Why they do it

If you got a computer virus ten or fifteen years ago, you probably experienced the digital equivalent of a mean and nasty practical joke: ink poured on important papers, stink bombs, bags of dog poop on fire, insults spray-painted on your house, your car keyed. Generally, virus/worm authors wanted notoriety, a rush of power, or just to stick it to someone who wronged them.

Now, it's all about cash money.

The Conficker worm recently woke up, as you may have heard. No, it's not the end of the world, but we are starting to see some of what it's designed to do- make money fast. Infected Windows machines are starting to present notices along the lines of "Hello. Your computer is infected. For $49.95, you can be cleaned!"

Malware authors are not maladjusted teens living in their parents' basement; they are professional criminals trying to make money.

Let's talk Android Apps

What apps do I use on my Google Phone?

Generally, I install apps that are either useful or diverting. Often there's a bit of overlap, and some categories include show-offy or just-in-case-someday-maybe.

Toggle Settings: I use this one constantly to toggle wireless, Bluetooth, and GPS. I also use it to quick toggle brightness and ringer mode. It's pretty flexible. I used to use Any Cut to quick toggle Bluetooth, but Toggle Settings works better for me.

Twidroid: If you follow my twitter, you know I use this a fair amount. It's a little crashy, but the developers have a strong and active release cycle, which is nice.

AK Notepad: I carry around a 99-cent paper spiral notebook in my back pocket for most note-taking, but this is a handy digital alternative until Google Docs works on my phone. A lot of people seem surprised that I use paper.

Flashlight: When it says light, it means light. Max brightness, no sleep, all white. Very practical.

The Weather Channel: Boring but useful. Has some neat smarts about location if you travel.

Bubble and Compass are a bubble level and compass, respectively. Countdown Alarm++ and Stopwatch do what they say they do. Handy to have.

ParkMark and Location Log are "where's my car" sort of apps. I don't have a preference for one or the other yet. YMMV.

Wifiscan does the wardriving for you and outputs a Google Earth KML or CSV to your SD card. The developer is super friendly, too.

ConnectBot does ssh and does it well.

Magic 8-Ball is a fun show-off toy. Sky Map falls into the same category, but as a real star map that changes view as the phone moves and shows real-world views based on GPS and compass readings is much sexier to show off. Somewhat geekier is The Schwartz Unleashed, complete with motion-sensing lightsaber noises and custom colors.

Phonalyzr and Power Manager are usage tools. The former reads my call log and displays nifty usage data; I don't know how long it will stay around. The latter lets me tweak power preferences, but I don't use it fully.

Shazam really pushes the envelope for the cool factor. Play music, hold the phone to the speaker, wait, and it'll tell you what song you're hearing. Like having a portable music trivia geek in your pocket.

ShopSavvy scans UPS barcodes and returns real-world and web pricing. Very handy when comparison shopping.

I currently only have a few games on my phone, would you believe?

Tetroid: A tetris clone I haven't played yet. Gotta have tetris.

Scrambled Net: A nice port of the puzzle game knetwalk, but since lost its appeal for me. I'm good at these sorts of visual spatial puzzles.

Lexic: A Boggle clone. I like word games, but I have poor skill in Boggle.

Coloroid: Another puzzle game that's a bit maze-like, but not as addicting for me.

DroidDice and Chess Clock do not count as games; they are tools for real face-to-face gaming.

Funniest. Star Wars. EVER.

Oh my god. I haven't laughed this hard since Noises Off. I managed to not fall out of my chair.

Behold, Star Wars [All three movies!] as retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi.




Direct link to video for my RSS friends.

Microsoft: scared or stupid?

With a reactionary title like that, you might imagine that I have a hard-hitting article full of insights and interviews and evidence.

