Road trip

We took a road trip up to Orange County, NY this weekend for my grandmither's 90th birthday. I hadn't seen my dad's side of the family in awhile so it was nice to go. Also, this was the first time any of them had seen Amanda except in pictures so that was another reason to go.

The trip was about 3-1/4 hours each way. A good part of the drive is off the major interstates, taking US-209 through the Delware Water Gap National Recreation Area. It's beautiful country and we may take the kids camping there in a couple of years once they're a little older.

We got home at about 1400 yesterday and sat outdside to enjoy the nice Spring weather. Judith's aunt and grandmother stopped by for a little while. After they left, I cut down some bushes which were beyond the point of trimming back so they'd look neat, along the front of the house. I'm thinking that after I cut the stumps flush with the ground, I'll build a raised bed and put in some flowers to spruce up the place.

I'm still tired from the weekend. :-)

Today I plan to do some more work with the WatchGuard Firebox X2500 demo unit that I got in last week, and this afternoon I have a meeting about an ongoing wifi hotspot project.

Fun fun fun

No, I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, I've just been preoccupied and haven't had much worth posting lately.

The other day I completed my in-depth eval of an Astaro ASG 120 security appliance. I have a call later today with them to get a couple of questions answered, and then I anticipate sending the demo unit back.

I received a demo Watchguard Firebox X to check out, also for possible use as a replacement for our Qube/IGear content filtering boxes. I should be setting it up later today. I've also had some discussions with SonicWALL and will probably be getting a demo from them, too.

This morning I wrapped up T&V of a new firmware release for our SMC8013 gateways. I ran into a couple of glitches, but no show-stoppers.

A private client of mine needs to limit Internet access for some of the PCs on his network, but is on a very limited budget. They have cable modem service from my dayjob, so what we're going to do is to use the SMC's ability to block Internet access from specified internal IPs. Their LAN is such that it won't be too onerous to switch all the PCs to static IPs, turn off the router's DHCP server, and then put all the PCs which need to be isolated from the Internet into a range with no outside access. I'm looking at a site visit on the 16th to implement this.

SF Wants to Regulate Bloggers

It's not just the Feds. Found via Mad Ogre:

Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.

Original article here.

Tar. Feathers. Rope. Some assembly required.

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.

TGIF

I spent this morning trying to get our Symantec IGear license reactivated. We purchased a renewal last month from one of Symatec's resellers but they sent the new license certificate to the wrong person here. As a result, the old license was allowed to lapse. I got shunted around by Symantec to several different department until finally I was pointed at a web page to enter in the IGear serial number and the new license number. Everything should be back up and running once our Qubes do their daily check-in. What a massive PITA. I'm glad it's Friday.

This afternoon I ordered a 512 MB SODIMM from Crucial to upgrade the RAM in my Apple iBook. It still has the stock 256 MB which is on the light side for OS-X. Usable but by no means optimal. 512 MB is usually the recommended minimum. Since the iBook has 1 free slot I'll have a total of 768 MB, which should be plenty.

Gerber Multi-Plier 400

Apparently I spent a pretty good chunk of change at REI over the past year, so when my annual dividend came in last week is was about $43. Of course, it burned a hole in my pocket, so I went up to the local REI store but didn't find anything I wanted. I'd hoped to find a good multitool, since my old Gerber Multi-Plier Scout had gone AWOL (it's since shown up). After getting home I went to their website and ordered a Gerber Multi-Plier 400 Value Pack from their outlet store on closeout. It came in today's mail.

The MP 400 is a compact model so it's smaller than my MP Scout. It came with a black ballistic nylon belt pouch and an Infinity Ultra LED task light (hence the "Value Pack"). Aside from the pliers with wire cutters, it's got a few different screwdriver blades, Fiskars scissors, and a knife with a half-serrated edge. All tools lock open, one thing I've always appreciated about Gerber's multitools.

My first impression was that it is a little rougher than my MP Scout, but it may be that my Scout is just worn in, because I've had it since the late '90s. Other than that, I tried out the knife blade by cutting up some Pampers boxes when I took out the trash tonight. It's sharp. I tried out the scissors on a piece of nylon cord and it cut fine.

The Infinity Ultra LED task light is pretty cool. It is powered by a single AA cell; Gerber includes a Duracell. The light is machined from aluminum so it should be quite rugged. It's finished in the white and has a black steel pocket clip. The body of the light is machined into a tail with a hole for a lanyard, which you have to supply yourself. I made one with a piece of green paracord.

The light is bright enough to keep you from tripping over stuff in the dark and to work on things without blinding yourself. It could probably be made a bit brighter if the reflector part of the bezel was polished better. Gerber claims that the light is good for 100 hours on the single AA cell.

My Multi-Plier Scout in currently in my laptop bag as part of my urban possibles kit, along with my Victorinox CyberTool 41 and an LED flashlight, among a few other items. I think I'll replace the Scout with the 400 since it's a bit lighter, and put the Scout in the console of my truck. The Infinity Ultra LED light will probably be stashed with my iBook, which I use when going to client sites.

Modem troubles

Those of us acting as guinea pigs for our forthcoming static IP service have been experiencing problems for the past couple of days. Due to some backend network architecture changes our IPs weren't routing. Mine went down sometime last night, but I didn't discover it until I tried to check my email from work this morning.

Upon getting home I logged into my SMC gateway and reconfigured it to pull an IP via DHCP, and got back online after the box rebooted.

Since I host mail.building-tux.com behind the modem I had to go and update the DNS A record so that I could receive mail. DNS for building-tux.com is provided by the fine folks at DynDNS.org. I've been using them for a couple of years now and have been 100% satisfied. One thing that's impressed me is the speed at which changes to DNS records propagate. Every time I've had to update the A record for mail.building-tux.com, I've been able to start receiving mail within 15 minutes, from a variety of outside senders.

