Everything’s cool in science fiction. Cars can drive themselves, a phone without video is considered what the Nokia 6682 is in today’s cell phone market, everything electronic is also voice activated, and if you read the “In Death” series by J.D. Rob, handguns are banned except in cases where they’re collectors’ items. Whether we want to admit it or not, more and more of science fiction’s staples are showing up in today’s world–so much for us not having an informed culture. This idea looks like it came straight out of the “In Death” series.

Tobacco kills people. Everyone knows this. So to try and combat that, a company has come up with an electronic cigarette idea (disclosure: I support this article’s political position, even though I 1: don’t smoke and 2: didn’t link it for its political viewpoints). In the series in question, tobacco is either banned or very hard to come by–the author doesn’t actually specify which one it is, but unless you’re among the rich crowds, you probably don’t have access to it in any case. Instead, people are doing, well, exactly what this article describes.

To the uninitiated, walking into this suburban Toronto bar must look like a throwback to the 1980s. A cloud of what appears to be smoke can be seen hovering over a group at the far end of the establishment. But a quick check of the sense confirms that looks can be deceiving.

The air is fresh, lacking the pungent aroma of burning tobacco; the eyes aren’t watering with the sting of fresh smoke seeping into the sockets; and instead of ash trays and cigarette packs, the tables are full of small bottles of liquid and other pieces of equipment. On this night, a group of Toronto-area electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, enthusiasts are getting together for their monthly meet-up.

Wouldn’t you know, science fiction does serve a purpose. How many more steps now before smokers get to freely comply with another of my political viewpoints–smoke all you want, but keep it to yourself. Oh well, the idea’s still interesting. And that it looks like it came right out of the only actual series I’ve managed to read through and not completely lose my mind makes it both interesting and amusing. Hell, why not? Let’s see where this thing goes.

This site has comments by email. This site also has posts by email, should you be sadistic enough to subscribe to it–hey, a couple of you have, so it’s relevant. Or it did, until approximately 2 hours ago. You see, WordPress released a slightly newish version of their software last month, and one or two of the things that get some fairly regular use over here I don’t think were expecting that just yet. So they’ve kind of gone, um, squishy. I get to go digging through code later, but here’s a thing to keep a hold of–all your info has stayed put. If you subscribed to get comments to an entry by email, you’ll get comments to an entry by email–just not immediately right now, and unfortunately not retroactively either. Although, now that I think of it, your mailboxes might just thank you for that. Same goes for posts by email–although those, at least, you’ll get retroactively (don’t worry, I have sane limits on the amount of email this thing sends). The features still exist, they’re just somewhat temporarily broken. stick around, though–I’m not done twisting things into knots just yet. One of those knots might just fix themselves.

As anyone who’s anyone on Twitter knows, just about any and every link you throw on the site now, including links to posts on this site, gets automatically wrapped in their t.co shortener–yes, even if the link’s already been shortened. They announced the rollout in June, and as of yesterday or the day before, have made it pretty much automatic and global. While some clients have developed workarounds, most of them get to put up with automatic URL shortening. Which, yes, is wonderful and great and convenient in theory. Except for one very minor little catch. Links, particularly links posted from this site and others like it, are already shortened through Bitly–we used TinyURL before that. In 99.999% of cases, they’re already small enough to fit inside their 140-character limit. Shortening them again just seems kind of like a waste of resources, really. And yet, there’s no real way to turn off the service on your account–meaning, unless you’re using a client or service who’s already coded a way around t.co, which most apparently haven’t yet, your shortened link is shortened yet again–often to no real benefit (19 character URLs versus 20? Really?). T.co is awesome, in theory. In practice? T.CNo. Just sayin’.

Remember when rogers first started screwing around with bandwidth restrictions, then proceeded to launch their own online on-demand video service and, escentially, flipping customers off with it by not exempting it from existing bandwidth caps? Yeah, I figured you would. If not, refresh thyself. Then, read this. Clearly, it’s monkey see, monkey do in the Canadian telecom industry–and, clearly, Shaw has very good eyesight. Again, reread that first link. Except, replace Rogers with Shaw. Where’s the CRTC on this, again? Oh, that’s right–they’re just now getting around to calling bullshit on Bell, 3 years later. Well, I tried. Now, back to pirating CSI.

Just when you think “Hey, a feature I can actually find a use for”, your local phone company things “Hey, a feature I can find a price for”. Latest example? Verizon. Certain android phones sold by the company come with the ability to be used as a wireless hotspot, not unlike the iPhone on any company that doesn’t try and milk you out of every spare dime you can find–hi, Telus, nice to see you. Until recently, those phones could be used in that fashion easily, and freely–allowing you to take advantage of your cellular data connection using your laptop, should you have no access to a traditional wi-fi connection and need to make use of your computer for something net-ish. Fast forward to earlier this week. Verizon pushed out an update to those particular phones, effectively disabling that feature. Their reasoning? Now, it costs extra. Google’s apparently helping them with this, having agreed to remove apps from the Android Market that might make it easier to work around the partial bricking. You don’t actually own your phone. It’s a rental–a very expensive, non-returnable rental. You can thank Verizon for the reminder.

