Technology

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).

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

Technology has now progressed to the point where we can apparently produce potentially viable embryos from adult skin cells.  We all knew it was coming, I'm just not sure we're ready for it.  The implications of this are scary, very scary.

Here is the Washington Post article.

I just read an article called Electronic Passports Raise Privacy Concerns.  At the end of the article, the author writes:

"Last year, the Government Accountability Office reviewed technology
similar to that used in the passport cards. The report found low read
rates and said the technology should be used only to track goods, not
to identify people.

The State Department hopes to begin issuing the cards in the spring."

Does anyone else see a problem with this?  For a government that is so concerned about terrorists coming into the US, they sure don't seem to care much about identity thieves.

Ok, I finally got scammed on eBay. Not for a lot of money, mind you, but it still stings.

A couple of weeks ago I bought an H700 for my wife for a price that I thought was too good to be true, and apparently it was. After a week, the headset we received started dropping its connection to the phone, plus there were complaints about buzzing and echoing from people my wife was talking to. I started doing some research, and apparently the H700 is one of the most popular headsets, and therefore one of the most frequently counterfeited. Amazon.com even has a PDF document from Motorola about how to distinguish the genuine product from the fake. When she got home tonight I looked over her headset carefully, and sure enough it's a fake. I sent an email to the seller about this, and I'm very curious to hear what he will say. In the meanwhile the cheapest place to get the genuine article seems to be Amazon.com, so that's probably where I'm going to be spending my money.

A couple of years ago I bought a tiny Creative 1GB flash-based MP3 player so I could listen to tunes.  One of the features I liked that the iPod didn't have is a built-in digital-tuning FM radio.  So now that I have an LG phone that can play MP3s, I wondered why (besides the obvious reason that Verizon wants to sell us MP3s and videos over their VCast service) LG didn't build in a radio too.  Sometimes I just want to listen to NPR or C-SPAN radio, and the little Creative FM radio sometimes doesn't do a great job with picking up those stations.  It would have been cool if LG added a decent FM receiver to their Chocolate phone, then it would truly be multimedia.

Since we switched to Verizon and got new Bluetooth-enabled phones, my wife got interested in getting one of the Bluetooth headsets so she didn't have to use the wired headset that she hated.  I got her a Motorola H700, and managed to save about $60 by getting it on eBay instead of at the Verizon store.  Works great.  But now it means that she is going to be going around with it attached permanently to her ear, and it's blinking purple all the time in standby mode, looking like a Borg implant.  Sigh.

Technology is great, isn't it? You install all these spam filters to protect you from unsolicited email, and then you never get the email you actually want to see. Over at my company, we get complaints from customers who never receive the email with their license information, or they never get our responses to their technical support questions. Well, this isn't because we're not sending them.

If you are going to put a spam filter on your email account, please learn how to use it properly. We do everything we can from our end to avoid getting blacklisted by ISPs so you can get our email, but it's really up to you to manage the filters so that our legitimate email doesn't hit your spambox instead of your inbox. It's really too bad that so many spam filters simply don't work that well and consistently misclassify emails. So if you don't take the time to check your spambox for legitimate email, don't blame us.

I'm currently dealing with the compatibility nightmare caused by Microsoft Windows Vista.  Security popups all over the place, for many things you would do, except that it appears they missed a spot.  Apparently of all the silly things that require administrator privileges, shutting down the machine isn't one of them.  I was expecting it to ask for my administrator password again, but I was able to shut down my Vista box from a standard account without so much as a peep.

It has become very apparent to me that with the increasing amount of software that people buy and install on their computers, many people assume that it will just work as advertised without any intervention on their part, and don't take the time to learn how to use even the basic functionality. A big problem for us at DTLink right now is personal firewall software such as ZoneAlarm, Norton Internet Security, and others. A number of these programs have a bug where if you upgrade a piece of software in-place, the updated software will not be allowed to access the Internet and the firewall software will not display an "allow this software to access the internet? yes/no" dialog.

