KnoBlog

So many people trust their firewall software, but what if the firewall software is preventing your other software from running properly?

Case in point: some older versions of Norton Personal Firewall will allow our software to access the Internet on a customer's machine after the user answers "yes" to the allow/deny dialog that pops up, but if our software is upgraded on that very same machine, Norton will not allow our software to access the Internet and does not even pop up the allow/deny dialog again.  The customer things that our software has stopped working, when it's Norton blocking the connection.

Case in point: some firewalls will deny our software access to our own web sites (but allow access to more popular sites such as microsoft.com) without popping up any kind of dialog alerting customers to that fact, so again our software appears to be broken.

These kinds of problems just cause headaches for customers and waste our time trying to track them down and figure out workarounds.  The process is especially difficult for customers who may not be as experienced with computers.  Customers mistakenly think that they have to disable their firewall software in order to get our software to work on their machines, when it is only necessary to learn how to use it properly.  We can only hope that the firewall software vendors make it easier for their customers to diagnose these kinds of problems (by providing proper feedback) and to fix them (by making the interface easier to understand).

We visited Niagara Falls, Canada recently, and an interesting thing happened.  Since this was the first time we had traveled out of the country with our boy, we had not even considered bringing any kind of identification with us to prove that he was ours.  The customs agent on the Canadian side asked about a birth certificate or any kind of identification, and after a little scrutiny let us through with a reminder to bring it next time.  At that point I was thinking... ok, how are we going to get back into the US?

Apparently getting into the US is not a problem, as the customs agent on the US side on didn't even ask about the child, and I think we were all a bit surprised by that.  So what does that imply exactly?  If I leave without a child and I come back with one, as long as he isn't screaming that's ok?

I guess we didn't look suspicious enough.  But that does bring up an interesting point, and this is something I obviously don't know since I'm not in the business: what kind of training do the border agents get in identifying suspicious characters?  A few years ago one of our relatives was temporarily detained coming back into the US from Canada, possibly because he has dark skin, a mustache, and speaks with an accent.  I don't know if they are racially profiling, but the guy is Russian, not Middle Eastern.

How much of what border security does is just for show?  Sure, they swipe your passport and look on their screens, but unless the computer tells them to detain you, are they really experienced enough to recognize a real threat?

Very interesting article in Newsweek.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/151758

More silliness from PHP.  This comes from my business partner, Yermo.

<?php

$retval = "eventdone";

if ( $retval != true )
   print "retval is not true\n";
else
  print "retval is true";

?>

PHP 5.2.5 under RedHat Linux yields "retval is not true".
PHP 5.2.4 under Kubuntu Hardy Heron yields "retval is true".

Trust not completely in machine translation, my young padiwan.

http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2008/07/then-well-grab.html

A guy posts a video of his new plane on rcgroups.  Someone comments on it:

> That's pretty cool - can it turn to the right?

The guy's reply:

> Yes, been watching too much nascar I guess

Actually it seems the Russians are already here, judging by the number of them I've met recently.  Maybe it's just because I've been getting out more, especially having a kid, but I've met at least four at the playground with their children or grandchildren, one at the Hair Cuttery who cut my hair, and one today who was the checkout girl at the Trader Joe's.  Plus the conversations in Russian that I've overheard at the mall, or in the grocery store.  It seems there is quite a large Russian settlement here in Northern VA, and I had no idea.  At least I get to practice speaking Russian now, at least a little bit at a time. 

Jerry Yang has his hands full.  Not only was his lunch eaten by Larry Page and Sergei Brin and he's playing catch-up, now he's also forced to do battle with Carl Icahn over who gets to sit on the board of directors.  Icahn, like any good investor, wants to see the value of his shares go up, so he is doing what he thinks will make that happen.  But in the meanwhile, Jerry Yang has to split his focus between trying to run the business and fighting off Carl Icahn at the same time.  I can understand wanting to increase "shareholder value", but is this really the right way to go about it?

Unfortunately I don't know what else Yahoo can do right now to reverse it's fortunes.  It seems that Google can just out-develop Yahoo, and many unique features that Yahoo had are quickly duplicated and improved.  Kinda sounds kind of like Microsoft doesn't it?  Google is also developing a lot of unique technology independently and has a lot of the public and corporate mindshare.  It seems that Yahoo may be in a no-win situation.

This isn't really an original thought by any means, but it struck me today as I was reading some posts in one of the forums I frequent: I think text messaging on cell phones is ruining the ability to write proper and complete sentences.  Suddenly, even when people have a full keyboard to work with, they feel the need to abbreviate like they are writing a text message.  Suddenly, "does anyone think a plane with forward swept wings is possible" becomes "does any 1 think a plane with 4ward swept wings is possible".  Y, Y, Y?  Maybe I'm too old for this now, but it actually takes me more time to think about substituting "one" with "1" and "for" with "4" than to just type the right word in the first place.  Plus the person reading it has to actually think about how to transform it back 2 the correct English word, so it takes longer to read the message.  I think that when 1 does this in a public 4um, it makes 1 seem uneducated, not clever.  Please, everyone, save the abbreviations for the cell phone.

Once in a long while we will order Domino's pizza delivery.  Some time ago delivery used to be free.  Back when I was in college, you would even get your pizza free if they didn't deliver it in 30 minutes.  Well, I'm not expecting free pizza, but in the last year or so Domino's has started charging a delivery charge.  At first it was $1.50, but today I noticed it is up to $2.  I thought this was an interesting development from a business point of view, considering that no one else charges for delivery.  I would think that it's a competitive disadvantage.

