about your machine and SID, and won’t trust you. Removing the machine from the domain, and adding it back in, solves the problem somehow.

Thank you, My Digital Life!

The other day I was talking to a co-worker (non-programmer), and she mentioned that she just finds it unbelievable how programmers write their programs. I likened programs to recipes, and referred to Short Circuit, where Johnny 5 burns a frozen meal because the instructions didn’t specify that the meal should be taken out of the box…

While recipes are a good analogy, for people who like the analogy a bit more specific to programming (and still have fun), here are some good resources:

• Lightbot, a neat little robot game that uses instructions to light squares.
• Lightbot 2.0, the sequel to Lightbot.
• Robot Battle, a game about building a robot and competing against others in an arena.
• Logo, the original educational programming language
• Alice, a 3D programming environment tutorial.

I came across this YouTube video on Geek Culture, and couldn’t resist reposting it… Enjoy while you can (i.e. before it’s taken down)!

I recently started working with Windows 7 on my work computer (expect a slew of updates to the old Vista postings 🙂 ) and ran into some problems with iTunes. First off, it needed the special 64-bit installer to be run (I’m using Windows 7 64-bit), even though after doing that it installed almost everything in C:Program Files (x86) (the default directory for 32-bit applications).

Then I tried to sync to my iPod. Oops, I forgot to authorize the new computer. So I authorized it. All seemed well, except for the Audible audiobooks… I added the Audible manager, authorized the Audible account in iTunes, and resynchronized. Now it came up with the message Some of the items in the iTunes library, including “…”, were not copied to the iPod “…” because you are not authorized for them on this computer. Yes I am. I just authorized them. Doing the authorization again confirmed that. I even restored my iPod to factory default settings (and forgot that to complete that you have to plug it in to a wall socket… 🙁 ). None of that helped - I still got the message.

That same message (or similar at least) popped up when I tried to play one of the protected files. And no matter how often I authorized the computer, and iTunes kept telling me that it is already authorized, it didn’t want to stick. Now, since Vista, Microsoft has introduced this new security model, mainly consisting of User Access Control (UAC), but also a change in what is considered an Administrator. In XP, it was sufficient to be part of the local administrator’s group. Under Windows 7 (and Vista), there is a distinct difference between running as a user of the Administrator’s group, and the option Run as Administrator. And apparently iTunes needs that!

After setting iTunes to Run as Administrator, I started it up and tried to play one of the protected songs. iTunes told me the computer wasn’t authorized, so I authorized it (again…). This time it seemed to stick however! The song actually played. And now it seems to actually synchronize all the songs, including the protected ones.

It does seem to take excruciatingly longer to synchronize when running iTunes as Administrator. Also, it makes me feel a little uncomfortable to say the least: it shouldn’t run as Administrator constantly. But it solved the issue for now, and I hope anyone else out there can benefit from this.. 🙂

At WordCamp San Francisco, Matt Mullenweg gave a speech on the growth of WordPress, version 3.0, what is planned for the future, and the philosophy of WordPress. Very informative, and Matt is a great speaker. He even borrows Steve Jobs’ signature stop word… 🙂

Adam Savage explains at Maker Faire 2010 how he solves problems - and provides a lot of insight in the “Myth Busters”! 🙂

OK, I don’t care if you can duplicate any of this technology with Qik or anything else that exists right now: you gotta give it to Apple that they can just put their finger on the right sentiments:

Like a pregnant woman showing the ultrasound to her husband in the Army, or the two people using sign language. Isn’t that the coolest thing??

Next on the list is undoubtedly a front-facing camera for the iPad. Imagine the slightly larger screen displaying the same picture.

I came across this video the other day, and in the middle part it has some interesting concepts about Home Automation. For example, if it was freezing overnight, the alarm clock would automatically go off 5 minutes earlier to give you time to scrape off the car.

Zedomax blog has a preview of an Android tablet running Android at the Adobe exhibit at Web 2.0. Although the preview shows off a lot of the functions (including the ability to run Flash and Air applications on the tablet), there are two distinct disadvantages for an Android/Flash tablet:

In This Week in Google of a week or two ago, a tool was mentioned to find people on twitter that match your social graph. The tool is available at http://followfinder.googlelabs.com/ and simply asks you for a Twitter user name.

After entering your name, Follow Finder looks at your followers, and finds people that are similar to the people that you already follow, and people that have similar followers to you. The result page then shows you two columns:

So, if you’re looking for more people to follow on Twitter, try Follow Finder, and see if the people it suggests are what you’re looking for.

I just entered a search query for Notepad++ in Google Chrome, and the results page looked slightly different from what I’m used to:

Most notably, the left hand side is much cleaner. Clicking on the drop-down below “Everything” will show you the different categories (Images, Videos, etc.). The Search tools option lets you choose between “Any Time” and “Last 3 months”, and expanding it will show you a new list of options:

• Limit to a time period
• Social graph results
• Visited or not
• Display of results
• Standard results

I’m still trying to get used to it, but it looks like the result page is in line with Google’s minimalistic philosophy.

An early release of the Scribefire extension for Chrome is now available here on Google Code. It’s pretty basic at this point, but the version number is listed as 0.1, indicating that improvements are on the way!

Also, the extension is labeled as Alpha, so it’s very early day. BTW, this post is published from the extension.

Today is the official release of Firefox 3.6, at 9:30AM Pacific Time (12:30PM Eastern). There are some early bird links available around the web, amongst which the Kabatology blog.

If you’d rather wait for the official release, don’t just twiddle your thumbs: watch this 2 minute video about the new features in 3.6:

Last Saturday my iPod froze up. After applying the reset (Hold on, Hold off, press and hold Menu and Select at the same time), the screen displayed the Sad iPod Icon. Fearing my podcast and audio book listening days were not over but put on indefinite hiatus, I drove home and entered the URL the iPod displayed: http://www.apple.com/support/ipod.

The results there were less than encouraging: try and reconnect your iPod to the computer (sorry, problem didn’t occur while connecting to the computer), or send it in for repairs. Well, we’re talking an almost 4 year old iPod here, so any repairs would probably cost more than the iPod is worth (heck the shipping cost is probably more than it’s worth…!). So I decided to use Google to see if anyone had an alternative solution.

This leads me to a Digg article, that pointed to an article “How To Fix an Ipod with the Sad iPod Icon” on Spilling Coffee. The basic solution boils down to:

1. Put something on your desk (a stack of paper works great) to prevent your desk from getting damaged (don’t worry about the iPod)
2. Grab the iPod firmly, with the connector pointing down
3. Slam it on the stack of papers on your desk

The idea is that the hard disk connector can come lose enough not to make connection anymore, but still be attached enough that a good bang will snap it back into place.

So with a heavy heart and closed eyes I banged my iPod on the desk and performed another reset. Lo and behold, the menu appeared! And faster than it had done on previous resets!! Thanks Tom Coffee!

Warning: banging your iPod on your desk may cause damage to desk, iPod, or anything else in the vicinity. It worked for me, but it may not work for you. Banging your iPod is a serious form of Apple fan-dom…

Recently I switched to Carbonite on two machines at home. After installing the software and starting the backup, I noticed that frequently something would be accessing the floppy drive (or at least trying). Googling around a little bit revealed that this was one of Carbonite’s “features”.

The two suggestions that kept coming up during my search were:

• Insert a floppy, and Carbonite will learn that that drive is a floppy drive
  • Sorry, that didn’t work
• Disconnect the floppy drive
  • Wait, and then open case when the drive needs to be used? Bad idea!!

There is a third option: disable the floppy drive in Windows.

If you open My Computer, you’ll see something similar to this:

Notice the 3 1/2 Floppy - that’s the one making all the noise. But not for long!

Right-click on the icon, and select Properties from the drop-down menu. Click on the Hardware tab and select the Floppy disk drive.

Click on the Properties button.

On the bottom of the screen is a drop-down box. Click on the drop-down arrow and change the selection to “Do not use this device (disable)”. Click OK.

Click OK on the screen with the 3 1/2 inch Floppy properties, and return to the My Computer screen. Your Floppy Drive A: should be gone, and with it the seeking Carbonite tries to do on it!

Christmas weekend Foursquare started with the private beta for their Blackberry client. There are about a 1000 beta testers at this time, according to Foursquare.

The current beta is geared towards trackball Blackberries - the Storm is working, but the app is not using all of the options a Storm has (touchscreen, tilt functionality, etc). The final version will be using the full Storm functionality according to Foursquare.

There are several enormous benefits for Blackberry users. I found the mobile site at times very frustrating:

• I kept moving around between cities, even while I was checking in.
• The login itself failed sometimes even though I was typing in correct username and password (I think it was related to which login I used - the normal one on the main page or the mobile one)
• If the app knows what city I’m nearest, and it can show the location of my venue on a map, why can’t it determine the location of where I am automatically?

At our company we’re using Symantec Backup Exec to back up all our servers, including some Linux machines. I set up a newer Ubuntu install (9.04) on VMWare, and was pretty confident I would be able to get the backup working (using the Legacy agent). Well, that was not as easy as it seemed…

I followed the instructions on installing the legacy agent. After some tweaking here and there, the server was now showing up in the list of legacy agents on the Backup Exec server. However, every time I tried to pull up information on the server, Backup Exec returned an error, saying the server refused connections and may be running out of available network connections. Nonsense. But something was not right apparently.

Googling around for instructions, and suspecting a firewall or security setting, I tried tweaking access to the ports Backup Exec is using. No effect. Then I hit upon something: luckily I had an older Ubuntu server running with the legacy Backup Exec client, and could compare settings. It turns out that Ubuntu installs a host file with the following content:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 fqdn.domain.com fqdn

Why is there a difference in the third tuple? On the older server, both lines referred to 127.0.0.1. I decided to change the 2nd line on the newer server to 127.0.0.1 and reboot. After giving everything some time to publicize itself on the network, it appeared and asked for the credentials to use for the new server. I selected the correct user, and to my astonishment, the complete directory structure appeared.

I don’t know why there are two different entries for the local machine, but it definitely broke the legacy Backup Exec client. Now I can only hope I never have use our backups…!

Two top 5’s to start off 2010.

The top 5 most read articles from 2009 (i.e. the ones posted in 2009 and read in 2009):

1. Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc
2. Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows
3. Ubuntu 8.10 installation - GRUB error 18
4. Firefox equivalent of Internet Explorer’s “Every Time I visit the Web page”
5. Cursor keys not working in Ubuntu 8.10 VMWare client

The top 5 most read articles in 2009 (i.e. the ones posted any time that were read in 2009):

1. Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc
2. Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
3. Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows
4. Ubuntu 8.10 installation - GRUB error 18
5. Blackberry desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar

The Kensington Bluetooth article was written in October 2007, but still accounts for almost 11% of the total page views in 2009.

Some more random statistics over 2009:

• We had 16,928 page views in 14,094 visits (up about 300% over 2008)
• Over 80% of our traffic came from search engines, with Google accounting for 78%
• The highest referral came from the Nagios community website
• Firefox was used by 58% of the visitors, IE by 31% and Chrome by 5%.
• Windows was used by 67% of the visitors, Linux by 28% and Macintosh by 4% (iPhones were #4 with 0.15%!).
• The browser language setting was English for 83%, German for 2.6% and French for 1.6% (Guten Tag and Bonjour!)

2009 saw a big growth for Automation Adventures (about 300% more visitors and pageviews). Hopefully this trend will continue in 2010!

… and were mildly impressed.

We set up an agenda before the call started, and used that as our base document. It was then filled out as we discussed the various points, and comments were posted to capture remarks, questions and clarifications.

A couple of observations:

• If your participants don’t have a Google account, you can’t add them with their regular Email address (even though that is somehow linked to their googlewave.com account), but you have to use their googlewave.com address.
• The Ribbit plugin didn’t work.
• There is a reluctance to edit other people’s blips. It seems to be more “polite” to comment on the blip and say that something isn’t correct than to go in and just edit the blip to correct it. Cultural thing - I’m sure it will change once more people have used Google Wave or even a Wiki.
• It’s hard to make a comment in the conference call, and record it in the wave at the same time. However, a conference call is far superior in hammering out a discussion quickly. Maybe a designated typer would be an idea in a conference call?

We didn’t run into any software problems. There were 5 people on the call and the wave, and we never saw a slow-down or a crash. The only disappointment was the Reddit plugin, but that was easily overcome.

I think Wave is still looking for a good application. Minutes and collaborative documents seem the most obvious application, but I have the feeling there are more exciting applications for the Wave technique in the future.

The last year or so I’ve been increasingly involved in Continuous Improvement events, “leaning” the organization and removing non-value added steps from processes.

Most of these processes were manufacturing-oriented. However, some of the same principles can be applied to office processes. While we were discussing that, I kept wondering how to use some of these Lean principles in software development. It turns out I wasn’t the only one, and there are several ways to apply Lean in development.

I moved in about a year from project-driven to-do lists, through Agile/Scrum development, towards something similar to Kanban in the factory process. The principle of Kanban development is fairly simple: limit the amount of Work In Progress (WIP), allowing for more flexible assignment of development tasks, more visibility, and a clearer flow of tasks through the different stages (analysis, development, acceptance, deployment).

In the process of learning about these techniques I came across a variety of websites and blog posts that may be of interest:

• Crisps blog - a blog from Crisp Consultants
• Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both - a book describing Kanban development and highlighting the differences with Scrum
• flow.io - A company developing a product closely following the Kanban methodology
• Aycan Gulez’s twitter stream - One of the developers on flow.io

I think in the next several weeks we’ll look into Kanban software development closer, and see if we can apply it in our small development department.

Amit Agarwal was recently the victim of a hacked Gmail account. He describes how he found out it was hacked, the steps he took to recover it, and advice on how to prepare (not prevent!) for when your account gets hacked.

I haven’t written anything specific to the blog in about a month. That doesn’t mean nothing interesting happened - far from it.

One of the interesting things was a speech by Vinton Cerf at Virginia Tech. Apart from being an entertaining speaker, you may also know him as one of the inventors of TCP/IP (together with Bob Khan). He touched on a large variety of subjects, some of which I’d like to highlight here:

There are 4 billion mobile phones, and 1 million PCs

Of all these devices, about 25% are internet connected. And the mobile phone market is still growing. Basically, if you don’t take mobile phones into account when developing software, you’re missing out on a large portion of the internet connected public.

Growing Internet penetration will radically change the landscape

Internet penetration is the percentage of a country’s population that can use the internet. The current top users of the internet are:

(All user totals are in millions. Data as of Q2 2009. Source: Internet World Stats)

So, currently China has the most users, followed closely by the US. If we’d get a 90% penetration rate in every country (and combine that with mobile phones - not all users have to use PCs!), we get a completely different picture: 1.1 billion Chinese, 1 billion Indians, followed by about 300 million Americans…

Even if you include all of Western Europe, you won’t get half of the users that China has by itself. It would be wise to account for non-Western alphabets in any new products.

IPv4 will run out of address space

IPv4 will run out of available addresses somewhere in 2011, by the latest estimates. So it would be wise to adopt IPv6 in any new deployments.

Inter-cloud communication is the new frontier

Computing is moving more and more towards the “Cloud”. However, we currently have several different clouds: Amazon, Google, IBM, etc. None of the clouds are interchangeable, and can’t communicate with each other.

The next big step in computing would be to develop a method to let information from one cloud move to another, to reach its destination. Vinton Cerf likened the current situation to the computer networks before the invention of TCP/IP and the Internet: several different islands, that required conversion stations or gateways to communicate.

Various info

• Mr. Cerf has wired his house with numerous sensors, measuring light, temperature, etc. He can use this data to optimize energy usage - turn heating off in certain areas before they reach their target temperature, etc.
• He raised the question of persistence of information. Currently we’re able to examine papyrus scrolls thousands of years old. However, it has become very difficult to read electronic data more than 20-30 years old. Humanity needs to find a way to preserve data in a format that is readable longer than half a generation.
• His latest work concerns an Interplanetary Internet. This addresses the enormous lag times involved in communications between the planets. As to why we would need this, he describes how the Mars Rovers were sending data to Earth initially: through a slow, overheating long-range radio. By switching to a shorter range radio the Rovers were able to increase throughput, however, they couldn’t communicate with Earth directly. The solution was to use the Mars Orbiters as relays, using a store-and-forward model. This resulted in a new Bundle Protocol, described in RFC 5050.

It’s been a couple of weeks now that I’ve had access to Google Wave, and sent out my invites. So, now what?

Well, it’s still fairly quiet. A lot of the people I sent invites to have the “What the hell is this?” reaction. A lot of the conversations that are going on are of the “hey, I’m on Google Wave - Wow, so am I!” variety. To be honest, I sometimes felt like I was using a preview of a chat client - until I was on the This Week in Google 15 wave (open your Google Wave client and search for twig or twig15).

In this wave a discussion developed on the Novell Pulse product that was announced. After seeing it mentioned, I googled around for a bit and found a demo video. During the video, the collaborative editing was demonstrated, and I remarked that it was missing the little balloons that show up when someone types within Google Wave. One of the other participants asked me for the link to the demon, I posted it, and he proceeded to incorporate all that into my original message. That was a really powerful moment to see what collaborative editing can look like.

Apart from that, there hasn’t been a whole lot of collaboration going on. I made some notes during a presentation where two colleagues had Wave invites, but they never collaborated on the notes. I guess the whole form is still a little foreign to most people; if you have edited a Wiki entry, you may have an advantage, but otherwise, you really have to have a good use case.

The big step for Wave will probably be the Federation server. I can see several applications of publicizing a wave within our company, but I don’t want to make that wave public to the whole world. I’m hoping Federation will give us that capability.

Another improvement (without criticizing the Google wave client) would be different types of clients to the Wave protocol. Novell’s Pulse is/could be one, but I think it would be beneficial if multiple clients appear (look what happened to the web browsers when Internet Explorer got competition from Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari) and Google (Chrome)).

The next couple of months will be interesting for Wave’s development. I think a lot of people forget that we’re still looking at a Preview (not a Beta!). Once the Wave splashes down on more people, it will be more stable and mature. Until then it’s a test environment, with only occasional glimpses of its potential.

It looks like the Mozilla Labs Weave add-on is getting close to a 1.0 version, with Monday’s release of the 1.0 beta 1.

Weave is an add-on that can synchronize your bookmarks, history, saved passwords and tabs between multiple machines. It stores all this information encrypted on a Mozilla-run server, but you can also set up your own Weave server to store all the info.

The 1.0 release has a change in the database and API, so if you are using Weave, make sure you upgrade all the machines using it. If you’re running your own server, you need to upgrade it too (minor change in the Apache configuration).

I’ve been hearing great things about the iTunes University, sporting audio and video from large Universities and Open Course material. Today I decided to check it out.

Apart from all the material on running your business, introductions to physics and biology etc., there are some truly interesting lectures. One that caught my eye was the University of Alabama’s “Zombies! Intro to Zombie Studies”. With episode titles as “She’s not your Mother anymore” and “The Living as Minority” this sounds like a winner.

I’m afraid though that the real title of the lecture is “Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature”, so this may be not as useful as I hoped in the event of a zombie invasion…

Here are the top 5 articles for October 2009:

1. (5) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
2. (2) Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc
3. (-) Ubuntu 8.10 installation GRUB error 18
4. (1) Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows
5. (4) Blackberry not syncing with BES

This looks like a cop-out, but here is how you do it:
[wave id=”googlewave.com!w+9wEkpHp-B” bgcolor=”#000000” font=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif” font_size=”11” width=”500” height=”700”]

Oh, and you need the Wavr plugin.

P.S. If you don’t see anything, you probably don’t have a Google Wave account. Which would make embedding a wave in your blog… ehm… difficult.

Well, it’s that time of the year again, Daylight Savings is about to end, and Outlook decides that some of my recurring appointments now happen 1 hour later.

Mind you, not all of them. I still have lunch appointments at 12PM, but I now have a recurring alarm to go home at 6PM instead of 5PM. That sounds like my boss is getting me to work an extra hour, but fortunately the recurring appointment “Commute to work” is starting at 8:30AM instead of 7:30AM…

Oh, and my Blackberry synchronizes with Outlook, but somehow manages to correct the braindead appointments to their correct time.

This seems to happen pretty much twice every year, ever since the US government decided to extend DST by a couple of weeks. We’ve patched all our servers and clients, ran conversion tools left and right, but it still happens. Creating a new appointment doesn’t really fix the problem - I have to wait until next week to make that appointment, and by mid-November they’ll be off again!

Luckily some Googling brought me to this post, and although it mainly discusses problems with Exchange and the Blackberry Enterprise Server, it does contain a reference to a Microsoft tool for Outlook (KB931667). To my surprise this tool was updated in August 2008 (hasn’t it been a couple of years since the change in DST?). After installing and running the tool, it found 13 appointments to fix. When I gave it the go-ahead and fix these culprits, the problem magically disappeared!

My only fear now is that I have to run this again on November 2nd… we’ll see.

Here are the top 5 articles for September 2009:

1. (3) Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows
2. (1) Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc
3. (5) Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar
4. (4) Blackberry not syncing with BES
5. (2) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit

Interesting to see that it’s the same 5 articles as last month, but in a completely different order.

Google Wave invites are slated to be sent out tomorrow to more than 100,000 people. As stated in their blog, these invites will go out to developers, users who have signed up and offered to give feedback, and select customers of Google Apps. Some of these invitees will be able to invite other people.

The blog post stresses that this is a beta test, and several features will still be missing from it. Also, the occasional downtime is to be expected.

Be that as it may, I’m hoping I can open my Inbox tomorrow and see a Wave invite. I think Google Wave may be like GMail: despite all the quirks and problems in the beginning, in a couple of years people will panic if it’s down for an hour. Now, how do I set it up to be integrated with my blog…?

Thanks, Jason Kottke. My monitor is covered in cookie crumbs.

I won’t tell you how it happened.

You’ll just have to see for yourself.

Oh, and if my wife is reading this, I’ll be home late on November 6th.

Here are the top 5 articles for August 2009:

1. (1) Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc
2. (3) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
3. (2) Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows
4. (-) Blackberry not syncing with BES
5. (5) Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar

The first day of the Progress User Conference 2009 is behind me, and there were some interesting, some not so interesting sessions I attended.

The Opening Session went largely past me: I had to switch around windows a bit which caused me to restart the session a few times, and then a production issue took me away from my desk for a while. I intend to go back and look at it some time next week.

The first break-out session looked interesting: “Transparent Data Encryption”. This session described an add-on product to encrypt the whole or parts of the database. I can see some problems with the implementation, mainly that data is stored in memory unencrypted, which was a recent security issue I heard (can’t remember what the product was - I think it was Acrobat?). For the rest it looks interesting, albeit not very flashy.

After that came “Introducing OpenEdge Explorer”. It allows the same functionalities as Progress Explorer, but can be run from a web browser - thereby allowing multiple platforms. Similar to Progress Explorer, OpenEdge Explorer allows you to manage multiple machines and multiple products from one interface. OpenEdge explorer adds a few extras, like a log file viewer in the browser. The interface is similar to OpenEdge Management.

The last session before the break I followed was “Optimizing OpenEdge Performance in VMware ESX”. John Harlow from BravePoint described what VMWare is, and in what situations OpenEdge could be virtualized. He went into some detail on what memory settings are best, what are the adventages and disadvantages of more memory and CPUs, and what disk system should be used. Very informative.

After the break I switched channels and went to the UI flexibility track. “Serializing ProDataSets to JSON” describes the new features in OpenEdge 10.2B to convert to and from JSON objects with one or two statements. This makes Progress a more flexible server for WebServices.

“RIA in Perspective” describes the various Rich Internet Application interfaces, and which interface is most appropriate in what situations. Distinctions made are in user knowledge level, user interface and footprint. The options are combined in a RIA User Interface Decision Tree, available in the Progress Community website.

The last session for the day was “Implementing RIA and OpenEdge”. Dustin Grau from BravePoint describes what tools he uses to create RIAs, and showed several components. Unfortunately at that point I had the presentation slide maximized (the interface for the online conference contains a video screen which most of the time shows the presenter’s face, and a second area that displays the slide show), and missed most of the live demo. Another one on the list of presentations to view later.

All in all an interesting day, with some research subjects. I want to go back to two sessions to see them in their entirety, and two sessions I wasn’t able to attend (“Introducing OpenEdge GUI for .NET” and “Tales from The Trenches: Using the OpenEdge GUI for .NET”). I’m looking forward to Day 2, where I’ll be attending some sessions on productive development and distributed development.

I’m currently attending my first Progress User Conference without being on location. Progress decided to go with an on-line conference this year in honor(?) of the economic recession.

