So far, so good

My modem is still online this morning. I took a peek at it before leaving the house and the LEDs indicated it was locked. Upon getting into the office I was able to get my mail via IMAP and when I polled it in OpenNMS, things generally looked good.

If the Motorola stays online for the rest of today I think I can safely conclude I've got a hardware problem with the SMC.

More cable modem problems

My SMC went down again this morning at around 1030. I power cycled it when I got home tonight and it came back up, but only for a short time. So, I disconnected it and reconnected the Motorola SB4101 which I'd been using previously but which has been in a box for the past few months.

The Moto came right back online and speeds are looking good. When I get into the office tomorrow morning I plan to poll it in OpenNMS to check the RF levels. If they aren't optimal I'm going to put in a request to have a cable tech check my connection. It's possible that the SMC is more sensitive than the Moto to less than optimal signal levels.

At least for the time being I'm using my Linksys RT31P2 router (provided by Vonage) as my firewall. It'll be interesting to see how well it performs, and how the Vonage service sounds while I'm passing other IP traffic across it.

In good company

Found via a story yesterday on Slashdot, an essay by Paul Graham entitled "Return of the Mac":

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

Graham's article does a good job of describing why I went with an iBook when I needed a new laptop back in December. You get a wonderful, seamless GUI but you also get the power of UNIX. To top it off, you have a plethora of commercial applications, and all of this runs on some very nice hardware.

I've found that most of the time I spend on a computer at home I'm using the Apple. It's partly the fact that as a laptop with a wireless connection I'm not limited to any specific location in the house, and it's partly the fact that the box is just a joy to use.

For most home users it is my not-so-humble opinion that a Mac is now a better choice than a Windows PC, as long as you don't have any hard-core gamers in the house. You get an easy to use, very solid, and secure OS, good hardware, and you don't need to be concerned with viruses and spyware. A coworker of mine has a PC repair shop that he runs on the side and tells me that about 65% of his work is cleaning up infected PCs. As long as the applications you need are available on Mac OS, why bother with the aggravation of Windows? And as much of a Linux fan that I am, there are still some rough edges -- printing in particular -- that make it trail behind OS-X for the majority of home users.

Back up

We're back online. Something needed to be kicked, and it appears that power cycling the modem did it.

Cable modem problems

I'm having a real WTF moment right now.

About 45 minutes ago I noticed that the SMC 8013 modem I have at home was offline. When I polled it in OpenNMS is shows as offline, unpingable via our DOCSIS network, unreachable via SNMP but with the right config file.

For shits and giggles I polled my old Motorola SB4101, which is currently sitting in a box. For soem reason, it's showing up as pingable and is showing info obtained via SNMP, though the info is purportedly for an SMC 8002.

As I said, WTF?!?!

I called Judith who was on her way home from school and asked her to power cycle the SMC. I'm hopin gthis clears out something and gets me back online. If not, I'll plug in the Motorola and use my Vonage Linksys router as a firewall. If I can't get back online then I'll be really annoyed.

Taking a break

I'm taking a bit of a break right now. I've spent a good part of the past couple of days changing diapers. Amanda is back to normal, although she seems to be eating more than she was before she got sick. She must be making up for what she lost over the course of last week.

Alexandra is on augmentin to fight a sinus bug and it's giving her the runs. So those diapers are real fun to change.

On Friday I was told that the issue causing our SMC gateways to stop routing when configured for static IP was fixed. Apparently, an MD5 key somewhere in our network got munged and killed our connectivity. I think something else is going on. I switched my gateway back to static IP yesterday and everything was running fine until this morning, when it dropped a couple of times. So, I flipped it back to pulling its WAN IP via DHCP. I really wish our network admins would fix whatever is wrong.