I’ve been making a fair few changes to things on this end lately. Mostly changes aimed at preventing things from falling flat on their faces. For the past few days, though, it’s been looking mostly like things were falling all over the place anyway. It started with my finally ditching Feedburner, while at the same time playing with the latest new addition to this blog’s feature set–you’ll find it at the end of this post. Multiple issues decided it’d be fun to crop up right around then. This blog’s RSS feeds, temporarily, did the awesomest impression of a corpse, with a path that used to be acceptable to get to the feeds in question deciding to pick around then to, well, fall flat on its face. Or so I thought. On top of that, the server was quite running away with memory usage around the same time–to the tune of over 2 gigs of reserved memory last night, for what should be at most maybe 3 quarters of a gig at peek times. Nifty. Except not. I managed to track down the memory leak to my first attempt at introducing the feature you’ll find at the end of this post, after a couple days of troubleshooting. It’s since been shot in the face. But the other issue? That was the fun one. And by fun, I mean so stupidly simple I could only have figured it out after a couple beers. Fortunately, I’d had 5 tonight so was in good shape. The RSS feeds, as it turned out, weren’t quite as broken as I’d thought. WordPress just temporarily decided to forget what it was supposed to do with them. A stupid setting on the admin side of the software developed temporary amnesia and needed to be reminded how things were supposed to look. And then reminded again, because it didn’t save the first time. Thanks, WordPress. No, really. Thanks. My technology has been conspiring to sych me out. And it damn near worked. Now, to go attempt this whole sleep thing, then try and figure out what the hell caused *this* spike in memory usage. More mockery tomorrow–I’ve built up quite a bit since things started conspiring. You’ll get to read it when I’m not halfway to Zombie City. Well, okay, if I remember.

I may or may not have made reference before to folks who get it in their heads that wi-fi has this issue wherein it’s exceedingly damaging in some way, shape or form. I may or may not have indicated that camp gets its ideas from the most ridiculous of sources–like, for instance, children developing mysterious symptoms of illness while at school, and feeling perfectly fine on weekends. Now, I catch wind of word coming out of Europe that some politicians would like to see an end to wi-fi. For the children, of course. They base it off of some studies comparing wi-fi to such things as second-hand smoke. Really. I’m not creative enough to make that up. Sounds more like the biggest risk to our collective health at the moment are these politicians.

Disclaimer: If you’re not of a technical mind, or things like hard drive failures make you run screaming in the other direction, you may want to skip this post. Just a friendly warning from your neighbourhood undercaffinated geek. Particularly when the fake ones in question leave not just you, but your equally technically inclined roommate, staring at the computer as though it’s just sprouted its very own artificial-ish inteligence.

Take this weekend, for instance. I’m minding my own on a Friday evening, trying to invent the best and least hair-pulling way to introduce updates by email–and comments, by the way, not just replies–to the blog, when the desktop decides to throw not one, or two, or three, but nearly a dozen warning and critical error messages at my face. Everything from hard drive failures to RAM usage being critically high, to flat out memory failures. Now, keep in mind, this machine’s nearly 4 years old and just had its wireless card replaced–twice, mind you, so one or two failures of that nature wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility. So I’m going through the usual diagnostic steps, doing what you do when you’re under the distinct impression your primary machine’s about 30 seconds from going flatline and you’ve got absolutely no spare parts kicking around, when this innocent enough looking “Windows XP Recovery” window crops up. It helpfully informs me that Windows is suffering damage possibly related to bad sectors on the drive. This along side yet another of those dialogue boxes cropping up informing me one or more IDE/SATA drives are about ready to self-shoot.

By this point, I’m more than a little WTF-ing. I *just* meaning less than a week ago, had a Dell tech out this way to replace the network card. Was I *really* going to have to have another one out to replace at least one failing drive and lord only knows what else? Not to mention the roommate just 48 hours prior to that got the pleasure of dealing with his very own failing hard drive and the replacement of same–in fact for much of Friday evening, while I was diagnosing, the running joke was that apparently hard drive failures had now become as airborn as your common virus. But I got curious. The only Windows XP recovery utilities, particularly utilities that bare that name, are usually found on the XP CD–and certainly don’t randomly show up when Windows is loaded, though sometimes I think that might be helpful. Enter that tiny little alarm going quietly off in the back of my head while I go hunting for my usual fix me tools.

