I’m selling a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition Verizon phone on eBay for a friend. The auction will end next Friday, February 22nd. If you’re interested in it or know someone who is, please go and bid on it.
Thank you for NOT BEING QUEER
February 14, 2008 by Leave a Comment
“NO QUEERING” … yeah, how would you feel if you saw this sign as you walked into a restaurant? Whether you’re gay or straight, it would probably strike you as questionable to say the least. It’s discrimination, right? But, what about when you see this sign:
You probably see these things all over the place and probably think nothing of them. Even if you’re a smoker, you just accept and generally obey these offensive things. Why doesn’t seeing one of these signs make you uncomfortable, then?
Before you jump on my case about the fact that smokers aren’t a protected class in the United States while homosexuals are, lets remind ourselves that fat people aren’t a protected class, either. How would you feel if you saw this sign up at a restaurant:
One could argue that the restaurant is trying to discourage folks from engaging in unhealthy activities which could lead to serious negative health effects like obesity, increased risk of heart disease, and early death. Also, they might be trying to create a more pleasant atmosphere for the other patrons–you know, it’s an unpleasant sight watching someone eat themselves into a food coma as part of their 6,000-plus-calorie-per-day diet. Yet, if a sign like this went up, there’d be no end of people complaining about how insensitive or offensive it is, or how businesses nor government should have this much control over how folks choose to fill their bodies.
According to the CDC/NCHS, a rough estimate based on sampling from 2003-2004 suggests that over 32% of U.S. adults are considered obese. Similarly, from the CDC’s 2003 data, the national average of smokers is only 22% of the population.
The American Lung Association claims that 438,000 deaths per year may be attributable to smoking-related causes, including second-hand smoke. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates 300,000 deaths per year may be attributable to obesity.
When I’m standing outside in the freezing cold, trying to enjoy my cigarette in peace in the only place left where I can exercise my personal freedoms, I really love it when someone feels the need to come up to me and say “you know, those are bad for you, you should quit.” Well, boy-howdy, I’m so sorry your great aunt Ruth died of emphasema or lung cancer and blah, blah blah. Look me in the eye and ask me if I really care. If I was related to someone as intrusive and annoying as you, I’d probably rather be dead, too.
The next time you see some fatass ordering two double-Whoppers with cheese and a large diet soda, you walk right up to them and tell them how your great aunt Ruth died of coronary disease and kidney failure and how they might want to think about quitting overeating–you might just save a life. Or, piss someone the hell off who is likely to be a lot less polite than your average smoker, who will likely tell you to shut the hell up, instead of just nod and smile and let you walk away.
Life is sweeter with the ‘Berry
February 13, 2008 by 6 Comments
After not being able to get data services on my Treo 650 last week, I finally had enough. It was over two years old and I was eligible for an “upgrade.” It was time to say goodbye to Palm and its aging hardware and operating system and move on to something more modern … or at least, switch to a product from a company that’s a little more commercially viable. I considered the Apple iPhone, but just can’t bring myself to pay the ridiculous “Apple Tax”–the extra money you pay for Apple’s fancy design. When a carrier offers the iPhone for $99, I might consider them.
What at&t was offering for $99 this time around was the Blackberry Curve 8310 [at Amazon]. So, on February 4th, my wife and I went to the Willowbrook Mall at&t store and bought them. I also picked up an Aliph Jawbone [at Amazon] Bluetooth headset for myself and she chose the Motorola H12 [at Newegg] Bluetooth headset. We could have saved some money ordering it all online, but there’s something to be said for immediate gratification, being able to walk out of the store an hour or two later with everything just working. However, I did end up ordering two Sandisk 4GB MicroSDHC memory cards for the phones from Amazon.
I’m not going to try and do a full review of these products as there are already plenty out there if you search for them. What I will do is list the things that I discovered, especially stuff that surprised or disappointed me. It’s going to be completely subjective and folks may not agree with what I point out as being important, but they’re important to me.