Microsoft has released a beta version of their next OS, imaginatively dubbed "Windows 7." I actually don't mind the name that much; I think that XP and Vista are silly names for versioned software. "What version are your running?" "Butter Hammer Pecan Movement!" Naturally, everybody and their dog wants to see about the next version of Windows; chances are that they will have to, anyway, once Redmond stops supporting their OS of choice or their hardware fails or their machine gets too old and crusty.

For quite a few years now, people have used peer-to-peer programs, applications, and networks to transfer large amounts of data semi-anonymously. Remember Napster in the Bad Old Days? Nowadays, most people use BitTorrent to transfer large files, and rightfully so; the algorithm is pretty efficient and makes great use of limited network bandwidth by spreading around the traffic burden in a sensical manner. A lot of Linux distros have used BitTorrent, since they operate on a limited budget and bandwidth costs. I know that other projects use BT to spread around large media files.

Also there's something about piracy and porn. Whatever.

So either Microsoft doesn't want to use BitTorrent (if so, my guess is NIH syndrome- look at Silverlight, their response to Flash) or they don't know about it (seems amazingly unlikely, but possible; perhaps the decision-makers don't get good info). Folks are using BT to distribute the Windows 7 beta anyway. Be nice to legitimize it, right?

I'm at a loss.

Communications convergence

Non-ironically, I want to opine about the various forms of communication I have at my fingertips, despite the fact that I've barely managed one blog post a week this month.

First, an examination of last month's NaBloPoMo experiment-slash-activity. Out of thirty days hath November, I wrote twenty-five posts. Not surprisingly, five of those days I went to BGG.Con and twittered my words. After con, I did up a Geeklist of the things I taught and played. I had thought that blogging once-a-day in November would have gotten me into the blogging habit; I think that BGG.Con and Twittering disrupted that nascent habit. Even though I cheated a little with some timestamps and missed a few days, I consider my November a blogging success.

Why the slowdown? Some of it is Twitter and my Google Phone. Right now, I get email, SMS messages, Google IM, Twitter, voice mail and phone calls on my telephone. I feel like I am communicating enough. Couple the tethering to my phone (sorry dear) with my sharing nifty RSS stuff, I know that I'm scratching my communications itch.

I still feel that blogging is/should be/is to me/feels like op-ed pieces; I want what I write to be interesting to everyone that I know reads it, plus the strangers who I don't know. Success is a variable here. Tweeting is the opposite of blogging.

Netscape, dead for almost a year

Well, the announcement by AOL has a dateline of December 2007, but evidently they stopped writing code for it as of February 2008.

Do I care? Should you? Probably not, since most of you fine folks are using Firefox (or if you're not, Safari or Chrome), except for those of you non-web designers who still for some reason use IE. Netscape survives as a branded portal, and also as a completely non-ironic Firefox extension. There's history, too- I don't think one could overstate the impact Netscape has had on the world of digital communications, the web (insert obligatory blink tag joke), the way millions of people do things on the tubes.

I'm grasping here to say something more of note about Netscape, and perhaps that's the notable thing; Given the current landscape of the web, Netscape itself doesn't matter. True, it forced Microsoft to look at the internet and arguably make IE suck less over time; true, without Netscape we would have no Firefox et al; true, Netscape used to be a household word for "going to look at the Internet." Netscape is a stepping stone, and we've moved on. What will next fall by the wayside?

All that aside, I do miss the ease of modding the Netscape throbber.

For the future!

With IT and wiring, you really need to document everything that you do for the idiot that will be there in five years. Especially if that idiot could be yourself.

What you need to pull off a medium-big wiring gig
You'll eventually build up a kit full of tools you like. This list is pretty off-the-cuff, and a decent start.

• Ladders, fiberglass. I enjoy having one four-foot and at least one each of six- and eight-foot. You will move a ladder often, so don't get anything too heavy.
• Electrician's tape, many many rolls of black, a few extra rolls of "other." White never hurts because you can easily write on it; day-glo whatever never hurts because you can see it in dark crawlspaces.
  