I keep 3 tools one hand for incidents kinda like this one–one spyware scanner, one virus scanner, one nuke ‘em all tool. Because I was testing a theory, and if I was right it would at least manage to nail most of it, I loaded–and fired–the nuke ‘em all tool first. Sure enough, within about 2 minutes of the utility running, Windows XP Recovery took a hike. And so did its small army of warnings and alerts and whatever else managed to show up. Yay! I’m free! Except not quite. I nuked the majority of the infection, and probably caught the source, but there was still damage. Have my desktop was toast, and I’m pretty sure I was missing things out of my start menu on top of that. Nice. Wonderful. Nifty. Easily fixed.

I ran my other two tools, which took a little longer than I’d of liked to finish–but they finished and nothing broke, so I’m happy, and removed what I think might have been the last remains of the thing. Easily delt with by a simple reboot. Now, there was just the issue of half my desktop and probably some of my start menu going completely snap all over the floor. Because I was sick and tired of fighting with it, a system restore took care of that–and then some. Yay, again. I took care of what I thought needed taking care of manually, then went on the hunt for info.

Apparently, the infection I just went around with is new. Extremely new. As in I’ve seen postings as early as May 13th, but no older so far. To the tune of every forum, blog, website etc I know to check has something on it. And still, it managed to sneak by my usually pretty solid defenses.

All told, I’d way rather have just had an actual hardware failure. Or several, to be completely honest. The fake ones were a bitch to knock out. Now, to find where I hid my emergency back-up material–just in case.

That didn’t take long. After just over a year of actual, constant usage, the router I ended up finally putting in service last February took that very short drive off the performance cliff. Or perhaps it was a long-ish one I just didn’t really pay attention to. The problem itself took the better part of 3 days to actually narrow down–initially, we blamed our ISP, but quickly discounted that in a matter of a few minutes. The modem was the next guilty party to be blamed–I’d had a small problem with this type of modem before, so it wasn’t about to surprise me if I’d be replacing that. A few tests and diagnostics later, nope, modem’s working perfectly fine. Well hell. I was hoping I wouldn’t need to invent money for replacement parts this quick. so now my sights are set entirely on the router. Yes, the router I’d just replaced already last February. We do our usual routine with all the computers in the house save one running wireless, because that’s just how we role. Things should be flying both around the internal network and past it to the greater internet. Things didn’t end up getting out of first gear in most cases.

It made troubleshooting this issue even harder still, as the desktop I primarily use for 90% of my online work when I’m at home has been experiencing its own good attempts at dialup performance on the network. I was initially blaming the router, but during testing I was getting much better performance from the laptop than the desktop, both of which I was testing wirelessly. Yes, the laptop’s definitely a more powerful machine, but that has no baring on internet speeds these days–a dual core processor should be running just as or nearly as fast on a network set up by an OCD geek as a machine running a core i5 or i7. Well, you’d think, anyway. Testing disproved that. So now, I have a theory. A dangerous thing in my hands, but you’ll have that. The mystery of the dying router was partially hidden, or at least masked, by the compounding suspected issue of the desktop’s card tanking in 18 different directions. Nifty, with the tiny exception of not entirely. Fortunately, or not depending on your perspective, that’s the easiest thing to replace–and the cheapest. It was also the first thing I got things moving in the direction of replacing–hi, Dell technical support. Time for you to actually work for me. Considering you’re working because I’m not, and all. So one phone call later, and yes it took giving out my former Dell employee ID, troubleshooting was bypassed and hello, replacement card under warranty.

So now, we have replaced the router. I am replacing the network card in the initial problem machine. The rest of the wireless equipment? Wayyy too new to be causing problems–unless someone really wants me questioning their compitence. The only questionable piece of hardware that has yet to be gone over with a fine-toothed “don’t you dare fall over” comb is the modem. And honestly, it’s only a gigantic questionmark over here because, er, one of those already blew up in my face. The unstable network should now, barring unforseen small technological implosions, only be a myth in the house of geekery. And if it’s not, I know one ISP who’s going to get really, really tired of hearing from me. Mostly because I’m not looking forward to the next installment of “When is a router no longer a router?”.

Blog author’s note: the below content is a guest contribution. Any responses will, if nothing goes and breaks, go directly to the post’s author and not to me. If you would like to contribute to the blog, contact me to discuss the possibility.
I love pizza, and hey, so does the owner of this here blog.
So niftily enough
pizza pizza
one of the major pizza places here in canada has an iphone app.
Nifty, I thought, and hey, it’s free. no complaints.
Um, except their was.
The accessibility of this app, leaves their a lot to be desired.
With a lot of patience, you can find, and by trial and error make voice over read things, and you can put together an order, if using specials, but attempt to design your own pizza? not so much.
Buttons don’t read, the process is not explained, in short, pizza pizza didn’t design this app with the voice over user in mind.
So, I sent the following short and simple message to their iphone feedback address.