The on-line format has some advantages and some disadvantages. Advantages are that I don’t need to get on a plane, check into a hotel, run all over the place to find the right room. I can actually keep an eye on my email, and look up things online, while listening to the presentations (although I could do that with a laptop). Disadvantages are the audience responses, human interaction, and the fact that I’m still at my desk and my co-workers look at me sideways wondering why I have these headphones on…

I’ll post a short update at the end of each day (which now ends around 1:15PM, as opposed to around 4PM for regular conferences) to let you know what I’ve taken away from that day.

One of the newsletters I subscribe to is the SQLCentral solutions. A couple of weeks ago they issued the Summer SQL Stumpers 2009, asking for the fastest way to calculate all the primes 1000 or lower. The fastest solution they came up with runs in about 7 seconds, which I thought was terribly slow for the algorithm used (Sieve of Atkins and Aristophanes), and I thought I’d give Progress a try. I came up with the following:

DEFINE TEMP-TABLE ttPrime
FIELD prime AS INTEGER
INDEX prime prime.
DEFINE VARIABLE i AS INTEGER     NO-UNDO.
DEFINE VARIABLE test-val AS INTEGER     NO-UNDO.

ETIME(TRUE).

DO i = 1 TO 1000:
  CREATE ttPrime.
  ASSIGN
    ttPrime.prime = i.
END.

DO i = 2 TO 499:
  ASSIGN test-val = i * 2.
  REPEAT WHILE test-val < = 1000:
    FOR FIRST ttPrime
      WHERE ttPrime.prime = test-val
      EXCLUSIVE-LOCK:
      DELETE ttPrime.
    END.
    ASSIGN test-val = test-val + i.
  END.
END.

MESSAGE "Etime" ETIME
  VIEW-AS ALERT-BOX INFO.

FOR EACH ttPrime
  NO-LOCK:
  DISPLAY ttPrime.
END.

On my machine the procedure runs in about 93 milliseconds, and as far as I can see the results are accurate. Progress 4GL FTW!

Hot on the heels of the first half of 2009 articles, here are the top 5 articles for July 2009:

1. Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc
2. Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows
3. Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
4. Ubuntu 8.10 installation - GRUB error 18
5. Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar

It’s been a while since I posted a top 5. To catch up, I’ll post the top 10 of the first half of 2009:

1. Ubuntu 8.10 connect to Cisco VPN through vpnc
2. Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
3. Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar
4. Ubuntu 8.10 installation - GRUB error 18
5. Nagios - how to determine the name of a service in Windows
6. Blackberry not syncing with BES
7. Cursor keys not working in Ubuntu 8.10 VMWare client
8. Wow64: How to get the Progress Debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
9. Firefox equivalent of Internet Explorer’s Every Time I visit the Web page
10. Cursor keys not working in Ubuntu Terminal Services client

The How-to Geek has an article about how the Firefox extension Google Reader Notifier is now tracking your browsing and displaying ads. It also shows you how to remove this crap if you’ve updated the plug-in.


If you use Google Reader Notifier, please head over to The Geek’s blog and remove it from your system, before more harm is done.

We have a little rotating web page setup in our break room, and have been using a dial indicator to show our performance in bookings and shipments. However, due to the nature of the set-up (a page, showing a flash file, that is configured by an XML file), it turned out to be necessary in Internet Explorer to use the option “Every time I visit the webpage” on the “Check for newer versions of stored pages:” setting in the Temporary Internet Files and History Settings.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 7 still can’t handle CSS properly, so some of the tables looked horrible. Switching to Firefox fixed that problem. But now the old data was showing. And where is that “Newer versions of stored pages” setting in Firefox???

It’s hiding in the config. In the address bar, type

about:config

Then find the setting browser.cache.check_doc_frequency, and change it to 1. This will duplicate the Internet Explorer behavior (as far as loading cached page goes, mind you!).

The options for this setting are as follows:

As I posted last week, I installed Nagios and the monitoring clients on a couple of machines. One of the machines I started monitoring was the machine we use to provide some internal webservices access to Progress databases. And this machine turned out to have a problem: 100% CPU usage!

Further investigation narrowed this down to TomCat using 99-100% capacity (basically anything it can get!). I’ve only seen this once before, with Microsoft Access, but since TomCat isn’t a Microsoft product, I assumed there was something wrong with my setup. A little bit of digging revealed two possible solutions:

1. There’s a bug in the Java engine. Apparently there is a Memory leak in the use of StringBuffer.toString() in version 1.4.1, and fixed in version 1.4.1_05. This bug was submitted way back in 2002, so I assume if I download a new version of Java I should be OK. And since I’m running a 1.6 version, I don’t think this is the issue.
2. The AJP connector is misbehaving. I found a post (unfortunately can’t remember where…) pointing to this connector as the culprit, and the solution was to explicitly state some of the default values for the parameters, with the exception of the connectionTimeout parameter. Instead of stating the obvious to TomCat, I decided to modify server.xml, and modify the AJP connector just enough so that it knows the connectionTimeout is 5000ms instead of eternity.
   > enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" protocol="AJP/1.3" > connectionTimeout="5000" > />

After implementing that last solution, the CPU usage for the machine dropped from 100% to about 9%.

After installing the latest Mobile plug-in, it generated an error. I have temporarily disabled the Mobile layout until this has been resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’ve recently set up Nagios on one of our test servers, and the Windows client for Nagios allows you to monitor services (whether they started, stopped, etc.). However, the name of the service to monitor isn’t always the same as the name in the Services application in Administrative Tools.

To find out the name of the service, you’ll have to look at the registry:

1. Open up regedit (Run, regedit)
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
3. Navigate to SYSTEM
4. Navigate to CurrentControlSet
5. Navigate to Services
6. Find the service you plan on monitoring. The name of the node is the name you need to enter on the Nagios server as the name of the service.

Google tasks are now available on your mobile phone. With all the applications Google has available, they’re becoming a serious contender for my desktop Outlook.

Wish list for Tasks:

1. Synchronize with Outlook Tasks
2. Give me context ability (filter on @Calls, @Home, @Work, etc.)

New media is everywhere. What is someone who doesn’t “get it” to do? Ask Jon Stewart to explain.

• Awesome video explaining the credit crisis… http://vimeo.com/3261363 #
• I wonder how a member of Congress can read and understand an 1100 page bill in just a few hours, and then vote on it. #
• Watching live reporting on dutch TV on #schiphol crash: http://www.nos.nl/journaal24/ #

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When upgrading an Ubuntu server to 8.04 LTS, you should use the new and improved server upgrade system. Use the following steps to activate this upgrade process:

1. Enable the “dapper-updates” repository
2. Install the “update-manager-core” package. Dependencies include python-apt, python-gnupginterface and python2.4-apt.
3. Run the command “sudo do-release-upgrade” in a terminal window
4. Follow the prompts on-screen.

I recently ran into some trouble accessing Automation Adventures. A strange screen covered pretty much the first page of the website, neatly hiding the login button and the dashboard of WordPress. Some digging revealed that Google Analytics had added a CSS division named ga_shade, effectively preventing me from using my own site…

Luckily, the fix is simple: remove the GASO cookie. In Firefox, open Tools, Options, Privacy, and click on the Show Cookies button. In the Search bar, type GASO, and remove the cookie. Reload the page, and the mist should be gone.

To increase the security when dealing with credit card processing via ICVerify’s request/answer methodology, it is possible to encrypt and decrypt this information. However, the documentation is fairly sketchy on this subject, especially when you’re not working in one of the languages used in the examples in the SDK.

After some hair-pulling on why it doesn’t work, I think I’ve got it figured out now. Here are the steps I used to get it working:

1. EncryptionManager.DLL is not a normal DLL, it is a .NET assembly. Trying to register it with regsrv32 will result in an error message, saying that it doesn’t have a DLLRegisterServer entry point. The trick is to use either the .NET gacutl.exe or the icvgacutil.exe supplied on the ICVerify SDK CD.
   UPDATE:You also have to use regasm to register the assembly!
2. Once registered at the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), the name of the DLL is not EncryptionManager. To make things more interesting, I had to link to the name FirstData.Encryption.Facade.EncryptionManager. The only way to figure this out is to dig through the registry after registering the DLL, or to use the option on the GAC utility to write out a registry modification file.
3. In Progress, you can use the COM viewer to access EncryptionManager.tlb, and see the different methods defined in the DLL. You’re only going to be using 2 of them most likely: EncryptThirdPartyMessage and DecryptThirdPartyMessage. Both use the creation date of the file you’re working with, so be careful not to copy this file or move it across file systems.

DEFINE VARIABLE vhEncryption AS COM-HANDLE NO-UNDO.
DEFINE VARIABLE vcPrepFilename AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO

INITIAL "C:TEMPicver001.prep".

DEFINE VARIABLE vcReqFilename AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO

INITIAL "C:TEMPicver001.req".

DEFINE VARIABLE vcEncrypted AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO.
DEFINE VARIABLE vcRequest AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO.
DEFINE STREAM sOutput.

UPDATE vcRequest FORMAT “x(60)”.
CREATE “FirstData.Encryption.Facade.EncryptionManager” vhEncryption.
OUTPUT STREAM sOutput TO VALUE(vcPrepFilename).
vcEncrypted = vhEncryption:EncryptThirdPartyMessage(vcPrepFilename,vcRequest).
PUT STREAM sOutput UNFORMATTED vcEncrypted.
OUTPUT STREAM sOutput CLOSE.
OS-RENAME VALUE(vcPrepFilename) VALUE(vcReqFilename).

The decryption routine is somewhat simpler, since we don’t have to move files around so much:

DEFINE VARIABLE vhEncryption AS COM-HANDLE NO-UNDO.
DEFINE VARIABLE vcAnswerFilename AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO

INITIAL "C:TEMPicver001.ans".

DEFINE VARIABLE vcEncrypted AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO.
DEFINE VARIABLE vcDecrypted AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO.
DEFINE STREAM sInput.

CREATE “FirstData.Encryption.Facade.EncryptionManager” vhEncryption.
INPUT STREAM sInput FROM VALUE(vcAnswerFilename).
IMPORT STREAM sInput UNFORMATTED vcEncrypted.
vcDecrypted = vhEncryption:DecryptThirdPartyMessage(vcAnswerFilename,vcEncrypted).
INPUT STREAM sInput CLOSE.

These code snippets should have some more error checking. Also, the request can be more than one line, depending on the version of ICVerify and the answer file settings in the configuration.

After last week’s problem with the Terminal Services client, I also experienced problems with the cursor keys in the VMWare client for Ubuntu 8.10. This was particularly annoying, since I use Quicken in a VMWare machine, and the selection of categories is much easier with the cursor keys than with the mouse.

It turns out that this is a bug in Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10. None of the patches since October 2008 have addressed this issue, but the manual fix is very simple:

• Open a terminal window
• Type the following in the terminal:

  echo ‘xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true’ > ~/.vmware/config

After entering this you have to restart your VMWare client session. If it doesn’t work, try restarting the VMWare server, however, since this is a client setting, it shouldn’t affect the server or be affected by server settings.

I’m using VPN and the Terminal Services client pretty frequently to access my computer at work. As discussed in this article, the Ubuntu VPN setup is much simpler in 8.10. However, when using the Terminal Services client, I had some problems with some of the function keys, in particular the cursor keys.

Now, being an old Unix hack, I managed to use the hjkl keys to navigate around the vi screen, but in some of the applications, this became an issue. With some Googling, the solution turned out to be fairly simple.

When you start up the Terminal Services client, go to the Local Resources tab. Under the keyboard heading, select as your keyboard language en-us instead of us. Now connect to the remote computer, and all the keys should function as they were intended.

Hope this helps somebody!

Yay. Thank god for standard user interfaces.

We spent a serious amount of time this morning trying to figure out how to change the default attachment from TIFF to PDF on our new Canon imageRunners. We finally figured out how to change it on a case by case basis, but wouldn’t it be nice to change the default?

At first we looked through the Remote UI for the printers. Although there are some options under Additional Functions that refer to transmitting documents, none of the options mention TIFF or PDF.

So, we caved and unwrapped the CD with the manual. Looking for “PDF” resulted in about 200 hits. Paging through each and every one of them lead me to the control panel on the printer. Apparently, you can set it by following this path:

1. Press “Additional Functions” (a button on the control panel)
2. Select “Communication Settings”
3. Select “TX Settings”
4. Page down until you can select “Edit Standard Settings”
5. Select the default image format

This option is not available through the Remote UI. In fact, the Remote UI does not resemble the Additional Functions from the control panel.

Which made me think. Was there at one point a falling out between the designers of the control panel and the designers of the Remote UI? Maybe each group thought their design was the best, and went their separate ways. Unfortunately (for the Remote UI group), the control panel group had much better relations with the features group, and the Remote UI group had to get the specifications via-via (but not directly from the features group). And so it came to be that not all the features are accessible through the Remote UI… Thanks, Canon, for making the user’s life just this much more interesting.

One of the things I need to do with my home machine is occasionally connect to our VPN at work. In 6.06LTS this required downloading the Cisco VPN client, compile it, install it, and hope it will work in the next kernel update. On top of that, you had to run a script to create the VPN connection.

In 8.10 Intrepid Ibex this is much simpler, and much more elgant. First, you need to install the VPN Connection Manager (VPNC) package. When you do this through the Add/Remove Applications, it should install three packages:

• vpnc
• resolvconf
• network-manager-vpnc

The first two are essential, but the third one is the kicker in 8.10: it allows you to manage your VPN certificates, and choose which connections to make and break.

After you’ve installed these three packages, do the following:

• right-click on the Network Manager applet.
• Choose Edit connections
• Click the VPN tab

• You should have the options to Add a connection manually, or to Import a VPN certificate.

• Since our network admin provided me with a certificate, I chose Import, and selected the certificate file.
• The import will try to get as much information as possible out of the selected file. In most cases, you need to provide the group and user password.
• If the group password is encrypted, it can be determined by taking the encrypted string and running it through the Cisco decoder at http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/bin/cisco-decode
• Save your changes
• Close the Edit Connections screen

You should now be able to left-click on the Network Manager applet, select VPN connections, and click on the newly added connection. The Network icon will show a circling star for a couple of seconds, and then indicate that the VPN connection is established by showing a yellow padlock in the bottom right of the icon.

Disconnecting is just as easy: left-click on the applet, select VPN connections, and select Disconnect VPN.

I’ve just upgraded Automation Adventures to WordPress 2.7. Everything seems to work fine, but let me know if you run into any problems.

Over the Christmas break I’ve installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my main machine. The installation was not upgradeable without some serious wizardry (the /boot partition was too small, and increasing that on a full disk is not easy), so I decided to do a fresh install.

After going through all the installation steps, and booting up Ubuntu 8.10 for the first time, I was greeted with a GRUB error 18. Some Googling revealed that this was caused by the hard disk being too large for the BIOS to handle. And there was even a helpful post that described a three step process:

• Set your hard disk for LBA mode
• Install Ubuntu
• Set your hard disk back to normal

• Restart your machine, with the Ubuntu CD as startup.
• Install Ubuntu as normal, until you get to the partition information.
• Select Manual from the partition options.
• The only thing you need to change is the main partition (/). Delete the one that is on the disk now. The partitioner may tell you it needs to write changes to the disk - by all means, let it write them.
• Next, create a partition at the very beginning of the hard disk, of sufficient size, but not too big (I decided on 1GB, but it may be better to go with 512KB or even smaller - not too small, since I couldn’t do an upgrade on my 128KB boot partition). Choose ext2 as file system - you won’t need journaling or anything fancy on that partition. Your mount point is /boot.
• Finally, create the main partition, covering the remainder of the hard disk. Make the file system ext3 - you want the journaling etc. on this one.
• You should now have a /boot partition at the beginning of your disk, a / partition for most of the rest, and a small swap partition (about twice the size of your memory). If not, you need to manually adjust the partitions until you have all three.
• Continue with the rest of the installation.

Instead of the top 5 of November and December, I think it’s a good idea to post the top 10 articles of 2008:

1. Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
2. Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar
3. Setting up MXP to run under Linux
4. Wow64: How to get the Progress Debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
5. iTunes 7.4 not properly installed
6. 100 Things people are really saying about Windows Vista
7. My first visit to the Apple Store
8. Ford Sync hands-on review
9. Blackberry not syncing with BES
10. New Apple products announced at Summer Press Conference (2007)

Well, it’s been a while on this blog. But with Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, a stomach virus and an insane workload at my day job, there was little time for blogging.

We’ve done some interesting things at work, we’re finally implementing some real web services for communicating between applications and even sister companies, we’re doing data mining, so lots of new things for me to pick up.

At home, things have been quite on the automation front. We did invest in a GPS device, to cut the Verizon Wireless bill by about $10 a month, and have some more options. Apart from that, I’ve installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on my main computer, and like it a lot (more about that in upcoming posts).

Anyways, I hope everybody had a great holiday season, Happy New Year to y’all and on to a more blog-ful 2009!

Productivity in IT departments around the world, and even in some other departments, dropped to an all-time low, when news got out that Monty Python created an official YouTube channel. The commitment of the Pythons is to publish their videos in high quality.

It is hard to say whether departments will recover from this shock.

How realistic are these movies that show advanced computer systems, like Terminator, The Matrix, etc.? Have you ever seen them install the latest updates? Removing the trialware that comes pre-installed…? What if they did run like our computers do?

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

I’ve been an avid listener of the Security Now podcast for a couple of years now, and learned a lot of interesting things concerning cryptography, possible avenues of attack on your home network, etc. But two recent episodes of SN showed me that the Internet is a dark and dangerous place, and that you need all the protection you can get. In this case, Firefox with the NoScript plug-in.

Before the two episodes aired, Steve Gibson had stressed the danger of having JavaScript executing in your browser when visiting an unknown site. This was my first encounter with NoScript, which, as the name implies, prevents Javascript from executing. The advantage above just turning off Javascript all together, is that you can allow certain sites, and block certain others. It can be a hassle sometimes to figure out which site you need to turn on to allow your webpage to display properly, but the added security is IMHO worth it.

The first episode that peeked my interest was episode 166, “Cross-Site Request Forgery”. Steve does a much better job in explaining this, but in a nutshell it is the technique that one site uses your cookies for another site to issue a GET request on a form, by displaying an “image”. Much to my surprise, NoScript was mentioned as a plugin for Firefox to prevent this.

The second episode was even more sinister. Episode 168, “ClickJacking”, describes how a page can use an Iframe to display another page behind innocent looking content, and trick you into clicking on a button in the hidden page instead of on the displayed page. This can be used to activate your camera and microphone in Flash, or change your password on MySpace to something only the owner of the malicious website knows. Once again, NoScript was suggested as the way to prevent this from happening to you.

So, Firefox with NoScript comes to the rescue of the beleagured Internet user. And I’m impressed with the development done on NoScript: starting out as a “simple” tool to turn JavaScript on and off for sites, it has now grown into the armor that is added to Firefox to protect you from most malicious websites.

Unless, of course, you turn off the script protection, as both Steve Gibson and Leo LaPorte confessed to in the latest Q&A episode…. 🙂

There is something screwy with Google Analytics after I switched themes, but hopefully it will start working this week. However, I didn’t capture data for the last week of October, so here are the top 5 articles for the first 3 weeks of October… 🙂

1. (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
2. (2) Blackberry desktop crashes when reading Outlook Calendar
3. (-) Blackberry not syncing with BES
4. (-) Ford Sync hands-on review
5. (5) iTunes 7.4 not properly installed

Sun has released an OpenOffice extension that allows you to import a PDF and allow basic editing. It uses Draw and Impress, as opposed to the more obvious Writer, to preserve the layout of the document. Forms are not yet supported. In future versions the developers aim to support more editing capabilities, and less on layout, by using… Writer.

There are versions available for Windows, Linux (32 and 64 bit), MacOS X and Solaris (x86 and Sparc). According to the comments in the Extension, it is kind of hit or miss if the extension works for your installation, but that explains why Sun is still calling it Beta.

I’ve begun to experiment with some web services at work, and an ex-colleague of mine had set up some instructions on how to configure Apache, Tomcat and mod-jk to seamlessly pass requests from Apache to Tomcat. However, the instructions were written a major version ago, and didn’t quite work with Tomcat 5.5 and the latest mod_jk.

The main problem was the reference to ApacheConfig. In Tomcat 4 this was org.apache.ajp.tomcat4.config.ApacheConfig. No twiddling with it seemed to help, and Tomcat 5 kept giving load errors. This part was referencing how to have mod_jk and Apache automatically create a configuration file. The Apache website wasn’t very helpful…

Finally, I came across a forum post somewhere (sorry, I forgot where), giving the answer: the Listener className should be org.apache.jk.config.ApacheConfig. After replacing that line in Tomcat’s conf/server.xml file, everything seemed to work like a charm!

1. (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
2. (2) Blackberry desktop crashes when reading Outlook Calendar
3. (4) WoW64: How to get the Progress debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
4. (3) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
5. (5) iTunes 7.4 not properly installed

About a week ago I got the exciting news that WebIS was releasing their Pocket Informant for the BlackBerry. I have used Pocket Informant on my PocketPC before, and was impressed with the features that it had - I never used all of them!

The BlackBerry version is not as extensive as the PocketPC one (a lot of settings seem to be missing - unless it was because it was the Trial version), but the look and feel were identical between the two versions. And as is mentioned on their website, the PocketPC version took over 8 years to evolve into its current form. Their goal with this version was to get the most important Pocket Informant features onto the BlackBerry.

There is one major drawback that makes me not want to buy this version however: in the week that I’ve had it installed on my BB Pearl, the application has slowed to a crawl, slowing down the entire phone with it. And slowed it down so much that I couldn’t make a call anymore. At other times, I was informed that the BlackBerry had terminated Pocket Informant because it had become unresponsive. This may have been an interaction with other applications on the phone, but to have a phone that won’t make or accept calls is not a good thing.

You can buy Pocket Informant for the BlackBerry for $19.95, or download a limited trial version here.

A couple of weeks ago I said that I thought that I knew what the Internet was all about.

I was wrong.

The Internet is about sharing information, without censorship, or control, from government, police, any official, religious or political leader. It is up to you to decide what is the truth. Don’t get all your information from one source, that is tightly controlled (i.e. TV). Gather your news like they are precious nuggets of gold.

The reason I bring this up is this documentary:

It is a long documentary, but worthwhile the information. If nothing else, it will wake up the gray cells in your head!

For about a week now I’ve had problems synchronizing my Blackberry Pearl 8130 from Verizon with our Blackberry Enterprise server. Nothing synchronizes: email, calendar, to-do lists, etc.

After trying several options suggested around the net (take out battery, turn wireless synchronization off and back on), with no results, I thought I’d have to secure wipe my Blackberry again. Hesitating to do that, I was playing around with the phone last night, and noticed that the message folder for my enterprise mail was missing. Now completely convinced I had to bite the bullet and wipe the phone, I went off to a restless night of sleep.

This morning, I was browsing through some of the options in Settings, and I noticed in Security Options an entry named Firewall. Curious, I selected it. It showed the firewall enabled, gave me options to block certain incoming messages, and showed how many messages were blocked because of Incorrect Encryption keys. 1159 were blocked??? This gave me an idea: I’ve had problems surfing to certain sites with the browser, while others worked fine, or were slightly slower than normal. I reset the counter of blocked messages, and try to access one of the sites I had problems with (www.zoho.com). Sure enough, it didn’t work, but upon checking the Firewall option, it now showed me 1 blocked message. Hey! Some key is corrupt!!!

The fix turned out to be very simple:

• Go to Options
• Go to Security
• Go to General Settings
• Scroll to the bottom where the Services are listed
• Place your cursor on Desktop
• Click the menu key and select Regenerate Encryp…

Not only did this allow me to surf to pretty much any site I had problems with before, my phone went through an automatic activation and showed me it was now synchronizing again with our Blackberry Enterprise server.

A fairly quick and simple fix, that is much faster than completely wiping your phone, and go through a new Enterprise Activation.

Yesterday Apple had its September presentation, which, as the title “Let’s Rock” may have given away, was focused on iTunes and the various iPod models. Here are the announcements in a nutshell:

• HD TV shows added to the iTunes store. $2.99 per episode ($1.99 for standard definition), and you can view them on Apple TV and your computer (and hopefully you iPod).
• NBC returns to the iTunes store.
• iTunes 8 is announced:
• New browsing options

• Genius mode: automatic playlist based on songs that “go great together”. It sounds like Pandora in iTunes.