I guess this at least ensure that the driver gets a couple dollars tip, but are people so unkind that they don't tip the driver at least a couple dollars anyway?  Our average order was around $20, and I used tip two or three dollars, but after I saw the delivery fee I no longer felt inclined to tip.  So I asked our delivery guy if his tips have gone up or down since Domino's started charging the fee, and he said they have gone down.  So now I question whether it was wise to raise the fee to $2.  Ok, I felt bad for the guy so I gave him $2 on top of the delivery charge.  This time.  We'll see about next time.

My wife just called me to tell me that our son said "bus" for the first time, after he saw a bus drive by.  At about 15 1/2 months, it looks like we are definitely getting to the stage when he's going to start to pick up words pretty quick.  In the last couple of weeks he started saying "mama", "ice", and "apple".  And now "bus".  Plus "this", "uh-oh", and "bye bye" from before, and it looks like we have seven words.  I guess we're going to have to really watch what we say around him; our friends just taught their little one to say "Obama".

I've never considered myself a pet person, and we never had pets when I was growing up, so when my girlfriend decided she wanted a cat and went to the shelter to pick one out, I wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea.  What did I know about cats?  She picked out a cute kitten, an orange tabby, about 6 months old.  The girlfriend was gone a couple months later, but she didn't take the cat with her, so he became my responsibility.  That was over 12 years ago.

Yesterday, I had to drop the cat off at the shelter because we could no longer have him around.  He has always been somewhat aggressive toward strangers in the house, but since the birth of our son, the cat became more aggressive toward my wife, and in the last couple of months started pooping outside the litter box, even when I had just cleaned it.  I tried a number of things to see if it would get him to behave, including dumping all of the old litter, scrubbing out the litter box, changing litter brands, moving the litter box, re-introducing him to the litter box, but nothing worked.  Finally, when we returned from our camping trip on Sunday, we found that he had pooped in the TV room, and peed all over the blanket in the little play tent in the living room where my wife nurses our son during the day.  I cleaned up the poop and immediately threw the blanket in the wash, and not 30 minutes later the cat had peed on the Thermarest pads that were under the blanket, as well as the pad in front of the fireplace.  It was fortunate that we had closed the baby gate to the upstairs when we went on our camping trip so he could not get into any of the bedrooms.

I struggled with what to do for a few days and discussed it with my wife, but in the end we decided that we couldn't have the cat around any more if we're going to be wondering where he would pee and poop next, especially if it was where our son was playing.  With a heavy heart I put the cat into the pet carrier and drove to the shelter, knowing that it was possible that they would not be able to place him and that he would have to be euthanized.  But I just can't think about that right now; I have to focus on the safety of our son.

The house feels emptier now.

As of today, our tiny little company is multi-homed on two T1's from two separate companies, eliminating one possible single-point-of-failure and helping to ensure that our customers are able to reach our servers even if there are problems with one company's equipment.  This required a new router, a new IP address range for our network (and the associated headache of changing the IP addresses on all of the machines as well as updating the DNS entries) and configuration of the BGP protocol to allow us to use both T1's at the same time.  Big kudos to my business partner Yermo for fighting through all of the administrative crap and getting this done.

The difference between being multi-homed and just having a hot failover T1 is that we can actually fully utilize the bandwidth on two T1's.  This is nice because when we release a major new version of Personal Stock Monitor, the flood of downloads peg our single T1 to the wall and everything slows to a crawl.  We tried outsourcing the downloads to an external server, but that was just too much of a pain.  Also we've had enough trouble with our initial T1 provider (including one multi-day outage) that it just made a lot of sense to have a backup.

So here we are, possibly the smallest company in the world to be multi-homed.  Now our single point of failure is if a tree falls on Yermo's house.  That would be bad.

"Me time" is when you get to forget about work, chores, and --gasp!-- even family, and focus on yourself.  Even if it's just a 15 minutes or a half hour every day, or even every other day or every third day, I think everyone needs a little "me time" to relax or have fun, to just do something that lets you forget for even a little while about the everyday stuff.

I did a quick google search and came up with some links about Me Time which I thought might be useful.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/09/15/me.time.health/index.html - This article just focuses on women, especially working mothers, but men and fathers need Me Time just as much for their own sanity.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/05/02/hfh.moms/index.html - Another more recent article from the same news channel, and again focusing on moms.

http://homeparents.about.com/cs/stayathomemoms/a/metime.htm - An article from about.com, again focusing on moms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/13/AR2008061304253.html - Finally, a woman who realizes that men need Me Time too, although I'm not sure why the focus is on men going to salons.  Going to salons is fine, but I'm sure many men can find other activities to occupy themselves with for Me Time.

http://healing.about.com/od/selfpower/a/metime.htm - More from about.com, this time from a male life coach.  He doesn't focus on specific activities or genders.  I kinda like this article.

Me Time activities can and often do change over time.  Before Liam, I went kayaking a couple times a week.  Now, my Me Time activity is radio-controlled planes and helicopters.  It's something that I can do by myself or with like-minded FBs (flying buddies), it's something I do where I can develop a skill, and it's something that (most importantly) completely takes my mind off everything else in my life, if even for just a 5-minute flight.

Goo Gone is a great product that has many uses, including removing adhesive residue such as that which is left over when you peel a label off something you bought.  By chance I discovered a new use: removing permanent marker from a whiteboard.  As it happens, my wife accidentally used a permanent market to write a friend's address on our kitchen whiteboard (that usually contains items for the shopping list, etc.).  That address was on there for about six months until I had brought the Goo Gone into the kitchen to clean some tape residue off a knife, and I thought to try it on the whiteboard.  It took a little rubbing, but the permanent marker came off almost completely.