From: Shane Davidson
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2011 4:45 AM
To: iphone@pizzapizza.ca
Subject: iphone app feedback.

To Whom this may concern;
I am writing you as a blind iphone user, who uses voice over, the built in screen reader.
The app would be useful to myself, and other blind iphone users if you took the time to make it usable with voice over.
At this time, some of the app is accessible, but it has a long way to go before it can be successfully used to order and manage previous orders with your company.
I am happy to help test this apps accessibility if your company is willing to build accessibility into the app so it works more flawlessly with voice over on the iphone, and other similar IDevices.
This is being posted as open communication on my own personal blog at

http://www.shaneD.net

and on another blog, welcome to knowwhere, that I help manage, at

http://www.the-jdh.com

so any response, or lack their of, will be read by a lot of users, both sighted and blind alike.
Thank you for your time and attention to this issue.
Sincerely;
Shane Davidson

In short, let’s see if pizza pizza cares enough to come up with a response or a reworked app with voice over support, shall we?

I blame Slashdot, and them there folks what host this blog. The web host thought it would be fun to include as part of their blog posting prank a little thinggy about the company being sold off, and their own control panel–which, by the way, could have benefitted from some of my caffeine this morning–being replaced by CPanel. That very nearly gave me a heart attack–until I remembered what day it was. Then I promptly did something I don’t do, like, ever–I thanked Christ and the chick who shot him out. I despise CPanel.

Slashdot, I think, wasn’t even trying this year. Their post, completely and entirely–I suspect purposely–uneditted and otherwise not anywhere near the type of post I’d expect to see from Slashdot, made a big show of a whole bunch of linux distributions, including Gentoo, merging. Yeah, I fell for it–for approximately .3 seconds. Though, admittedly, something like this would be nice if it were an actual serious thought. Too bad the leaders in those respective communities couldn’t manage to get along enough to make something like that work if they tried–which they probably never actually would. Different philosophies, and all. Kinda like me and Apple–more on that in another, later, caffeine-induced entry.

No one actualy tried to pull one over on me yesterday. My blood pressure, though? May not be quite the same for a while…

Edit: I fail at HTML on laptop. Or typing on laptop, anyway.

It’s no secret the CRTC has spent most of this year failing at this whole keeping the big 3 ISP’s in Canada at something vaguely resembling in line. They decided nearly two months ago that unlimitted internet didn’t actually exist, and kind of stuck to that until escentially told not to be–Shane’s take on how that ended up playing out is over here. Then, they decided it might be in their best interest to put the idea up for a review and get back to it in 60 days. I thought they might take advantage of the election to change their mind again, but before they could, Bell Canada–one of the big 3 who’re sitting comfortable behind usage-based billing (UBB) decided to get crafty.

Bell, in a submission to the CRTC yesterday, dropped its usage-based billing demands of the third-party ISP’s, one of which I’m currently a customer. Well, they sort of did. They replaced it with agrigated volume pricing (AVP), also known as UBB 2.0. Rather than charging ISP’s for what they’ve used after they’ve already used it, Bell is now looking at the possibility of having them purchase a certain amount of bandwidth from them, and god help them if they underestimate how much they’ll need. Yep, download cap 2.0, kids. Officially screwed? You betcha. And Netflix knows it. In direct response to the fact their Canadian branch is among those being targetted by these measures, Netflix Canada has officially lowered the quality of its video streaming service. Oh, yeah, and they kind of pointed out what I’ve been saying for at least the last month–the only ones benefitting from it are the big 3. Oh and, guess what? Here’s the kicker–Bell’s customers still get the pleasure of dealing with UBB while they slap us in the face with AVP. Forget officially screwed. We’re heading straight down the road to officially ripped the hell off.

The following things should, in fact, be restricted from both myself and Shane for the safety of the general public.

• Any kind of network access whatsoever
• Most forms of access to the internet, or at least the less legal portions of the internet
• Any and all versions, local or otherwise, of dropbox–this includes, but is not limited to, the Dropbox website

The reasoning behind it? Uh. We’ve just managed to find a very interesting and quite creative way of putting any and all of the above to our advantage–in quite possibly the most dangerously lethal way possible. Also known as the absolute quickest way of getting material sent to multiple directions without causing mass amounts of headaches. Clearly, we absolutely must be stopped. For our own good.

PS: Sorry, Jessica. We’ve made your computer a casualty tonight. See? Told you it was dangerous.