Pluto Data Followup

In going through Sitemeter's list of referrals linking to this blog, I've found that the single most popular is for searches related to the Pluto Data Scam, which I previously posted about. In fact, if you google for Pluto Data this blog is one of the first few links. This has done wonders for my traffic. :-)

I've also received emails from folks asking what to do if they see a fraudulent Pluto Data charge on their credit card statement. I'm not in a position to give out legal advice but what I did was to call my credit card company to dispute the charge. In my case, they looked into it and reversed the charge. Since it's evident that somehow, the people behind the Pluto Data scam got ahold of my credit card number, I had the bank disable the account pending a call back from me to reenable it. They said that to discontinue it immediately would hamper the investigation. (I don't know if this is true or just a stalling tactic to keep you as a customer.) Now that the investigation on my card is complete I am planning to cancel the card.

Were I hit with multiple charges, I'd probably also file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. See this link, and my state's attorney general. Since it was only a $40 charge I didn't feel doing so was worth my time.

If you have specific questions about how to handle this or other identity theft issues, you should contact a local attorney familiar with consumer law.

Airport blogging, part two

This is being written at gate E8 in the Fort Lauderdale airport. Unlike Philly, the wifi access here is free, and available throughout the concourses and at each gate. What surprised me, though, is that the airport is not using a captive portal to at least get you to click on a button to accept their terms of service. Rather, it's wide open. I started FireFox and went straight to Yahoo.

Not that I'm complaining.

Anyway, the plane for my flight which is supposed to depart at 0950 is not expected to arrive here until about 1020. Estimated departure time is now 1100. What with the wonderful PHL baggage claim I'll be lucky to get out of the airport there by 1600.

SMC WAP Problem

We're can't login into the SMC WAPs we installed Monday. After entering in the username and password, we get the logon screen back. If not for trying to logon using FireFox we'd be scratching our heads.

Unlike IE, which just dumps you back at the logon page, FireFox pops up a download dialog box asking you what you want to open the file index.htm with. Then when you select FireFox, you get a new tab with the same logon page.

I think the problem is that the internal web servers on the WAPs have the MIME headers misconfigured to serve up pages as "text/plain" instead of "text/html." Unfortunately, the Live Headers extensiont to Firefox is either no longer available or not compatible with v1.01, so this is a SWAG.

For more on MIME headers configuration, see what the WWW Consortium has to say.

Doing better

Judith called me last night to let me know that she and Amanda are doing a lot better. That sure sets my mind a bit more at ease. Alexandra is still sick but it doesn't seem to be really bad.

Airport blogging

I am writing this post in WordPad while sitting at gate B6 in the Philadelphia International Airport. It will be posted later since although I'm sitting about ten feet from an AT&T WiFi hotspot, it isn't free, and I'm not about to pay $9.99 to get online for such a short time.

This afternoon I am flying down Fort Lauderdale, FL to setup equipment demonstrating our product for providing high speed Internet access to hotel guest for our booth at a hospitality trade show. I'll do the actual setup sometime tomorrow, and once everything is up and running I'll drive on over to my Grandfather's house. I'll get to see him and his "mistress," as well as an aunt and uncle.

Although I'm looking forward to seeing relatives, it would've been hard to think of a worse time for this trip. Not only do Amanda and Judith still have their stomach bugs, yesterday Alexandra came home from daycare with a mild fever. Thankfully, my mother-in-law was able to help out Judith yesterday because I had to go on a service installation for a senior VP. And today, my mom was able to take off and watch the kids. Judith was well enough to make it into work, which she needs to do because we've both missed a lot of days this winter being sick ourselves and being home to take care of Amanda when she's been sick. We have our babysitter lined up for tomorrow if needed. Gawd. I'm flying home Thursday.

Regarding yesterday's install, it was interesting. Along with my boss I headed out to a nearby country club, to which the previously-mentioned VP belongs. The club is getting high speed access for the office, plus they want to setup a hotspot for members. To cover the whole building we needed two SMC 2555W-AG access points. To isolate the hotspot traffic from the office LAN, two cable modems were installed, one for the office and the other for the hotspots.

The 2555W-AGs are business-grade APs, offering pretty good security features and good signal. They also support power-over-Ethernet. The interface is a little goofy, in my opinion. Initial setup is done through a console cable on the command line. You have to login via a terminal emulator and set the Ethernet port's IP, and if you are not located in the USA you'll need to change the country, due to different RF regulations in various countries. Once this initial setup is complete you can logon and use the web UI.