Astaro Review Online

Linux.com is running my review of Astaro Security Linux 5.1. Check it out and tell me what you think.

McCain-Feingold "Clarification"

The outrage in the blogosphere has been noticed:

Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold reassured the Internet community that bloggers will not be regulated by federal campaign finance laws.

"The latest misinformation from the antireform crowd is the suggestion that our bill will require regulation of blogs and other Internet communications," they said. "This issue has nothing to with private citizens communicating on the Internet."

Uh huh. One thing Congress is really good at is drafting ambiguous legislation that can be applied by courts in ways the writers of the legislation didn't intend. Legislation gets passed and then the law of unintended consequences takes over. Look at how RICO, intended as a tool for fighting organized crime, has morphed into a law used to go after abortion protesters. With respect to the law under scrutiny here, a court has already ruled that it is applicable to more than what its primary sponsors claim.

Methinks that McCain and Feingold were taken by surprise with the shitstorm the FEC's comments generated.

Powerline Ethernet

I'm looking for feedback on powerline Ethernet (e.g., HomePlug) from anyone who's used it. I was recently asked to come up with a cheap solution for providing Internet access to guests of small hotels (50 rooms or less). My idea involves using powerline Ethernet to provide in-building backhaul for several wireless access points. One of the powerline Ethernet bridges would be connected to a cable modem.

I realize that powerline Ethernet is a technology mostly used in homes, but I'm especially interested in hearing from anyone who's used it in a business environment. How well did it work? Were there any particular problems you ran into?

Thanks in advance.

More chipping away at the First Amendment

So much for being the party of smaller government:

... two key GOP leaders last week were talking about expanding it. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters he wanted to extend the agency’s control over “indecent” speech to cable and satellite television. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, his House counterpart, said he also might support the idea.

What a load of crap. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." is so damn difficult to understand. I agree with the sentiment that an awful lot of content on TV and radio is foul. But more Federal regulation administered by unelected bureaucrats in the name of protecting the American people isn't the solution. If people find something offensive -- especially on a service they pay for each month -- they can turn it off or change the channel.

This just goes to show you that like the Democrats, Republicans are statist control freaks at heart. Each party just likes to regulate different things. The Dems want to regulate stuff like guns, race, and business, while the Reps want to regulate what you do with your genitals, what you watch or listen to, and what substances you can put in your body.

More template tweaking

Based on reader feedback I got rid of the navy blue background in the header. I'm still not 100% satisfied with this template so I may switch to something completely different. Anyway, at least now the header is legible.

MFI Blog

GWA.45 created a new blog specifically for the McCain-Feingold Insurrection. Current members are listed there.

New color scheme

In light of reader feedback I changed the color scheme. Hopefully this is a bit easier on the eyes. Please let me know what you think.

How the Government Breaks the Law

From Judge Andrew Napolitano:

It should be against the law to break the law. Unfortunately, it is not. In early 21st-century America, a dirty little secret still exists among public officials, politicians, judges, prosecutors, and the police. The government - federal, state, and local - is not bound to obey its own laws. I know this sounds crazy, but too many cases prove it true. It should be a matter of grave concern for every American who prizes personal liberty.

When I became a judge in New Jersey, I had impeccable conservative Republican law-and-order credentials. When I left eight years later, I was a born-again individualist, after witnessing first-hand how the criminal justice system works to subvert and shred the Constitution. You think you’ve got rights that are guaranteed? Well, think again.

Read the whole thing. H.L. Mencken comes to mind:

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Regulate THIS!

In just a few months, [FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith] warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines. Link.

The McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Act stinks like a barrel of dead fish, and this is the topping. Using it to directly suppress individual political speech is beyond the pale. Fuck that. I will not be silenced. I will write whatever the hell I want and link to any site I please. I don't want to have to sit down one day and answer the question from my kids, "Daddy, what did you do when they censored the Internet."

Molon Labe applies not just to my guns, it applies to my keyboard. Join the M-F Insurrection!

Out and about

This afternoon I'll be going to one of our customers who is experiencing intermittent connectivity problems. Their SMC gateway keeps dropping offline and has to be power cycled. We have several customers experiencing similar problems and we've been unable to replicate this in our lab. So, we're planning to setup a laptop connected to the modem via a serial cable and save the console output to a file. We'll simultaneously run Ethereal to see if maybe the problem is being caused by some kind of weird packets. We'll leave the laptop onsite for a few days to gather a good amount of data.

The SMC 8013 gateway that we use doesn't have a regular 9 pin RS232 port on it. Rather, the serial console is only available if you pop the cover off and connect a custom cable to an array of pins on the mainboard. Obviously, it's not anticipated that this will be a frequently-used feature.

Rather than going into the office then out to the customer, who is in West Chester, I'm just working from home this morning.

Pluto Data Scam

I just sent this to the Daynotes Backchannel:

Hi all,

I just got hit by the "Pluto Data" scam. I called my credit card issuer and they're going to dispute the charge. I should have a credit back to my account in 3 business days. In the interim I've deactivated the card; the issuer said that closing the account would hurt the fraud investigation. Assuming this goes in my favor the account will definitely be closed, though.

Bascially what the scammers do is place a charge on your credit card for $29.99 or $39.99. There's an 888 number for Pluto Data on the credit card statement. Other folks who've called the number get informed it's for a DVD or CD that they didn't order.

the working theory the perpetrators seem to be using is that at $30 - $40 charge when mixed in with a bunch of other items on a statement won't be noticed, or if noticed, ignored. Luckily, I hadn't used the card at all last month so when I saw the Pluto Data charge it immediately raised a red flag.

There is a long, detailed thread about this on the Broadbandreports.com forums:

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,12704660

Feel free to pass this on to anyone you feel should read it, and/or put it on your Daynotes page.

