Beachballin'

Nice one, Dell

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:33:00 -0700

I dunno what Dell’s going for here, but whatever it is, they’ve missed the mark.

You should have gotten a couple of emails from me by now I am in charge of your relationship account with Dell. It has just recently been transitioned to the gold team. One of the emails that I sent you was a quote please look that over when you get a chance we based it on one of the systems that you had purchased before but the most important thing is to make sure the shipping and billing is correct. If not please update the word doc I have attached to this email and please take a look at the PDF too when u get a chance it will tell you more about the Gold team.

Where do I start?

The grammar is horrible. ‘Should have gotten’? ‘when u get a chance’? inconsistent capitalization, run-on sentences. This is horrific, and reads more like a 14-year-old’s text-message inspired D- ‘see me after class’ essay.
They did send an e-mail full of quotes - out of nowhere. We didn’t ask for anything. We’re not in the market. No one I’ve talked to knows why on earth they’re e-mailing us with quotes on hardware we didn’t ask for.
‘If your information isn’t right, edit this word document and send it back to us.’ No, fuck you. It’s YOUR job to edit your damn documentation. If you want me to do it, give me a web form to fill in.
Oh, and the ‘Word Document’ is a docx file, which requires Word 2007 - which MOST businesses these days have not updated to, and don’t intend to update to. In fact, it’s probably the second least accessible word processing format ever, next to ODF. Fuck you again.
As if I’m going to trust random Word documents from nowhere. Who the hell are you? How can I trust you if you sound like a 14-year-old semi-illiterate Yahoo! Chatter? Honestly, give me a break.

Despite this coming from Dell USA Small business, where we do have an account, and despite it having Patrick’s name, phone number, and address on it, I’m still fairly certain that this is some kind of phishing e-mail. More to come.

Update: I spoke with Patrick. This is, in fact, an e-mail from Dell, and they had all the information right. They’re just being useless douchebags. Way to suck, Dell.

Tagga’ed! I guess this is neat. I’m now as...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:39:23 -0700

Tagga’ed! I guess this is neat. I’m now as legitimate as those stupid surveys you get asked to text things to in HMV ads before movies. Woo!

This pisses me off

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:38:00 -0700

This is irritating. More than that, it’s infuriating. I’m no fan of Russia, especially not with the way things have been going in the country lately, but seriously, let’s be honest here with the situation at hand and get some perspective.

I got even more irate today watching Senator McCain’s speech on the conflict in Georgia, and his misrepresentation of the situation unfolding there.

McCain starts out by talking about the history of Georgia, which includes it being a fourth-century convert to Christianity. Why McCain mentions this is probably to remind the Christian right that this isn’t some Muslim nation full of brown people that they shouldn’t care about - these are God-fearing Christians, and so therefore they matter. That bothers me, but not as much as the rest.

He continues by reciting how events have unfolded there, mentioning first that Russian troops rolled into South Ossetia on Friday, conveniently ignoring the fact that Thursday evening, the Georgian army launched an offensive against the area, bombing its regional capital. Why? Because Georgia considers South Ossetia to be one of its provinces, and the separatists there to be the enemy.

This reminds me of how Iraq rolled into Kuwait, asserting that Kuwait actually belonged to it. Except in that case, Iraq was our enemy, and was also the larger force. In this case, Georgia is the smaller force. Why? Because Georgia mistakenly believed that (like the US), they would be welcomed.

In the 1990s, South Ossetia declared independence from Georgia after a referendum showed 98% support for independence; Georgia, however, doesn’t recognize their independence, and so on Thursday, they started out shelling the capital and moving troops into the region, killing Russian peacekeepers and civilians alike.

So, after Georgia started the conflict, Russia rolled its troops in and pushed Georgia back out again, and now have continued on into Georgia, apparently intent on at least taking out Georgia’s military infrastructure. Georgia has offered a cease-fire, which the Russians have ignored.

McCain paints this as the Russians not honoring a cease-fire, but let’s put it this way. If a small region that wants independence from its big brother suddenly gets attacked by its big brother, its citizens are killed, and the troops that you sent in to keep the peace are also killed - are you going to stop at repelling them? Personally, I’d want to wipe them off the map. Regardless of whether the region is part of Georgia (as Georgia claims) or is independent (as they and Russia claim), shelling the capital and moving your army in, resulting in casualties, is senseless and ill-conceived.

Dasha is Russian, and has family in the area. They own a summer home there, and live there often. When the fighting started, they were off visiting other family in the Ukrane, which is fortunate because the Georgian offensive obliterated the town they live in, reducing their home and everything in it to burnt-out rubble. Had her family been at home, they would probably be dead. Explain to me how, regardless of to whom the area belongs, killing her family solves anyone’s problems, and I’ll gladly cool down.