(1) The 8310 has GPS which is very cool, but TeleNav’s service is $9.99/mo for unlimited routes. Ouch. Still, the software and service seems excellent so far and it’s still cheaper and more convenient than buying a dedicated GPS unit.
(2) The 8310 has GPS while the 8320 has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. Yeah, I really would have liked my new phone to have Wi-Fi, but in reality, having GPS will be far more useful for me.
(3) The Blackberry OS 4.2 that currently ships with the device doesn’t let you record video. Luckily, RIM is working on their next upgrade, OS 4.5 (formerly referred to as OS 4.3.1, apparently renumbered by marketing) that will. I just hope they don’t keep slipping the anticipated release date over and over. Anyone know how to get into their beta program? I’d love to play with the beta release.
(4) Even though the 8310 has GPS, it appears that pictures taken with its camera do not store the GPS location in the image’s EXIF data. Again, not a big deal but something that I had expected and it not being implemented surprised me.
(5) The push-email sync. delay is a lot longer than I expected. My guess is that the Blackberry Internet Service doesn’t poll my IMAP mailboxes as frequently as I’d hoped, because even manually performing a “Reconcile Now” doesn’t seem to help. I’m guessing they only poll every 10-20 minutes which isn’t that bad, but not having a proper manual “sync now” that triggers the back-end poll is a let-down.
(6) When paired with a Bluetooth headset, answering the call with the green phone button defaults to the headset. I expected that answering the call by pressing a button on the phone would default to activating the handset. If I wanted to answer the call on my headset, I would have used the headset to pick up the call. This matters because I often have my phone in my pocket but leave my Bluetooth headset in my jacket pocket; I only wear it when I’m actually out and about. So, when I receive a call, I’ll grab my phone and answer it but the phone sends the call to the headset–argh! I then have to hit the menu button and select “Activate handset”, or press the $/Speaker button to use speakerphone, to actually talk on the phone. At the very least, this needs to be a configurable option in the phone application, whether to answer the call using the Bluetooth headset or on the handset.
(7) The Jawbone is an awesome headset. The noise cancellation really works well. It’s really comfortable to wear; it feels lighter on the ear than it actually is. But, it’s butt-ugly. I mean, it’s embarassing to wear this thing in public, it’s so ugly. When you buy the Jawbone, you’re definitely not buying it for the looks, that’s for sure. But, if you spend a lot of time talking on your cellphone, especially in public places or, like me, in the car with the window open, this headset will not let you down.
(8) On the other extreme, the Motorola H12 is gorgeous. It is small, lightweight and aesthetically pleasing. Even the charging base looks great on a desk and the use of magnets to attach the headset to the charging contacts on the base make my inner geek go “squee!” The sound cancellation on the H12 is adequate, but I’m not convinced it’s nearly as good as the Jawbone. However, where the H12 falls short in technical quality compared to the Jawbone, it more than makes up for it in sexy. I’m actually tempted to return my Jawbone in exchange for another H12, for just this reason.
That’s it for now. I’m anxiously awaiting the Blackberry OS 4.5 and what improvements it will bring. I’ll post an update once it arrives.
Do you have a Blackberry? Have any tips for me? Your favorite applications that you think I might enjoy? Any cool undocumented features or shortcuts that you’d like to share? Please tell me about them in the comments here.
Tags: Blackberry Curve 8310, Aliph Jawbone, Motorola H12, Bluetooth, TeleNav, GPS
del.icio.us/dossy links since January 28, 2008 at 09:00 AM
February 4, 2008 by Leave a Comment
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since January 28, 2008 at 09:00 AM:
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“Default behavior for XP is to save the desktop configuration on exiting the operating system. To prevent saving the desktop configuration, implement the following registry edit.” HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer …
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“This program offers many ways for you to prevent changes to the Windows desktop. You can, for example, make the desktop icons immovable and also prevent deleting, renaming and copying. […]”
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Everything you wanted to know about creating a Debian package, but were too afraid to ask.
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Paul Graham hits the nail right on the head: “Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code.”