• iPod classic: the current line up of an 80GB and a 160GB model will be changed to one 120GB model, priced at $250 (what, not $249?).
• iPod Nano 4G:
• has the form factor of the Nano 2G
• the video of the 3G
• Built-in accelerometer
• new User Interface
• landscape mode for coverflow
• thinnest Nano yet

• $149 for 8GB, $199 for 16GB

• iPod Touch:
• Thinner
• has integrated volume control
• built-in speaker(!)
• Genius playlist creation
• Nike+ built-in (you still need the Nike+ transmitter)

• $229 for 8GB, $299 for 16GB, and $399 for 32GB

• AppStore: 100 million downloads in the first 60 days. Upcoming offerings: Spore Origins, Real Soccer 2009, Need for Speed: Undercover.
• Two new headphones:
• A regular set with in-band control (volume, next, prev, play, pause) and microphone for $29

• An in-ear set with two drivers per bud (woofer and tweeter) for $79

• iPod Touch 2.1 software: Free upgrade for 2.0 users, $9.95 for 1.x users
• iPhone 2.1 software:
• Free upgrade
• improved battery life
• fewer call drops
• fewer crashes
• increased speed for iTunes backups

I just received an email from TiVo, announcing the availability of a new HD DVR: the TiVo HD XL DVR.

The product specifications list this unit as:

• Save up to 150 hours of HD programming at one time
• TV signal sources: digital and analog cable, digital and analog antenna. Satellite NOT supported.
• Replaces your cable box using one or more CabeCARD™ decoders available from your cable company
• Video output modes: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, native, hybrid
• TiVo Series3™ architecture

Google has released their beta browser Chrome for Windows. It distinguishes itself from other browsers by having a very minimalistic design, and some interesting technological features:

• The address bar doubles as a search box, history browser and suggestion bar.
• The tabs can be dragged out of the browser to create a new window, or multiple tabs can be combined into one window.
• The new sandbox feature allows every tab to run independently from the other tabs, so if one site crashes it won’t take anything else down, and can confine “bad” sites to just their sandbox (instead of giving them access to your whole machine as in some browsers made in the Northwest of the USA).
• Activating the Incognito mode will prevent any pages you visit from showing up in your history.
• Chrome has improved warnings for suspected phishing sites, malware, etc.
• By clicking the star icon next to the address of a website, it is turned into a bookmark.
• It features Google Gears integrated in the browser.
• The Javascript engine is one of the fastest available today.
• Chrome is multi-threaded. Not only does this mean that one looping JavaScript will no longer tie up your whole browser, it simplifies memory management (since the separate process can be closed, and release all used memory), and can make use of multiple processors.
• Google continually updates a list of harmful sites, that Chrome uses to warn the user.

After all these benefits, there are some negatives:

• I couldn’t run the Chrome browser out of the box. Whenever I started it, it would give me “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click on OK to terminate the application.”. A bit of Googling taught me that Symantec doesn’t like the sandbox option of Chrome. If you add -no-sandbox to the shortcut used to launch Chrome, all is well (except you’re not using the sandbox feature).
• Limited plugin availability. Since the browser is pretty new, there aren’t a lot of third party, or even first party, add-ons, as opposed to Firefox.
• The end user license. Although Google’s motto is “Do no evil”, some of the wording in the EULA suggests that Google has rights to do anything it wants with whatever you enter through the browser. This sounds like Adobe’s EULA for Photoshop Express, and hopefully Google will revise the license to be more respective of the user’s ownership.
• Beta. I know Google has a history of releasing beta products (I think GMail just recently left beta status), but this time, the playing field is different. This is the frontline of the battle against intrusions, this is where the new malware tries to enter your computer. If there is a hole in Chrome, the bad guys will exploit it - especially since Google is a pretty high-profile target.
• Fear of lock-in. Soon you’ll be using GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, etc., all through your Google browser… One company to rule them all?

It will be interesting to see where Google takes Chrome, and if acceptance is going to be as high, or even higher, as Firefox.

If you want to try it, go to Google Chrome and download your copy.

Now, this is what the Internet is all about in my opinion.

This is a Dutch children TV show, from the early 1970’s if I remember correctly, about what happened to the children of the village of Hamelen, or Hamelin as you English speakers might know it, when the Pied Piper (or “Rattenvanger”) frees the town of rats, but keeps the children hostage until the village pays him.

Popular believe has it that only 6 episodes survived on tape. However, someone only known as ogterop-deux (after one of the characters the kids encounter) is trying to get other episodes online. Check out this compilation of the first season, and follow the links to see other episodes.

A warning however: since this show is Dutch, it is spoken in Dutch, so only of interest to people who actually speak Dutch… 🙂

1. (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
2. (2) Blackberry desktop crashes when reading Outlook Calendar
3. (4) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
4. (3) WoW64: How to get the Progress debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
5. (5) iTunes 7.4 not properly installed

I just finished watching a recording of Merlin Mann’s presentation Bear traps, time burglars and attention sinks, or “Why does my email make me crazy?”. He discusses the problems today’s Knowledge Worker faces, and gives a couple of quick tips on how to get a handle on them.

You can watch the recording at iTunes. Also, visit Merlin’s website 43folders for more information and tips on Getting Things Done.

It has happened to everyone: you are composing this message, and say something like “as you can see in the attached Excel sheet” or talk about the cute picture you’ve attached, and then you forget to attach the file…

Have no fear, Outlook Attachment Reminder is here! A small but effective script will scan your message for the word “attach”, and check to see if you indeed have attached any files. If not, it will alert you, and ask you if you want to send it anyway.

If you have a signature that uses files, the script even has a provision for that!

Thanks to LifeHacker.

The Technix Update blog has a handy little tip on how to change the default save format from the dreaded DOCX to the Word 2003 standard of DOC.

In case the blog gets swamped or the tip disappears, here are the steps in a nutshell:

1. Open Microsoft Word, and click the Office icon at the top left.
2. Click the Word options.
3. Select Save in the left pane, then select Word 97-2003 documents from the drop down list.
4. Click OK.

If you have a DOCX document that you want to convert to a DOC, try one of these web services for free:

• Zamzar
• DOCX2DOC
• Zoho Writer

or you can download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.

1. (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64 bit
2. (2) Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook Calendar
3. (3) Wow64: How to get the Progress Debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
4. (4) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
5. (-) iTunes 7.4 not properly installed

I’ve just finished upgrading the blog to WordPress 2.6. Please let me know if there’s something not working, or something looks odd. Thanks!

My wife posed this question to me about a week ago. She spilt some milk on her keyboard, and wondered what was the best way to handle it.

A little bit of Googling revealed the following steps:

1. UNPLUG your keyboard. No ifs buts or whatevers.
2. Try and get as much of the spilled beverage out of the keyboard.
3. If it was water, let the keyboard sit and dry for at least a day, preferably a couple of days. You should be OK after that.
4. If it was anything else (especially sticky liquids), try the dishwasher. Place it in the dishwasher (top rack if you feel brave and want to use the heated drying - I wouldn’t).
5. Add soap. You don’t need any of the additives, to make glasses sparkle etc. and it may actually be harmful to your keyboard.
6. Close the dishwasher and turn it on. Don’t use the heated dry cycle - it may melt your plastics.
7. Remove the keyboard from the dishwasher once the cycle is completed.
8. Shake out any left-over water.
9. Let the keyboard dry for a week. You may want to remove the keys to allow the board to dry faster, but I think a week in a fairly dry environment should take care of it.
10. Plug and pray.

This week my car was in the shop, and as a loaner vehicle I had a 2008 Ford Focus, with Ford and Microsoft’s new Sync system.

The car itself is OK. I normally drive a Ford Taurus, so the Focus is a little smaller, but I used to drive a Renault Clio back in the Netherlands, so I’ve got no problems with a smaller car. Actually, in about the 3 days I was driving it, I managed to get the average MPG up from 25 something to around 31.6. Not amazing, but better than the 19+ MPG we get out of the Freestar, and the 22-24 MPG for the Taurus.

You can tell the Focus is the low-end model of the Ford line-up. The sun visor feels a little cheap, there are some other things that make the car feel less sturdy, and whoever designed the cupholder inserts has never put a cup in one - and tried to remove it (hint: I think the rubber insert should stay in the cupholder, not around the cup as a misformed bottle warmer.

On to the tech part - the Sync system. Sync is a voice-controlled system to control phone and audio. A wide range of phones and audio devices (read: portable MP3 players and the likes) are supposed to work with it. I have a BlackBerry Pearl 8130 and a 3rd gen iPod, pretty standard equipment, so I didn’t expect any problems.

The pairing of the phone over Bluetooth went smooth. And every time I started the car, it connected to the phone quickly and without intervention. The only time I had an issue was when I got in the car around 11:15PM, and Sync didn’t connect to my phone. It took me a minute to remember that the phone turns itself off after 11PM… 🙂

Hooking up the iPod to the Sync system was a little more complicated. The steps in the Sync manual describing how to connect your music player through a USB cable - didn’t work. The system maintained there was no music player. After a little bit of fiddling in the menus I managed to tell Sync it really had a music player. After that, I was able to select songs, artists, albums, genres etc., but my play lists were completely missing. At least I was able to play music and the likes! But my confidence in the manual was pretty much gone.

And then the issues started:

• I like listening to podcasts. Some of them are pretty long. And I don’t like leaving my iPod in the car. However, when you stop the engine and the Sync system, or disconnect the iPod, it loses track of where it was in the “song”. The only option you have is to fast-forward to the point where you left off - a fast-forward that only skips 5 seconds at a time, at a speed of roughly 10 seconds skipped per real time second. To get back to 1 hour and 15 minutes into the podcast, I had to press the fast forward button for about 8 minutes. On top of that, roughly after every 20 minutes of the “song”, the fast-forward stops, like it thinks you can’t be serious about skipping that much of the “song”.
• While I was listening to some music, I received a phone call. I was able to answer the phone call, and talk to the person on the other side. The music had stopped. After terminating the call, I was still in the phone menu. The voice commands were now focused on the phone, not on the media. It took me roughly 3 minutes of yelling at the voice system and pushing buttons to get my music to play again. At least it continued where I left off.
• The “Help” command in the voice system can be handy, but at times is completely useless. I use voice recognition because I’m driving. The system knows I’m driving, because I’m not allowed to do certain setup options. Then why, pray tell, does it tell me after asking for “Help” 2 options, one of which is to “see the manual”??? Should I whip it out and read it while I’m doing 65MPH? Not a very safe suggestion.
• To this day I cannot ask the system to play an artist or album. I can play genres, but only if I select it through the button menu. The voice system claims no knowledge of any music on my system, be it an artist or a genre. Apparently it is supposed to index your music files, after which these voice commands work. But: “Indexing” doesn’t appear in the Sync manual index, and neither does “Factory defaults” and some other useful options.

For a week or two now, I’ve been using Enso Launcher. Enso Launcher is a product from Humanized, a company focused on making the computer and its usage more humane.

Enso Launcher installs itself, displays a welcome message, and then immediately disappears out of sight. It patiently waits for you to press its hotkey (Caps Lock by default, but you can change it to the left or right control or windows key, or the right shift key if you like Caps Lock - yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. I-Yell-In-Email-messages!). If that happens, it displays a transparent message, and you can type a command. The original Enso knows about 10 commands (centered around opening and manipulating programs and their windows), the Enso Beta expands that list tremendously.

Enso Launcher is ideal for people who hate using the mouse. And it keeps you focused on your task at hand. You don’t have to remember that Microsoft Word is hiding in Programs, Microsoft Office. Instead, you can tell Enso to Open Word, and it will list all the commands that contain the phrase WORD, with the most likely and most used at the top.

An example of Enso’s use is an incoming phone call. I play iTunes while I’m working, and that can be distracting during a phone call. Instead of pulling up iTunes and pausing the playback, or pulling up the volume and muting it, I can press the Caps-Lock key, type PAU (for PAUSE), and iTunes pauses its playback. After dealing with the phone call, I can press Caps-Lock again, type PL and press the down arrow key to select PLAY TRACK, and iTunes continues where I left off.

Apart from the preprogrammed commands, you can let Enso learn new commands. With Learn As Open, you can teach Enso a new Open keyword for a directory or a file. If you’ve downloaded the Developer Prototype, and are handy with Python, Java, .NET, Perl, Ruby, or any language that supports XML-RPC, you can create your own commands.

The additional beta plug-ins to Enso Launcher add such abilities as addings maps, search an amazing variety of web services, translate selected text, render TeX markup language, and control your media player.

After two weeks of playing with Enso, I’m beginning to miss it on PCs that don’t have it. It’s unobtrusive, right there when you need it, fast and flexible. Plus some of the philosophies built into Enso (like the non-modal dialog boxes) are really interesting ideas, that should be more wide-spread.

Enso is free, open source, and is distributed on Windows 2000, XP and Vista. There are versions in the make for OS/X and Linux as well.

1. (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64 bit
2. (2) Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook Calendar
3. (3) Wow64: How to get the Progress Debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
4. (4) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
5. (-) Spore Creature creator - Spore demo program

Finally I’m getting around to posting a rebuttal of John C. Dvorak’s Eight Reasons Your Web Connection Should Be Metered. He claims the current all-you-can-eat model can’t continue much longer, and is stupid. I assume Dvorak is talking about measuring every bit and byte that is sent across your connection, when he talks about metering (he mentions “metering the Web”).

1. Elimination of bandwidth caps, restrictions, and throttling

2. Promotion of higher speeds

3. Moderate users would pay less than they pay now

4. Download junkies would pay for their habit

• video conferencing
• podcasts
• internet telephony
• video downloads (like AppleTV)

5. Spammers pay more for junking up the Web

6. Elimination of the net neutrality issue

7. Development of IPTV mechanisms

8. Energy savings (aka “green”)

So, what’s the alternative?

Spore is making progress! The Creature Creator that was announced for June 17th (yeah, good timing with Firefox Download Day!), is now available! Check out the demo here!

The Creature Creator will be used to have people design different creatures, which will be used to populate the game universe for the full Spore game when it ships this September.

The demo version has 25% of the total body parts, the full retail version is supposed to make all body parts available.

The Spread Firefox website has a forum post announcing the official start of the Firefox 3 download day as 10 a.m. PDT on June 17th. The local times are listed here.

This means I can’t start downloading Firefox 3.0 until 1PM… the tension is unbearable! 🙂

The Mozilla developer center announced yesterday that Firefox 3 is expected to release on Tuesday June 17th. It is accompanied by a large amount of compatible Add-Ons, and is expected to break a record of number of downloads in one day.

1. (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64 bit
2. (5) Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar
3. (3) Wow64: How to get the Progress Debugger to run in Vista 64 bit
4. (4) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
5. (2) My first visit to the Apple store

For anyone who noticed that the last week or so this website was slow, my apologies. It turns out the culprit is a plug-in for Twitter called Twitter Tools, and after deactivating it, load times are practically back to normal.

Revision3, host of such video podcasts as Diggnation, Systm and TekZilla, suffered a Denial of Service attack over the Memorial Day weekend. The interesting twist in this is that Revision3 says MediaDefender was the one causing the DoS attack.

Why is this interesting? Because for years discussions have been going on about the moral and legal issues of remotely trying to patch a machine that is part of a zombie network. The strategy is using a similar technique as the controllers of the network use to tell their zombies what to do, but in this case it tells the zombies to patch themselves and “revive” them from zombiness. The main point of discussion is whether or not it is morally and legally correct to control someone else’s machine, even if the purpose of that control is to fix a problem.

And here is MediaDefender doing that exact thing, with the disastrous end result that prevents anti-virus companies from employing the remote patch strategy. According to Jim Louderback’s blog post (CEO of Revision3), MediaDefender readily admits to using Revision3 servers for what they believe a good cause (distributing fake torrents to identify and neutralize illegal file sharing websites). The problem is, they never informed Revision3, who noticed the unknown torrents, identified them, and blocked access to them. At that point, the MediaDefender servers went postal, believing that some distributor had blocked them, and started a SYN flood on the Revision3 servers.

When Revision3 traced all this back to MediaDefender, there was no apology or anything. Just a statement saying that they now added a policy to prevent this from happening again. Which is perfectly fine, but what about the thought behind the original policy? What if this DoS was targeted against something more critical than Revision3’s video distribution (not belittling Revision3), like a hospital, power plant or EMS station?

I hope Revision3 follows up on this. Apparently the FBI is involved (a DoS attack is illegal), and hopefully this will result in something more than a slap on the hand.

Update: Wired has blogged about this as well.

The Mozilla Foundation is trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records by setting a World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. They plan on accomplishing this goal by having as many people as possible download Firefox 3.0 on the official launch date.

To participate, head over to Download Day 2008, and either monitor the site to see when the update day arrives, or pledge to download and be informed by e-mail when the big day arrives. As of this moment, over 66,000 people have pledge to participate, with about 12,000 coming from the U.S.

• Darth Vader feels blue: http://tinyurl.com/2gt6ln (thx jkottke) #
• Amazing animated wall-painting: http://www.vimeo.com/993998 #

I came across this interesting page, that shows the ubiquitous “Hello, World!” program in 366 different more or less well known programming languages.

It clearly shows the difference in the two database language that we use at my place of work, Cobol and Progress.

Cobol:

• Hello World in Cobol

***********
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
MAIN SECTION.
DISPLAY “Hello World!”
STOP RUN.
**********

Progress:

/* Hello World in Progress */

message “Hello World” view-as alert-box.

Check it out, there are some weird languages listed, like LOLCODE and Argh!

A nice weekend home automation project: the Emergency Party Button.

The Emergency Party Button turns an ordinary apartment into a full-blown disco, complete with laser, black lights and fog machine. The guts of the whole system is the X10 protocol, that is used to send a signal from the Big Red Button to a transceiver module, which in turn forwards it to computer. The computer then runs a script turning off lights, closing blinds, and turning on black lights, laser, strobe light, fog machine and music.

The whole project sets you back a little over $600, but you can probably get some of the items cheaper (the button, including hardware and X10 transmitter, cost the maker about $170). Unfortunately, the only thing I know about the maker is that his screen name is plasma2002.

Check out the video to see the end result:

(Via Lifehacker)

• Coming to terms with the fact that “I’m getting old” is no longer a prediction but an observation. #

• Worst CAPTCHA ever? http://tinyurl.com/4my4ej #

Wow, it does take some time to reinstall all your software and documents on a new machine. Here’s the list I had to work through:

Software

• Windows XP
• Service packs
• Office 2003
• Outlook GTD plugin
• Outlook Completed Task!
• Blackberry desktop
• microTorrent
• 7Zip
• Adobe Reader
• APC PowerChute
• BOINC
• CamStudio
• Citrix client
• Emergent Task Timer
• EverNote
• Firefox
• Filezilla
• Google Updater
• HP IP Console viewer
• iTunes
• iLike Sidebar
• Nullsoft Install System
• Open Workbench
• OpenEdge 10.0B
• WinDiff
• Windows IIS
• Paint.Net
• Pidgin
• Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook
• PuTTY
• Shoreware Call manager
• Symantec Endpoint Protection
• TortoiseSVN
• UltraEdit
• VirtuaWin
• VMWare Player
• VMWare Server Console
• VMWare Virtual Infrastructure Client
• Webshots

• iTunes Library
• my Documents
• PuTTY settings
• Webshots wallpapers

• Flash player
• Shockwave player
• Aging Tabs
• del.icio.us Complete
• DownThemAll!
• Evernote Web Clipper
• GTDInbox
• IE Tab
• MeeTimer
• NoScript
• ScribeFire
• StumbleUpon
• Tab Mix Plus

As I tweeted about a week ago, I’m upgrading from Vista to XP. Vista has become very unstable over the last year that I’ve been using it, and all the beta drivers and programs that I had to install to support 64 bit probably did their share of damage. Not to mention the WOW64 addition to the registry - what a pain in the behind that is. Service Pack 1 was a case of “too little, too late”: hardly any perceivable improvements. I don’t care if a lot of the improvements were “under the hood”: if I don’t benefit from it, directly or indirectly, it’s next to useless to me.

We (the company I work for, and probably everybody else that looked at Vista) installed Vista on the machines we got around this time last year, under the impression that XP was quickly going to be replaced by Vista. Dismissing the reports that Vista wasn’t all it was supposed to be, we installed it on 6 machines in our IT department. I actually was so bold as to install the 64-bit version, assuming that within a year, 64-bit would be the norm instead of the exception. Yeah right.

Not in Windows land. Apparently things move slower there than anywhere else on this planet. And that’s coming from someone born and raised in the Netherlands, that used to have the title that everything happened 25 years later there than in the rest of the world. I’ll ask the city of Redmond to come by and pick up that trophy. After a year, most programs I used to use are available in 32-bit versions (oh, Symantec: having a 32-bit application doesn’t do any good if the installer is frakking 16-bit!). Most programs. And the ones that are in 32-bit, don’t all support 64-bit Windows (as I found out when we were rolling out our ShoreTel phone system with accompanying clients).

One of the “improvements” of Vista would be its increased security. Much to my surprise I read an article a week or two ago, in which a product unit manager at Microsoft, David Cross, is quoted as saying that one of the security features in Vista was deliberately designed to “annoy users”, to put pressure on third-party software makers to make their applications more secure. I’m still wondering if among those applications were such gems as Microsoft Office, and not to forget Vista itself.

Then of course in the beginning of April was the commotion about a Windows 7 product announcement for 2009. Regardless of whether or not this announcement is viable or not (as is David Cross’ comment), if I run a company with 500 PC’s, and am faced with either upgrading to Vista now, or waiting another year or so and skip the Vista upgrade, I know what I’d choose.

On top of that, two analysts from Gartner describe Windows as “collapsing”, and claim that Microsoft must make radical changes to the OS or risk becoming irrelevant. Is this foreshadowing that Windows 7 will be better, or that Windows will be replaced by one of the competing operating systems (Apple OSX, Linux, etc)?

I’m with Dvorak on this one…

1. (3) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
2. (1) My first visit to the Apple store
3. (-) Wow64: How to get the Progress Debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
4. (2) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
5. (-) Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook calendar

• I’m thinking about doing a website in this font: http://tinyurl.com/6eyu58 #
• Funny Farm, Funny Farm, Funny Farm. #

• Using technology to battle the forces of evil: http://tinyurl.com/3vtty3 #

• Finally fed up with Vista, installing XP in VMserver. #

A little round-up of some baby advice I’ve collected, especially for geeky dads.

Number one with a bullet: Kid-Proof Your Home Theater. Even though we don’t have a very pricey entertainment center in our house, it still has a lot of openings and trays that slide out. Dutch readers may remember Youp van ‘t Hek, asking his toddler why there was a peanut-butter sandwich in the VCR, upon which the toddler explained: “Video hungry!”. If you want to prevent that, read the article…

Next would be the GeekDads podcast. This is also a Wired product, but as opposed to the magazine and the website, this is audio. It talks about how to be a geek and a dad, describing interesting things you can do with your kids that they enjoy, and satisfy your inner geek as well.

Also in the audio category would be The Daddy Cast by P.D. Love. This is a broader daddy podcast, not concentrated on geeky stuff, but on all aspects of fatherhood.

Last but not least is Baby Cheapskate. This blog has reviews of products, but more importantly, a ton of tips on how to save money buying diapers, formula, baby clothes, etc. etc. Worth every article on it.

Have fun with these websites, and if you know of any other interesting sites, please leave a comment.

• Jester, a joke recommender that learns from your reactions: http://eigentaste.berkeley.edu/user/jokes.php #
• This guy is setting up his Mac mini as a Media Centre http://tinyurl.com/37bzox #

For the past two days, my Blackberry Desktop software has crashed when it was trying to read the Outlook calendar entries. Rebooting didn’t help, and I really didn’t want to reinstall software and go through the pain of resynchronizing.

Luckily, the solutions was relatively simple. After Googling around for a bit, I came across this post on BlackberryForums.com, describing an easy and effective way to make my Blackberry’s calendar match my Outlook calendar (again).

The KB entry referenced (KB 11703 on the BlackBerry Technical Solution Center) describes the procedure for Windows 2000/XP. The procedure is similar on Windows Vista, the only difference is that the Intellisync folder is located at C:Users<user name>AppDataRoamingResearch In MotionBlackBerryIntellisync. You don’t even have to reconfigure the synchronization settings - after deleting the Intellisync directory, start the Desktop Manager and synchronize your Blackberry.

But I have to agree with the post directly below the solution: I wonder what got it messed up to begin with…

Quitting Assassin’s Creed is harder than you think. Not because it’s so addictive - it’s because of the sheer number of steps you have to take to quit. As demonstrated in this video:

Thanks to PC Gamer.