Russia does a lot of bad things, but the bad things they’re doing now are as a result of the worse things that Georgia did. If Russia can disable Georgia’s military to the point where they don’t pose a threat to South Ossetia, perhaps everyone can go on about their lives without worrying whether some overzealous, US-backed military nutcase president is going to order an airstrike on your cottage.

Seriously people, learn the facts before you comment, and the world would be a better place.

check pass; user unknown (why I love fail2ban+logcheck)

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:57:00 -0700

Anyone running a server on the internet should run logcheck, and anyone who runs logcheck will notice log entries like this:

Jul 21 14:15:03 skywalker sshd[22292]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=122-117-8-14.hinet-ip.hinet.net
Jul 21 14:15:07 skywalker sshd[22294]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): check pass; user unknown

This particular user didn’t just try once. He tried 524 times. I can only assume that he eventually got bored, but in the meantime, he was probably using up a lot of sshd processes, preventing other people from logging into the machine, not to mention wasting bandwidth and server resources.

A short while after that, I got around to installing fail2ban, which basically solves all of these problems. It monitors your logs, and after a certain (configurable) number of failed authentication attempts, it takes action. What action it takes is entirely dependent on the configuration.

On my servers, it’s simple. I tell iptables to add the IP address to the firewall. All packets to the user are dropped silently from that point on, until a predefined timeout is reached, at which point they are removed. If they’re still (stupidly) trying, they get banned again.

There are many benefits to fail2ban, and personally I think it’s a great little utility that no one should be without.

It keeps persistent idiots from being able to scan your system and potentially find actual vulnerabilities.
It keeps people from successfully using dictionary attacks to guess passwords (unless the password is one of the first ten or so entries in their dictionary).
It keeps your log files from filling up on popular servers prone to attack.
It can e-mail you, log a notice, send a text, or whatever when it blocks a user, allowing you to watch hosts that keep getting banned and report them.
It can watch any log for any event - it could even watch your e-mail logs for spammers who keep trying to send messages through your server, and block them too, or watch for users hammering your webserver with useless requests.
It can take any action to block a user - even connecting to your Cisco firewall to block them from all servers at once.

For any sysadmin running a server, this is an indispensable tool.

Music Review: Becky's iTunes Library (★★★☆☆)

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:30:30 -0700

In these days of RIAA lawsuits, creative commons music, Pirate Bay torrents, the iPod, the iPhone, the Zune, and the iTMS, it’s refreshing to see music distributors focus on quality AND quantity, providing good music that changes people’s lives and makes their days better. While this has seemed to be a rarity of late, this collection of new music and classic hits is enough to make even the most cynical hardliner hopeful.

I should disclaim this by saying that there is a lot of music in here that really, just isn’t my kind of style, and it can be a little jarring to suddenly go from classic Creedence to Jane’s Addiction to Teagan and Sara. It can also be frustrating to skip forward to a favorite song only to find that it was purchased from iTunes and cannot be played without being authorized. Still, there’s a lot here to love.

The aforementioned Creedence is a good place for classic rock/folk lovers to start, with hits like ‘Born on the Bayou’ and ‘Looking Out My Back Door’ bookending less-known classics like ‘Lodi’ and ‘Hey Tonight’. From there it’s a sandbox, where your experiences derive from your involvement in the world around you. You can jump ahead to Detroit Rock City, slow it down with some Lionel Richie, or remind yourself of Ontario in the early 2000s with some Sum 41.

Truly, there’s a lot to love here, but it’s not all green fields and rainbows. The issue of not knowing which songs are ‘protected’ is a big one that can really contrast with the enthusiasm of finding the exact song you feel like listening to. On top of that, once you find an artist, album, or song you like, there’s no guarantee of musical context to go with it. There might be only one album from an artist, or even one song. Albums might be incomplete, forcing you to go without your favorites, or limiting you to only those songs which received the most airplay during their hayday.

All in all, it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely a refreshing change from the other iTunes libraries that I’ve been seeing a lot of lately. Not to dampen those libraries or their efforts, but let’s face it - nothing beats the Stray Cats when you need to get your feet tapping.

All in all, I give this library three stars out of five, for an excellent collection marred only by inaccessibility and inconsistency.

This is what happens when you're badass

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:41:49 -0700

Created by OnePlusYou

iPhone Love

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:33:00 -0700

They say that there’s no such thing as bad press. Rogers, then, must be thrilled at the amount of (what must logically be) good press that they’ve been getting lately.