Apple is not a fan of letting people do what they want with the hardware they purchased. That’s no huge secret. Now, they’re starting to become more like that with the software people purchase. The latest? In-app purchases may be on their way out. Apple is apparently looking at forcing all content purchases, IE: things you would normally buy directly from the app developer(s), through its own store. The solution? More money for Apple, less control for users/developers. The result? More people considering finding brand spanking new and interesting ways to unlock their hardware. Probably not what Apple was intending, but as the Techdirt article points out, it’s a real good way to piss people off and make them do exactly that. Way to be, Apple. I’ll just be sticking with my Nokia, now–at least until it self-bricks and I get to deal with Windows Phone 7. But that’s another entry. In the meantime, happy 89125435543 reasons to jailbreak your iThing, kids. Enjoy.

I’ve officially managed to date Jessica‘s computer. Its official age, as of right now, is older than dirt. Yesterday was an adventure in the upgrading of RAM. After finally figuring out this thing cannot keep its various periferals attached while it’s being worked on, I got to playing around with a couple 1 GB sticks I punked from Kyle while I was over there. In so doing, I think I did both Jessica and him a favour. Before me, he wasn’t sure if one of his sticks went south on him. That took all of 10 seconds to determine for absolute sure–it’s toast. As for the other? It might as well have been, at least so far as I’m concerned. This machine just plain ain’t supporting. It’s DDR2 RAM, for starters, which apparently this motherboard predates by a couple years. Add to that, I think this thing only goes up to PC2700, which well, do they even make RAM that slow anymore? So that was a fun excuse to throw open the case.

Now, it’s off to a valentine’s get together with a few friends, one of the 80 million things I love about Rochester. Mockery? Snarkery? General geekery? Yeah that’s still coming. As for now? I see food in my near to immediate future. Catch you on the flip.

I’m not one for capped internet connections. Never have been. Not even if I’m only checking email. I took full advantage of one ISP on my way out for reasons of capped bandwidth/traffick shaping policies–that they’re still continuing with, last I’d heard. I ripped into another for offering its own customers an on-demand streaming service a la Netflix and deciding hey, our internet customers don’t actually need a reason to use our service over torrents, so we’ll just count it against their bandwidth cap. I went at them again, this time for lowering their already ridiculously low caps in response to the launch of the offending Netflix in Canada. At the time, while none of the big 3 ISP’s (Rogers, Bell and Telus) were offering unlimitted internet services, the smaller ISP’s TekSavvy, Primus) were. And life was great. I ditched Bell for TekSavvy, who I ended up leaving for other reasons over 2 and a half years later–but that’s been beaten to death over here already, and avoided both issues. Bell decided not long after that that they didn’t much like us playing that game. So they wined to the CRTC. As did Rogers, as did Telus. Because, you know, competitive advantage in Canada just shouldn’t be allowed to exist. This past week, the CRTC agreed. Now, as of February first, even the smaller ISP’s are mandated to piss off their customers by charging them for any and all usage that takes you beyond 25 GB. After 25 GB, your options are to pay $x for every gig over that amount, or pay another price–usually only slightly less–for blocks of bandwidth, some companies (hello, TekSavvy) are calling it insurance, that you may or may not actually end up using for a month–more than likely, you’ll end up using.

As a general guide, let me let you in on a little hint as to just how ridiculously tiny 25 GB is. If you’re into the whole online gaming thing, even if it’s just one of those games you find on Facebook to kill half an hour on your coffee break, you can blow through 25 gigs easily in a month. If you’re doing anything more demanding than that, for example playing World of Warcraft, even if it’s not for very long at a stretch, 25 gigs goes by pretty quick. Get a lot of email? Use a fair bit of Twitter? Decide you want to install your favourite OS on a spare computer? Or virtually? Do pretty much anything that isn’t your typical half-hour of internet usage a day for checking email/paying bills? Your 25 gig cap waves goodbye in an aweful goddamn hurry. Yep, you guessed it. Youtube, streaming music, random TWAudio or Q-audio things, they hurt too. And don’t even get me started on what any even moderate amount of file sharing of any kind, legal or otherwise, does to the bandwidth cap–which would be the entire reason for the cap in the first place.

The major players in the Canadian market have been calling the shots pretty much since the advent of the CRTC and the granting of regulatory authority to the CRTC over our portion of the internet. Bell, Rogers, Telus all started throttling traffick, manipulating things in such a way that traffick that fell into specific categories was slowed or otherwise given headaches–we call that throttling, or traffick shaping. The big push from the smaller ISP’s at that time was “we’d never do that to you!”. And, ironically, they were right–they usually never did. So shortly before I officially was to switch ISP’s from Bell to Teksavvy, Bell thought they’d extend a favour to the smaller ISP’s, and do the traffick shaping for them. Nice, no? Naturally, the CRTC was perfectly fine with it–prompting at least two complaints and a petition that didn’t actually end up getting a whole lot of anywhere. And voila, one third-party throttle, served monopolistically. It’s been that way escentially since. Same with the newest issue of usage-based billing.