When this happens, people assume it's a problem with our software, because that was the last thing they installed on their computer. A couple of times I have had to set up remote login sessions with customers in which I could see and control their machines remotely and I could configure their firewalls to allow our software to access the Internet, but I can't possibly do this for the thousands of customers we have out there.

I know computers are a scary black box for a lot of people, because it's hard to understand what's going on in there, but I do wish that people would learn to use even just the basic functionality of their software such as being able to add an application to the list of programs allowed to access the Internet. You would think that the firewall software vendors would make this process pretty easy, and in most cases it is, but not telling users that their software is blocking our software is just unacceptable. This is a long standing bug that should have been fixed long ago, but people are still dealing with it today.

Here's a story on ZDNet about trying to get Linux and Windows XP working on an older laptop computer. It reminds me of the time a couple years ago when I tried to set up my MythTV mini-tower with a wireless adapter so I could update the electronic program guide since the wireless router was in a different room at the time. Not only did I have to return the first wireless adapter I bought it since Linux wouldn't recognize it, but after I found one that worked (even though I had to manually download and install the kernel driver for it) it kept dropping the connection intermittently, so the nightly program guide update failed half the time. It looks like the situation only improved somewhat now that Linux at least automatically recognizes many wireless cards, but having "7 steps" to adding WPA encryption just isn't acceptable, especially when Windows makes it so easy. Linux has certainly come a long way in the past few years, but sometimes it just seems like it's two steps forward, one step back.

I use Norton Internet Security 2005, which includes Norton Anti-Virus and Norton Personal Firewall. The personal firewall software is what controls Internet access to and from my machine, so when I have a new or updated application that wants to access the Internet, it pops up a dialog asking me whether I want to allow this or not.

At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. In reality, this only happens about 90-95% of the time. The rest of the time, it silently blocks Internet access for an updated application and leaves me wondering why my software doesn't work. (I also know for a fact that ZoneAlarm sometimes exhibits this behavior as well.) Anyway, I stumble around a little wondering what's going on, realize that it's probably this old bug, open Norton and re-add my application to the allowed list.

How is a non-technical user supposed to know what to do when their applications suddenly stop working after upgrading? Since we release updates of Personal Stock Monitor fairly often, our customers run into this quite a bit and think its our software that stopped working, when in reality it is their firewall software that is blocking Internet access. It's frustrating for our customers to have to send us email and wait for a response, when the simple solution would be for Symantec to fix this bug that has been there for years.

A recent PC Magazine review of a new laptop complained that this particular laptop only had two USB ports, compared to four on most other laptops in this class, and the reviewer made it sound as if two just wasn't enough. This got me thinking: Does anyone really need four USB ports on a laptop? I use a laptop every day for work, and I regularly use exactly zero USB ports. I might plug in a scanner once in a while when I need to scan, or my external hard drive for backups, but most of the time the only cable connected to my laptop is the power cord. With wireless networking and printer sharing, you don't even have to have your printer connected to your laptop any more. Mine certainly isn't.

What do people use four USB ports for? I would rather have two USB and one or two Firewire ports, although I don't even have any devices that use Firewire. Or two USB ports and an Secure Digital (SD) flash card reader, like on my old Toshiba laptop. Or two USB ports and a fingerprint reader for security. If you find that you really need more USB ports, plug in a $10 USB micro-hub. So many other choices, why waste the space on 2 extra USB ports that 99% of laptop users probably don't even need?

I never liked to study history back when I was in school, but that's probably because we were force-fed boring facts by mostly boring teachers. But it turns out that one of my favorite classes was US History with Mr. Bittner, because he was able make it interactive and fun. Since that time I realized that if you make it interesting enough, kids will want to learn, which is why I like the History Channel so much. Purists may criticize this as being akin to the Cliffs Notes of history, but slicing it up into easily digestible 1-hour segments actually works.

Anyway, this post isn't really about that. Being the computer geek that I am, once in a while I run across an interesting story about the history of computers or the Internet. So this is the short story for today, The Story of the PING Program, from the person who wrote the original code.  Of course it's a bit technical, but if you've ever used the PING program, you might appreciate it.