Vancouver Sun: Unhappy? Assert yourself. Don’t buy the iPhone

Global TV: iPhone costs significantly more in Canada
Globe and Mail: In response to Rogers’ pricing uproar, Bell offers Samsung Instinct with unlimited data for $39.70 (also in the print edition, 04/07/08 page B3)
Fortune Magazine Weblog: 30,000 signature anti-Rogers petition
CTV: iPhones may have ‘poisonous bite’ for consumers

It seems as though the chronology has gone from ‘BTW some people are unhappy’ through ‘Let’s do a video report on how pissed off people are’ and now sits at ‘Don’t buy it.’ It seems like the only way things could get worse for Rogers is if this guy got loose and joined the furor.

A screen capture from Stargate: Ark of Truth. Purportedly the...

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:27:00 -0700

A screen capture from Stargate: Ark of Truth. Purportedly the replicator base code. Apparently, replicators are programmed in Javascript. I hope they’re using SquirrelFish!

Great, now whenever I see @songsinblue post on Twitter, I’m reminded of sushi and get hungry....

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:06:57 -0700

Great, now whenever I see @songsinblue post on Twitter, I’m reminded of sushi and get hungry. Pavlov: 1, Wallet: 0

"Rogers is testing our faith. Will we stay true to the one righteous path, overcome the trials that..."

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:09:00 -0700

“Rogers is testing our faith. Will we stay true to the one righteous path, overcome the trials that our Lord and Savior Steve Jobs has placed in front of us, acting through his agent, Ted Rogers? Or will we abandon the divine path laid down before us, turning away from salvation and travelling down the road of damnation and suffering?”

- Me, on Tanya’s iPhone blog entry, which I’ve posted on way too much

Tumblr, Friendfeed, and Web 2.0's Information Overload

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:44:00 -0700

(This post is contextually based in Raul’s post about Tumblr - it started out as a comment there and snowballed)

My general response to having a hard time with something is to bail on it. I tried out friendfeed after a friend’s ranting and raving, and my first and consistent impression was ‘This is great, now all the sites I might like to take my coffee break to browse are all condensed into one cluttered, complicated, hard-to-use interface.

Fact of the matter is, I’m not ‘cool’ enough or ‘trendy’ enough for these kinds of things to make a difference. I can see the value for people like iJustine or perhaps Rebecca, people who deal a lot with social networking on more than a casual level - being able to go in and see what people are talking about, what other people are commenting about in regards to it, to watch trends for what’s got people’s attention, and to use or write about it in turn.

As much a fan of hype as I am, I don’t want to get caught up in it. I see this a lot in programming - the ‘next big thing’ is generally technology hyped up by people who don’t really understand it very well. They know the thing it makes easier than anything else, but they know nothing of the drawbacks, and so when the smoke settles, the revolution winds up as just another tool in the toolbox.

It’s the same with ‘Web 2.0’. I don’t feel like I have to be on FriendFeed, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Grokster, Technorati, Blogger, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and every other website on the planet. When I am curious about a site, I try it out. If I like it, I use it. When I stop liking it or it gets boring, I give up on it.

The thing I like about Tumblr is that instead of consolidating everyone ELSE’S junk, it just does yours. Friendfeed presents me with an annoying, hard-to-use interface that aggregates everything that everyone is doing on the internet - I currently have Amazon, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, two Jabber accounts, Last.fm, Tumblr, Twitter, and Youtube, and I’m certain that most people on the site have more than that. This seems stupid. It’s information overload, and on top of getting far more information that I’ll ever need, most of it about things that I don’t like or aren’t interested in, I also get comments from people I don’t like or disagree with on things I don’t like or disagree with. That’s great for some, but not for me.

Tumblr appeals to me because instead of providing one channel into which funnels the entirety of the internet (at least, for two degrees of separation), it allows me to dump whatever I happen to be interested in into a bin and people can follow that over RSS. If they don’t like it, they unfollow. Drag it out of the Safari bookmarks bar, and don’t worry about it.

Hypothetical situation - I meet someone interesting on Twitter, and they’re saying cool stuff. I find out they have a tumblr site which also grabs their twitter feeds, as well as their flickr pictures, quick links, and longer blog postings. Fantastic. If their site is similarly interesting, then I unfollow them on Twitter and add their RSS feed to my reader. Now suddenly I’ve tried the free sample, I like the taste and texture, and so I can go for the whole dish. Being able to escalate someone else’s impact on your life by upgrading them from Tweets to Tweets, Photos, and Blog in one simple interface is fantastic.