Bell and Rogers began instituting, and later lowering–hence those first few links at the top of the entry–bandwidth caps. They started out mildly reasonable and didn’t hang around there long. Instead, prices went up, bandwidth went down, and–at least on DSL–speeds escentially stayed the same. Suddenly, we weren’t getting what we’d call our money’s worth. Once again, up comes the smaller ISP, this time with an unlimitted bandwidth offering and a promise of “We wouldn’t do that to you!”. And, once again, they’re usually right–they, specifically, wouldn’t do that to their customers. And once again, Bell, Rogers and Telus, who the smaller ISP’s have little to no choice but deal with if they want to be able to offer internet service, volunteered to do them the favour of instituting bandwidth caps for them. And once again, they did it with the complete backing of the CRTC–poof, usage-based billing is born, the unlimitted internet is dead. As before, there’s a mass amount of appeals underway to try and convince the CRTC to see reason, but so far, it hasn’t done much but take up space in the news. And once again, the CRTC is stuck in 1995 or 2000, in the land of the barely above 56k. And just like that, like the land of barely above 56k, the CRTC snaps its fingers and unlimitted internet no longer exists. Now if we could just see *improvements* to our internet services come through as quickly as hinderences. Well, can’t have everything. At least someone’s seeing some quick progress.

I’ve been dabbling in the more involved server admin business for the past while. One of the things we’ve been experimenting with for the better part of a month is the firewall provided by ConfigServer. It’s halfway decent for what it does, as long as you’re not trying to do anything too involved–like, say, get certain functionality native to WordPress to actually, you know, work. Like, for example, trackback/pingback functionality. So, since we had absolutely nothing else planned whatsoever tonight–hi, oh my god cold, we figured we’d either fix CSF or break Shane‘s blog. Turns out we did neither.

According to ConfigServer’s software, which I have taken to not trusting after our most recent discovery, inbound trafic on all the ports we needed to be open was possible. As was outbound. Except for that tiny little part wherein it sort of wasn’t. That lead to some pretty interesting problems in the neighbourhood of him actually being able to receive trackbacks/pingbacks. Since blogging in general, and WordPress in particular, is primarily focused on the whole community/conversation element of it all, that posed a very small problem. We fiddled off and on with it for a few weeks, and eventually for reasons of trying to scrape together a few dollars, we decided to start the process of migrating him away from that server and to my arangement over here. After breaking things in that department in all kinds of new and interesting–not to mention very very creative–ways, we thought we’d play with seeing if that fixes the outstanding issue of tracking back. Hence, if you hadn’t figured it out, the test post from earlier. And wouldn’t you know, the damn thing up and proved us both idiots. First try, it did exactly what it was supposed to. The only *really* major difference? The server the problem blog’s on isn’t running ConfigServer’s firewall–and won’t be, if I can possibly get away with it. Aside from that? Same server configuration, more or less, with a few extra mostly irrelevant bells and whistles I don’t actually use but hey, they’re cool.

The moral of the storry: If you’re running ConfigServer’s firewall, look for alternatives. If you’re not, keep it that way. It’s bad for you. Stay very, very far away from that program–particularly if you, or anyone you’re hosting/maintaining the server for, plans on running a WordPress blog. They just do not like each other and I think the relationship’s pretty irreparable. Now, the search begins for alternatives.

From the department of IT Security 101, courtesy the Peterborough Catholic district School Board, comes this real life lesson of what happens when you don’t tripple check your security. you end up hacked by one of your own students.

John Mackle, education director at the Peterborough Victoria Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board, said the Grade 8 pupil at St. Anne’s School in Peterborough’s north end found his way — via his laptop, a piece of downloaded software and the board’s internal network — into a board file server containing provincewide test results.

“To be honest, I don’t know that he would have understood what he was seeing,” Mackle said.

“The information that he was able to see wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to him.”

Mackle said the incident occurred when the server in question, which isn’t located at the school, was turned back on after undergoing a service upgrade.

“We normally have two levels of security,” Mackle said. “In this case, level 1 was turned back on, but level 2 was not. This allowed the boy to gain access.”

Security for all servers has been upgraded in the wake of the incident, he added.

By “upgraded”, does he mean “reenabled”? And, really, just what kind of security do they over at the Peterborough school board consider to be level 1? Inquiring minds want to know. If the system was secured, the kid shouldn’t have been able to access it. On second thought, I’ve come to understand the school board’s definition of secured and the rest of the world’s definition are usually two pretty different things. If given enough time to work at it, most school board security systems–at least up here–could probably be compromised with a minimal amount of effort, if someone with a problem with that school or the board really wanted to.