Altough the boxes support 802.11a, b and g, I disabled 802.11a. Very few people are going to have compatabile cards and I wanted to reduce the load on the units. Per the customer's wishes we activated encryption. Since the club doesn't have a captive portal this is the only feasible way to limit access.

One thing I disliked about the WAP is that you cannot have just WEP or just WPA. If you activate WEP, WPA is automatically enabled. I realize WPA is more secure but this is a semi-public hotspot and encyption is really only used for access control.

A side effect of having WPA enabled was that my boss could not get his Powerbook to associate with the access point. We couldn't figure out if it was something specific to his machine or an incompatibility between Apples and SMCs. I was wishing that I'd had my iBook with me for another data point.

That's it for now. More later, perhaps.

Oy

This has not been a fun weekend. Both Amanda and Judith came down with a stomach bug. Our pediatrician's told us that yes, something is going around. Wonderful.

So as you can imagine, I don't have anything profound to write about.

I hope your weekend was more relaxing.

Followup on Philly CCW

Apparently, the guy that Philly has decided to railroad in my previous post is a lawyer.

(Let's audience laughter die down.)

Philadelphia is in for a world of hurt. As recently as 1996, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on the issue of Philly's ability to regulate firearms.

"The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.[*287] Because the ownership of firearms is constitutionally protected, its regulation is a matter of statewide concern. The constitution does not provide that the right to bear arms shall not be questioned in any part of the commonwealth except Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where it may be abridged at will, but that it shall not be questioned in any part of the commonwealth. Thus, regulation of firearms is a matter of concern in all of Pennsylvania, not merely in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and the General Assembly, not city councils, is the proper forum for the imposition of such regulation."

Ortiz v. Commonwealth, 545 Pa. 279 (1996) at 286 - 287 (emphasis added). (The first line in the above excerpt is Article I, Section 21 of the PA Constitution.)

Open season on CCW holders in Philly?

This is preliminary but it looks like John Street's efforts to go after CCW holders in Philly may have already started. See this thread on the SIG Forum (you'll need to go to the second page).

We need to keep an eye on this.

Well, this is a first

In general, I've found CD burning to work better under Linux than Windows. However, this morning I attempted to burn copies of the SUSE 9.2 Professional CDs for a coworker and K3B kept crashing on me. I was able to copy the first two discs, but starting with CD-3 is flat out refused to work.

So, I rebooted my laptop into XP and installed Nero 6.3. It worked flawlessly.

I wonder if the hardware has something to do with it. My source drive is my Dell D600's Toshiba DVD-ROM and the burner is a LaCie/Mitsumi 48x CD-RW connected via USB. I've certainly never seen such flakiness with K3B on Bagend, which has an NEC IDE DVD-RW.

John Street is an Asshole

Mayor John Street of Philadelphia is an asshole. Philly had a rather nasty spate of murders committed with guns over the weekend, bringing this year's homicide total to 78. So what does Mr. Mayor want to do? Disarm the potential victims:

The mayor says Philadelphia is in the midst of a crisis. He's threatening to impose a moratorium on gun permits, perhaps as early as next week.

And, he says, he's written a letter to Governor Rendell, asking for a meeting to explore legislation regulating the sale of guns in Philadelphia...

Pennsylvania's Uniform Firearms Act fortunately reserves all regulation of firearms to the state. Moreover, there is no such thing as a "gun permit" in Pennsylvania. Unlike states such as Illinois or New Jersey, there is no requirement for an otherwise law-abiding citizen to obtain a permit to buy a firearm. Rifles and shotguns may legally be purchased directly from another PA resident, although handguns much be bought through a Federally-licensed dealer. And, before a dealer can sell any firearm to a customer, he must first pass a background check performed by the state police in Harrisburg.

So just what does Street want to put a moratorium on? Does he want to suspend the issuance of permits to carry a concealed firearm? If that's the case, then he's preventing people who are vetted by the state as certified good guys from carrying a gun for protection. Just how many of the recent spate of murders were comitted by carry permit holders? If it's anything other than ZERO I'd be very, very surprised -- otherwise the media would be trumpeting the fact.