This is what Friendfeed fails to do - instead of giving you a taste of a person’s involvement and then letting you expand out, it gives you everything all at once. For some people, this is great; for others, it doesn’t work, and I’m one of those people.

To give another example, I’ll use @FabGirl, who I used to have on Twitter - and in fact, through whom I found most of the Vancouverites I have on Twitter today (as I recall, it was red beret day, so imagine how confused I was when I decided to try Twitter and everyone had a strange hat on). I found her tweets interesting, but she was also prolific enough that I had to unfollow her - only because I have trouble concentrating (because of medication I’m on), and because Twitter’s API breakage was forcing clients to update in 10-minute chunks, which is too slow to follow a torrent of tweets.

(As a side note, once Twitter gets its service back online or FabGirl signs up at identi.ca, I’m planning on re-following - nothing personal, honest!)

Information overload is not for everyone. Some people love it, some people hate it. Studies lately have shown that constant multitasking actually actively harms the brain’s ability to concentrate on tasks. Flitting back and forth between different tasks requires the brain to work in a certain way, pulling information back into relevance and then pushing it out to make room for something else, all the while maintaining a list of everything that needs keeping track of. In addition, another study I read about this week talks about how the very act of remembering something changes how we remember it - while memories will fade if not used, memories that are referenced and recalled over and over again will mutate on their own. Details will change, facts, figures, people, names, places, citations, it all mutates over time. I can’t imagine that multitasking, which requires juggling between different things all the time, is any good for the brain.

What it comes down to is that if you don’t want to go to Friendfeed and get an aggregation of everyone’s aggregation of everyone’s activities, then don’t. If you have a use for tumblr, use it. If you don’t want something on your tumblr page, remove it. Change things around, subscribe to different things, change your style. Find out what the service can do for you, not what you should do with the service. If the answer is grand, then go for it. If it’s bland, then let it lie.

I need to tumbl more often, or this is going to end up like my last weblog - tied to a chair...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:16:38 -0700

I need to tumbl more often, or this is going to end up like my last weblog - tied to a chair and… no wait, I’m thinking of something else.

Twitter’s scheduled maintenance in 6 hours. While you’re Twitterless for two hours, you...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:22:38 -0700

Twitter’s scheduled maintenance in 6 hours. While you’re Twitterless for two hours, you may as well check out http://identi.ca ;)

Need to go to the Fido store and find out what it’ll take to get an iPhone on launch day....

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:22:38 -0700

Need to go to the Fido store and find out what it’ll take to get an iPhone on launch day. Keeping my dignity is not a requirement.

Woke up at 6 AM to a phone call for money. Amazing how easy it is to online-bank whilst asleep.

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:03:35 -0700

Woke up at 6 AM to a phone call for money. Amazing how easy it is to online-bank whilst asleep.

Hang on… if peanut butter is awesome… and buttermilk is awesome… BRB, starting...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:32:09 -0700

Hang on… if peanut butter is awesome… and buttermilk is awesome… BRB, starting epicurian revolution

New blog post: Why identi.ca is cool, http://is.gd/KZq

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:21:40 -0700

New blog post: Why identi.ca is cool, http://is.gd/KZq

Why identi.ca is cool

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:23:33 -0700

Twitter sucks. I mean, it’s great, but it sucks. Some stuff is broken. Some things don’t work. Entire features are offline while they fix them. Kind of a pain.

There are lots of other sites that do similar things - pownce comes to mind - so why should anyone care about identi.ca? Legitimate question.

Here’s the problem. Twitter is owned by Twitter, Inc. Pownce is owned by… well, who knows. That’s not a problem in and of itself, until you look at something like Facebook, which has consistently shown a disregard for its users privacy or preferences by doing things like advertising what you buy on other sites without asking you. Now, I doubt Twitter would ever do this, but it’s possible. They have to make money somehow, right?

Most people have never used Jabber, and for good reason - most of their friends are on MSN, AIM, and so on. Some people have, without even knowing it - GTalk, for example. What is Jabber? It’s pretty neat, and worth explaining.

The concept behind Jabber is to create a decentralized, federated chat network. Unlike MSN, where you connect to Microsoft’s servers, or AIM where you connect to AOL’s, Jabber lets anyone run a server. Anyone. You, me, anyone. The protocol then allows for those servers to communicate, and thus for users on those servers to communicate.

For example, let’s say I set up a Jabber server to run on cdslash.net, and I create an account, ‘dan’. My Jabber ID is now ‘dan@cdslash.net’. Maybe some of my friends want accounts too, so they create ‘john’ and ‘jacob’. Now we can add each other by adding ‘john@cdslash.net’ and ‘jacob@cdslash.net’ to my contact list and vice-versa. So far, it’s the same.