Let this be a lesson for aspiring IT people. Secure your shit. Twice. And for the love of chese, if you’ve got a system installed, tripple check that it comes up when the server you’re trying to protect does. I should not have to point that out.

Verizon’s been building up over the last week to this supposedly major announcement to happen today. Today came and went, and the biggest thing to come out of that announcement? The iPhone. Naturally, there’s a sort of but not really appropriate level of fanpeopleism over it–it’s an Apple product; what’d you expect? Or rather, it’s a kind of dumbed down version of an Apple product–what you get when you cross a supposedly advanced piece of technology with a network that was advanced in 1997. Naturally, you do that, you wind up with half a dozen irritating limitations–things people who actually expect to be able to *use* the iPhone probably aren’t overly happy with.

• The phone runs on CDMA only, which is escentially older hardware–even Bell up here is moving entirely away from CDMA. Quickly.
• They’re saying it won’t run on Verizon’s 4g, LTE network. Because, apparently, people want it now now now. Hey, they waited this long.
• Being CDMA and CDMA only, if you’re on the phone, you can’t be doing anything on the internet–like, for example, looking up an address the person you’re talking to just gave you. Conversely, if you’re checking your email, or looking up that address, you can’t make/receive calls. Nifty. Except no not really.
• And don’t even get started on reception–of which Verizon has very little in supposedly well-populated areas.

And that’s just the issues we know about after today’s announcement. There will probably be more. All told, Verizon’s major announcement isn’t entirely all that major. Unless you’re an Apple loyalist–but then you’ve probably already got an iPad or something anyway. But, hey, someone might enjoy themselves. Just don’t ask them if they can map something out for you.

Update: If you really really really want an iPhone with one of these carriers, I’m sorry. But if you still do, the folks over at Wired have, as always, put together a pretty good comparison of what you can expect on each carrier’s network. Some of the limitations on that list for Verizon are in this entry, but it’s worth a read anyway. Just in case. Hey, you never know.

last week, the app store for Mac OS was released to the general public. No more than 24 hours later, it’s been cracked for the general public. You probably didn’t need a crystal ball to see this coming–try and lock something down, and you’re only challenging people to find ways around it. You need only look about as far as the iWhatever to see that. Once again, Apple comes up with a gatekeeper type system for one variation of its OS. And once again, someone nudges that gate open just enough for Apple’s control to slip. You had to see that coming.

When I try a quick and dirty hack to convince you to send mail through an alternate port, that would be the time for you to decide to send the offending email. Not after the account has been appropriately whiped from the system, and then subsequently reentered. And certainly not after we’ve been dicking with it for nearly 3 hours, not counting time to take a break in order to avoid throwing the offending piece of hardware through the nearest window. Thank you for wasting my time.

No love,
The geek

PS: Hey, Primus? Not cool with the blocking of port 25. Seriously. Let’s try not doing that, shall we? You’re breaking things more than they need to be at the moment. And some of these things don’t take much as it is. Also no love from the geek.

A few months ago, I dared to predict Apple would be slowly herding developers and users to their new app store for the mac in place of the ability to download apps of their choice from other sources. One such other source, which is currently accessible on Mac OSX, is apple’s software download website–that site, effective in two weeks when the app store launches, officially dies a horrible, bloody death. Or, gets redirected to the app store. whichever you prefer. Someone going by the name Myron Byron left me a nice little comment on that entry a few hours after it was posted.

Really? So providing a curated App Store means they’ll also *remove* the existing ability to install software that isn’t provided via that store?? That’s quite a stretch.

This isn’t the same situation as the iPhone/iPad, in which customers knew they were buying in to both a curated AND a locked-down store, and in which there has never been any other way to install apps. Do you honestly believe Apple would be willing to alienate their millions of existing Mac customers?

In fact, if you read the pc-mag link you included in your article you’ll see that Steve Jobs refers to the Mac App Store as the “best place to discover apps”. “Best” not “only.”

Steve Jobs may well be a control freak, but he’s not an idiot.

I responded to that comment, and he’s not been back to the site since.

Given Apple’s tendancy to classify installing an app when and how you want, if it just so happens that when and how you want may be outside of the app store, as voiding your warranty, no, I personally don’t think it’s much of a stretch at all. You’re right, though–Jobs is a control freak, not an idiot. So expect in another version or two after that for them to come up with another way to say “not recommended”.

It didn’t take that long.

Apple first announced the iPhone/iPad-style App Store for Macs at its “Back to the Mac” event when it gave the industry a peek at its next Mac OS version, dubbed OS X Lion. Apple has already made one feature of that upcoming OS available in the current version, FaceTime for Mac, and the App store will be the second. The intention of the Mac App Store is to make installing apps on the desktop as simple as it is on iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads. This includes easy discovery in a gallery with ratings and stats, a one-button install, and automatic updates.