This is just another big-city mayor looking for a way to deflect attention from his own failed policies by scapegoating law abiding gun owners. IOW, another asshole.

NeoOffice/J

I installed NeoOffice/J on my iBook today. In the words of its developers:

... NeoOffice the main development project for making OpenOffice.org to run natively on MacOS X. It is a free software port of OpenOffice.org to the MacOS X platform.

In doing so, they are using Carbon and Java. The end result is that OO.o winds up fitting in with the rest of OS-X's GUI and it should run faster, since you don't need the overhead of X11. So far I've only used it a little bit, to create an invoice for a client and then export it to a PDF. We'll see how it does compared with the X11-based Mac port of OO.o.

iBook RAM Upgrade

A little package from Crucial was waiting for me when I got home tonight -- the 512 meg SODIMM I ordered last week. I installed it after dinner.

This was the first time I'd popped open the iBook. Per Apple's instructions in the iBook owner's manual, I removed the battery, then flipped the box over and took off the keyboard. With the keyboard off I was able to get to the Airport Extreme wireless card, which sits over the RAM slot and so needed to be removed. Under the Airport Extreme is a protective metal plate held on with four tiny Phillips head screws. Luckily, the small Phillips bit on my Victorinox Cybertool fit the screws or I'd have to go find my jeweler's screwdrivers. With the plate out of the way I was able to access the DIMM slot and install the new stick. Reassembly was in reverse order.

The iBook recognized the new RAM without problems. You can check this by going to the Apple menu and selecting "About this Mac."

So far the upgrade seems worthwhile. The machine is noticeably better running when I have multiple apps running. After logging in I opened Thunderbird, Firefox, IE, Safari, iChat, and Yahoo! Messenger. With the stock 256 megs of RAM everything would've opened much more slowly. And it may be just me, but several graphics-intensive sites, e.g., Foxnews.com, seem to render faster now.

So, I definitely recommend upgrading if you're running OS-X on only 256 megs of RAM. 512 should be good, and 768 is great. OS-X will use it.

Busy, busy, busy

It's been a busy past few days.

Saturday was spent at home with the kids, then Judith and I went out for dinner while my parents babysat. It was a nice break.

Sunday afternoon I took a drive up to Cabela's. I'd forgotten that they are having their Spring Expo, and when I got there found that it was mobbed. No matter, I got what I went for: 4 .50 caliber ammo cans. I want to get all of my ammo into these cans so that it's better organized and sealed against humidity. The cans are also too difficult for small kids to open, although in a couple of years they'll both be exposed to guns for safety reasons. Take away the "forbidden fruit" stigma and kids are much less likely to get into trouble with guns.

Aside from the ammo cans, Cabela's had a sale on Sellier & Bellot .45 ACP @ $7.49 for a box of 50. In my experience, S&B makes accurate, reliable ammo. I've had good results in the past with S&B .303 British, 9mm, and .45, so I bought four boxes of .45. Finally, I also picked up an HKS speedloader for my Ruger Service Six. The Ruger has now replaced my S&W Model 28 as my downstairs house gun. It shoots just as well and if G-d forbid I ever have to use it, I'd be less upset at losing the Ruger to the evidence room than the Smith.

Yesterday I attended an installation of our hospitality service offering at the same hotel I visited for the site survey about a month ago. It's in Beach Haven, NJ on Long Beach Island, which is about a two hour schlep each way. It was educational and got me out of the office for a day.

Feds Investigating Pluto Data Scam

This is a bit of good news.

Federal authorities have opened an investigation into a rash of mysterious $30 and $40 charges appearing on consumer credit cards around the country, MSNBC.com has learned. The charges are for the purchase of DVDs and CDs from a company named "Pluto Data Ltd." Thousands of complaints about the charges have appeared on a Web site devoted to the mystery, with consumers saying they've never heard of the company.

I hope they catch the bastards behind this scam.