• Sharpies.
• Wire cutters, aka "dikes."
• Good scissors, aka "snips."
• Boxes of cable, probably category 5e and probably plenum.
• Patch panels. Don't get crummy ones; these things will probably outlast you. Think six times before you mount them, since once you punch down, you will never want to move them.
  
• Sharpies, fine tip.
  
• RJ-45 heads, lots.
• Crimping tools.
  
• Wall plates, various sizes. I currently like the keystone-style blanks so you can pop in different colored jacks or blanks or coax or RJ-11 as needed.
  
• A bucket of pull-string. Two colors is fun, but overkill. If you remotely intend to mark different things with different colored string, rethink everything.
  
• At least one cheap toner and wand per person.
• A fancy Fluke meter. If you can, get the fancier one.
• A whole box of miscellaneous screws.
• Cordless drills, non-sucky. Also get extra batteries and a charger.
• Screwdrivers, various.
  
• More sharpies, and pens. Write down as much as you can.
  
• Fish tape. For some reason, this stuff is expensive. It also sucks.
  
• Labelmaker, good. Label extensively.
• A good knife. Maybe two.
  
• Measuring tape. It never hurts.
  
• Punchdown tools.
• Fish sticks. Expect to lose or break at least one, so have extra. Bonus if you don't lose 'em.
  
• Flashlights.
• Batteries. Those Fluke meters, cable testers, radios, you name it will eventually need batteries. Have spare so you don't need to waste an hour on a battery run.

Did I forget anything? Yes. I have no doubt. The moral of this story is be prepared to improvise, and be prepared to make at least one mistake.

Always pull twice as much as you think you need, always, always. The cost of a wiring gig is virtually never the material, but the cost of labor and the calendar time. If they ask for one drop per room, make sure you do two drops. I say overpull unless physical space is a serious concern- for a one-person office, I'd do at least four terminations total. Maybe six. This gives you maximum flexibility in the future: Maybe you put in two people into the office, maybe a printer, maybe you go VOIP with your phone system, maybe you rearrange the furniture.

Wiring shouldn't be an afterthought. Do it when the walls are down.

Android update

My phone tells me this morning that it wants a software update.

One selling point for me wrt the Android platform is the fact that it is an open platform- anybody can develop for it, or improve it, or build upon the work. Open Source, me likey. I know, on a deep an instinctual level, that hardware is much less important than it used to be- atoms are more and more a commodity these days. You buy a $50 off-the-shelf Linksys router, drop in a free third-party custom firmware, and you have the power of a full-on expensive router that would probably cost you at least few hundred bucks.

I don't really expect this first update to change the world or my phone to suddenly bake bread, but I'm pleased with the fact more than the details. This "minor bugfix" of an update evidently patches a security vulnerability in the browser. Big surprise, it's a buffer overflow.


For posterity's sake, before the update, my phone thought the following:

Firmware version: 1.0
Baseband: 62.33.20.08H_1.22.12.28
Kernel version: 2.6.25-01828-g18ac882 android-build@apa27 #1
Build number: kila-user 1.0 TC4-RC19 109652 ota-rel-keys,release-keys

The update took about four or five minutes to download, install, and reboot.

After the update, my phone thinks the following:

Firmware version: 1.0
Baseband: 62.33.20.08H_1.22.12.29
Kernel version: 2.6.25-01843-gfea26b0 android-build@apa27 #6
Build number: kila-user 1.0 TC4-RC29 115247 ota-rel-keys,release-keys

Neener, Neener, Neener

My Google Phone arrived today.

Data is fragile

I pulled a few small rabbits out of small hats this week. Two of our users had partial hard drive failures, and it was a relatively simple matter to boot Ubuntu and salvage their data. Luckily, I didn't have to deal with total drive failure- just an amount of time to physically move the data from a suspect device to a known good device. Presto, happy and relieved users.

One kind of data loss: the physical media fails.