--
Dave Markowitz AIM: dmarkowitz527
frodo527@building-tux.com Y!: dave_markowitz
http://www.building-tux.com RKBA = FREEDOM!!!
http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/

People who commit this kind of fraud should be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Yugo night sights

My dad was over last night for dinner and afterwards we checked out the new toys we picked up on Saturday. At his suggestion I lit up the night sights on my Yugo SKS to see if then they'd glow in the dark. To my surprise, this worked. I have to wonder if they really are tritium, or just glow in the dark paint.

He brought his new Colt Police Positive Special over for me to look at. It was made around 1960. The blueing is really nice and it wear a set of Pachymar Presentation ruber grips, which aren't original although they do have the Colt medallions. The gun's single action pull is OK but the double action is typical Colt: on the heavy side and it really stacks towards the end of the trigger stroke. Blecchh. How anyone could prefer one of these over a S&W K-Frame is beyond me.

One thing the PPS has going for it is that it's light. In fact, it's basically a 4" version of the Colt Detective Special 2" snubby. Unloaded weight is around 26 ounces, which would make it easy to tote. By way of contrast, a 4" K-Frame like my Model 15 is over 30 ounces unloaded.

Snow on the way

The weather wankers are calling for the Philly area to get anywhere from 6 - 12" of snow, with the festivities to start sometime this morning. Naturally, all the supermarkets have been cleaned out of bread, milk, and eggs. It also means that I'll be picking up the kids early today, because the daycare is closing at noon.

Rather than waste time commuting, I'm working from home this morning. I can check my email via Outlook Web Access, but I can't get into our VPN. I'm getting an authentication failure. I've called our IT helpdesk a few times but keep getting an "all circuits are busy" message. I'll try some more but I may not be able to resolve this until I get into the office tomorrow or Wednesday. What a PITA.

Yugoslavian SKS

I picked up a Yugoslavian M-59/66A1 SKS this afternoon for $150 OTD at Surplus City. I figured I'd better get one while they're still available cheap. It's an unissued rifle and came with the original logbook, although without a sling or cleaning kit.

The Yugo M-59 was a close copy of the Soviet SKS, the 59/66 added a grenade launcher to the muzzle along with a modified gas system, and the 59/66A1 added flip up tritium night sights. Unfortunately, my rifle is now old enough that the night sights no longer glow in the dark, although they do give me a 3 dot sight picture, which is slightly better than the blued irons in poor light.

My rifle was packed inside and out in cosmoline. I first tried some Simple Green on a paper towel to clean the stock, but the goop laughed at me. So, I got out the mineral spirits, which did a pretty good job degunking it. I immersed the bolt in mineral spirits while I worked on other parts of the gun, then took it outside and hosed it down with brake cleaner. The firing pin now rattles freely, so I don't need to worry about slamfires.

The barrel is nicely blued, while the receiver is almost a plum brown in some areas. I ran a few patches dipped in mineral spirits through the bore and it looks darn good. The last couple of patches were wet with Kroil and it's soaking overnight. I'll punch the bore again tomorrow then leave it with a light coat of FP-10 or ATF. Yugo SKSes do not have chrome plated bores, unlike virtually all other SKSes you can buy, so you need to oil them or they'll rust.

I believe that the wood is beech; it's in great shape. From what I've read cosmoline will continue to seep from the stock especially after the rifle gets warm. Once the weather gets warmer, I may wrap the gun in paper towels, stick it in a plastic garbage bag, then put the whole thing in my truck to bake for a day or two.

All that extra steel on the muzzle really changes the balance compared with other SKSes. A Soviet or Chinese SKS tips the scales at around 8 lbs. The Yugo is over 9 lbs. The already mild recoil of the 7.62x39 should be even tamer in this piece.

The Yugo SKS is much more nicely made than my Norinco pinned barrel SKS, although to be fair the latter is an exceptionally reliable rifle. It's just ugly. The Yugo has a much better piece of wood on it and the metal finish is far superior. From what I've read online the Yugo rifles tend to be some of the more accurate SKSes although I'll have to try it out to see how much validity there is to this.

I'll post a range report once I get a chance to shoot it.

Firefox 1.0.1 available

The Mozilla guys released a security update/bug fixes to Firefox today. Release notes here. So far I've installed it on my Dell D600 test box under SUSE. So far so good, but if I run into any issues I'll make note of them in a follow-up post.

Checking in

No post yesterday -- Amanda got her ear tubes. The operation went well and she recovered incredibly quickly. By the afternoon, it was impossible to tell she'd been under general anesthesia a few hours before. Pretty amazing for a baby who's only seven and a half months old. In contrast, when Alexandra got her tubes put in at 11 months she was cranky for the rest of the day.

We had to get up at around 0500 to be at the Childern's Hospital of Phialdelphia outpatient facility in Exton by 0645. So by the time we got home at 0900 I was pooped.

You never want to see your child go into the hospital for any reason but in this case it was the right thing to do. Amanda no longer has fluid in her ears for the first time since late November. I'm just glad it's over and done with.

Now this is odd

Darryl H. emailed me at my Gmail account inquiring about how to manually set Windows Master Browser roles. Normally, Google posts relevant ads along the right side of the screen. E.g., when I get mail from the TechnoLawyer list ads for legal software often show up. So what does Google post when the text of the email is asking about how to set browse roles in a Windows network?

Fart machines.

Busy weekend

Yesterday I made a site visit to one of my clients to install antivirus software on their file and mailservers. The fileserver runs W2K3 SBS Edition; I loaded AVG Fileserver Edtion on it. It's set to do daily updates and scans. I went with AVG based on my experience with their free, non-commercial-use version. I've found it to provide good protection on several Windows boxes and it cause much less of a performance hit than Norton Antivirus, which has grown into a bloated pig.