• Social No-no: finish somebody else’s sentences, when you have no idea what he’s talking about. #

The top 5 articles for March 2008 on Automation Adventures:

1. My First Visit to the Apple Store
2. Setting up MXP to Run under Linux
3. Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
4. iTunes 7.4 not properly installed
5. Twitter updates for 2008-03-25

Ars Technica is presenting their latest installment of the Ars System Guide, discussing three setups for a DIY computer.

I’m still planning on building one, but with the new financial burden new baby, I’d have to go with the budget box.

Ars Technica’s Budget Box consists of the following components:

• Asus M2A-VM HDMI motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Retail (Socket AM2) processor
• 2GB DDR2-800 RAM
• PNY GeForce 9600GT video card
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB SATA hard disk
• Samsung SH-S203B DVD/CD reader/writer
• In-Win C589T case
• Logitech X-240 speakers
• HP w2007 20” LCD
• Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
• Logitech Keyboard

• Motherboard: $77.50
• CPU: $64.99
• RAM: $52.99
• Total price: $195.48.

Recent exchange on Twitter:

• hotdogsladies: Remember: there’s no “I” in cyclops.
• dmoren: Wait. I’m pretty sure there’s one ‘i’ in cyclops, right?
• hotdogsladies: You’re close, @dmoren - there are 2 “sees.”
• dmoren: That depends: are we talking before or after *SPOILER ALERT* Odysseus pokes the “i” out with a big stick?

• I wonder when the Kindle will be part of the standard highschool school supplies #

• Worst title of an article on digg: http://tinyurl.com/2zbcfl - Iceland’s largest _anything_ is superfluous! #

I has planned this for March 6th, but unfortunately my tardiness caused me to be just in time in Washington DC to pick up my mom from the airport (no, not the Airport Express, the actual Dulles International Airport), and no time to waste by visiting the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner.

However, when I dropped her off at the airport on the 16th, I thought I’d have plenty of time. And I would have had, if I’d know my way around Tyson’s Corner a bit better. As it turns out, I had just enough time to drop in, play with a couple of devices, and head out. And so I did.

First on the list was the MacBook Air. That thing is really surprisingly thin and light. And the finish is beautiful. To demonstrate how light it is, there was a customer watching a movie while balancing the Air on one hand. Wow.

Next was the iMac. That was actually a bit thicker than I expected it to be. Plus the bevel below the screen is larger than it looks on the website or the advertisements. The keyboard however is beautiful. The Mighty Mouse wasn’t as intuitive as I had hoped it would be, but after a while I think I figured it out.

I skipped the Mac Pro and the other two MacBooks, because they had a small pavilion set up with educational software. The kids were playing with the software, and completely ignoring the machine. It may be that this happens with educational software on PCs as well, but I never noticed that payed any attention to that. It must have something to do with being a new daddy… 🙂

I browsed the software and accessories isles a bit before I zeroed in on the next target: Apple TV 2.0. Looks good, nice remote, too bad it seemed to be running in some kind of demo mode. But it’s going on my wish list. Especially if the rumors about DVR capabilities being built in turn out to be true.

My last stop was the table with the iTouch and the iPhone. The iTouch was alarmingly light - I suspected it was a mock-up, but no, it was a fully functional 16GB music, video, and Internet device. Really cool. The iPhone was much heavier than the iTouch - much heavier than any phone I had I think. Same interface, but the addition of GPS makes Google maps fully functional, and it is amazing to see your location with satellite maps. It makes you think that you could zoom in and see yourself standing.

And then it was time to leave. I think I could have stayed until they closed the store - I had the same feeling as back in 1978 when I was playing with the TRS-80 at a Radio Shack store. And as at a trade show a couple of years later when they had an Apple Lisa set up to play with. It’s the kid-in-a-candystore feeling, that was lacking from the Gateway store I visited, and certainly lacks from Walmart or Best Buy. I will be back Apple Store - either in person or on the web.

I got a new cellphone a couple of weeks ago, and in trying to follow where several men have gone before, I got a BlackBerry (Pearl 8130 to be precise).

One of the things that really appealed to me was the possibility to surf the net from pretty much anywhere that Verizon Wireless has coverage. But the built-in browser was a little clunky, and I had heard about Opera for cellphones. I was able to install Opera Mini without much problems, and liked some of the extra features it had over the standard BlackBerry browser.

Right until I listened to episode 126 of the Security Now! podcast. In that episode Leo reads an email from a listener (Anand K.), describing that he discovered how the Opera Mini browser talks to the Internet. It doesn’t talk directly to web servers, it talks to a transcoder server, which is like a proxy with extras. The use of this transcoder server makes it impossible to provide end-to-end SSL security for client connections. The show notes for episode 126 do a pretty good explanation on how this affects the possibility of having secure connections, and how the Opera Mini transcoder has to have access to all your data, your passwords, user name, login, cookies, etc.etc. Not only that, but all the information is then transmitted in the clear to the actual web server…

To be fair, Opera describes this behavior in their FAQ, but this is terrible! If you use your mobile phone for anything that requires security, ditch Opera Mini immediately. Opera suggests to install Opera Mobile, however, I don’t think there is a version for the BlackBerry. Back to the built-in browser…

I just read the excellent Giant in the Playground webcomic “The Order of the Stick”, and the last installment was a tribute to the late E. Gary Gygax. It turns out he died Tuesday March 4th in his home in Lake Geneva.

Some of you may recognize that name as one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. He provided hours of joy to countless geeks around the world.

Thanks for all the fun, Gary. You will be missed.

Over the weekend, our company’s spam filter decided it would no longer filter spam. Naturally, this never happens on a weekday, so this morning everybody’s Inbox was overflowing with Viagra and Rolex offers… and the lucky few who have a SmartPhone got all that spam earlier than the rest of us.

Since the corporate spam filter was a piece of crock anyway (I won’t name names because it was Symantec), I decided to look around for a good Outlook spam filter. I came across SpamBayes.

SpamBayes is a free, open-source spam filter, that uses the Bayesian approach to determining if a message is spam or ham. A message scores points in both the ham and the spam category, based on the hamness or spamness of each word in the message body. There is a gray area where SpamBayes will let the user know a message is suspected Spam, and there are setting to determine whether a message is certainly spam or certainly ham. The SpamBayes website has a detailed description of the inner workings of the algorithm, so I won’t go into too much detail.There are a number of different applications of SpamBayes. The one probably most commonly used is as an Outlook plug-in (that’s what I was looking for). The plug-in supports Windows XP with Outlook 2000/2003/2007, and Windows Vista with Outlook 2003/2007. Other applications include setting it up on Thunderbird, Gmail, and any POP3 or IMAP mail client, or installing a script that runs on your mail server.The installation as an Outlook plugin was fairly painless, even on a Windows Vista 64 box. The only problem I encountered was that Outlook immediately crashed after installing SpamBayes, and the plugin was disabled when I restarted Outlook. However, the FAQ page quickly gave me a solution (tell DEP that Outlook is a safe application - I reluctantly agreed), and SpamBayes has been humming along ever since.

After installation, SpamBayes runs a setup wizard, which basically asks you to feed it a large amount of spam and a large amount of ham. This will get the algorithm started. You can then tweak SpamBayes to look in certain folders (I currently get GMail in Outlook, so I have two inboxes). When SpamBayes detects spam, or suspects it, you can tell it what to do. I currently have configured it so that spam is moved to the Junk E-mail folder and marked read, and suspected spam to the Junk Suspects folder and marked unread.

Personally I think SpamBayes does a better job than the Symantec Spam filter (that seems to run every now and then) - it correctly detects all the spam Symantec has detected, and then some. We’ll have to see how it behaves in the long run, but for now I’m not shedding any tears about the demise of Enterprise Spam detection.

If you’re like me, you’ve tried keeping plants around, but they seem to die after a week or two. It took me a while to figure out that these green things need water. I always forget to water them, though, switching my attention to much more interesting things (i.e. geekier! :-))

What if your plants could remind you to water them? And what if they did that by twittering you? They would get my attention, for sure.

Botanicalls has a Do-It-Yourself article on how to make a moisture sensor, hook this up to your computer, and install some software to translate the incoming “I am dry” signal to an actual Twitter message. You need to have some basic soldering skills, and not afraid to hook up something you created to a computer. The components can cost you up to $100, depending on what you have laying around USB and power wise.

It looks really interesting, but unfortunately the plants I have/had are a lot less than 100 dollars, so I’d rather buy a new plant.

Some of the interesting spam subjects I got in the last couple of weeks…

• “SOLD OUT -LIMITED OFFER-Rolex Watch under 250$” - thanks for letting me know I can no longer benefit from this special offer, since you’ve already sold all of them!
• “Umbrella staircase” - Hmm, that could be handy if the staircase is outside and it’s raining…? (it turns out that the sender believes 80% of all Christmas gifts will be bought online, and provides me with a link or twenty to buy watches).
• “Your family” - Errr… what about my family? I’m expecting a “Buy our product or the dog gets it” email next!
• “Is YOUR family safe? Let ADT Protect you today!” - Phew… got that one just in time!
• “Become a real man length your banana size!” And be the envy of banana growers everywhere!
• “Become a true sexual giant in a coming new year!” Our medicine may take a couple of years to have any effect…
• “BuyViagraSoftTabs!” Wait… soft? I thought the purpose of Viagra was quite the opposite?
• “I was looking for you” - But now I’m not anymore?
• “Who wants excess waste in their body” - I’m more than satisfied with the normal amount of waste, we don’t need the excess.
• “Lose up to 30lbs in 30 Days - Featured on Oprah!” - Literally.
• “Get a REAL VISA credit card” - So, the other ones I have are FAKE??? Damn.
• “Get Rid of Pores and Blackheads” - Yeah, let’s get rid of those Pores! What are they good for anyways…?

Well, it’s been very busy here the last couple of days. At home that is, the blog was kinda quiet. The hectic schedule from a couple of weeks ago has changed into taking care of a new baby.

Last Thursday, at 7:58AM, we became the proud parents of a little baby girl, named Diana. We got home from the hospital last Sunday, and are now trying to adjust to taking care of 7 pounds of little woman. Mother and daughter are doing fine, but they are demanding a lot of my time.

So, posting on the blog will be a little slow these days/weeks. Bear with me (that’s what I tell my daughter too when I try to change her diaper, and so far, she has….).

A hectic schedule at work and at home has prevented me from reporting on the MacWord announcements Steve Jobs made in his keynote. A quick round-up:

• Office 2008 native on Intel
• Time Capsule, an external hard drive companion to Time Machine, with a built-in Airport Extreme base station. Two versions, 500GB ($299) and 1TB ($499), ships in February.
• iPhone update: SDK in late February, now maps with locations, SMS to multiple people, webclips
• iPod Touch has upgrade to get all this. Existing users have to pay $20 to upgrade.
• iTunes movie rentals. Regular $2.99 for library titles, $3.99 for new releases. HD costs a dollar more.
• AppleTV take 2 - no computer required, but can sync to one. HD movie rentals. Integration with Flickr and YouTube. Price dropped to $229.
• World’s thinnest notebook - the Apple MacBook Air. 13.3 inch widescreen, 3 pounds, 0.76 to 0.16 inches thick, iSight camera, full size LED backlit keyboard, large trackpad with multi touch gestures (like on the iPhone and iPod Touch), 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, 5 hours battery life, 1.8” harddrive 80GB standard, 64GB SSD optional, 1.6GHz Core Duo. No optical drive - need to have it as USB connected drive, or borrow one from a PC or a Mac. Priced at $1799, and ships in two weeks.

Science Daily has an article describing how silicon nanowires can be used to capture body heat, and use that energy to power a wide array of devices. Some examples could be the Department of Energy’s hydrogen fuel cell-powered “Freedom CAR,” and personal power-jackets that could use heat from the human body to recharge cell-phones and other electronic devices.

Apparently the human body generates over 25,000 BTUs in body heat, and more bioelectricity than a 120V battery. That should be enough to power a cell phone, and then some. Hopefully the machines won’t find out how efficient we are at generating energy…

So, with all the dangers lurking out there, we all use https connections to our servers, have SSL sessions, use PGP keys to sign and encrypt our email, and run a plethora of scanners to keep our computers virus- and adware-free. But how about a keylogger that picks up your wireless keyboard transmissions?

This is not a new problem. A man in Norway saw his neighbor typing on his screen, because his wireless keyboard’s receiver was picking up his neighbor’s keyboard. In this case it was the same brand computer, and the same brand wireless keyboard. Encryption would prevent that from happening. But now that the Swiss security firm DreamLab Technologies has discovered that the popular Microsoft Wireless Keyboards use an encryption that can be cracked by a simple PDA, using even a so-called secure wireless keyboard becomes a serious security risk.

In the white paper mentioned in the press release, the two researchers describe in broad terms what happens between a wireless keyboard and the receiver, and how easy it is to eavesdrop on a session. The frequency used is in the 27MHz band, for which a large number of receivers is available. Most keyboards should have only a limited range, but under the right circumstances and with the right antenna distances of a mile have been achieved.

Not all wireless keyboards have the same problems, however. Logitech uses a different technology to encrypt the communication between keyboard and receiver. Also, Bluetooth keyboards are possibly more secure. The two researchers (Max Moser and Philipp Schroedel) are continuing to investigate the security of the different wireless keyboards.

In the mean time, I suggest not using your wireless keyboard for anything but the most innocent of traffic. If you want to control your media center with it, that’s fine. Just don’t go online with your bank, without hooking up a keyboard cable.

There is a demo video on the Dreamlab Technologies website, showing their exploit in action. Within a minute the viewer is watching two different keyboards being picked up and cracked.

Microsplot has an interesting article contradicting Microsoft’s slogan “100 Reasons You’ll Be Speechless”. Au contrair, MS. People are talking more than ever about Vista, and not all of it is Wow.

Some of the items are not entirely Microsoft’s fault, such as not supplying disks with a new computer, but the majority of the issues are directly to be blamed on Microsoft. You can see a number of quotes from articles around the web for each of the points brought forward in the article.

The 100 things in a nutshell:

1. Vista is a flop. A disaster. Dead.
2. Vista is one of the 10 worst tech products of 2007!
3. Vista is the most disappointing tech product of 2007!
4. This took five years?
5. What happened to all the promised features in Vista?
6. Vista isn’t ready for release!
7. Vista? Yawn.
8. Vista? Why?
9. Vista: The end of the Microsoft empire?
10. Abandon Vista, Microsoft!
11. Vista shows that Microsoft is spread too thin.
12. Microsoft knew they were releasing ‘a pig’.
13. Microsoft’s most loyal fans can’t praise Vista!
14. I’m mad at Microsoft!
15. Vista marketing is senseless!
16. Vista marketing is sleazy!
17. Vista’s versions are a confusing mess!
18. Vista’s upgrade paths are just as confusing!
19. Upgrading to Vista is a pain!
20. Upgrades are so much easier on other systems!
21. Why are some Vista versions so limited?
22. Vista is too expensive!
23. Vista’s hardware requirements are unbelievable!
24. Windows Vista Capable is a lie!
25. Vista is slow to start up!
26. Vista is slow all over!
27. Vista’s a non-stop parade of problems!
28. Vista’s a downgrade in stability!
29. Vista breaks my applications!
30. Vista is frustrating!
31. Vista spies on me!
32. Vista’s Software Protection Platform! Yechh!
33. Vista calls me a criminal!
34. Get out of my face, Vista!
35. Vista’s UAC is awful!
36. I can’t trust Windows Update!
37. Vista security is still second-class!
38. Microsoft’s security reports can’t be trusted!
39. Vista’s driver support is horrible!
40. Vista’s networking is unreliable!
41. Vista still has the Registry?
42. Vista is power-hungry!
43. Vista’s Sleep mode is lousy!
44. I can’t use virtualization on Vista?
45. Vista has too much disk activity!
46. Vista’s backup is lousy!
47. A; drive? C: drive?
48. Vista’s Search is poor!
49. Vista won’t let me change root certificates!
50. Vista gives me Internet Explorer 7? No thanks!
51. Vista’s built-in applications are a step down!
52. Windows Meeting Space is useless!
53. Where’s Vista’s answer to iLife?
54. Windows Media Center is a loser!
55. Vista’s remote desktop access software is inferior!
56. Vista still gives me all that crapware!
57. Vista’s interface is a step bakwards!
58. Vista changes things for no reason!
59. Vista’s Flip 3D is a lame Expose!
60. Vista messes up file menus!
61. Do I need Vista for anything other than games?
62. Some ‘Vista advantages’ don’t even require Vista!
63. Vista has the fit and finish of a Yugo!
64. Even Vista’s box is poorly designed!
65. My new PC doesn’t even come with the Vista disks!
66. Vista licensing restrictions are ridiculous!
67. Vista server costs are ridiculous!
68. Vista is just more Microsoft lock-in.
69. Vista lets Microsoft control my computer!
70. Windows Genuine Advantage - an advantage to who?
71. Vista deactivates itself!
72. Vista’s DRM is inexcusable!
73. OS X is better than Vista!
74. GNU/Linux is better than Vista!
75. Vista rips off other OSes!
76. Vista’s been leapfrogged by OS X Leopard (10.5)!
77. Vista doesn’t even match up to OS X Tiger (10.4)!
78. Leopard is as bad as Vista!
79. Nobody’s buying Vista!
80. Vista isn’t spurring new PC sales.
81. Vista? We’re not even going to think about it until SP1.
82. Microsoft is lying about Vista sales!
83. Microsoft is searching for scapegoats!
84. Why are OS X sales booming since the release of Vista?
85. IT nerds hate Vista!
86. Consumers hate Vista!
87. Enterprises hate Vista!
88. Even the industry hates Vista!
89. Vista? Ban it!
90. Vista? What a joke!
91. I won’t upgrade to Vista!
92. I want to upgrade to XP!
93. Extend my XP support!
94. I want to buy a computer with XP, not Vista!
95. Would I install Vista again? No!
96. How do I uninstall Vista?
97. Goodbye, Vista!
98. Goodbye, Windows!
99. Hello, OS X!
100. Hello, open source!
101. Microsoft’s list of 100 Vista benefits is really padded!

3D Realms released an all new teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever. Yay.

How about releasing an all new GAME?

*Update** Wired released their annual Vaporware awards, and Duke Nukem Forever has taken first place for the 5th time (2001, 2002, 2005, 2006, and now 2007), with a life-time award in 2003, an unofficial possible win in 2004, and a slow start in 2000 with a 2nd place.

I ran into a problem with Outlook the other day. Someone sent me a message, that was a forwarded message from someone else. Only, the forwarded message was attached, instead of quoted. And Outlook refused to open the message. Double-click, Right-click & Open, Right-click & Save, nothing worked (although Save gave me a beautiful .msg file - that Outlook refused to open).

After searching the Internet for a couple of days, seeing all kinds of references to security levels and warning messages (that I didn’t get - Outlook didn’t give a peep when trying to open the message), I gave up - I only get one or two attached messages a month, and most of them are jokes.

It got annoying however when I decided to use the GTD Outlook Plug-in. In this plug-in, you have the capability to attach several messages to a Task. The message that initiated the Task is quoted in the task description, and subsequent messages are attached. I couldn’t open these attachments, and to make things worse, the GTD Plugin moved the messages that I attached to an undisclosed location, so I couldn’t find these messages anymore!

So, back to searching the Internets. I finally came across this message on Tutorials Win. It described a similar problem with Outlook 2007 (I’m still using 2003), and said that Google Desktop was to blame. That made sense: a couple of days ago Windows Vista informed that Google Desktop had unexpectedly quit. The forum post suggested disabling the indexing of Outlook, but for me, the only thing that worked was completely uninstalling Google Desktop.

Everything works fine now, I can access my attached email messages again. I’m sure I’ll miss Google Desktop, though…

Terry Pratchett has revealed in a letter on the website of artist Paul Kidby that he is suffering from a rare form of early Alzheimer’s disease.

Pratchett is probably most famous for his Discworld series, where a parallel world, carried by 4 huge elephants standing on an enormous turtle named Great A’Tuin, has more than a passing resemblance to our own world.

In his announcement letter he proves he hasn’t lost his sense of humor:

I know it’s a very human thing to say “Is there anything I can do”, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

He still has a couple of books in him, and I look forward to them with more anticipation than ever before. God bless, Terry.

I came across this little game, which tests your knowledge of countries, capitals and noteworthy locations around the world, and determines your Traveller IQ. Have fun!

According to MacNN, Apple is set to raise the prices on downloadable movies in iTunes to $15, just a couple of dollars below the retail price of a physical DVD. This means that for $3 more, you can order the same movie, without DRM, with extra content, in a nice box, and probably in better quality.

It is suggested in the article that the studios are under pressure from retailers such as Wal-Mart. Which basically means that old-style retail is trying to hold on to their distribution model, and forces the new-style retail to mimic their inefficiencies… I hope Apple will come up with something else, especially now that there are serious indications on the music side that the old model is failing (EMI scaling back funding of the RIAA, more and more DRM-free music).

When we were browsing the local Best Buy last Sunday, I noticed there is a large section devoted to the Nintendo Wii: games, accessories, etc. One thing still is ominously missing: the Wii console.

Wired has an article describing the woes of Nintendo. After increasing capacity from 1 million to 1.8 million units per month, they sell about as much units in a week as the XBox 360 does in a whole month. Yet no store seems to have them in stock. Only EBay has a large supply: about 8,000 auctions were active, selling the $250 Wii for $400-$600.

Yahoo! has a Wii Finder in their buyer’s guide - but the only results I’m getting are “Out of Stock” for the online store, and there is no information for local stores. The “official” Wii Tracker shows a bit of history: Yesterday eToys got some Wiis in stock at 12:30PM, and were sold out at 12:40PM. Toys R Us has the Console for sale a whopping 30 minutes before they too were sold out.

If you’re looking for a Wii, be prepared to do a lot of calling and driving around. A better bet is EBay. Or you can follow the Wired advice and just follow the UPS man from store to store…

A new feature in Japan: a road that makes music when you drive on it.

Apparently the grooves in the road are set at certain distance to get to just the right tune…

(Link from Jason Kottke’s website).

Last Thursday, I got sick.

I don’t know if it was a late reaction to all the holiday food, travel, family stress, or whatever. But waking up Thursday morning, I felt so miserable, that I was convinced my co-workers would be off much better without me kvetching at the office.

So I stayed home. After some sleep, hot soup and lunch, I was feeling a bit better, and decided to see what the TiVo in the bedroom could play from the TiVo in the living room. Well, apparently not the free content that I subscribed to, and could download off the Internet without any problems.

I subscribe to two shows on TivoCast, CNet and Cranky Geeks. Both of these shows are available to anyone without paying a penny. Granted, the only source for the TiVo version is TivoCast, but otherwise, it seems to me that these shows are freely available. But when I was browsing the other TiVo, I could not transfer these shows between TiVos.

The reason that was given is that the copyright holder has requested that this content cannot be transferred. Although this is possible with the CNet (I couldn’t find a download link for their content), but it seems strange for Cranky Geeks, which on the front page has download links for several formats.

So what could be the real reason? Is TiVo tracking to see who downloaded the content? So why block me from transferring the content from one TiVo to another, within the same house? Are they tracking to see how often it is watched? By whom? Or is this some kind of default that the “copyright owners” haven’t thought about, because their content is freely shareable??

Anyways, it seemed kind of fishy to me. If anyone knows why this is setup this way, I would love to hear it.

Through Michael Hyatt‘;s blog, I came across this talk from Larry Lessig at TED about how the current copyright laws limit the creativity of people. Apart from the talk being absolutely informative, there are two great examples of creative work, that, according to today’s copyright law, are not permitted:

Javier Prato’s “Jesus Christ - The musical”

And George Bush and Tony Blair in a touching duet:

Hopefully law makers will develop the common sense Larry Lessig refers to.

After all the Mac guy vs. PC guy videos, you might think they’re running out of ideas. Not so. This one is too funny (especially since I’m struggling with Vista every day…):

Today I ran into an interesting problem. I wanted to print out a search result set - I needed to check off some of the files that I found from a Windows Search result, and add the ones that weren’t checked off to another list. Apparently, the only option in Windows is to make screen shots and paste them into Word to print them. If you have more than two or three screens, that can become a drag.

There had to be a better method. Our systems guy suggested using Posix tools for Windows, and then using ls or find to get to the right data. I didn’t feel like adding yet another non-Microsoft utility (that will become unsupported in no time) to the mix of things. Then I remembered looking at PowerShell a couple of months ago.

PowerShell is the next generation command line for Windows. It approaches everything in the system as an object, and you can perform operations on those objects, retrieve information from them, etc. When I looked at it, my reaction was “Cool!”, but since I didn’t have an actual need for it, it dwindled away in a corner of the harddisk, until I needed disk space and it was deleted.