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Official download location for msrdpcli.exe, for Windows prior to WinXP which included it as part of the regular install.
Can someone at at&t please fire whoever broke data services?
February 2, 2008 by 2 Comments
“Wish you weren’t paying $40/mo. for unlimited cellular data services that aren’t working? With at&t, you will.”
Yes, at&t’s cellular data services have been unavailable since January 31. You know, the service I pay $40/mo. for each Treo 650 and I have two on my account. It’s been unavailable since the outage started, and it’s still not working today, February 2. This also includes SMS text messaging.
I don’t know how many people are affected, but it seems this was widespread enough to make it a newsworthy outage. It’d be interesting to see if there’s any estimate as to how many customers are being affected by this.
Do the math real quick and you’ll see that this service is costing me close to $80/mo.–that’s roughly $2.60 a day. Is at&t going to give me a service credit for this outage? I doubt it. The best you’ll probably get is a “oh, we’re sorry” and basically screw the customers. But, if I “forget” to pay my bill on the due date, they’ll cut the service off until payment is made! WTF?
Is this a large enough outage to create a class-action lawsuit? If they fix the service by tomorrow, that’ll be 3 days of outage, or $7.80. I don’t know how much your data portion of your monthly bill is, but I imagine this is at least a few million dollars of revenue that at&t is collecting but hasn’t provided the service for. It’s plain old theft, if you ask me. Telcos should be federally mandated to return monies paid for services that weren’t delivered–customers shouldn’t have to wait for hours in hold queues to get refunds that weren’t their fault to begin with.
Did this outage affect you? Is it still affecting you? If you want to join the angry mob, drop a note in the comments. Lets see how widespread this is: share your city and state so we can see. I’d also like to know what data plan you’re paying for, to get an idea of how much this outage is costing us all.
Debian package of character counting plugin for Pidgin
February 1, 2008 by 44 Comments
I finally got around to learning how to create a Debian package using the excellent Debian New Maintainers’ Guide so that I could finally create Debian binaries for the character counting plugin for Pidgin that I whipped up last year.
There’s a screenshot of Pidgin 2.3.1 running on Debian 4.0 (etch) with the plugin loaded. You can download it here:
If you need to build the plugin for a different architecture (I only have i386 readily available to me), here’s what I used to package this:
- pidgin-convcharcount-plugin-2.3.1.tar.gz (10.6 kB)
If anyone wants to take this and make an RPM out of it, that’d be nice. If you do, leave a link to it in the comments so others can find it. Thanks!
Configuring DD-WRT as a wireless/wired router and bridge
February 1, 2008 by 2 Comments
I’ve installed DD-WRT on a WRT54GS and configured it as a router that bridges the wireless AP, the ethernet and WAN connection. I didn’t want DD-WRT configured as a “gateway” as that means NAT and I didn’t want that: my firewall is already doing NAT, so I wanted DD-WRT to just route traffic upstream.
Here’s a diagram of how I set things up:
I wanted the WRT54GS to bridge the 172.16.113.0/24 network on the WAN port (interface vlan1) to the firewall with the 172.16.113.0/24 network on the wireless AP side (interface br0). The firewall’s NIC was configured as 172.16.113.1. The WRT54GS’s WAN port was configured with a static IP of 172.16.113.254 and gateway of 172.16.113.1. The local IP was configured to 172.16.113.253 and no gateway. The VLANs were configured so that everything was assigned to the “LAN” bridge, all 4 wired switch ports, the WAN port, and wireless.
This looks like it all should have worked, but it didn’t. What I finally ended up having to do was to set a small startup script to make the final adjustments. I’m going to share the steps to set that script here, since I know I’ll forget it:
nvram set rc_startup=' echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/br0/proxy_arp echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/vlan1/proxy_arp ip route add 172.16.113.1 dev vlan1 ip route delete default ip route add default via 172.16.113.1 dev vlan1 ' nvram commit
And with that, everything works. Clients can connect wirelessly or wired, get assigned an IP via DHCP in the 172.16.113.0/24 network, get routed up to the firewall which enforces all my security and routing policies.