The mail server, which runs SuSE and CommuniGate Pro, got ClamAV installed. For integration with CGP I'm using cgpav. Since I didn't remember to bring my SuSE 9.0 discs I had to grab the RPMs from ftp.suse.com. By doing so I wasn't able to rely on YaST's dependency checking, so I first made a detour through dependency hell and had to also grab gmp to proivde a required library. Freshclam checks for updates every couple of hours, then installs them if available. Since a lot of spam is the product of various worms, I'm hoping that this will cut down on the amount of junk mail they get.

While onsite I also looked at a couple of their PCs. They use Outlook Express (blecch) and Norton Antispam. The latter is causing an odd error the first time OE is started. If they try to right-click on an email to view it's properties, or to move an email to a different folder, OE craps out, but only the first time you do this after booting the PC. If you go into the details provided by Dr. Watson, you see that a DLL being called by Norton Antispam is the culprit. I'm doing another site visit in March and we've already discussed giving Thunderbird a try. We'll also get Spybot Search & Destroy on all their PCs. They are rightly concerned about malware and I'm wondering if a proxy server setup to filter out a lot of the junk wouldn't be a bad idea.

Last night my MIL was kind enough to babysit while Judith and I went out to dinner. She was in the mood for steak so we went to Outback. Unfortunately, the wait was on the order of 75 - 80 minutes. Their steak isn't worth that long of a wait, so we wound up at Ichiban, a local Japanese restaurant that's pretty good. Judith was able to get her steak and I got shrimp and scallops.

Today I watched Amanda in the morning while Judith went out with Alexandra to the supermarket. After they got back I went out to Lowe's, back to the supermarket for stuff Judith forgot, and then the bank. One of the drawers in our kitchen was falling apart so I needed to buy supplies at Lowe's. While there I picked up a Black & Decker jigsaw for all of $25. It came in handy cutting the wood which I used to replace the bottom of the drawer. Yeah, it's a cheap saw but for my light occasional use, I don't need Porter Cable.

"Humanizing Gun Nuts"

Taking a look at the flip side of the gun control issue, Reason magazine has published a review of the book, Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures, by Abigail Kohn.

In Shooters, anthropologist Abigail Kohn argues that both sides of the debate have become so alienated from one another that they effectively form subcultures, and she studies them accordingly. Kohn calls Shooters an ethnography, an anthropological study conducted from within a culture to gain the “natives’ point of view.” Rather than studying gun enthusiasts though literature and statistics, or from behind a duck blind to ensure “objectivity,” Kohn spent time with enthusiasts, interviewing them, taking classes with them, and shooting with them.

The book looks promising.

What kind of person supports gun control?

Find out here.

Not the crowd I'd want to be associated with.

Astaro Follow Up

I got permission to use a Dell Dimension P4 for testing so this morning I was able to load Astaro Secure Linux 5.1 to kick the tires. The text-mode installation went as smooth as can be, finishing in a little over 10 minutes.

The box has only one NIC so all I was able to do was explore the GUI, but so far I am very impressed. Aside from a full feature set, Astaro's interface is well-designed and pretty intuitive.

I'm going to see if I can round up a second NIC so that I can do a real test. I'm not sure if this will require a reinstall although given how easy the install is, I don't really mind if that's required.

Obviously this isn't a real review but I thought I'd share my favorable initial impression.

System Rescue CD

Knoppix is often touted as a good choice for using as a bootable rescue disc. There's nothing wrong for using it as such but a more specialized live CD is available. Strangely enough, it's called System Rescue CD. A complete list of the tools available on the CD is available on the project's home page.

One tool found on the System Rescue CD which I've used in the past is Darik's Boot and Nuke. If you select DBAN at the boot prompt, you'll boot into a very specialized live Linux system which allows you to securely erase the contents of a hard drive by overwriting it repeatedly with other data. (Merely reformatting a hard drive does not erase existing data.) DBAN is especially useful for companies or individuals decommissioning and selling off or donating old PCs. They can be booted into DBAN, the drives wiped, and then the you don't need to worry about confidential data being disclosed.

New Linux distros to try

My research of content filtering applications led me last week to Astaro Security Linux. Aside from enabling one to easily setup an x86 box as a Linux firewall, Astator offers a content filtering option which might be useful for our situation at work. It certainly bears investigating, so I downloaded the ISO for it last Friday and burned a CD. I have a box at home on which to try it, although I plan to see if I can scrounge something up at the office, too.

Today I grabbed the ISOs for Slackware 10.1 CDs 1 and 2. I first tried getting them via Bittorrent using Azureus installed on my SuSE laptop, but it kept crashing. It's possible that's because I'm behind a firewall and port 6661 isn't open. In any event that meant I needed to get it using a browser.

I was able to get the ISOs for both CDs using Firefox but I'm glad that I checked the MD5 sums before burning them to disc. Neither file was good. I went back and got them using Opera and this time the downloads were not corrupted. Interesting.

To burn the discs I used K3B, which is by far the best GUI burning app I've used on Linux. It compares favorably with Nero Burning ROM on Win32. Indeed, the developers appear to have taken cues from Nero. Since my laptop doesn't have a burner, I used an old LaCie USB CD-RW drive I found in a closet. The combination works well.

I'm not sure yet what I'm going to throw the latest version of Slackware on, but rest assured that I'll post a writeup once I do.

I'm not dead

I just haven't posted since last Wednesday.

We had a nice weekend. Saturday morning we visited with friends who just moved into a new (to them) house over in Lafayette Hill. Judith and I like it a lot -- 4 bedrooms, a den, full basement, a room they'll make into a library/study and a 2 car garage. To be candid, we're a bit envious. (A garage would be great but what I really miss not having is a basement.)