Basically, what I needed to do was select all the files in a certain directory, and all its subdirectories, with a certain file extension (*.r, for compiled Progress code), that were created after October 24th. Of those files, I need to know the filename, and path.

After some fiddling around, and realizing that I needed the last written date instead of the creation date, I came up with the following beauty:

Get-ChildItem -filter *.r -recurse

where { $_.LastWriteTime -gt “10/24/2007” }

Format-List FullName

Out-Printer

I would have preferred Format-Table, but it turned out some of the paths were too long to be displayed in the table list.

PowerShell 1.0 looks pretty promising, and PowerShell 2.0 is currently in beta, looking even better. This may be something that will be in my standard toolbox from now on.

Skype announced the release of a beta version of Skype 2.0 for Linux. The new version supports video, so Linux Skype users can now put the webcam to good use.

The Linux beta can be downloaded here. Hardware requirements are:

• Processor: 1GHz or faster
• RAM: 256MB
• Hard disk: 20MB free space
• Microphone and speakers, or headset
• Internet connection, broadband is best, GPRS is not supported for voice calls, and results may vary on a satellite connection.
• Videocard driver with Xv support
• Qt 4.2.1 or higher
• D-Bus 1.0.0
• libasound2 1.0.12

The page has versions for Ubuntu (7.04 - no 7.10, although this version should work fine with Gutsy), Fedora (Core 6, and 7), Debian Etch, OpenSUSE 10+, Mepis, Mandriva, Xandros and CentOS. There is also a generic Dynamic and Static package.

On November 3rd, 2007, Sixth Floor Labs LLC announced that they launched their business. The press release can be found here.

They also released the first release of Project Alexandria, an Asteroids-like arcade game. This is downloadable for free here.

Although it’s commendable that a company decides to make Linux games, this game’s graphics look very much like the Commodore 64 graphics. I haven’t played the game yet, but I’m not sure the world is waiting for the next 1980’s game. Hopefully future release will look a little better…

Firing Squad has a break-down of a $500 gaming PC upgrade. Roughly the components are as follows:

Since this is an upgrade article, the writers have assumed you already have a case, hard drive, optical drive, mouse, keyboard, monitor and OS.

Recently our systems administrator asked me if it was possible to run MXP under Linux. “I don’t think there is a client of Progress for Linux, at least not graphical”, was my first response. But I got intrigued, and started digging (or rather, googling) around. And it is possible.

I’ll describe what I did under Ubuntu 7.10 with Progress 10.0B, and MXP 8.1E. The steps should be very similar for other Linux flavors, or later versions of Progress and MXP.

Step 1: Install Wine

The first step is the easiest: install wine.

sudo apt-get install wine

This should install wine (if it wasn’t already installed), and any dependencies.

Step 2: Configure wine with IEs4Linux

The next step is to configure wine. You can do all of it manually, but by far the easiest is to use IEs4Linux. You don’t have to use the latest beta (which includes support for IE7), since we’re only interested in the underlying framework, not the support of IE.

The best place to look is the IEs4Linux website, but in case the steps aren’t available:

1. Open a terminal
2. Open /etc/apt/sources.list
   sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
3. Uncomment or add the following lines
   deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy universe
4. Add this line:
   deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt gutsy main
5. Close gedit, update apt-get package list and install cabextract:
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install cabextract
   You might get an error about an untrusted site (wine.budgetdedicated.com), but you can ignore that.
6. Download IEs4Linux and install
   wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
   tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
   cd ies4linux-*
   ./ies4linux

Step 3: Install Progress 10.0B

To install Progress, you have to have your license code handy. Also, in my case I had the installation CD copied to the hard drive. In any case, it’s as easy as typing

wine setup.exe

and following the prompts.

Note: the standard installation of wine treats everything as Windows 2000. I ran the setup under Windows 2000, then switched to Windows XP as standard. I don’t think there is a difference for Progress.

Step 4: Installing MXP

I’m assuming that you already have an installation of MXP on your network somewhere. If not, install it from a regular Windows machine, and copy your settings over.
The installation of MXP hinges on a couple of things:

1. The startup icon. Copy this from a Windows machine already running MXP
2. The services file. This is used to connect to the proper databases. Add the services needed to /etc/services.
3. Most installations have a shared drive that contains sources or compiled programs. So that will be our next step.

Step 5: Creating a mount to a Windows Share

We have all the compiled programs installed on a share on our Windows server, which is mapped to the Q drive. The first step is to make this Windows share visible on our Linux box:

1. Make sure you have the Samba filesystem installed:
   sudo apt-get install smbfs
2. Add a line to /etc/fstab like this:
   //admin/progress.mxp /mnt/progress.mxp smbfs credentials=/home/ronald/.smbpassword,user,defaults 0 0
   This will allow the system to automatically mount the Windows share (//admin/progress.mxp) on a mounting point on Linux (/mnt/progress.mxp) as Samba (smbfs) with the credentials from a hidden file .smbpassword
3. Create the .smbpassword file:
   gedit .smbpassword
   username=DOMAINronald
   password=TopSecret

Step 6: Linking a drive letter to a Windows Share

Wine has a nice little solution to map shares to drive letters:

1. Select Applications->Wine->Configure Wine
2. Select the Drives tab
3. Add a drive mapping

ln -s /mnt/progress.mxp q:

Step 7: Install the foresight.fon font

At this point you should be able to start MXP with the icon, and be OK until you actually enter a username and password. After that, all hell breaks lose because the foresight font is not installed properly. I muddled around for a while, and finally came across this:

1. Make sure you have the microsoft core fonts installed.
   sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
2. Install fontforge
   sudo apt-get install fontforge
3. Use fontforge to convert foresight.fon to a BCF file.
4. Open foresight.fon in fontforge.
5. Go to the “Element” menu, and choose “Font Info…”
6. Go to the Encoding tab
7. Click the box next to Encoding (probably reads Windows Latin (“ANSI”)
8. Choose “ISO 8859-1 (Latin1)”
9. Click “OK”
10. Go to the File menu, choose “Generate Fonts…”
11. The right hand box should be set to BDF, if not, change it to BDF
12. Click “Save”
13. 96 dpi is sufficient, click OK

14. Go to where you saved the font, and rename it to how you want it to show up, i.e. foresight.bdf

15. Convert it from BDF to PCF format:
    bdftopcf -o foresight.pcf foresight.bdf
16. Create a bitmapped fonts directory
    sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/bitmaps
17. Copy and install the font
18. sudo cp foresight.pcf /usr/share/fonts/bitmaps

19. sudo mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/bitmaps

20. Make the new directory available as a font directory
    xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/bitmaps
21. Refresh the font server
    sudo xset fp rehash

There was a small outage today as I was upgrading various parts of the website to WordPress 2.3.1. It actually took a lot longer than expected, caused in part by the refusal of GoDaddy to accept two FTP connections from the same IP address. Plus, when I came back after transferring the new version, there was an error box waiting for me, asking me if I wanted to overwrite some of the files. Oops.

Everything seems to be working, though. Please leave a comment if you find something that is broken.

UPDATE I also updated the theme a bit, hope you like the new layout!

I just received an email from Chumby Industries, informing that the Chumby is now shipping to a select group of customers. If you want to buy one, sign up on the store page.

Meanwhile, while you’re waiting for your Chumby to be delivered, or waiting for it to become available, you can play around with the Chumby-on-the-Net. Below is an example of the Chumby I just created:

It looks like a really nice combination of digital photo frame and web widgets. There are widgets to display your Flickr photos, weather info, stock alerts, etc. The widgets take turns on the display, based on their settings. To have the Chumby operate, you need a Wifi connection and (unfortunately) an AC outlet.

The Chumby ships for a little under $200.

I finally got my Bluetooth adapter (a Kensington Bluetooth USB Adapter 2.0) working. Initially when I bought it, trying to install the factory supplied driver wouldn’t work. After a tiresome exchange with support, where they informed me that there was no Vista driver available, and they didn’t have any information about whether or not the driver would be developed.

Well, apparently they developed one (yay Kensington), but failed to inform people who had filed a request for it (Booh! Hiss!). However, when I tried to install it, everything seemed to work fine until a message box popped up informing me that the installation had failed. Digging through the Vista Temp directory, I found the installation log, with one Error message (the rest was fine): “ERROR Device plugged in, no MS stack”.

After trying to run the installation program with Administrative rights, and with UAC turned on and off, I was ready to give up. The funny thing was that the installation program just seemed to download the actual installation program, explode it, run the setup program in there, and delete it when it finished or failed. So, during a new attempt, I grabbed the directory that the installation program created. It has the platform specific files (in my case 64-bit), a setup program and some other stuff. Of course, the installation failed again, but at least I had the files now.
Update:The files are located in Users[you]AppDataLocalTempBTW_6.0.1.6200.

When I pulled up the Device Manager in Vista, it showed the Bluetooth EDR dongle listed. I tried several different things (which I won’t mention, because they didn’t work), until I decided to Update the driver for the dongle. When Vista asked me for the driver, I pointed it to the driver directory within the exploded installation directory, and Vista was happier than a clam to install a bunch of devices (Kensington Bluetooth EDR Dongle with trace filter, Microsoft Bluetooth Enumerator, and two Bluetooth devices in the Network adapters group). Yay!

The next (and last) step in setting up the adapter with my Motorola RAZR was the easiest: go to Control Panel, Bluetooth Devices, and Add a new device. Make sure your phone is discoverable, and set up a passkey. Voila! The phone should now be connected.

Next thing on the list is trying to grab floAt’s Mobile Agent. I have an older version installed, and have already figured out that the only way floAt can talk to my phone seems to be to use the COM port (when you pull up Bluetooth Devices, click your phone, select Properties, and go to the Services tab, it will tell you which COM port the phone uses).

Somewhere along the upgrade trail from 7.3 to 7.4.2, I started getting the annoying message “iTunes was not properly installed. If you wish to import or burn CDs, you need to reinstall iTunes” whenever I start iTunes. After following this advice, and restarting iTunes, I got the message “iTunes was not properly installed. If…” - OK, you got the idea…

Apparently a lot of other people seem to be having this problem. And it happens under Vista 32 and 64 bit. Despite the message, people are reporting that importing works fine (I haven’t seen any messages confirming that burning a CD still works).

A discussion thread on the Apple Support forum helped me out: simply installing the GEAR Software drivers seemed to resolve at least the message. In some cases, a new error message pops up saying it can’t find the folder with the CD settings. In that case you have to uninstall iTunes 7.4.x, install 7.3.2, copy the CD folder to a safe location, uninstall iTunes 7.3.2, reinstall iTunes 7.4.x, install the GEAR driver, and copy the CD folder back.

I haven’t tried importing or burning a CD yet, but at least iTunes starts without pausing for me to click OK!

Last Friday an MIT student was arrested for wearing a piece of homemade jewelry (for lack of a better term - it’s NOT a fake bomb) in an airport. The spokesman for the State Police was congratulating her for surviving the incident.

Wow.

Oh, I forgot to mention this happened at Logan Airport in Boston. You might remember Boston from a recent publicity stunt, where the whole city came to a standstill over “mysterious electronic devices”. And I forgot to mention she wasn’t arrested inside the terminal, but she was surrounded by police holding machine guns outside of the terminal. Apparently she wanted to blow up the terminal by being outside it.

One of the explanations dictionary.com gives for “terrorism” is “the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization”. When our police force is freaked out by a student wearing a piece of circuit board, LEDs and a battery (it is uncertain if there was a piece of putty involved), to the point that they are ready to use deadly force, they are definitely in a state of fear produced by terrorism. Maybe we need to set up a terror thermometer to measure how freaked out law enforcement is over simple things.

Her choice of clothing was described as “scary” by the arresting officer. Of course, in this day and age anything remotely resembling high-tech equipment is scary. Especially when it involves batteries and LEDs.

So be careful next time you walk around with your laptop or cell phone. It better be clearly marked as a laptop or cell phone, or you might be suspected of attempting to blow up your local Starbucks.

Yeah, I just got bit by that Vista “feature”… the one where your network slows down when you play music. That one, yeah.

I just added an index to our database, unfortunately from the client side. While I was chastising myself for doing it client-server instead of host-based, I was watching the number of records being updated per second. Hmm, about 400… maybe if I shutdown some programs. First, Sidebar - it displays some RSS feeds and weather information. OK, up to 420-440 records/sec. Not bad…

Then I remembered reading something about the Vista network stack and playing music files. I closed iTunes, and lo and behold: I now was updating about 1800 records/sec! Over 4 times as much??? Me thinks Vista has a problem there. This is on a dual-core 2.4GHz Intel with 2GB RAM.

ZDNet has an article with Microsoft’s response to the Vista network performance issue, and while some of the arguments may be true (only local network operations, two high priority drivers contending for the same resource, etc.), I still think it’s funny that a dual processor system would have its network performance so drastically reduced.

Anyone thinks it’s the DRM…? Anyone…?

The Record has an article describing how Ivan Bowman is spending his days working from home, but still being able to attend meetings, exchanges notes with other developers, and hang out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks with his co-workers.

He is able to do this 1,350 kilometers from the Waterloo office by way of IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues from his home office.

The robot itself looks a little creepy at first, more resembling a coat rack mounted on a cardboard box, with speakers, a camera and a touch-screen computer. But apparently looks are only skin-deep, and Bowman’s colleagues ignore IvanAnywhere’s looks and work with him like any other robot co-worker. How’s that for an avatar!

This morning I received an email from Amazon, informing me that Spore is available for pre-order!

The price is $49.99, and the expected release date is March 31st, 2008. Hopefully this will bring an end to the long wait for this game.

Wired has a sneak peak at the first computer game of Penny Arcade, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode I. Besides the familiar Penny Arcade humor, this game is special in that it will be released in episodes, only available directly from the PA website.

Each episode will presumably be cheaper than a complete game, therefore lowering the threshold for buyers. However, it also puts a lot of pressure on each episode: make one bad episode, and you might lose some of your fans, resulting in lower sales.

I’m looking forward to the game, especially after seeing some of the screen shots: they capture the comic’s style perfectly. And it will probably be my only chance to ever see the Fruit Fucker in action…

John C. Dvorak discusses the problems Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage experienced this weekend, and what the implications are for all online “Web 2.0” application.

But, frankly, this whole article builds up to the last two paragraphs, where John warns that when the last dot-com bubble burst, company after company went out of business, leaving the users stranded. And the next bursting bubble is on its way…. This fits with some of the other columns he has recently written.

I think we’re having a completely different dynamic in this “bubble”. First of all, it’s debatable that there is a bubble - although with VMWare’s recent IPO that has significantly increased in price (about 150% of initial offering), there are some indications. Second of all, although there are some smaller companies where your data may not be as safe as on your own computer, I don’t see Yahoo, Google, and even Microsoft going out of business any time soon. The biggest risk might be that they close down one of their services (like Google Video). And if they would do that with Google Docs, I assume they would announce it months in advance.

One thing John misses in his “reverse time line”, is that by introducing the desktop, you’re replacing one point of failure (the web service) with another point of failure (your desktop). Even on a desktop a backup is invaluable - so how does that differ from having a backup of the data on your web service? At least I know that in case of an outage at one of Google’s services, they have backups. Right…? Google…? You do, don’t you…?

This morning when I got to the computer at work, it was a little sluggish. Not thinking anything of it, I decided to restart the machine - it’s running Vista 64-bit, and for some reason there are some problems with Microsoft’s Most Secure Windows Ever.

However, during the shutdown, I saw the message “Configuring Updates” come by. And sure enough, during the startup, Windows happily announced that it was “Installing Updates”.

Wait a minute. I know it was a long weekend, but I sure as hell didn’t install any updates that required a reboot… So what happened?

Well, apparently, “Download updates but let me choose whether to install them” doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. And according to Slated‘;s blog post, I’m not the only one.

When checking the update log, it shows an update to the Windows Update program. Most likely this is related to the Windows Genuine Advantage problem from last week, but what good is telling the OS that you want things done a certain way, when it then happily turns around and does something else?

I think they call that a bug. Some other people call it malware. I for one feel less and less in control of a machine that is sitting on my desk, and that I use to write software for our company…!

The newest offering from TiVo, the HD DVR, might suffer from a problem when your cable provider uses Switched Digital Video (SDV).

This blog post on Lauren Weinstein’s blog signals a problem that might prevent the new HD TiVo’s, that are using CableCARDs to receive the channels, from receiving all channels when your cable provider is using SDV.

As it happens, two days after that blog post, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) made a filing with the FCC according to Lauren’s follow-up post. However, this solution (the OpenCable option) doesn’t sit well with the Consumer Electronics Association, who find the solution unduly expensive and cumbersome to develop.

Until a final solution is developed, the users of the Tivo HD DVR might have to resort to the old method of infrared switching of their cable boxes, instead of relying on the CableCARD technology…

Apple’s Summer Press Conference reveals a set of new products:

New iMac

A new iMac, in aluminum and glass. Much like the mock-ups that were floating around the Internet. 2 screen sizes: 20 and 24 inch displays. Also, new keyboard: 2 USB ports, 1/3 of an inch high, wireless? Bluetooth 2.0. Not sure, but the mouse is probably new and wireless as well.

20” model comes with 2.0GHz or 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, 24” with 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme. ATI Radeon HD graphics card (ouch), 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0, up to 4GB memory, up to 1TB of hard drive. 20” 2.0GHz for $1199, 20” 2.4GHz $1499, and 24” 2.4GHz $1799.

UPDATE: There is a 4th model listed on the iMac product page, a 24” 2.8GHz with 2GB memory and a 500GB harddisk for $2299.

UPDATE 2: the wireless keyboard and mouse are options, $30 (extra) for the keyboard, $20 for the mouse.

iLife ‘08

iLife ‘08 consists of iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand.

• iPhoto
  iPhoto has a new option, “Events”. This groups albums, so it minimizes the number of albums you’ll have to browse through. Options to hide photos and see only the ones you like, “smart” albums (e.g. 3 stars and above).
• .Mac
  .Mac will be integrated with iPhoto, producing .Mac Web Gallery. Also, the iPhone has added “Send to Web Gallery”. Basically the same idea as iPhoto ‘08, integrating the iPhone with .Mac. It’s easy for others to be able to submit photo’s to your .Mac Web Gallery, and these submissions will be auto downloaded to your iPhone. Also increased the storage capacity from 1GB to 10GB, priced at $99.95 a year.
• iMovie
  iMovie ‘08 is a complete rewrite. The idea is to make the creation of movies really, really fast. The idea of a video library with the same scrolling as the photo albums. Very easy editing and building of movies. Plus, it’s simple to make a version for iTunes, put it on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. Options to encode your movies in multiple resolutions.
• iWeb
  Integration with other web services: Google Maps, Google AdSense. Media index feature, where the photos of your site are easily indexed. Support for personal domains, and new themes.
• iDVD
  For those people who don’t want to send a huge file across the Internet, there’s the option to make DVDs. New themes have been added and pro encoding for higher quality.
• GarageBand
  Two versions included, GarageBand for regular multi-take recording, and Magic GarageBand for playing with a virtual band.

iWork ‘08

iWork ‘08 consists of Keynote, Pages, and the newcomer, Numbers.

• Keynote
  Keynote ‘08 includes new text effects and new transitions. Also new is Instant Alpha: grab a photo, take out the background, keep the part that you want, and include it in your presentation. Smart Builds lets you automatically generate animations from pictures that you drag into it.
• Pages
  Pages ‘08 adds a new mode: apart from the page layout mode, there’s now a new word processing mode. There is built-in change tracking, and it’s compatible with Word. Pages ‘08 comes with 140 built-in templates.
• Numbers
  New in iWorks ‘08 is Numbers, “a spreadsheet for the rest of us”. Done in the style of Pages, your spreadsheets are basically layed-out on the page. It includes intelligent tables, readable formulas, simple sorting and reformatting without affecting other parts of your spreadsheets. It can also import from or export to Excel.

Q&A session

There is a Q&A session with Steve Jobs, Tim Cook (COO) and Phil Schiller (EVP Product Marketing). During this Q&A the following nuggets are revealed:

• The new iMacs are noticeably thinner, not just the keyboard, but also the computer.
• The Mac Mini gets a refresher today as well.
• There is Apple TV news coming, just not today (today is a Mac day).

The Amarok blog has a sneak peek at the upcoming Amarok2 release. The following things are new:

• New playlist.
• Better use of Magnatune genres
• Support for Magnatune gift cards.
• CoverBling (experimental version of CoverFlow)
• Use of Plasma (the new desktop and widget technology in KDE4) for the central area.

I think Apple is still peeved about Cisco suing them over the iPhone name.

Apparently they are now taking revenge by knocking Cisco’s Wireless Access Points off-line. Or at least, so says Duke University. According to the IT department at Duke, the iPhones periodically flood the school’s WLAN with MAC address requests, knocking several access points off-line for 10 to 15 minutes.

Duke has submitted a trouble ticket with Apple, because Cisco claims the problem is not on their end.

Personally, I think Apple found the perfect DDOS attack against Cisco. Cisco may need to revise their opinion, and fix this possible Denial of Service.

Eliot van Buskirk reports in his blog:

I just spoke with Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, and he told me a SoundExchange exec just promised - in front of Congress - that SoundExchange will not enforce the collection of webcaster royalties under the new rates that would have driven many of them out of business.

Good news - in so far as that this is a promise not to enforce collection. The rates are still there as far as I understand. And apparently SoundExchange can change their mind - even after promising things in front of Congress…

The Google Desktop has been released as a Linux version as of this week.
All the familiar features of the Windows version are there:

• Quick search by pressing the Ctrl key twice
• Smart indexing
• File versioning
• Integration with Google websearch

You can download the Linux version here. It requires glibc 2.3.2 or higher, and gtk+ 2.2.0 or higher.

Internet radio is protesting the substantial increase in royalties they have to pay with a Day of Silence. Yahoo! Music is silent. So is Pandora. Others participating according to the press release of SaveNetRadio:

• Live365
• Rhapsody
• MTV Online
• AccuRadio
• KCRW
• Radioio
• DigitallyImported
• RadioParadise
• 3WK
• myMVY
• Wizard Radio
• Born Again Radio
• Pearadio.com
• Ear.fm
• WGLI
• WMUK
• Head-On Radio Network
• Zecom/Gemz Radio
• monkeygrip music cafe
• KFCF
• LuckySevenRadio.com
• Blue Power/Guitar Speak
• WPNA

and many, many more. A complete list of participating radio stations can be found at www.kurthanson.com/dos.

The reason for this Day of Silence is not just the fact that the royalty rates have increased. They have increased dramatically, and will continue to increase through 2010, rising from 8/100 of a penny per performance in 2006, to 19/100 of a penny in 2010 (details can be found here). Also, these rates will be applied retroactively back to the beginning of 2006. The Day of Silence is both a protest, and to give listeners a taste of what it will be like after July 15th, when the new royalty rules go into effect.

Tim Westergren of Pandora says it best I think:

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the “Internet Radio Equality Act” has already been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet radio-and Pandora-from obliteration.

I’d like to ask you to call your Congressional representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill. It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.

I hope the voice of reason will beat the dollar of the lobbyists…

Coding Horror has an interesting article on how Jeff Atwood cleaned up a Windows machine that got infected after he browsed the Internet with the original Internet Explorer.

The main tools he uses are either built in to Windows, or are available from the SysInternals website. Good reading, and the SysInternal tools (Process Explorer and Autoruns) are valuable even without spyware running wild on your machine.

The Ubuntu Video website has posted this video about Linux. 🙂

English Russia has these great pictures of a Russian ATM running an unlicensed copy of Windows…

Good thing is any helpful customer can probably buy a license, with VISA, MasterCard, Cirrus or any of the other credit cards that are displayed.

I came across this picture on digg.com. Click and drag your mouse up or down to zoom in and out.

ArsGeek has an excellent article on how to make the Vista Shutdown button actually shut down your computer.

In the Plan Settings for your Power Options, choose the Advanced Power Settings, and change the Power buttons and lid, Start menu power button option to Shut Down.

See the Arsgeek article for a more detailed description with pictures.

It looks like all went well with the upgrade to WordPress 2.2.

I may change the design a little over the next week or so, to take advantage of the new plugins option in 2.2. This makes maintaining the site much easier (i.e. no need to hack into PHP code to add a small functionality to a sidebar).

Lifehacker has updated a cool little utility Adam Pash has developed, called Swept Away.