But let’s say my friend Mike wants to run his own server, and he puts it on fullduplex.org. Now he has an account, ‘mike@fullduplex.org’, running on a completely different server than all of my accounts. Maybe his girlfriend has an account, maybe his parents have accounts. Again, it’s the same.

Except for the one big difference: I can add Mike to my contact list. I just add in ‘mike@fullduplex.org’, and it goes out and communicates with Mike’s server to send my buddy request. He accepts, sends one back, and I accept, and voila - we’re communicating. Likewise, so can ‘john@cdslash.net’ communicate with ‘cassandra@fullduplex.org’, even if neither one of them knows that they’re on different servers. It’s completely transparent to the users.

You might ask why someone would bother with this, when you can just have one server. As an example, my company could set up a Jabber server that was tied into our corporate directory, so that all users automatically could automatically log into Jabber with their global username and password. They could automatically have everyone in the company on their list, broken up into groups by department. When a new person joins the company, they’re instantly on everyone’s list. When someone leaves, they’re taken off.

So this company, let’s call them JBoo Media, has all of their users as firstname.lastname@jboomedia.com. Now I can go and add them to my list, and they can add me to their lists. I don’t have to care how they manage their users, and they don’t have to care how I do mine. It’s completely federated, completely decentralized, and completely open.

So how does this apply to Identi.ca? Well put simply, it’s the same idea. It supports a protocol that allows different services to interact. Conceptually, if Twitter and Pownce supported this, for example, someone on Pownce could follow someone on Twitter, and vice-versa.

Going back to our company-and-users example, JBoo Media could have their own copy of identi.ca running the laconi.ca software. They could put it up internally, and give all of their employees accounts based on firstname.lastname automatically. They could integrate it with Jabber, so that they automatically get replies via Jabber, and can post messages through it as well - everyone could have a ‘Laconi.ca’ user on their list that would post to their account automatically.

They could also modify the software, to handle internal vs. public messages. They could set it up so that by default, messages are internal-only - the public can’t see them on the website (maybe laconica.jboomedia.com). Only messages that the poster explicitly puts public are viewable to the outside world. You could add in that @replies and direct-messages are allowed to go out. If JBoo had a sister company that they worked closely with, maybe called Infinida Networks, then the two could set each other up as trusted, so that all Infinida users can see non-public JBoo posts, and vice-versa.

This is all, of course, in addition to being able to follow people on identi.ca, and any other similar site that runs the software.

It’s well known that in some areas of the world, certain technologies are completely and irrevocably entrenched. In Turkey, the vast majority of internet users are on MSN messenger. Orkut is huge in Brazil, and so on. The problem is that no one who doesn’t speak Portugese goes on Orkut, because the only people there are from Brazil. Thus, if someone from Brazil wants to communicate outside of Brazil, they need to use two services.

So, consider this. A Spanish-language version run by a company in Mexico, catering to the Mexican market. A site in Brazil. A site in Turkey. Russia. Japan. Five million users in Mexico. Twenty million in Japan. Only two million in Turkey, but they post a lot more often. Fifteen million in Taiwan, but they post compulsively from their cellphones instead of SMSing their friends, treating it largely like a distribution list for sending messages to all their friends at once.

That’s 42 million users. That’s a lot of users. That’s hard to scale… very hard to scale. Except you don’t have to scale all of those users all the way. The server in Mexico only needs to support its users. Same with Taiwan. Same with Japan. Same with Turkey. 99.999% of their traffic is going to be to other people in the same locality, so they can just focus on solving their own problems. Taiwan might need to work mostly on their SMS gateway. Japan needs support for Kanji.

Groups who communicate largely within themselves, or who have special or particular needs or functionality requirements, can manage their own systems independently. If Identi.ca starts getting too slow, or you move to another country, you can jump ship. Create a new account over there, and get all your followers to follow the new you, and off you go.

The possibilities are as fascinating as they are endless.

You can visit the website for the Open Microblogging specification, but it’s a pretty dry technical document, all in all. Then again, so was Jabber when it first came out.

Identi.ca is neat. Open-microblogging, so multuple sites can inter-communicate. Also open-source, so...

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:16:26 -0700

Identi.ca is neat. Open-microblogging, so multuple sites can inter-communicate. Also open-source, so the community can make it better. Woo!

Note to beggars: the longer your sob story, the more of your time you waste on me

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:11:15 -0700

Note to beggars: the longer your sob story, the more of your time you waste on me