After moving into our home in 2001 neither of us thought we'd want to move again until we're ready to retire. However, we've been feeling a bit cramped in our house, especially since Amanda arrived. Due to the way the real estate market has been the past few years we've already built up considerable equity in the place. It's worth real consideration of moving into a bigger place in this area. But we won't jump into anything, that's for sure.

Followup on tax stuff

Feedback from readers Al and Paul have caused me to reconsider the Quicken/Quickbooks choice. For my needs Quicken may be enough. Since I already have it I'll check it out.

Thanks, guys.

NOD32 Antivirus

I am looking at installing NOD32 Antivirus on the SuSE/CommuniGate Pro mailserver and Windows 2K3 SBS file server at one of my clients. I'd welcome comments from anybody who's used NOD32 for a mail or fileserver.

TIA.

Tax stuff

Tonight I finished putting together the materials needed to file our 2004 income taxes. Since I do some side work I need to put my expenses and revenues into intelligible form, which I do in the form of an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. I then print this out and give it along with all my receipts to our accountant.

What I really need to do is start using something like Quicken or QuickBooks to keep track of all this stuff. Quicken is meant for personal finances but a lot of small business use it. Still, I'd rather use something that adheres to GAAP, which means I should shell out for Quickbooks. It's a shame that I need to do that, since my iBook came with Quicken already loaded.

Anyway, Judith will be dropping off all of our stuff with our accountant next Saturday, so we should find out what sort of refund we'll be getting soon.

Saturday Night's Alright For Shooting

I'm back home enjoying a Newcastle Brown Ale after spending a couple of hours with my dad at the range. I ran 150 rounds of Winchester-USA .38 Special 150 grain LRN through my 4" S&W Model 15. This was the first time in quite awhile I shot the Model 15, which was the first decent handgun I ever bought, back in 1996.

My shooting tonight was ok, though not as good as I can do. I was having problems focusing on the front sight, which is attributable either towards fatigue, having been sick for almost a week, or being closer to 40 than 30. Anyway, I was still keeping all my shots on a paper plate from 7 yards, firing double action only, shooting rapidly.

I think I'm going to change the grips on it. It currently wears a set of Pachymar Gripper Pros. They leave the backstrap exposed and don't fit quite flush. This leaves an area with a bit of a protruding ridge which digs into my palm, which bothered me even with the mild loads I was shooting tonight. I think I'll get a set of Butler Creek rubber grips which cover the backstrap. They should make shooting the Model 15 more comfortable.

After 150 rounds, the S&W was filthy. That's ok, I don't mind a little cleaning. Lately when shooting one of my pistols I've taken to a quick wipedown and a couple passes through the bore and chambers with a BoreSnake, but I felt that the Model 15 needed a more thorough cleaning. So, I broke out the cleaning kit while Dad was still banging away and used a rod, bronze bore brush, and patches. I swabbed out the bore and chambers several times and left them wet with Hoppe's No.9. I'm going to let the gun soak overnight and run dry patches through tomorrow, then leave it with a coat of FP-10 to prevent any rust.

I also got to shoot one of Dad's Russian Nagant revolvers (he has more than one, they're cheap). This one was made in 1919 at the Tula Arsenal, then later rebuilt. To sum up my opinion of the Nagant as a military service weapon: It's a good gun for the other guy to have. While an interesting historical curiousity, it's fires an anemic round and the trigger, even in single action, sucks. With serious concentration a Nagant can actually be quite accurate, but it's not what I'd regard as being easily shootable. Honestly, I'd rather be armed with a .36 caliber Colt Navy percussion black powder revolver if I had to defend myself. I might even take a .31 Colt Baby Dragoon or Wells Fargo model. The ballistics would be aboutt as good and I'd be more confident I'd actually hit what I was aiming at.

"Women will get sterile just looking at you."

On Krautboy's blog:

Okay, I like Star Wars as much as the next person who was a child during the late 70's/early 80's, but there are some people who are just a little *too* into it. These people go to conventions. They dress up. Some better than others. I of course choose to share with you the latter group. These are all pictures from a Star Wars convention from a site my co-worker decided would be a good idea to share with me. Now, I share with you.

ROTFLMAO!!!

Vonage

Home sick again today.

Judith and I have been paying about $50/month to Verizon for telephone service, just for local and Philly Metro. (For long distance we've been using our Verizon cell phones.) Having spoken with several people who've switched to Vonage and with one exception, have been extremely satisfied, we decided to look into VOIP to save some money. (My employer is in the process of rolling out VOIP service but I was told by the local engineering manager that my area won't get it for quite some time, due to the amount of plant reconstruction that's going to be needed to support it.)

Vonage has two plans for residential customers: Basic w/500 minutes anywhere in the USA and Canada, or Premium Unlimited. Basic costs $14.99/month while Premium is $10 more. We signed up for the Basic plan on Saturday. The box with a pre-configured Linksys RTP31 VOIP router came today.

Most users would connect the Linksys to a cable or DSL modem. However, since I already have a router, and need that router to keep my static IP, I hooked it up behind my SMC8013 modem/router, leaving the WAN port to pick up its IP via DHCP. It's generally recommended to have as few hops between you and the VOIP callee, so we'll see how this works. If necessary I can reconnect my old Motorola modem and plug the Linksys into it.

I made a few test calls from the Vonage connection to my cell phone. Until we get our number switched over from Verizon we have a temporary number for receiving calls on the Vonage line. However, calls from the Vonage line show up with my home number on caller ID. Interesting. Since Verizon hasn't switched us over to Vonage, the POTS line still works as normal.

Sick again

The sinus infection I've had since Sunday had me feeling like total crap this morning so I called in sick. This sucks.