Swept Away monitors your open windows, and whenever a window hasn’t been used for a user-defined number of seconds (default 300 = 5 minutes), it automatically minimizes the window. This not only helps you keep an uncluttered view of your desktop, but in some cases the minimized program actually uses less memory (think Firefox with the trim on minimize tweak).

The new version adds a user-defined monitoring interval (default 300 milliseconds), and some bug fixes.

Well, I just spent close to two days figuring out how to make the Progress Debugger to run in Windows Vista 64-bit.

When we first installed OpenEdge 10.0B on Vista, an error message popped up that the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Secure couldn’t be accessed. Since everything seemed to work OK, we didn’t pay much attention to it.

Until we tried to debug a program, and Progress informed us that we had to enable debugging. prodebugenable seems to do little more than change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Secure\ProDbgCK"C:\DLC100B” from “Debugging disabled” to “Debugging enabled”. A co-worker of mine, running Windows Vista 32-bit, simply pulled up the registry editor, and created the necessary keys.

When I did that in the 64-bit version, prodebugenable still complained it couldn’t access the registry key HKLMSoftwareSecure. Suspecting a rights issue, I installed a utility called subinacl, that allows to read and change the rights on registry keys. However, this utility also couldn’t find the registry key… and it’s a 32-bit program. Hmm.

It turns out that Vista employs a virtualization of the registry for 32-bit programs. There is a node called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node, under which 32-bit programs can create keys. It’s still a little black magic for me, but here are the steps I took to create the necessary keys and get the Progress Debugger to work:

1. Open a command shell, running as Administrator: find the cmd command, right-click on it, and select “Run as administrator”
2. Type the command
   reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node /v Secure
3. Type the command
   reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Secure /v ProDbgCK
4. Type the command
   reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Secure\ProDbgCK /v "C:\DLC100B.state" /d "Debugging disabled"
5. Verify the correctness of the keys by typing the command
   reg query HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Secure\ProDbgCK
6. It should show you the state key with the value “Debugging disabled”.
7. Now open the Proenv environment, also running as Administrator.
8. Type the command
   prodebugenable -enable-all
9. You should get the confirmation that debugging is now enabled.

After these steps, you can start using the debugger. If these steps don’t work, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

One drawback: if you’re running Aero in Vista, activating the debugger switches the theme to Windows Classic. It doesn’t switch back automatically…

Update 2/15/2019

I went through this article today, while installing Progress 10.0B05 under Windows 10 64-bit. A lot of the same problems, but when I tried to install SP5, I got a new error: “OpenEdge r10.0 installation corrupted: “DLC” registry key not found”. Several Progress KB articles address this issue, but only one gave a solution that worked:

Manually add the DLC string containing the path to the Progress OpenEdge install directory (%DLC%) to the Startup registry key:

For 32-bit OpenEdge installs on 32-bit Windows Servers / 64-bit OpenEdge installs on 64-bit Windows Servers:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PSC\PROGRESS\<version>\Startup

For 32-bit OpenEdge installs on 64-bit Windows Servers:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\PSC\PROGRESS\<version>\Startup

1. Start REGEDIT from the RUN command then navigate to the appropriate Startup registry key.
2. With the mouse on the Startup key press right mouse key and select New -> String Value.
3. Create a String value and call it DLC.
4. Then set the Value name: DLC and the Value data: (should be the path of the OpenEdge installation).

   Example:
   Value name: DLC
   Value data: C:\Progress\OpenEdge
   

5. Exit regedit.
6. Run setup.exe again to install the Service Pack.

After applying this registry key, the SP5 update went through and I now have a OpenEdge 10.0B05 version running on Windows 10.

Today WordPress 2.2 was released on the unsuspecting masses. It includes a couple of neat improvements (speed, Widgets included in the core, better comment moderation), and it looks like we’ll be moving to WP 2.2 this weekend.

So this Saturday, from about 9AM to 12PM, there will be intermittent outage on this website…

The reason the Apple store was down for maintenance? New MacBooks. Or, more accurately, the same MacBooks, but with a new processor.

Update: there’s a press release, describing the changes in more detail:

1. Faster Intel Core Duo processors (2.0GHz or 2.16GHz)
2. 1GB of memory
3. Larger hard drives (80, 120 or 160 GB)

Prices start at $1099 for the smallest model, and go up to $1499 for the (black) top-of-the-line model.

When I was browsing around the Apple site, and wanted to find out what the price for an 8GB iPod Nano was, I was presented with the “We’ll be back soon” page.

Apparently Apple is updating the store for a new product?

“We are busy updating the store for you and will be back shortly.”

Mid-may, too early for the iPhone, OS X doesn’t have an update due… I’m curious!

Ubuntu 7.04 (nicknamed “Feisty Fawn”) is officially released. The Ubuntu main page still mentions 6.10 as the latest version as of this moment, but you can download the various versions here. I’m 25% into the download now, and will let you know what it looks like in a bit.

I finally got a new computer at work. Actually, that was last Tuesday… It’s a nice machine, 2Gb RAM, Dual-core Intel, only 150GB hard disk (of which 15GB are reserved for the mysterious “recovery” partitions).

Before the machine arrived, I’d been thinking about how to transfer my old machine to the new one. A Virtual Machine would be great - transfer everything to the new screaming piece of metal, and ditch the old one. Especially since I came across VMWare’s Converter, this seemed like the way to go.

Unfortunately, nothing turned out to be easy. Several attempts of running Converter in different ways, from the target Vista machine, or from the old XP machine, always there was some kind of error. After struggling about 2 or 3 days, I decided it may be easier to make a backup of the old machine, create a minimal WinXP virtual machine from scratch, and restore everything to it. This seemed to work, with the exception that after rebooting an odd error about a PROCESSOR1 popped up. Tried the restore several times, with different WinXP installations, no go.

Finally gave up. And since I didn’t want to go through installing Windows again, I decided to set up the machine with Vista 64-bit. Our SysAdmin warned me about possible problems, but after struggling with transferring data for 5 days, I didn’t want to reinstall Windows any time soon.

So, as of last Saturday, I’m running Vista 64-bit. All seems well - so far only one program has been acting up (Above&Beyond 2006). I’ve got a little bit of a problem with printer drivers, but that is because SysAdmin didn’t install Vista-64 drivers on the servers.

I’m still setting up stuff, but for now all seems to be working. I’ll keep you posted!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Floola is a cross-platform applications to play music from your iPod on any computer. It is now up to beta 34, which adds podcast support. The only time a platform choice comes into play is when downloading the installer: there are packages for Linux, Windows (98 and up), and Mac OS X (10.2 and above).

The only problem is that DRM’ed tunes cannot be played. For that, we suggest using QT Fair Use.

Thanks to GHacks for the links.

As mentioned earlier, an initiative is going on to get an independent artist on the number 1 spot of the iTunes Music Store.

Today is the day. So go for it!

Josh Kuo has an interesting article about giving your old Linksys a new lease on life with the OpenWRT project. Some of the options after installing OpenWRT:

• Install asterisk
• VoIP
• router/firewall on steroids with nmap, snort, and tcpdump
• VPN with openvpn
• Wireless hotspot with chilispot, FreeRadius and WPA.
• All-purpose office server with DHCP, cups, lighthttpd, NTP

OpenWRT is not officially released - its current version is Release Candidate 6.

When Apple TV was launched, arguably the biggest complaint was that you couldn’t record your own shows with it. Now it seems Apple is thinking about doing a HD DVR, but the limitation seems to be the internal 40Gb hard disk.

Enter the USB ports on the Apple TV. What if you could hook up an external hard disk? Miglia seems to provide the functionality Apple is looking for. However, making iTunes recognize that external USB drive may means some serious software integration, and it wouldn’t be in Apple’s best interest to leave Miglia completely independent.

Sources: The Apple Blog, Blackfriars, and MaxDailyNews.

I just received notice (even though it was released March 13th…) that Miranda has done a minor upgrade from 0.6.7 to 0.6.8.

Miranda is an instant messenger with multiple protocol support, like AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Google Talk. Version 0.6.8 has a few bug fixes for AIM, Jabber (Google), and MSN support.

If you have never used Miranda, give it a try. It’s Windows only, but that’s OK - still stuck with a Windows workstation at work (oh how appropriate… oh well).

I think I confused Hardware and Software DEP in a recent post. The description of turning on Data Execution Prevention in the Performance option is Software DEP, as described by this Microsoft article.

Microsoft also has an article about turning on Hardware DEP, which, as Steve Gibson said in Security Now #78, can result in a system not booting because some 3rd party driver causes a DEP violation. So be careful when following the instructions, or wait for Steve’s DEPuty utility.

Most Windows XP users are unaware about a very powerful option included in Service Pack 2, called Hardware DEP support. DEP stands for Data Execution Protection, and can prevent many buffer overruns that plague Windows (and Linux, and Apple) software.

To activate hardware DEP, you need two things:

1. A processor that supports DEP
2. An operating system that implements DEP

Most processors produced in the last couple of years support it. However, most BIOSes turn DEP off by default! To find out if your system supports hardware DEP, Steve Gibson of Spinrite fame has written a small Windows utility called Secureable. This will show you processor bitlength, Hardware DEP support, and Hardware Virtualization support. I haven’t seen any utilities for Linux…

After determining that your processor supports Hardware DEP, you need to enable it. Reboot your computer, and go into the setup. Depending on the BIOS, this may or may not show up as an option. Dig around in the menus, but be careful not to turn any other options on or off besides Hardware DEP.

If your BIOS allows you to turn DEP on, reboot the computer again, and turn DEP on in Windows. It’s a little hidden, but I reached it as follows:

1. Right-click on My Computer and select Properties
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. In the Performance block, click on Settings.
4. Click on the Data Execution Prevention tab
5. Select the radio button Turn On DEP.

If any programs cause problems, you can add them to the exceptions list by pressing the Add button in the DEP tab, and adding the program name.

Warning! There are reports of Windows not being able to start after enabling DEP. Check out Steve Gibson’s Securable page for the status of his program DEPuty and links to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article on how to set up DEP.

However, since the advantages of DEP are pretty big, I suggest making a backup of your system and trying it out, despite the risks. If you are a little more conservative, wait until Steve finished DEPuty…

I just picked up a neat little utility called gSyncit. It’s a plugin for Outlook 2003 and higher (including Outlook 2007!), and synchronizes your Microsoft Outlook calendar with Google Calendar.

It seems to work pretty smooth. Just remember that your Google login name might contain @gmail.com… 🙂

For the past year or two I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, including Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code (and Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech and Security Now!). I’ve been lagging behind a bit, and just listened to the February 19th episode. In it, Adam mentions a great initiative from Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff (of Pacific Coast Hellway fame), called Bumrush The Charts.

The idea is to prove that podcasting can make an impact, and deserves more respect from the traditional media. So, on March 22nd, we’ll try to take an indie podsafe music artist (Black Lab) to number one on the iTunes singles charts as a demonstration of the power of podcasting.

Read more at the Bumrush The Charts blog, and make sure your iTunes credit is ready on March 22nd!

TiVo Lovers has an article describing a new feature of the TiVo, Amazon Unbox Video Downloads on Tivo. This service allows you to send Unbox content you get from Amazon (either purchased or as part of a special offer) directly to your TiVo, allowing you to watch it on your regular TV.

Not all content is available to be sent to your TiVo, but that probably will increase as this service takes off. Also, there currently is no way to order videos directly from your TiVo, but with the HME environment TiVo has opened the door to anyone to write an application that can do this.

If you register for the service by April 30th, you get $15 credit for movies and TV shows.

This coming weekend is the first time the DST in the US starts on the second weekend in March, as opposed to the first weekend in April. This is due to the passing of the Energy Policy Act in 2005. So, likely, anything written before 2005 is going to be FUBAR’ed this weekend…

Linux Watch has an informative article about the workings of DST on Linux-based systems, and pointers to how the various distributions are handling the changed DST. Ubuntu is missing from that list, but any of the Debian packages (they both point to the same version of the tzdata package) should work.

To verify your system is ready for this weekend’s time change, type in the following command:

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

If all is well, the first two lines should contain a March 11th date. Here’s the output of my system:

/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

If your output doesn’t contain the March 11th date, you need to run a standard update to make sure you have all the latest patches installed:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Run the zdump command again. If it still doesn’t show the March 11th date, you need to resort to the manual update described in the Linux Watch article, but the APT upgrade should take care of it.

Now get some rest. We’re losing an hour sleep this weekend, but at least the Ubuntu systems will hum along quite nicely.

This morning I was notified by the Apple updater that a new version of iTunes was available, version 7.1. Quoting from the Apple iTunes website:

Using iTunes 7.1, you can now enjoy your favorite iTunes movies, TV shows, music, and more from the comfort of your living room with Apple TV. iTunes 7.1 also supports a new full screen Cover Flow and improved sorting options to let you decide how iTunes should sort your favorite artists, albums, and songs.

The full-screen Cover Flow looks pretty neat, and is something I wanted to see before, to have iTunes display on a TV screen. If only they could incorporate music videos that I got in there as well…

Update: iLounge has an in-depth article with screenshots of the changes between iTunes 7.0 and 7.1.

Update 2: Nevermind my feature request - it’s already in there! Activate Cover Flow, and watch your videos play full-screen. When the video has ended, it returns to the Cover Flow album view. Way to go, Apple! 😉

Sorry if there was a short period where the website seemed to be in a state of flux - I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2. Pretty painless upgrade, Adsense 0.8 still works, WordPress DB Backup 1.7 has been replaced with a 2.0.1 version, Akismet was upgraded, and WP Cron was retired (the new WordPress has a semi-cron version).

The only plugin not carried forward seems to be Digg This 1.0 - but I don’t think I got it working in the old version either, so no big loss there.

Please post a comment if you find anything working strange in the new system, and have fun!

Google announced the latest development in their Google Apps product, Premier. It also updates the standard Google Apps with a new service, Docs and Spreadsheets.

I’ve set up our family’s domain (bruintjes.us) on Google Apps a couple of weeks ago, getting GMail to our domain, and some shared stuff thrown into the mix. It requires some fiddling with the Domain Name settings of your domain, but the Google help files are great.

The Google Apps Premier product adds bigger mailboxes (10GB), single sign-on support, Email gateway, Email whitelist, no ads displayed on Google services, and access to Google partners. It will be free until April 30th, after that it will be $50 per user per year.

I think Premier is a serious Windows Office contender. At a price of $50/user/year, if you have a small-medium business with 100 users, you can run a mail server, web server, calendar, and collaboration environment for $5000 per year, without having to buy any hardware or hire any support personnel (Google provides the support, and the hardware).

The only drawback is that your office is dead when your internet (or Google’s) goes down, but then again, some businesses depend so heavily on reliable internet connections that that is the case nowadays as well.

Well, our wiki server is up and running, and cyclops is humming along. However, it seems a little sluggish and it turns out Backup Exec is backing it up at the tremendous transfer rate of 2MB per minute….

That’s kind of slow. Backing up all of the server will take about 16 hours that way. And it is something in that machine, because the old test server (a HP XW4200) is reaching about 300+MB per minute in the same setup. I’m thinking that it is a network card issue, but I’m not sure what to do to solve it. So, I’ve started a thread in the Ubuntu forums, with little response so far. Basically I’m answering my own question… 🙂

If anyone has any experience with setting up Ubuntu or Debian or Linux on the Proliant M370, feel free to leave a comment…

Oh, and don’t add the option options e100 e100\_speed\_duplex=4 to /etc/modprobe.d/options - your machine will take forever to boot up to a prompt, and it will not enable the network card. Apparently that’s not a valid option for my card or driver…

As I mentioned before, we’ve set up an Ubuntu server with Apache, MySQL, and PHP, to run, amongst other things, a wiki (in our case DokuWiki). For some reason the main page was working fine, but any other pages were showing up as var_www_vhosts_wiki.medeco.com_whatever.

After some frustrating searches around the Web, I finally figured out what I did wrong. Here are the steps I took:

1. Set up Virtual Hosts in Apache:
2. Create the directory for your virtual domain under the vhosts directory
3. Create a file in /etc/apache2/sites-available with the same name as your virtual domain, containing the following:

    <VirtualHost wiki.medeco.com>
      ServerName wiki.medeco.com
      ServerAlias wiki
      DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web
      ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-error.log
      CustomLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-access.log common
      RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-rewrite.log
      <Directory /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web>
        Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteRule ^_media/(.*) lib/exe/fetch.php?media=$1 [QSA,L]
        RewriteRule ^_detail/(.*) lib/exe/detail.php?media=$1 [QSA,L]
        RewriteRule ^$ doku.php [L]
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
        RewriteRule (.*) doku.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]
      </Directory>
    </VirtualHost>
   

4. Create a symbolic link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled, pointing to your virtual domain config file in sites-available:
   ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wiki.medeco.com /etc/apache2/sites-enables/001-wiki.medeco.com
5. Touch your local DokuWiki config file:
   sudo touch /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web/conf/local.php
6. Restart Apache by entering
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

A couple of weeks ago Adobe released Flash 9 for Linux. I’ve looked around the net a bit to find instructions for installing it in Ubuntu, but some were pretty obscure (download the .rpm, convert it to .deb with alien, install the .deb package, ignoring the errors, etc.), and most were still for the beta player.

Luckily Adobe made it very easy: the tar.gz package includes an installer, and you can either install it only for the current user, or system-wide.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Download the .tar.gz archive from here
2. Unpack it locally by issuing the command
   tar zxvf install\_flash\_player\_9\_linux.tar.gz
3. Go to the newly created directory:
   cd install\_flash\_player\_9\_linux
4. The Readme.txt file is your best source of information, and you should check it in case anything has changed. Basically it tells you to run flashplayer-installer.
5. If you want to do a system-wide installation, run
   sudo ./flashplayer-installer
   If you want to do an installation for the current user only, just use
   ./flashplayer-installer
   I did a system-wide install - if you do it for current user only, I assume the prompts are similar, it just wants to know your local plugin directory.
6. The installer will tell you in which mode you are running (system-wide or current user), and then prompt you to either press CTRL-C to abort, or ENTER to continue
7. The only question asked for the system-wide installation is the directory that Firefox is installed in. Answer /usr/lib/firefox.
8. The installer will summarize what it will do, and then asks you to proceed. Type y.
9. You’re done! Tell the installer that you don’t want to do another install.

Pretty straightforward, and very similar to the original Flash Player 7 install that I did. So far it seems to be running fine!

Last Friday our first ‘official’ Linux server went live at work. It’s a 6.06 LAMP server installation, which was remarkably smooth. The main problem was trying to figure out why the Compaq Proliant ML370 would hang after pretty much the first line on the screen (unpacking the kernel) and giving a cryptic 4294672.157000 error message. It turns out there is a problem with the APIC support in Ubuntu 6.06, and adding the option noapic on the command line before the last - is the solution.

The rest of the installation was like I said remarkably smooth. We’re setting up a Wiki on the server, and transferring it from our Fedora Core 4 testserver was pretty easy (it would have been real easy if I’d remembered to fix some hard coded paths).

Next steps are setting up a virtual webserver, so we can access the site as wiki.medeco.com, and enhancing the security… 🙂

I’m thinking about upgrading my (slightly aging) Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10. However, some horror stories have been floating around the ‘net warning of the impeding disasters…

Regardless of that, Steps to Upgrading Ubuntu To The Next Release : Ubuntu (6.06.1 / 6.10) describes the steps necessary to upgrade your Ubuntu distribution to the next release, without downloading a CD or DVD directly.

As soon as I have a solid backup, I think I’ll give it a try…

This article was promoted to the Digg front page recently: Using your iPod on Linux. At first I was excited - maybe there is some useful information in this article!

Unfortunately, it turns out to be a simple three step article, showing how to install gtkpod, how to start it, and how to sync your music between gtkpod and your iPod. The comments point out some of the shortcomings, like video files, purchasing from the iTunes Music Store, etc.

I’m staying with Banshee for now!

Another missing piece in the list of applications that I found essential seems to have been resolved: Banshee Music Player is replaced iTunes.

The version that is included with the standard Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is version 0.10, and although pretty good, I desperately missed the podcast support. Using iPodder to get the podcasts and import them into Banshee was a short-term solution - I don’t like doing repetative tasks by hand… 🙂

On the Banshee website was mention of version 0.11.3, which came out earlier this month, with support for Podcasts..! Since I had a little bit of trouble trying to install some of the plug-ins (missing libraries and utilities), I was a little wary to install 0.11.3 from scratch, until I found this excellent How-To on getting all the prerequisites, the source code itself, and all compilation/installation instructions!

It takes a while to get through them all (depending on how many libraries you already have installed), and I had two hiccups (#1 was during Step 1, I had to use libsgutil1 and libsgutils1-dev with Ubuntu 6.06 instead of libsgutils and libsgutils-dev, #2 was during the configuration of ipod-sharp - I needed to install the mono-gac package).

I just fired it up, and seems to work OK! I just added 6 feeds to the podcast module, and I’ll update the episodes a little later. For now, great stuff, and thansk to the folks at Banshee for creating the cool application, and GameGod of Linux Revolution for the great How To!

I ran across a new file sharing site, called divShare. It claims it’s a free file hosting service for everyone, no registration required - but if you register, you get access to the ‘advanced’ options.

Apparently there is no file size limit, and no limit on the time a file can be stored there. Is this the perfect backup site for your hard disk (although you may want to encrypt your backup…)?

I’m a man of my word…

Unfortunately, we got ourselves a little puppy November the 19th. Daisy is now 16 weeks old, and a serious handful. She’s halfway potty-trained (although last night we had a stumper - after walking her for 10 minutes, she comes in and pees on the floor… oh well…), and happy to chew on anything you put in front of her. We were hoping on starting her puppy training last Monday, but unfortunately that class got canceled. Luckily PetSmart has some classes as well, amongst them a puppy class starting tonight.

All this means that pretty much all the plans I’d made for the week of Thanksgiving got canceled. I’ve been planning on setting up a website for the Foresight User Group at www.foresightug.com, teach myself PHP, and try and get a Wii, but no such luck. But I can’t complain - even though sometimes you can strangle a puppy, Daisy’s saving grace is that she’s so cute.

On our home automation front not a lot has changed. I finally added a little qualifier in one of our MisterHouse scripts, to prevent our lights from going to 50% at 10PM if we’ve turned them off, and changed the schedule around a little bit to allow for 30 minutes puppy time in the morning. The MisterHouse Wiki seems to be doing great - I get a couple of update notices per day.

And that’s pretty much it. Hopefully we’ll have some more time on our hands after Christmas, but I hope to be able to post something before that.

Cheers!

So, on September 30th, I write this post making all kinds of excuses why I haven’t posted in a while, and that I’ll do better. And of course, now I feel like crap, since I haven’t done better.

Therefore, no more excuses, and I’m going to schedule time every day to at least pick a top story I’ve read that day to blog about.

And if I don’t… well… sorry..?

TiVo announced in a press release today that the newest version of their Desktop software, TiVo Desktop Plus 2.4, will allow users to convert any (free) video from formats such as QuickTime, Windows Media Video, and MPEG-4, into the format used by TiVo for playing recordings.

The software will be a one-time purchase of $24.95, and will be a free upgrade to owners of 2.3. The TiVo Desktop page doesn’t show the new version yet, but I assume this is the page it will appear on.

Depending how automated this is, this will finally allow me to watch the video podcast diggnation on our TV!

That was an interesting three weeks. Without any posts to the blog.

First reason was my mom coming over for almost two weeks. She’s from the Netherlands (as am I originally), and visits almost every year. It’s always fun to have her over, but it’s also very tiresome - apart from doing my day job, I now have a second job as tour guide of the area, and a third job as translator. She’s home now though, safe and sound.

Second reason was my wife (and me!) having to make several trips to a fertility doctor in North Carolina. It’s only about a two hour drive away, but added on to the tour guide and translator jobs, this started to wear me out.

Third reason is a project at work, being several months in the making, decided to go into testing phase. Of course some bugs appear, which need to be fixed sooner than ASAP.

And of course all this happens in a period with exciting stuff going on:

• TiVo releases the Series 3. And it’s on sale. Very expensive though. And some problems with CableCards (long live our cable companies).
• The release date for the Nintendo Wii is announced (November 19, 2006). And it’s price ($249). It still looks pretty exciting, and I hope I can convince my sweetheart I need one…
• I caved and bought a Nintendo DS. First of all because of the cool game Brain Age. And second of all because there seems to be interaction between the Wii and the DS (wireless).

Apart from that, lots of new exciting stuff is happening at home itself. Ubuntu is getting a strong foothold here, and I’ll tell more about the 4 things I needed to be able to do. So far I’ve been able to do 2 1/2… We might be getting a dog, so there goes that free time. But more about those things in a different post.