One of the two machines had some moderately old AppleWorks files, which poses another kind of data loss: obsolescence making your data impossible to read. AppleWorks is a productivity suite (think OpenOffice or MS Office) that Apple Computer end-of-lifed in 2007. As I understand it, the current software offering, iWork, does not import all AppleWorks formats. Windows users have seen this before with MS Word- MS Word 97 had particularly problems with earlier versions, and even now MS Office 2003 requires a compatibility pack to read MS Office 2007 files.

Another kind of data loss: Actually misplacing the data. You can forget what directory, machine, disk, or tape you stored your file.

NASA, too, has problems of all three kinds. The original moon landing tapes are missing. Nobody knows where they are, they may physically be rotting away due to age, and they only have one device that can read the tapes (which is in a facility slated to close). We may never see the raw footage of mankind's first moon landing.

Backup is part of a solution- you must test your backups, maintain your archives, and ensure that your data is in a current format or some form of open standard.

This makes me paranoid.

Awesomely good, Awesomely bad

I've wanted a Watchmen movie for more than half my life. The new trailer sends shivers up my spine. I've watched it three times today and seriously thought about going to see Batman again to see it on the big screen.

There's a bug in DNS, some of the major glue on the 'tubes that prevents you from having to remember a 32-bit number instead of just typing in "rossum.blogspot.org" ever day. We should expect an exploit in the wild in the near future. Good info here, video for the layperson here. Patch your shit, people.

If I could pull nearly seven miles

Yikes, what a long last several days. We're rolling out a new Nortel VOIP system at NOCCA that requires actually decent wiring spec, so that means putting a new wire wherever there exists a phone.

So yes, we've put in something on the order of thirty-five thousand feet worth of new cat 5 cable. Each cable has four pairs of twisted wire, so strictly speaking, I'm talking fifty miles of copper wire.

Ah, the march of progress.

Anyone else finds this ironic?

Microsoft says that Apple's Safari web browser on Windows introduces severe security issues.

I read some news reports today that indicate XP SP3 comes with an insecure version of Adobe's Flash Player.

This isn't exactly apples to apples, nor is it apples to oranges. Apple needs to fix its bugs, and Microsoft needs to fix its bugs that allow Apple's bugs. Adobe says use the newest version.

Update your software and back up your data, people.

Ubuntu on a Mac

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the latest Ubuntu CD (8.04 Hardy Heron x86) will merrily boot a latest-and-greatest MacBook Pro with no hassle.

Of course, I'm not sure why I'd want to shell out two grand to do so, but it's nice to have the option and know that the Ubuntu team are on top of things.

I have the PowerPC build of the distro, but I haven't tested it.

Cell phone headsets

Executive summary: If you drive with a cell phone, you should use a headset. I bought the first generation Aliph Jawbone and like it.

Right, moving on.

Two months ago, my loyal readers may recall that I started using a Bluetooth headset with my cell phone. Of course I find out yesterday that the company is soon releasing a second version of their product that's sexier, sleeker, newer- hell, it's literally got leather upholstery. At least the price point hasn't changed. This doesn't bug me so much, but I do wish they had a loyalty program.

I don't constantly wear my headset like some folks. You see these people walking and talking, and at first you think they're either talking to you or outright crazy and conversing with their dog. I got problems enough without strangers thinking I'm talking to invisible people across the ether. I most commonly see people who spend a long time working alone wearing headsets- delivery personnel, usually. They may have a business case to wear one, too. Maybe taxi drivers will soon start wearing them for dispatch.

I very specifically wear mine in two cases: driving or if I plan to have a long phone conversation. I've even gotten into the habit of wearing it no matter how long the drive unless I have someone in the car with me. This may change in the future, but for now, it's a solo tool.