What I’d like to do next is play with the AP isolation setting to keep the wireless clients from being able to snoop on the wired connections. I like to keep this configured as an open wi-fi access point, but I don’t want someone who roams up to be able to see the activity of the wired clients. But, for now, what I’ve got working is good enough.
Tags: Linksys WRT54GS, DD-WRT, router, bridge, HOWTO
del.icio.us/dossy links since January 21, 2008 at 09:00 AM
January 28, 2008 by 1 Comment
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since January 21, 2008 at 09:00 AM:
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Oh, childhood memories all flooding back … wow, nostalgia city.
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Colin reminds us how to get an RSS feed of search results from WordPress. I know I’ll forget this again, so here’s the link.
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Woo! Twitter Karma got Ed Yourdon’s seal of approval. I’m giddy.
Covering large areas with some Linksys WRT54GS’es and DD-WRT
January 27, 2008 by 2 Comments
I recently helped a friend of a friend with a wireless networking setup who has a Seriously Large House–we’re talking easily 10,000 sq. ft. per floor, and the house has 3 floors. Yeah, it’s that big. They had set up a Linksys WRT54G and two WRE54G repeaters and, no surprise, had horrible signal coverage and frequent packet loss, and this was just trying to provide connectivity to a single floor in the house. Needless to say, they were not pleased, so I was invited to take a look and fix things.
I’ve always heard good things about the third-party firmware DD-WRT, so I decided to give it a shot. I picked up two WRT54GS routers ($70 at Amazon.com) and installed DD-WRT on them. I also installed DD-WRT on the WRT54G they already had.
Oh, a word of advice–if you recall, I bought one of those WRE54G’s back in May 2007–don’t waste your money on them. They cost more than the WRT54GS, can’t run DD-WRT as far as I know, and they only have one antenna, which means losing half your bandwidth per repeater hop. There’s absolutely no reason to use them, whatsoever–unless you’re not willing to figure out DD-WRT, of course.
So, I configured one WRT54GS as the master which has the WAN uplink providing network access to the wi-fi cloud. The remaining WRT54GS and WRT54G were configured as repeater bridges, all with the same SSID to facilitate roaming which worked perfectly–only one (!) packet dropped when roaming between AP’s. I did crank the power up from the default 28mW to 60mW which made a significant difference in signal range and coverage.
With this, there’s reasonable coverage on the first floor, but most importantly full coverage on the second floor which is where they were most interested in. The third floor gets good signal strengh in spots, but that’s adequate for now.
Overall, for the price, the Linksys WRT54GS is a fantastic product and when used with DD-WRT, can be used qutie effectively.
shiobara.com is getting a make-over
January 27, 2008 by Leave a Comment
It’s been over two years since we’ve taken the photo album down on the family website, shiobara.com–June 2005, to be exact. It’s time to give it some proper care and feeding. The first step was to replace the old site with WordPress, which required some changes to AOLserver in order to get it to work right. I then created a new theme that’s a little less cluttered and with colors that aren’t quite as offensive. Here’s a “before and after” set of screenshots:
(shiobara.com, before)
(shiobara.com, after)
I realize I have no graphic design ability–hell, I can’t even coordinate colors when I dress myself. Someday, I’ll find someone who’s ridiculously talented and wants to do the graphic design for me to save me the embarassment of doing it myself. Until then, I’ll just keep hacking away at it myself.
Now that the site is all in WordPress, the next step is to clean up the photo album. I took it down back in 2005 and wanted to redo it, but never got around to it. So, recently, I’ve started working on a Media Gallery plugin for WordPress that uses jQuery, jCarousel Lite and ThickBox. It’s pretty slick, and once we’ve launched the photo album, I’ll release the plugin as open source. If you’d like a sneak peak to beta test it, just ask.
Tags: family, photos, WordPress, plugins, web design, jQuery
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
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