Google Reader has changed their look. And it’s a big improvement.

Big change I see is the categories you can put your feeds in, and you can read them by category. That’s the one big thing I missed when I switched from bloglines.
It has the same setup as GMail: you can have All Items, Starred Items, etc. etc.
You can list all your subscriptions, or list only the ones that have updated items.

It looks like it is still in “Labs” status, but I feel they’re ready to make it “Beta” 🙂

Don’t tell your wife that with Labor Day weekend, you’ll have plenty of time. She’ll cheerfully make sure you don’t… 🙂

It’s not as bad as it sounds here: we were talking about the weekend, and my dear wife mentioned that if I had some time, could I take a look at why her computer was so slow. Sure!

I first checked for the usual suspects, spyware, adware etc. Spybot S&D is up to version 1.4 now, and AdAware is still going strong. Neither one found anything. Then I checked the hard disk space. The disk was about 80% used, which prompted me to do a disk clean up. That helped a bit, but not much. Maybe defrag? Why not? (Well, because it takes forever, that’s why not).

No success. Then I remembered reading an article about the hard disk controller being stuck in PIO mode, even though I’m pretty sure her computer has Ultra-DMA (it seems to have found a controller for it). A quick check, and sure enough, the primary IDE channel had switched to PIO modem. Some digging (haha) around found the article by James Barton. It describes a step-by-step on how to fix this problem, and prevent it from happening again. Just because blogs sometimes disappear, I’ve copied the steps below:

1. Open up the Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlClass{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
3. There are several sub-keys under this one, such as 0000, 0001, etc. You are interested in two of them that say Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel.
4. Make the following changes to both of those keys:
5. Delete any attributes named MasterIdDataCheckSum or SlaveIdDataCheckSum. This resets the tracking for errors that Windows uses to determine when the transfer mode should be lowered.
6. Add an attribute with the name ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess and a DWORD value of 1. This tells Windows that it should lower the transfer mode when there are six consecutive
   errors instead of six cumulative errors.
7. If they exist, set the following keys to a hexadecimal value of ffffffff (eight F’s). This
   will change the transfer modes to UltraDMA-6:
   • MasterDeviceTimingMode
   • MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
   • SlaveDeviceTimingMode
   • SlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed
   • UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
   • UserSlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed
8. Reboot your computer and check the devices to see if they are set to UltraDMA Mode 6.

Reading through some of the comments, you need to check the BIOS to make sure it’s setup to support DMA for the hard disks (another article states that Dell is known to turn this off - guess what, my wife has a Dell…), and it is prudent to make a backup before mucking around with these settings.

So I guess I’ll be making a backup today, and see if there’s anything I can do about that DMA mode…

Update: I just finished backing up and modifying the parameters, and her machine sure is a whole lot snappier. As a test I ran iTunes playing her music library, and starting up both Firefox and Thunderbird. The sound didn’t hiccup once. Thanks James!

Of course, after finally breaking down last night and installing Codeweaver’s CrossOver Office to install iTunes, today I see this article in Linux Journal on how to use your iPod with Ubuntu.

The article shows a few options to sync music, and also explains how to sync photos and change the default application that’s opened when you plug in the iPod.

A worthwhile read, and something to try out tonight…

I came across this little gizmo the other day. I’m not quite sure what it is, as the makers decided they wouldn’t mark it as an alarm clock, or a radio, or anything like that. They marked it as a Chumby.

Apparently this is the next generation of alarm clocks/photo frames/whatchamacallits. It’s a small computer, with a screen about the size of an iPod screen, sound capabilities, and a “squeeze sensor”. It’s capable of doing “anything you can think of” - as of today the most popular widgets include a Digital Clock (imagine that!), a Flickr photo viewer, Google News, and a ShamuCam.

The product is not available to the general public, but the company (Chumby Industries) is asking for developers and crafters, and offering them beta-versions of the product. They’re shooting for a retail price of $150 or less - about the price of one of those glowing orbs. But it sure looks like the Chumby has much more to offer than an orb showing a few different colors.

Wired magazine has an article summing up the pros and cons of CableCard technology. CableCards are essential to the TiVo Series 3 (it sports 2 CableCard slots), and a recent federal appeals court ruling requires cable companies to support them.
In short:
Advantages:

• No cable box needed
• Can be sent through mail
• No need for kludges like an IR blaster

Disadvantages:

• One-way system (although CC 2.0 fixes that)

I’m curious to see when Charter… er.. SuddenLink starts to support CableCards…!

Slowly but surely I’m getting to a working Ubuntu workstation. Tonight I finally made some time to set up the VPN connection - thereby freeing myself from lugging a Windows laptop to and from work every day…

Instrumental in setting this up were two websites: PattonCentral (describing his experiences on setting up version 4.6 and 4.8 of the Cisco VPN Client), and popey.com, which is the actual step-by-step instructions (although they are for version 4.6 - version 4.8 doesn’t need the patching as described).

After that, starting the VPN client was simple, and by using the built-in Terminal Server Client I was able to access my work desktop computer. For the connection protocol: RDP works, but RDPv5 works better if you’re using lots of Windows keys.

Next step - bloody iPod synchronization (still haven’t quite figured out gtkPod…).

In the Google Talk blog, Lewis Lin announces that plans are underway to “explore interoperability” between Google Talk and Skype. The press release is here.

Since they seem to be in the exploratory stages, it may be some time before we actually see the product on the market. It will also be interesting to see how the interoperability is achieved, since Google Talk uses Jabber/XMPP, which is pretty open, and Skype uses a completely proprietary protocol. My guess is Skype will incorporate the Jabber/XMPP to allow to talk to Google Talk, and to any other client that uses the same protocol. That way, they don’t have to open up their internal protocol to their competitor Google (Skype being owned by eBay, Google developing their own payment system to compete with PayPal, etc.).

A rumor is spreading that the new TiVo HD PVR Series 3 will be announced September 12th and will be available September 13th.
Matt Haughey of PVRblog noticed two comments, one on one of his articles and one on the Engadget article with the pictures of the Series 3, stating this. However, despite extensive searches, these are the only claims made to that effect. When Matt posted an article describing the rumor, the poster who posted the rumor-comment revealed himself as MK153, working at Best Buy.
Apparently he has found a reference to the Series 3 in the Best Buy inventory system. It shows an In-Stock date of 9/17/2006, showing Best Buy SKU’s and UPC codes, and a price of $799.99.
How an In-stock date of 9/17 translates to an available date of 9/13 isn’t clear… if this rumor is true, that is great news, but there is the possibility it is just that - a rumor…

I’m trying it - again. Maybe this time Linux Desktop is ready for me.

After reading all the good reviews on Ubuntu Linux, I’ve decided to switch. Taking stock of the applications that I use on a regular basis that are not linked to web browsing or E-mail:

• Quicken
• Cisco VPN
• iTunes
• TiVo Desktop

The day before I was going to make the actual switch we were browsing through a bookstore and I ran across Ubuntu Hacks, a book with 100 tips and tricks for beginners and experts. It had some interesting hacks in there that I could apply, most notably a step by step on installing several virtual machines.
After looking through some of the descriptions I decided on VMWare Server. This is a free download, and an amazing product. As opposed to the Windows Virtual machine, I didn’t have any issues with the Windows Genuine Advantage tool installation. Plus I love the fact that I now have an image of Windows that is completely pristine, no applications installed, that I can use to rebuild a Windows machine in minutes.
Installing Quicken was a bit of challenge, since I misplaced my installation disk. Once located, it was a breeze.
I haven’t installed anything else yet, since it’s the thick of summer down here, and yardwork and relaxation are also important, but I can’t wait to get my hands back on the box.

Engadget has an article with pictures of the new series 3 TiVo in beta test. Still very beta (it doesn’t seem to have TivoToGo), but it seems to sport 2 CableCARDs. Can’t wait to get my hands on one of those babies once they are released!

The Google Talk blog announced that Google Talk has been updated. If you’re using Google Talk now, it should automatically update over the next few days. If you can’t wait or are a new user. you can download it here.
File sharing is done by dropping one or more files onto a chat window. These files can been regular files, but also photos or music. If you drop photos on the chat window, it will show smaller previews of the photos immediately. And you’re not limited to just files - you can share whole folders.
Voicemail is pretty standard: if the person you’re trying to reach isn’t there to answer, you can leave a voicemail message instead. Interesting is that the voicemail is sent as an email attachement to them, so they can listen to the voicemail whenever they check their email.
Music Status and Music Trends allow Google Talk to show what you’re currently listening to, and submits that information to Google Music Trends. Whenever your song in one of the supported players (currently iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Yahoo Music Engine) changes, Google Talk changes too.
Interesting new features - I’ll definately play around a bit with the new Google Talk!

Several sources report this morning that a federal court in Texas has ordered EchoStar to halt the use and sale of several of its digital video recorders after a jury has ruled that EchoStar infringes on a TiVo patent (US Patent No. 6,233,389, issued to TiVo in May 2001, known as the “Time Warp” patent).
EchoStar is seeking to block the permanent injunction while it launched an appeal. If the injunction remains in effect, it would require EchoStar to turn off many DVRs used by its Dish Network customers within the next 30 days.

Ron Klinkien has set up a Wiki called MisterHouse from Scratch, where he describes his experiences with setting up the Home Automation software MisterHouse.
He describes all the steps he had to take, the tips and tricks he learned along the way, and a lot of under-the-hood details on how to configure Linux, MisterHouse and several accessories he attached to his Home Automation box.
A very interesting read for anyone interested in Home Automation, and a must for anyone setting up MisterHouse.

Via Gizmodo I came across the Asus Wl-700gE, a remarkable router.

• Built-in 160GB Harddrive
• USB 2.0 connections for external hard drive or thumb drives
• Efficient heat dissipation via special airflow design
• Plug in a USB memory device and use easy file transfer with AUTO COPY
• Support for sharing files (also music, video and/or photos!) both within and outside the network - the last with special accounts you can set up.
• DDNS support and Web server
• DHCP server + Samba Server/Local disk
• Automatic download of files - even with the PC off. Supports BitTorrent, http and ftp protocols.
• Digital Home Information Center - even supports music files via iTunes - making it possible to use the WL-700gE as iTunes “server”.
• Support to build web pages on the router.
• Supports 802.11b/g - no word on 802.11n support.
• The Broadrange aspect increases signal coverage by 300%

Unfortunately no word on prices yet… but this looks an awesome piece of equipment. It doesn’t look bigger than a regular router, but it packs a lot more punch.
Update: The Gizmodo article has a link to the Ubergizmo article, where it mentions a price of $500.

On August 3rd, Apple announced that Ford, General Motors and Mazda, will include iPod connections on most 2007 models. This means they join the likes of Honda, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz, which already sport these connections.
This means you don’t have to resort to a tape-deck or FM radio adapter anymore. Plus you will be able to control the iPod from your regular audio controls, making it more convenient and safer than having the iPod laying around in a cup holder.
This means I’m definately going to hold off on buying a new car until the 2007 models come out… 🙂
Thanks to Business Week for breaking the news.

Lifehacker has an excellent tip on how to remove typo’s you’ve made in web forms:
Wait for the drop-down box to appear, move to the offending entry, and press SHIFT and DELETE at the same to remove it.
Thanks Gina!

My cellphone provider, Verizon Wireless, has finally done something cool: they released a GPS navigator application on their Get It Now platform.
This application, VZ Navigator, can perform pretty much the same functions as a GPS unit:

• Tell you where you are
• Tell you how to get from where you are to your destination
• Show you Places of Interest in your vicinity, and how to get there

And when I say Tell, it actually talks you through the directions: there is a female and a male voice available to guide you to your destination.
It also shows the next upcoming direction change as big as your screen can handle, plus the distance to the direction change. The screen changes layout depending on where you are: on the Interstate and highways it shows you the next intersection or exit, on local roads it shows you how to turn and what the name of the street is.
It works pretty simple: choose your destination, either by selecting one of your Favorites, choosing a result from the local search list, or by typing in an address. When you select Navigation, the navigator immediately starts giving you directions.
I’ve used it from the Verizon store to home, between home and work, and from home to the store, and there are few surprises. The most annoying factor is that the map (and to be honest about every on-line route planner) thinks our street is one continous street, while in fact it consists of two distinct parts. This results in a lot of directions trying to guide you over a field of grass… However, when you don’t follow the directions, the system quickly recovers, telling you it’s recalculating the route and picks up from your new location.
The service is free for 30 days, after that it is about $10 a month. Which beats most GPS units (at least the ones I was looking at). Undoubtedly the full-blown GPS units have more options and certainly a larger screen, but this is a nice way to get used to having a navagiation system with you.
It’s not available for all phones, but the Verizon website has a list of units VZ Navigator supports, plus a nice demo.

Just a reminder for all users out there: hug your sysadmin tomorrow. July 29th is System Administrator Appreciation Day.
Although in every day life I’m a programmer, I also manage a Linux server running a Wiki (amongst other things), two HP-UX machines that run our main databases (although I might be considered more of an operator/victim there), and of course several computers at home. So I feel connected to SysAdmin Day, in a small way.
A shout-out to the guys at Blogger, who have kept this blog and thousands of others running. Thanks guys.
And to all the SysAdmins who keep the websites I visit on a daily basis running: Digg, SlashDot, The Dilbert Blog, Lifehacker, Wired, and last but not least the Shawn Hogan Fan Club.
Happy SysAdmin Day!

Zatznotfunny has an installation page for CableCARDs in the upcoming TiVo Series 3 receivers. Also on the page is an excerpt from a letter from TiVo to the FCC and cable operators, informing them of the capability of the Series3 to accept up to two CableCARDs, and that the product is currently being test and will be generally available soon.
If only Charter Communications would make the CableCARD available in our area (southwest Virginia)…:)

Wow. That sucked.
Today I ran across an announcement that Microsoft Virtual PC was available for free. Since I need to install a new release of some software, and didn’t want to risk my main machine, I thought Virtual PC would be nice. And it is. Right up until you want to run Windows Updates.
After going through some updates for the checker, the Windows update decided it was time to validate my Windows installation with Windows Genuine Advantage. Which failed miserably. Several times. With an error code 0x80242006.
Before you accuse me of piracy, this is an Enterprise copy, installed on all our machines at work (and as you can tell by the posting time, I’m at work…). This morning one of the admins used that same copy to install and update a regular machine. So it must be something with the VirtualPC.
It turns out I’m not the only one: a quick google for 0x80242006 resulted in about 86 hits. The top one (www.mydigitallife.info) immediately sent me to the right site to download the Windows Genuine Advantage update directly. Yeah, I know this link is to an executable. It seems to be safe though.
After installing this update, all seems well. I’m actually continuing the installation now, and dreading the upgrade from SP1 to SP2 in a Virtual PC…

In anticipation of the celebration of Independence Day, I ran across this post from Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy), concerning the subjects currently before Congress.
You may want to keep an eye on where your fireworks are, and where they land - before you know it you’re a terrorist!
And now back to home automation…

I just ran across the Pandora music player… Wow.

The idea is to identify a song or artist that you like, and by using the Music Genome Project Pandora tries to identify similar songs and artists. You can guide it by saying you like a certain song or dislike it, you can prevent songs from being played for a month or so, etc.

The whole player is browser-based (it uses Flash), and has a lot of neat little features (like a progress bar underneath the album cover for the song, and cool little animations when you provide song feedback).

This is a free service that shows and displays ads, or you can subscribe to an ads-free version for $3-4 a month depending on the subscription plan.

Well, it’s been about a month now that we’ve been using the Actiontec Internet Phone Wizard with Skype, and it seems to be working OK.

My wife has used it for a couple of long-distance calls to family in the States, and some of those calls last up to 1 1/2 hours (she’s a professional talker…). I’ve used it to call family overseas, and the only complaints we’ve heard is the occasional stutter in the speech, and on one overseas call there was a hollow sound to the phone call.

The hardest thing is to remember to set up a speed dial code for a long-distance phone number - meaning there is a limit of 100 numbers you can set up as well. An incidental call cannot be made without setting up a speed dial code - unless I missed something in the documentation.

One gripe about the setup is that you have to be logged in to Windows to use the Phone Wizard and Skype. It would be nice to run this all as a service or something. For now, I think I have to resort to an automatic login (I remember seeing an option for that in Windows XP somewhere).

All in all, I like the Phone Wizard. There is room for improvement, but the quality is good, and you can’t be the cost of Skype…!

Google has once again launched a new service, called Picasa Web Albums. This is Google’s answer to Flickr and Yahoo! Photo’s, integrated with the Picasa software running on your desktop.

Interestingly enough, this is not touted as Beta, but rather as…

The only limitation (apart from it being invitation-only) is that the storage space is limited to 250MB of free storage. For $25 per year you can get an additional 6GB of storage. The system requirements section leaves out the fact that Picasa is also available for Linux.

It looks like an interesting alternative, and I’ll definately sign up for an invitation. I like the Picasa software, and even got my wife to use it, so this would be a natural extension of the photo experience.

Well, after receiving the Internet Phone Wizard (sometimes referred to as VoSKY, but made by Actiontec), I managed to find some time today to hook it up. Amazingly simple!

The whole adapter is a small box with two phone line hookups and one USB connector. The USB connector goes to the computer (USB1.1 or USB2.0), one phone hookup goes to your analog phone handset, and optionally one phone hookup goes to your phone line. With this last line hooked up, you can make both Skype and regular calls, and your handset will ring when someone calls your regular phone number.

I decided to first install it on my regular PC, which has a 1.4GHz AMD and plenty of memory.

The installation steps for the Internet Phone Wizard are

1. Install Skype
2. Add a contact
3. Assign a speed-dial number for your contacts
4. Connect your phone to the Internet Phone Wizard’s phone port
5. Connect the USB port on the Internet Phone Wizard to your computer
6. Insert the installation CD into your computer when Windows XP detects the device
7. Choose Install software automatically, and ignore the warning that the software hasn’t passed Windows Logo testing.
8. Register the software
9. Allow the Internet Phone Wizard to use Skype.

… Oh, I forgot to mention this only works with Windows XP or Windows 2000…? Sorry, Mac and Linux users…

All in all, the installation took a little under 10 minutes, mainly because I had to hunt for a handset. A few test calls later, I’m thoroughly impressed with the sound quality: indistinguishable from a regular phone call.

Next up was a lowly Dell with a 450MHz P4. Same painless installation, but I was a little worried about the processor in there. It turns out I worried for no reason (something that has happened to me before): the call quality on the Dell was identical to the AMD!

Combined with the free SkypeOut in the US and Canada, this is a winner. The unit cost me a little over $50 including shipping, and seems to work perfectly.

The only drawback is that apparently I need to add SkypeOut contacts to my dial list, and assign a speed dial number. The ##00-1-xxx-xxx-xxxx sequence described in the manual doesn’t seem to work… A small price to pay for cheap calls!

Most everybody has heard by now that Skype has free calling within the US and Canada, until the end of 2006. I’ve been toying with the idea to get a Vonage or Skype setup at home, and this was the tipping point. Good call, Skype… 🙂

To make everything work as seemless as possible, I’ve also ordered the VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard. This little gizmo should make it possible to use both Skype and regular POST lines with our cordless phone. The VoSKY should be coming in today or tomorrow, and I’ll post my experiences with it ASAP.

I can’t believe it is 6 months since I last posted anything…

Things have been moving along in home automation land, and I’ll definately start blogging a little more about it.

Sorry for the hiatus - we’re back though!

This may not be directly related to home automation, but sure as hell save a lot of mouse miles a year…

Launchy allows you to launch programs quickly, by pressing ALT+Spacebar, and typing the first few characters of the program you’re trying to launch. It can be skinned, you can add all kinds of extensions to the index (think mp3’s or avi’s - quickly launch your music or movies!), and is available for Windows, Linux and OSX.

Think Secret has an interesting article on Apple’s road to a Media Center.

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0511macmini2.html

Videora has created this tutorial on how to convert DVDs or standard videos to the iPod format. They use DVD Decrypter to import the DVD and their own Videora Converter to convert the video file to iPod format.

The iLounge forum has two discussions/tutorials, one for Windows, one for Mac users.

Oh, by the way, Videora also has a tool to convert your home movies to TiVo format.

James Poniewozik has an interesting article about an alternative pricing structure: how about paying a premium to watch the show before anybody else? Pay twice the price to see the show one day before the show airs on regular TV.

This is very similar to ordering PPV movies: you’ll see it before anyone sees on the networks, but you’ll see it later than anyone who paid the premium to go to the movie theatre. And amidst the clamor from record companies to provide different pricing structures for no other reason than that some music is in higher demand than others, this actually makes sense: knowing one day earlier than everybody else what happenes on Lost might be worth an extra $2 to some people. Think about Survivor: the value of the episode diminishes in value after it has been broadcast on the networks, so some people might even pay $5 or $6 for the ‘Inside Scoop’ on the next person voted off.

I should get started earlier on Mondays… Several sources have reported that TiVo is going to support transfers to video iPods and Sony PSP’s. A beta is available starting today, and a general release is scheduled for early next year.

The downside is that the transfer process is far from fast - apparently TiVo suggests syncing overnight. Add to that the time to transfer your shows from the TiVo to your PC, and this may take a while. I suspect that the added copyright-measures (apparently the video transferred to your iPod will include a digital watermark) is largely responsible for the slow process… maybe they’ll be able to improve that by next year.

With the holiday season just around the corner, Apple is set to introduce three new iPod models, according to this presentation.

(In case you didn’t notice, that’s Saturday Night Live footage. It may not be entirely correct… thanks to iLounge for this reference).

I just received an e-mail message from TiVo, announcing an exclusive preview for TiVo Rewards members. The preview is part of the tests that TiVo has been doing over the last couple of months where content is downloaded to your TiVo.

The movie is actually an advanced screening of Tai Seng Entertainment’s “Red Trousers”, a “documentary about the lives and training of Hong Kong martial arts and movie stuntmen. Directed by Robin Shou, this film is an engaging look behind the scenes of the training and culture from which stars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and MATRIX choreographer Yuen Wo Ping got their start.”

When you go to www.tivo.com/redtrousers, and sign up for the movie, it says it will download the movie around November 23rd to your TiVo.

Even though the deal with NetFlix seems to have fallen through, TiVo keeps exploring new options, and it looks like this is a step towards downloading movies on demand.

Information Week has a review about TiVo in your Pocket, describing how to transfer your TiVo recordings to a PocketPC. Unfortunately, my trusty old iPAQ only has 64Mb, so there’s very little room for video’s. Let’s see if we can convince the wife we need more memory..:)

Apparently a day earlier than everybody expected (Tuesday instead of Wednesday) Google Talk was released. It is a beta IM/Voicechat client, but it has some interesting potential as witnessed by question 15 on the FAQ:

1. What new features are you working on?

We could tell you, but then you’d have to promise to not talk about it… Joking aside, Google Talk is still in beta, and we’re working hard to add features and make improvements. We’re just not quite ready yet to reveal the other cool things we’ve got planned. We can say this, though: we believe strongly in user choice and open standards, and we are committed to letting users access Google Talk using the client and platform of their choice, as well as to enabling our users to talk with users from other service providers.

We also want to keep making Google Talk better and we want your ideas and feedback to help make this happen! Talk to us using the Help link in the Google Talk interface. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’d really like.

This leads me to believe that Google Talk is more than just the client: it will be an API that anybody can tie into. Also, this may be the end of any rumours that Google is buying Skype: they’ll just make their own Skype…

Engadget has a few pictures of a new feature on TiVo, the TiVo Download. It resembles the enhanced advertisements we have now, and it resembles the download of a program from another box. I’m anxiously awaiting this update!

I’ve had my iPod for a month or two now, and I love the fact that I can listen to “radio shows” (also known as podcasts) whenever and whereever I want to. Almost immediately after I got the iPod I went out and bought a cassette adapter from Philips at Wal-mart for about $10. It works great (once I figured out that turning the volume way up on the iPod is much better than turning up the volume on the radio - the radio picks up the noise from the cassette adapter), but last week I was in two vehicles that didn’t have a cassette player. So I was SOL and PO’d…

I started looking at some FM radio tuner - since most cars still have a radio (but for how long…?). Two of them struck me as good products: the Griffin iFM and the DLO TransPod.

The iFM has besides the radio tuner two cool options: remote control and recording. The remote control looks pretty standard (play, pause, forward, volume, etc), but the recording has two options: record through a built-in microphone, or record the radio. Plus the little remote looks damn sleek. It sells for about $50.

The TransPod also has two cool options besides the tuner: it charges the iPod through one of your vehicle’s power adapters, and it has an adjustable mounting arm. It sells for about $100 (although I’ve seen them online for as low as $75 - new).