Let's compare driving without a headset versus driving with a headset. Without, you must hold your cell (and ergo the hand) up to your head. Regardless of squandered attention, my hand cuts of a bit of my peripheral vision, but also makes me less inclined to turn my head. This is the crucial argument for using a headset- not that you're more or less focused when you jibber-jabber, but that your sense of kinesthetics inhibits you from the maximum range of freedom if you've got your meathook by your mug.

Upshot? It took a few days to a week to get used to handsfree talking. Now it's second nature. Oh, and it works with my Mac. Bonus.

Shameless plug:

To tweet or not to tweet

Twitter.

The idea is that you drop tiny one-line status updates- "I'm walking the dog," "Having lunch with Ford," "Dreaming about Mars," "Failing to learn how to juggle" etc, and anyone on the tubes who care can follow along to see what you're up to. I see the appeal of a real-time human status line.

It reminds me of finger in the Good/Bad Old Days.

Do I want to do it? Sure, maybe. I like the notion of social computing. I might be more inclined to tweet more frequently than to blog. The low hurdle of a few dozen characters coupled with the directed "What are you doing?" approach effectively removes the problem of writer's block.

I don't have a good idea as to how many people really read this blog, but I'd have an exact number as to how many people "followed" me on Twitter. So there's a selfish, egotistical, narcissistic desire to know how many people care about what I'm doing NOW NOW NOW NOW RIGHT NOW.

I keep track of the games I play already; I'm starting to keep track of the books I read, too. I could do something over at NetFlix for movies, but I honestly have watched fewer movies these days. I also don't really like the fact that my first ideas are simply to report on the media I'm consuming. That seems equal parts shallow and needlessly materialistic, plus the elegance-needy part of my brain despises the extra work needed to keep the same data in two places by hand.

I hear some good use-cases for the service, particularly in convention/conference/con settings or other large gatherings of relative strangers. Businesses can use it like a rumor mill, or Rumor Control. Performers can use it for tour dates and bookings and the like.

Do you use Twitter? Why?

Loss

If someone stole your main computer, how doomed would you be?

A stranger would have your data; what could they do with it?

You would no longer have our data; could you get it back?

Left hand, meet right hand

Microsoft is incompetent. Specifically, their Xbox 360 repair division has no idea that things happen. At all.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Timeline:

• I acquire a 360 that's giving three lights on the Red Ring of Death.
• I poke at it for a few weeks and finally submit a repair request to Microsoft.
• A few days later, I receive a box to ship the console off to Mesquite, Texas.
• They get the box in a couple of days.
• They send me a new/refurb/repaired console which arrives in a few more days. (I should've taken better notes, but I'm pretty sure they sent me a refurb instead of repairing the one I sent them.)
• I happily play for two days. (Not in a row, mom.)
• Today, I get an email telling me that they never received my console and will cancel my service request.

Does this make sense in any context other than sloppy procedures on the back end?

P.S.: For those of you who find this post many moons down the road searching for "Red Ring of Death," know that the MSKB doesn't tell you the nature of such a hardware failure, but some research led me to believe that I had an AV failure of some kind, so try fiddling with your cable first.

Tech toys

I bought the bullet and bought a fancy Bluetooth headset.

Like many recent tech purchases, I tend to listen to other people's experiences and do a decent amount of research before plunking down dollars for a gadget. So far, I like my little cybernetic ear roach.

You want one? Check it out. They come in red, too.

UPDATE:I've got an Amazon link there to a black Jawbone that should come through an RSS reader.

And speaking of music

First, A great big shout to fellow geek Peggy for pointing at Plopbox, a repository of eight-bit music, covering some 4400 tunes as of this writing. When you hit that site, grab your headphones or crank up the volume and yank off the knob! The in-browser player is very handy.

I also came across C64music, a label devoted to preserving the vintage sound of that era. Buy their stuff, or obtain it illegally. I sure wish they did another live show.



Finally, yay for Firefox extensions.
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Now playing: Martin Galway - Comic Bakery (Danko mix by Tomas Danko)
via FoxyTunes