After breakfast I plopped myself in front of Bagend and did some playing around. Since I'm hadly using Mozilla Composer anymore I installed Firefox and Thunderbird. (Actually, I had them installed but they were FF PR-1 and TB 0.8. I upgraded both to 1.0.) Then I spent some time adding a few extensions to FF, namely, Forecast Fox, Adblock, and Bookmarks Sync.

I took a break from rotting my brain online :) to install the Wolff extra power springs in my two Okay-brand 30 round AR-15 mags. When I ordered them I'd intended to get new springs for my old 20 round AR-15 Colt mags, but clicked the wrong button. Since I have the two Okays I let the order stand, although I still do plan to replace the springs in the old Colt mags. Hopefully after doing so they will be reliable in my AR-180B.

While farting around with gun stuff I ran a couple patches wet with FP-10 through the bores on my AR-15 and my AR-180B, using the Otis cleaning kit I picked up last month from Cabela's. The AR-180B lacks a chromed bore and I wanted to ensure that it had a good coat of oil.

I did the AR-15 more for shits and giggles than a real need to do so, but it showed me that I could've done a better cleaning job after the last time I shot the rifle. It was by no means filthy, but it could've been cleaner. So, I broke it open and wiped down the innards with FP-10 on a patch, paying particular attention to the locking lug recesses in the receiver, and under the extractor claw on the bolt.

The Otis cleaning kit is pretty damn neat, beating the old USGI buttstock kit hands down. The only advantage the GI kit would have is in driving out a stuck bullet or maybe a stuck case. Were I headed to the sandbox, I'd definitely include an Otis M-16/M-4-specific kit with my stuff.

More lab time

I spent another couple of hours this morning in our lab trying to test new firmware for our Blonder-Tongue Megaport Gateways and Outlets. We needed to upgrade the firmware on the outlets. To do so, you first login to the MPG using the BT management app, then select the upgrade option for the MPOs from a menu. Doing so pops up a dialog box prompting you for the file path on a TFTP server, from where it'll pull the firmware file and put it on the MPOs.

It appeared to work for one MPO but not the other. Rather than using the same app previously used to login to the MPG, to connect to an MPO to see what firmware it's running, you need to use a different program which does its communication on Layer 2. Unfortunately, I can't get that application to run on the Dell Latitude D600 I'm using. I've tried it using the onboard Broadcom Gig-E NIC, and an old 3Com PCMCIA 10/100 NIC. We also tried it on another Dell with a Broadcom Gig-E NIC, also without success. Both laptops are running XP Pro SP2, and I'm thinking that's the problem. Yet my boss was able to get the app to run on his Apple Powerbook running Windows 98 in a Virtual PC emulator. Arrgghh!

Maybe if we become a large enough customer for BT's MPGs/Os, we can get them to write a single app that will allow one to do the initial setup, ongoing config, and MPO upgrades. As it is now, initial setup needs to be done through a browser, then the two other Win32 apps are needed for ongoing maintenance. That's ridiculous.

Shortly after bagging it in the lab, I caught a train home. Judith had a professional development course tonight so I had to be home early to pick up the kids at 16:00.

One result of dumbed-down education

This should scare you:

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.

The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.

The survey of First Amendment rights was commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and conducted last spring by the University of Connecticut. It also questioned 327 principals and 7,889 teachers.

That's appalling, but I suppose it shouldn't be surprizing. Civics education has been downplayed for decades in the US and the results are coming home to roost. Instead of being taught about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, kids these days are subjected to indoctrination about diversity and self-esteem. I was graduated from high school in 1986 and remember how Voter Preparation was regarded as a blow-off class.

One has to wonder if this isn't intended. The state-run schools are producing graduates who are increasingly eager to turn over to the state their freedoms.

It sure is frustrating, especially since I have two little ones at home.

(Thanks for GeekWithA45 for the pointer.)

Lab day

I spent most of this morning in our lab with my boss, getting more familiar with the Blonder-Tongue Megaport equipment we use to deliver Internet access to hotel rooms. It's pretty neat stuff, allowing us to bring in Internet access using one of our cable modems, then make it accessible from each room over existing CATV wiring. In essence, it's like setting up a small-scale CMTS and cable modem system within the hotel.

Slow

Things have been a bit slow, hence the lack of extensive updates. Here's a roundup of what I've been up to:

Tuesday was a half day for me. Judith was taking a professional education course so I needed to be available to pick up the kids from daycare. It was nice being to spend more time than usual with them. Nothing is as cool as walking into a room, having Alexandra notice me, then have her run up to me screaming "Daddy!"

Yesterday I had a meeting with one of the vendors who handles our outsourced email. We want to consolidate with a single vendor, and naturally they want to be it. After the meeting I got a chance to review our existing contract with them. If nothing else, they have better attorneys than our other vendor, who's proposed contract looks like hell.

Gmail was acting up a bit yesterday afternoon. I wasn't able to login to it using Firefox on either of two PCs on two separate networks. IE worked OK, though. Wierd. It seems to be back to normal, now.

BTW, I have 5 Gmail invites. If you want one email me at davemarkowitz at gmail.com.

Last night I got home and had to immediately run out to get prescriptions filled for both kids. Alexandra has a sinus infection, while Amanda has an ear infection. Both are now on Augmentin. In light of this, I am pretty sure that Amanda will get tubes in her ears, like Alexandra. After taking care of that and making myself a sandwhich for dinner (neither Judith nor I felt like coooking), I flopped down in the living room with my iBook to do some surfing.

This morning I installed Ping Plotter and Multiping, both from Nessoft, onto my test laptop. I'm sure they'll come in useful at some point.

I continue to work my way through Jonathan Hassell's book RADIUS. It's not long, but it isn't light reading. It is well-written and I do recommend it for an overview of the protocol.

There's a new version of Trillian out, which I installed on my test laptop under XP today. I hadn't used Trillian in awhile. So far it works quite well, and feels more like a Windows app than does GAIM. I think I'll stick with it for now. Kopete remains my preferred IM client when running Linux.