It’s a hard choice, but I think I’ll be going with the TransPod. I’m spending enough time in the car to make it worthwile, and I’m not going to be podcasting anytime soon - so the recording feature is lost on me.

TivoTool is a TivoToGo program for Mac OS X and Linux users. On the Mac it seems to integrate very nicely with iTunes (I don’t think it will do the same on Linux… 🙂 ). It does require you to ‘hack’ your Tivo by applying a couple of patches and installing vserver on your box… so if you’re not ready for that, wait for the official release of TivoToGo for Mac (which may not be that far away - considering Tivo is trying to hire a Mac programmer).

Skyllian is a Skype plug-in for Trillian. I’m not sure as what the feature set is (can’t seem to find a documentation file out there), but it looks promising. I’ve recently joined the Skype revolution, and I must say the quality is amazing. If anyone is using Skyllian, I’d like to hear what your experiences with it are…

This interesting article showed up on the IBM website:

Linux on board: Blowing the lid off of TiVo

It explains in some detail how the TiVo box is running the Linux OS. Not for the faint of heart…

Mad Penguin has a review of the Sonos Digital Music System, which is a series of wireless boxes connecting to your music server. Very sleek looking boxes, and a wireless control tablet.

This morning Apple released version 4.9 of Apple - iTunes. Amongst the new features are subscribing to PodCasts. The subscription system is really easy - I’m transferring my subscriptions from iPodder to iTunes. However, there seems to be a bandwidth issue with some of the podcasts: I can’t seem to get Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code or the Gillmore Gang. Everything else seems to be trickling in slowly. To the left is a screenshot of my current Podcast directory in iTunes. On the iPod they show up in the Podcast directory of the Playlists section.

I think Apple is making an excellent decision by integrating the Podcasts into iTunes. Sampling or subscribing to a Podcast is just as simple as adding music to your shopping cart, using the same directory structure.

By the way, you did notice that Blogger now supports pictures right…?

OK, this is more a personal note:

While going through my stack of papers that accumulated on my desk, I came across this printout, referring to a page on www.evillabs.net/tivo, describing how to remove MPEG2 encrypting. This may come in handy when I want to do some editing on Linux, so just for the sake of posterity:

[BEGIN QUOTE]

FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY! DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE THESE MPEG2 STREAM OUTSIDE OF YOUR HOUSEHOLD!

Preparatory Steps
You will need the DirectShow GraphEdit.exe (available in the Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK, or Google it), and the following DirectShow Filters:

• TiVo DirectShow Filter Source
• MPEG2 Demuxer (Moonlight/Elecard recommended)
• MPEG2 Multiplexer (Moonlight M71 recommended)
  (You can get both of these from the XMuxer Pro evaluation version)
• Dump (available in the DirectX 9.0SDK)
  (You can get both graphedit and dump.ax from this guy)

Now what?

1. Open up GraphEdit.exe
2. Drag you SomeVideo.tivo into the GraphEdit work area
3. Delete (select and press Delete) everything but the source box (the one with your video’s filename in it)
4. Select Graph / Insert Filter… / DirectShow Filters
5. Dig around for a MPEG2 Demuxer
6. Add it to the graph, and draw a line from the source file’s output pin to the demuxer’s input pin
7. Dig around for a MPEG2 Muxer and add it to the graph.
8. Draw a line from the demuxer’s video output pins to the muxer’s input pin. Do the same for the audio output pin of the demuxer.
9. Dig around for Dump.
10. Add it to the graph (selecting an output file, i.e. “dump3.mpeg”) and tie the muxer’s output pin.
11. Your graph should look something like this:
    • Your Tivo file with an output connector
    • A connection from your TiVo file to the MPEG2 Demux
    • An MPEG2 Demultiplexer with one input connector, and two output connectors (video and audio)
    • Two connections (audio and video) between the Demuxer outputs and the Muxer inputs
    • An MPEG2 Muxer with two inputs and one output connector
    • A connection from the Muxer output to the dump input
    • An output file with one input
12. Press “Play” on the GraphEdit toolbar, and, in under 5 minutes, you have an unencrypted MPEG2 streem. Joy!

[END QUOTE]

Now this document is a semi-perfect copy of the one that used to be up on evillabs (I can’t reach the website right now), and you should only use it for personal use.

Yay! I finally got one for my birthday (June 9th - thanks… no, I don’t mind, 41), a 30Gb iPod Photo. This is a really sleek piece of hardware - about the size of my wallet without the usual accumulation of receipts, notes and business cards.

I’ve managed to squeeze all of my CD’s on it, using a whopping 10Gb of the device. So, what to do with the other 20Gb? Hey, iTunes has some really cool music… and is expanding daily.

But the really cool thing I use the iPod for during travel (car and plane) are the Podcasts. The Daily Sourcecode by Adam Curry is just fun to listen to (bringing back memories of Curry and Van Inkel), and on a recent business trip to Orlando I was listening to a 2 hour show by Leo Laporte of The Screensavers fame. You have to be careful when you listen to this stuff with headphones on - people around you may think you’re mental when you start giggling…:)

Once again, not really a Home Automation post, more a post about what I’ve been playing around with for the last couple of weeks… and of course, the podcasting is automation in the sense that it is sort of a TiVo for Radio…

Om Malik’s Broadband log clued me in on this page, with some photo’s of TC Con ‘05! Las Vegas. The really interesting photos are this one showing info on a DVD, with the photo’s after that showing the purchase of that same DVD. Also, it looks like there is an option to show home video’s on your TiVo.

Another thing mentioned is in the caption of this photo, which according to the captions that are far below the photos is a “theoretical TiVo-branded Wireless-G adapter that offloads some of the work from the TiVo box resulting in higher transfer rates”.

Wow… that would be the one thing needed to facilitate the streaming of high-res home video’s and DVD’s to your TiVo wirelessly. We’re still using the old Wireless-B adapters here, and although they are extremely reliable, I’d love to plug in that NetGear WG111 and get a little better transfer rate. Currently the network seems to settle down at around playing speed, regardless of resolution (interesting isn’t it). To have an external device do the transfer would make life easier on especially the Model 50’s TiVo.

Life moves pretty fast… (thanks Ferris. I’m just going through some of the snippets that I collected over the last couple of weeks, and I came across this short list of Tivo Tips and Tweaks, called Secret TiVo Tips and Tweaks by Yahoo! News. There’s not a lot of secrecy about them, but some are really cool (I didn’t know about the Easter Egg they mention). Check it out, have fun with them and see which ones you find really useful.

Google released their Enterprise edition of the Desktop Search tool they released in October last year. Not exactly Home Automation, but maybe of interest to people who got hooked on it using it at home but weren’t allowed to use it in the workplace.

I’ve been using it since last year, and it works great - even helped me find a file on my machine when I was sure I didn’t have it…

Robert X. Cringely has an interesting analysis of the week where Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates leakes some information on the upcoming XBox 360, Google starts testing the Google Web Accelerator, Yahoo! releases their Music Engine and a $6.99 subscription service, and somebody claiming to be an insider at Apple leakes some information on the upcoming iTunes movie service.

MediaDialyNews published a series of three articles about Tivo, “What TiVo People Know”:

1. What TiVo People Know, Part I
2. What TiVo People Know, Part II
3. What TiVo People Know, Part III - A Modest Proposal

The first article roughly describes what has been available in the past to record programs, and how the TiVo differs from it. The second article describes more of the benefits of the TiVo. The third acrticle is the most interesting - it describes how to adopt the ability to skip commercials to a new advertising strategy.

The articles are written by Cece Forrester, a media planner in Chicago.

Check out these funny video’s from Mozilla Europe:

• The Office
• The Mobile
• The Notebook

Probably old news by now, but I just noticed that Leon released the second beta of Galleon on March 8. New features include bugfixes and improvements on TiVoToGo, and support for weather.com weather status and predictions.

The Street reports that Tuesday TiVo and ComCast announced that they will develop a new DVR with TiVo, that should be available to ComCast viewers by mid to late 2006.

This might put any rumours of TiVo’s death to rest… and apparently it is not just The Street reporting it: The Wall Street Journal reports something similar, although I can’t check it since the WSJ requires a registration.

Edited:
It’s official, even on TiVo’s and Comcast’s website. Apparently this is the news everybody was waiting for: the shares of TiVo went up about 75%…!

While browsing the TiVo community, and trying to find a solution for my still not working Netgear WG111, I came across some posts describing how to use two LinkSys WRT54G routers and create a bridge. The post included a link to a site dedicated to the LinkSys line of network equipment: LinksysInfo.

You don’t need to register to use many of the features, but please do, and if possible, make a donation. This site has either the information you’re looking for, or people on the boards can point you in the right direction.

I’m looking for a similar site for Netgear…

iSee iTunes is a cool little application using TiVo HME. It allows you to control the iTunes program on your computer, changing playlists and rating the songs that are being played.

It does not play any songs through the TiVo. To actually hear the music you need to hook up an Airtunes unit or something similar. However, if I’m not mistaken the last version of JavaHMO was capable of using iTunes, and iTunes playlists. Wouldn’t it be great if these two programs could somehow be combined…?

This website describes how to use more than just the standard features provided by TiVoToGo. Check it out, and see how to view movies on your PocketPC…!

Tivo To Go Unleashed!

I installed Galleon 0.1 on my machine yesterday. First off: read the instructions. One thing that got me was the fact that it uses JDK 1.5 - all I had was 1.4’s.

This is the first TiVo HME enabled version of what is formerly known as JavaHMO. It has one very neat feature added: you can transfer files from the TiVo to your PC while sitting at your TiVo. So if you like a program, apart from give it a thumbs-up, you can now decide to transfer it to the PC for later editing and DVD burning.

Since I didn’t have the correct JDK installed until this morning, I haven’t been able to test any of it. I will try and do some transfers tonight, and let you know.

Oh, if anyone has a NetGear WG111 working with TiVo, please let me know. The darn thing is frustrating the heck out of me, and it would be nice to know it should work…

So far I have had no luck hooking up the Netgear WG111 I bought 2 days ago. Apparently just disconnecting the old network adapter and plugging in the new doesn’t work (I didn’t expect it to work), but even the following set of steps didn’t work:

1. Turn TiVo off
2. Unplug old Linksys adapter
3. Turn TiVo on
4. Check that there is no adapter
5. Turn TiVo off
6. Plug in new Netgear adapter
7. Turn TiVo on

I wish I could put down step 8 as “Check that adapter is there and working”, but so far it only shows the old network settings, and no signal. I will have to do some more testing, but so far it is about as frustrating as any of the other wireless network adapters I’ve set up.

A beta version of Galleon has been released. This is made by the same developer as JavaHMO (Leon Nicholls), and utilizes the HME from TiVo.

This version sports no JavaHMO plug ins as yet, but the list of features looks pretty impressive. Download a copy of it and try it out…!

Yahoo!’s Tech Tuesday is taking a close look at DVR’s. DVR dilemma’s takes a look at how TiVo measures up against ReplayTV and Microsoft Media Center. DVR recording tips shares a couple of tips on how to improve your DVR experience. And DIY DVR shows you some do-it-yourself alternatives to the commericially available DVR systems.

Yesterday I came across a couple of posts stating that TiVo is now supporting 802.11g adapters. A quick check revealed that the Supported Wireless Adapaters page at TiVo support now shows 2 G-adapters: the D-Link DWL-G120 and the NetGear WG111. Both require version 7.1a of the TiVo software (i.e. the software on your TiVo). Monitor the supported adapters pages for correct versions of these adapters.

I checked, and BestBuy has a deal on the NetGear WG111: the in-store price is $59.99, with a total of $40 of mail-in rebates. Check your stores for the details…

Of course I rushed out and grabbed one, just to test this out. Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time last night, and a simple substitute of one wireless adapter for another doesn’t quite work. I’ll have to play around with it a little more tonight!

Several people on the tivocommunity.com forum (including TivoBill) report that there is little or no speed increase when using 802.11g - yet. This may be resolved in future versions.

TiVo announced their latest goodie: TiVo HME.

The HME is a SDK (yeah I know, TLA’s all over the place), allowing third-party applications to make use of the TiVo display. It looks like JavaHMO, but with the added integration the possibilities seem limitless. The SDK download includes the early adopters version of the kit, a couple of sample applications, and a desktop simulator to test out your applications. You’ll need TiVo 7.1 to use HME.

The sample screens look stunning. This could be very big, and I think TiVo sees this as their next step in software development. They’ve set up a developer’s challenge as well.

Meanwhile, several forums have popped up describing HME. One is a spin-off from the PVR Blog, the HME PVR Blog. Another is a forum on tivocommunity.com, listed under the Underground Playground. Both (and others I’ve undoubtedly missed) look very interesting, and I’ll most certainly will give HME a whirl over the weekend!

Well, apart from yesterday’s short post about the Crossbar system, all plans went out the door the last two weeks. Why? TiVoToGo.

About a week and a half ago my TiVo gleefully reported that it wanted to reboot. Yes! Version 7.1 was downloaded. The reboot and install took not that long (about 20 minutes). Several things have changed as far as I can see:

• The TiVo-Slow shortcut to get to the Settings menu no longer works. This quickly became our fast way to put the TiVo in Standby. Oh well.
• The Now Playing list includes the title of an episode.
• The To Do list includes the title of an episode.
• Menu’s are a little slower - overall the reaction time of the TiVo seems slower.
• The commercial-skip (Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select) still works (yeah!).
• Oh yeah, I can transfer recordings to my PC…

I transferred a couple of shows to my PC, and using 802.11b it was faster than I expected. The average transfer speed was between 400-500Kb/s. If you’re transferring shows, don’t sit and stare at the screen: it will take a while, depending on the quality you recorded the show with. I had a fairly big recording still hanging around on my TiVo (Ronald Reagan’s funeral broadcast - 6 hours at Basic), which I transferred during the night. You’ll do a lot of things during the night if you do show transfers and DVD creation.

Playing back the show on my 19” monitor was surprisingly easy: apparently I had a good codec installed on my system, so after transferring the file, all I had to do is right-click the .tivo file and tell Windows Media Player to open it. I was asked for the Tivo Desktop password I created 2 weeks ago (a short moment of panic, what was the password?), and then the recording started playing. The quality was pretty good, and I was watching a show on my own private 19” TV. Purty kewl… :)

After playing around with it a little bit, the next piece I needed was a DVD burner (that was the reason I’d kept the Reagan thing around - my wife recorded it and wanted it preserved. I already copied it to VHS tape, but wanted something easier). After looking at the local shops (I was too impatient to wait for a mail-order burner) the choice was between a Plextor PX-716A and a Sony DRU-710A. Both internal burners, both with support for Dual Layer, very similar, even in price. I decided on the Plextor purely because I’d read about their excellent reputation in the past. So far, I’ve had nothing to complain. The Plextor comes bundled with a Roxio DVD authoring product, so I immediately created a little test DVD. No problems!

So I had the means to transfer files from the TiVo, and I had a means to record files to a DVD. Now the middle part: editing .tivo files.

Since the Roxio software didn’t want to read the .tivo file directly, I figured I had two options: try to convert the .tivo file to a regular .mpeg file, or use the Sonic MyDVD trial software. I researched the first one a bit, and it looked workable, but I wanted to use the ‘consumer’ product first.

Downloading and installing Sonic MyDVD is simple. You click on the link TiVo provides to download the trial version, and after supplying some contact information the download commences. It’s about 280Mb, so don’t do it over dial-up… While it’s downloading, you’ll receive an e-mail with a license code. This will allow you to use MyDVD for 2 weeks or 50 starts. The big advantage MyDVD has is that it can transfer files directly from your TiVo, and it opens .tivo files.

The first project I tried was editing the season premier of Battlestar Galactica. This was a two hour show I recorded at High Quality. After transferring it to the PC, I started removing the commercials. Editing proved a little easier with MyDVD than with the Roxio editor: you’d just split the file at the beginning of the commercial, repeat the process at the end of the commercial, and delete the commercial afterwards. The only way I could find in Roxio was copy the clip, and change the beginning and endings of the two clips - this could be a problem with files running into the gigabytes…

Sonic MyDVD comes with a ton of menu editing options and templates. It was very easy to create a little menu, and add the show’s signature tune as a background option. The show length after editing out the commercials was about 1h 18m, so I selected the Standard Play quality to create the DVD. I first created the disk image from MyDVD (I was not going to waste one of the DVD’s if something went wrong), which takes a considerable amount of time - a couple (4-5) hours on a 1.4GHz with 700+Mb memory. The next morning (I told you you’d be doing a lot of night processing) I burnt the resulting file to DVD with Roxio (the MyDVD trial doesn’t seem to include the option to burn a .iso file to DVD), and tried it out on the TV. Pretty good quality: only during quick camera movements did we see some kind of delays in the display, and there were some artifacts around light/dark transition areas. Considering that the SciFi channel is one of the basic channels, and therefore sometimes pretty fuzzy, I was happy with the results. On to bigger projects.

The Reagan funeral proved more of a challenge, but only because of the size of the file. I tried to use the ‘Fit to DVD’ option in MyDVD, however, I must have ran out of disk space, because the next morning an “Unknown error” greeted me. I split the program in two (hey, 6 hours is too much anyway - even Lord Of The Rings comes on two DVD’s at least!) 3 hour projects, removed the commercials and news, and added chapters to indicate interesting points. I just finished burning the first project, and will check out the results tonight on the TV.

So far, I think MyDVD is worth the $50 they want from you if you use the TiVo promotion. It’s very simple to capture, edit and create a DVD. It lacks some of the advanced features in professional editing software, but then again that professional editing software can easily run you a couple of hundred if not thousand dollars. I’ll probably have to try out the capturing next, since my wife has become excited about the DVD burner now and wants to transfer our vacation video’s to DVD. I hope she doesn’t become too upset if I start editing the 6 hours she shot, and wind up with a 1 hour DVD…

I just came across an entry in www.tivoblog.com where the author describes his experiences with Crossbar Media’s AV Cast system. It looks pretty interesting, but at that cost you’d almost buy a second TiVo recorder at $99, and add a wireless adapter for about $50.

Still, it could allow for faster viewing of programs, even with two TiVo’s linked together in the same room, with a wired network. It could even take away the need for having a cable box and TiVo recorder in the bedroom.

I’ve installed a new router over the weekend.

Some time ago I was thinking about the setup of our home network. I bought a Linksys BEFSR41 Cable/DSL Router years ago when we first signed up for Internet over the cable. Then when we moved to our new home, and we’d have computers upstairs and downstairs, I added a Linksys WAP54G. Now downstairs we have a PC with a wireless card, and a TiVo with a wireless USB adapter. Adding the XBox would mean another wireless adapter, and when we want to add a TiVo in the master bedroom would mean yet another wireless adapter. Time to rethink this.

It occurred to me that with three devices downstairs that wanted to be added to the home network, they could all share one wireless connection. So my idea was to use the existing WAP54G as an uplink to the new wireless broadband router WRT54G, and the BEFSR41 as a hub for the three devices. That would only require buying the WRT54G.

The first step was completed this weekend: I transferred all connections and settings from the BEFSR41/WAP54G duo over to the WRT54G. All went well, except for one little hiccup: it is advised to beef up security on your wireless devices. One of the small steps you can take is not broadcasting your SSID (the name of the network). However, even after I specified the name in all the devices, they wouldn’t connect. The solution proved to be frighteningly simple: broadcast the SSID, let your devices connect, then turn of the SSID broadcasting. Apparently somehow the network devices “remember” the SSID after seeing it…

The next step will be trying to let the WAP54G talk to the WRT54G somehow. But that will be a project for another weekend.

TiVo has a belated Christmas present for us. After about half a year of delays, they finally released TiVoToGo. This service allows you to download, view and (real soon now) burn DVD’s on your PC from shows recorded on your TiVo.

Here is the official TivoToGo page. If you have TiVo, be prepared for some waiting: apparently even after signing up on the priority list it can take several weeks to receive the latest version of the TiVo software (version 7.1-X).

Also, TiVoToGo is not for everybody: currently it seems that only the stand-alone TiVo series 2 boxes will receive this upgrade. Not only that, but the accompanying new version of the TiVo Desktop (version 2.0) is currently only available for Windows. Last but not least, it seems you need a codec for MPEG-2. The ones that I have seen advertised are commercial versions - hopefully there is also some free codec available to watch the stuff you recorded yourself…

Even with all these limitations, I’m pretty excited about this, as it will allow me to watch processes running and TV at the same time, without the need for an extra box. I’ll share some info whenever the TiVo box has its updated software.

Isn’t a holiday weekend great? I finally had some time to sit down and see what happens with all those triggers and programs that I wrote. After all, I still had the problem that sometimes the lamp in the living room would react to X10 signals, and sometimes it wouldn’t. And this seemed to be the only item.

Stupid Programmers

When I started analyzing the log file, it looked like the lamp never reacted to the button macros. All the other lights did, but when you look at the log file for the living room lamp, there was no entry that it had been turned off or on by that button macro. That narrowed it down: I probably forgot to reload the code.

After reloading the code, it still wouldn’t respond. Well, maybe I need to do a force reload. That would be the sure-fire way to reload the code (which looked absolutely fine!). Still no go. Desparation was setting in at that point: I didn’t get any error messages, so I thought everything was fine. Or wasn’t it?

The setup that I have has a separate Linux box taking care of the MisterHouse program. I use a browser on a Windows box to tell MisterHouse to reload code. This triggers the program on the Linux box to start reloading and compiling stuff. And that’s where the error messages are displayed: not in an error log, not on the window displayed when you reload the code - but on the screen where MisterHouse is sending the output.

And sure enough - there was an error. When adding the code to turn the living room lamp on and off by pressing a button, I also added some code I wanted to use for an outdoor light. However, the outdoor light was not defined yet. So, MisterHouse complains that I’m using a variable that hasn’t been defined, and reuses the previous version of the code. Which didn’t include my living room lamp.

I quickly commented out the section with the outdoor light, and forced a reload. Presto! There were no more error messages. And when I tested out the buttons, everything worked like it should.

The Neutral Zone

I had bought a ToggleLinc PLC switch to control one of our outside lights. After resolving the erratic living room light, I was confident that we didn’t have any more X10 signal issues. So, what do you do when you have a working system? Right: you change it.

I added the ToggleLinc in the garage, and fixed a logic problem at the same time (the switch closest to the house controlled the outside light, the one fartest away controlled the garage light - I think it should be reversed). So, armed with screwdriver, flashlight, and new switch, I set out to install the ToggleLinc.

It was pretty straightforward. The only thing that threw me off was that there were two black wires attached to the old switch. Hmm. One is supposed to be the Live wire, the other is the Load wire. That’s when I found out I was missing one tool: a Volt meter.

The first attempt didn’t work: the little green LED didn’t come on. Maybe I had the wrong black wire designated as Live. So I switched the two black wires around. Still no go. Scratch head, check connections. Everything looks OK. The two black wires connected to Live and Load, the Ground wire connected, the Neutral wire capped. Just like the drawing. Hmm… the drawing does show the Neutral wire with dashes - making me believe it was an optional connection. Well, not according to the troubleshooting section:

• “My switch only has two wires”
• “Won’t work - you need the Neutral wire, or you need to use a SwitchLinc.”

Luckily the neutral wires were there, just bunched up together at the back of the box. I hooked up the Neutral wire to them, and lo and behold - everything worked. Programming the switch with the correct address was a snap, and now we have a porch light going on at dusk and turning off at dawn.

Well, after some deliberation I decided to keep a log (more precise a blog) of the adventures in X10 automation. This log is started after I’ve been fiddling around with X10 automation for a while, so in brief the setup that I have:

• CM-11A controller
• 4 Lamp modules (2 X10’s and 2 LampLinc PLC’s)
• 2 Appliance modules (both ApplianceLinc PLC’s)
• 1 X10 Maxi controller
• 1 X10 RF receiver

The two appliance modules haven’t been installed yet, because when I tried to install them, it looked like we had a problem with the two phases in our home, and some trouble with weak signal. When using Smarthome’s trouble-shooting guide, the advise was to install a repeater-coupler. After installing this the systems seems to work more reliable (one of the lamp modules would react only every now and then to signals it seemed, but reacts to them every time since installing the repeater-coupler), but I haven’t had a chance yet to readdress the issue with the ApplianceLinc’s.

As controlling software I use MisterHouse. It’s running on an old Pentium PC, with barely enough memory etc. to support the web interface. But it’s enough to run Linux and MisterHouse, and it’s running a whole lot more stable than the Windows version that was on there.

I’ll try and keep an account of my adventures into X10 in this blog. Home automation can be fun, but also very frustrating at times…