Mac developers will still be able to make their programs available via download from their own or third-party Web sites, but it makes sense for them to rejigger the apps to fit with the new App Store, since this will deliver them the largest audience of Mac users. As with the iPhone/iPad store, the Mac store will give Apple more gatekeeper control over what’s allowed in, enforcing whatever restrictions they deem fit. It also means developers will hand over 30 percent of the purchase price to Apple.

Once again, I called it. As of January 6th, you will no longer actually own your mac any more than you actually own your iWhatever. You work faster than I thought, Apple. Awesome. But not really.

Fans of the previously mentioned Delicious website may be entitled to a tiny little bit of cellebratory partying. According to clarifications that floated across my desk today, they’re possibly not, in fact, shutting down. Updates directly from Yahoo!, courtesy Shane’s blog, indicate they may be selling off the service instead. No word whatsoever on Yahoo’s other services that are scheduled for potential shutdown. If you’re not sure what to do after the site finds itself on the auction block, or otherwise not the delicious website it is now, try this list of alternatives, complete with yet another link to yet another list of alternatives should that one not do it for you. In the meantime, whatever happens with the site itself, at least you won’t be left completely screwed. We hope. Find a suggestion not on the previously linked list and want it promoted? Let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.

I don’t know anyone who’s ever actually used Delicious, or del.icio.us if you’d prefer, with the exception of maybe those folks over at Lifehacker. Yeah, in spite of the fact damn near every social networking plugin/add-on for a website has the service available–nearly as available as Facebook. Well, if you do use it, you won’t be anymore. Multiple sources are now saying Yahoo’s killing it, along with its Buz service, and Yahoo! Videos–also services I don’t know very many who actually use. The things that die to cut costs, I guess. Oh well; at least there’s still Google and Youtube.

So long, Delicious. I’d say I’ll miss ya, but I didn’t even know ya.

I used to be in love with TekSavvy. I recommended the thing to anyone looking to escape the clutches of Bell Canada. Their plans were awesome, their service rocked my world, the lack of bandwidth restrictions made my geek heart do the happy dance. And on the rare occasion I had to deal with tech support, which wasn’t very often or for very long, they were rock solid beyond anything. I delt with their other departments only a tiny little handful of times, but even those were mostly all aces. The love afair ended a week and a half ago.

I’ve recently taken in a roommate. The afore mentioned roommate also used to come with TekSavvy. We’d planned to keep both services running, and attempt to combine them in such a way that internet speeds would go from borderline awesome to wicked awesome in 3 seconds flat. We called at the beginning of November, roughly, shortly after we’d escentially decided to give this whole roommate thing a try. It went back and forth between yes we can and no we can’t, and some very odd and less than amusing combinations of the two. We spoke each to several different people when we got our hands on these interesting combinations.

One thing lead to another, we wound up bouncing to the manager queue. Or rather, we thought we were bouncing to the manager queue–more on that later. Finally, we were getting something vaguely resembling consistency. We got sent to Elizabeth, who told us she was a supervisor in the sales department. Suddenly, we saw things get cleared up, straightened out, and appropriately beaten into submission. Bell got told they’d be doing what we wanted, when we wanted, and not to ask questions. We were ready to go, and all we had to do was show up on the day of the changeover. Except no, not really.

About four days before the day services were supposed to be switched over, and the day before Shane was due to jump a bus up this way, I wake up to a message on the answering machine. This message, from Alexandra, escentially undid what we’d just gotten everything but written confirmation was going to happen. Naturally, it involved a callback. And that’s when things got a little more interesting.

Apparently, not only was Bell not, as we were previously told, going to do what we wanted–on account of this was to do with an install that has nothing to do with any of Bell’s services, but for the last two weeks before this, we hadn’t, in fact, been speaking to a supervisor in the sales department. I still don’t think we were speaking to anyone managerial when we got the callback, though she claimed to be more senior than Elizabeth–whatever the hell that means. Needless to say, we were significantly less than enthusiastic to be having that conversation. We promptly canceled both our services right there in favour of Primus, who I’ve had dealings with before and left because I had a better offer.

Apparently we’re not alone on the list of folks who’ve run up against the Elizabeth issue. She’s told at least one other customer she was a manager as well, and made claims similar to that which she made to us–this customer has also, since, been corrected by someone else, including on Elizabeth’s managerial status. While I can’t say whether or not that customer’s contemplating the big switch, but it’s acts like this that ended up turning what I saw as an absolutely perfect service into something from which I wanted to run, quickly, in the opposite direction.

So long, TekSavvy. It’s been fun. In this case, you can thank your own customer service folks for the bad taste in my mouth. I do. And as of tomorrow, I won’t even have that.