Finally, I subscribed to the MacAttorney mailing list. I still retain some interest in the practice of law and should I resume it, I'm leaning in the direction of using my iBook. The mailing list will help me get up to speed on what Macintosh apps are out there suitable for using in a law firm.

Seen today online

"In the 60's people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal."

Keeping it up

Not that, you pervert. I logged into my mail/fileserver this morning and ran uptime. Here's the results:

Welcome to the Mitel Networks SME Server.
bash-2.05$ uptime
11:21am up 366 days, 15:22, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

Now that I can say it's been online for a year+ without a reboot, I can get serious about migrating off the e-Smith platform.

A Day on the Border in California

If you're an American concerned with national security in general and the situation along our border with Mexico, this will piss you off:

Three of us volunteers captured 40 (FORTY) of them (illegal aliens -- Dave) in the past day (Jan 21 to 22, 2005) on this one mile wide property. The volunteers only come once in a while to help the rancher. The rest of the time, his ranch is a wide open path into the USA, not much different from any other mile of border. If they make it 1-2 miles inland, there are lots of houses/shacks/trailers which are "pick up sites." There are only a few Border Patrolmen to cover each 20 mile sector of the actual border, which is only a token effort, just minor window dressing, to show the sheeple that "Uncle Sam is on the job." They basically don't catch anybody, maybe 2% of the crossers by actual truthful and frank (not official PR) Border Patrolmen's estimates. Anyone they catch in this sector is by pure blind luck, or they are the ones which private citizens stop, hold and call in, and they pick up and count as captures. This 2% true catch rate is meaningless, since the illegals just get taken to the border, and cross again tomorrow or the day after, with a fresh 98% chance of success. Pretty pitiful, huh?

Note: "Travis McGee" is the THR username of Matthew Bracken, author of the excellent novel Enemies Foreign and Domestic.

Snow day

We got dumped on good yesterday and this morning, about a foot total. Not much compared with a lot of other places in the country but that's a good snowfall for SE Pennsylvania. So I finally got to use the Troybilt snowblower I got before Thanksgiving.

It works great and beats the heck out of shovelling. After cleaning my driveway and sidewalks I took care of my neighbor, a widow who lives alone and who appreciated the help. I'm glad I got a two stage unit. Even so, the bottom of my driveway was plowed in and it required multiple passes in each spot to clear.

The temp was in the teens with a good wind, so the wind chill factor was in the low single digits. It made me glad that I'm sporting a beard now. My face never got cold. :-)

Firefox bookmarks sync extension

Now this is seriously cool. It's a Firefox extension which allows you to sync your bookmarks across multiple computers. You need an FTP or WebDAV server to store an XML file of your bookmarks, but then it's quite easy to use. It's also a great way to have an offsite backup of your bookmarks.

Camino

Last night I spent some time playing around with Camino 0.8.2, Mozilla.org's web browser for Mac OS-X. Of course, since the full Mozilla suite and Firefox are available for Mac, one might wonder why there's yet another Gecko-based project for this platform.

The difference with Camino is that is uses the Cocoa user interface, so it looks like other apps written for Aqua, Mac OS-X's GUI. It fits in better with the Mac desktop aesthetically.

I used it for about 45 minutes or so last night on my iBook and Camino appears to be a competent browser. It has tabbed browsing and a built in popup blocker, like Firefox. Pages rendered similarly to those viewed in Firefox, although items like drop down boxes had the Aqua widget look.

Unfortunately, Camino seems to lack the customizability of Firefox. I didn't see any way to install extensions, which is a killer feature in Firefox. For example, I really like the Adblock extension which allows me to filter out a lot of crap. Hopefully, this is a feature that will make its way into Camino in the future.

What a day

The site survey I went on yesterday was educational. My background is on the Ethernet and fiber side of things. The survey, on the other hand, was basically a walk-through of the RF (CATV) installation at the hotel, in order to gather data on how to design a proper MDU Internet solution, using the existing CATV wiring to feed Internet access to each hotel room.

That took about three hours and we finished by 1310. By that time a minor snowstorm was moving into the Philadelphia area. I ran into it on the way home while still in Eastern NJ. Unfortunately, as soon as the first snowflake falls around here half the people turn into total morons.

Once I hit Route 42 outside of Philly traffic slowed to a crawl. I saw several cars and trucks pointing the wrong way by the side of the road. It took me until about 1745 to get home, by which time I was completely fried.

The weather liars are calling for a real snowstorm this weekend, starting Saturday afternoon and running into Sunday. They're calling for anywhere between 4 inches and a foot of snow, so it looks like it's finally time to go get some gas for the snowblower. Yeah!

It'll be slow today

I'm going on a site survey for our hospitality product at a hotel in Beach Haven, NJ, so there won't be much of interest until tonight at best.

Plastics

OK, not the line from The Graduate, but can one of my readers recommend a source for Lexan sheets? I have a window next to one of the doors in my home that I want to put a sheet of Lexan about 1" behind, for improved insulation and security. The piece of Lexan will need to be about 11" wide by 79" long.

TIA.

Neal Knox Passed Away 1/17/05

Posted by Jeff Knox on THR

-------------------------------------

A Message from Neal
Dad wrote this message to the troops after the doctors gave up on him. Unfortunately, his condition deteriorated so rapidly that it didn't get sent out. Mom has attached comments as well.

A memorial service will be held this Thursday at the Manassas Church of Christ at 10:30. Details available at www.NealKnox.com.

Jeff
-----------------------------------------------

From the Desk of
Neal Knox

The Firearms Coalition
PO Box 3313
Manassas, VA 20108


Dear Friends,

I’ve always made it a point to deliver the news to you straight – good or bad. Now I’m afraid I have some unpleasant news. As you’re aware, I have been fighting colon cancer for the past year. The doctors tell me that my fight is almost over.

I believe in miracles. I believe in God’s healing power and eternal life through Jesus Christ. I know it will take nothing short of a miracle for me to win this battle.

Should that miracle be granted, I will rejoice; but I rejoice nonetheless, for I’ve been blessed with a wonderful life, a great family, work that I love, and many wonderful friends. Most of all, I thank God for my long-suffering wife Jay Janen who not only put up with me, but has actively supported my efforts for the Second Amendment for nearly forty-nine years.

It’s been a great run!

I had always assumed that long life was my birthright. My father passed away just this past fall at the age of ninety-two.

I counted on the same sort of life-span and was planning accordingly. We’ve barely settled into that house in the country that I’ve been promising Jay for so long. I started rebuilding her classic Mustang convertible and have it in pieces in the basement garage. I’ve laid out a 100- yard range next to the house, and was looking forward to having my dear friend Ken Oehler help me set up a ballistics lab in the basement.

Time for those projects was budgeted into the next generation of the Firearms Coalition. The plan was to have sons, Chris and Jeff, take more prominent roles in the fight, freeing me up to do other things like shooting and writing books. Jeff moved out here for that purpose over a year ago but my illness sidetracked those plans.

I have long wanted to evolve the Firearms Coalition into a resource for grassroots activists and organizations. The goals of the Coalition would be to provide activists with the resources, training, and technology they need to be more effective in the fight.

Now, I hope you will help Jay and the boys as it looks like they will be taking on this important task without me.

There will be more details in the weeks and months to come, including a new book that Chris, Jeff and I have been collaborating on. I regret that I am unlikely to see it in print, but I am confident in their ability to see it through.

I am thankful for you and the many other friends that have blessed my life making me a truly wealthy man. There have been disagreements, even fights, but the goal of freedom has been a unifying force.

I ask your prayers, both for me and for my family, especially for Jay who never expected to see me go first.

I urge you to continue the fight. Continue your support of the ongoing efforts of the Firearms Coalition and keep the grass roots growing.

Thank you for keeping me in the fight for all these years.

As always: Yours for the Second Amendment,


Neal

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Neal passed away early this morning, January 17. He was surrounded by our children and his brothers and went quickly without pain.

A memorial service has been scheduled for Thursday, January 20, at the Manassas Church of Christ, 8110 Signal Hill Road in Manassas, Virginia. The service will begin at 10:30 AM with a luncheon to follow.

It was Neal’s wish that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Firearms Coalition or to Rainbow Children’s Home in Gainesville, VA.

Neal’s condition deteriorated so rapidly that there wasn’t time to get the above- letter out before his death. He very much wanted to let you, as a faithful friend, know what was going on. We will post more information on the web site, www.NealKnox.com.

I can’t tell you how much Neal has loved the difficult work to which he has dedicated his life. It has cost us much while at the same time being extremely rewarding in so many ways. The greatest reward has been the love and friendship that we have found along the way. You’re an important part of that.

Thank you so much,

Jay
Jay Jannen Knox

Neal Knox in ill health

This was posted on 1/14/05 by Tom Gresham ("Guntalk") over on THR:

Many of you know or know of Neal Knox, who has been a tireless fighter for the Second Amendment for more than three decades. Today I received this from Jeff, his son.

-------------------

Tom,

You probably know that Dad has been fighting cancer
for the past year... He's taken a serious turn for the
worse.

At this point, the doctors have given up and sent him
home with hospice care. We're doing what we can but
mainly it's controlling the pain and praying. Unless
God decides that He has more for him to do here, the
end could come any time.

I wanted you to know.

You're welcome to let people know about this and
prayers are encouraged.

Jeff

---------------------------------------------

__________________
Tom Gresham, Host
Tom Gresham's Gun Talk radio show

This is truly sad news. During the last three decades, Neal Knox fought more than any other one person for our Second Amendment rights. I got the chance to meet him and shake his hand at the 1998 NRA Convention, shortly after the "Winning Team" disgracefully refused to let him speak.

IMO, the best way we can honor Neal Knox's memory is to be as vigilant in the defense of our RKBA as he was.

Ruger Police Service Six Range Report

Last night I finally got to shoot the Ruger Police Service Six that I picked up cheap last Fall. This is a stainless steel revolver chambered for .357 Magnum, with a 4" barrel, and fixed sights. It wears a set of Pachymar Presentation grips. It was probably a police trade-in.

The Security/Service/Speed Sixes were Ruger's first generation of double action revolvers, replaced by the GP-100. The Sixes are roughly comparable to a S&W K-Frame, but a little beefier. With a lot of use, they can develop smooth actions, but by and large a K-Frame will have a better trigger pull.

I put 132 rounds of Winchester white box 150 grain LRN .38 Specials through the Ruger, while my dad ran 18 of his .38 Special handloads which push a 148 grain cast wadcutter at around 850 FPS through it. (We shot at the Lower Providence Rod & Gun Club's indoor range, which doesn't allow magnums.)

All shots were fired double action. As one would expect the Ruger functioned perfectly. Accuracy was OK with the Winchesters but I found it hard to shoot one-hole groups at 7 yards. In contrast, when I shot my dad's S&W Model 10 with the same ammo, I got one ragged hole. It could be the ammo, but it may also be the Ruger's trigger, which while pretty decent isn't as good as a broken-in K-frame like Dad's Model 10. I found that shooting the Ruger well required a lot more concentration than the Model 10.

That said, the Ruger exhibited accuracy more than sufficient for its intended use -- as a sidearm for policemen. Likewise, it would do just fine as a self defense piece for Joe Citizen. It will be interesting to see how well it can shoot with different ammo, though.

As a stainless gun, cleanup was a snap. I ran a BoreSnake with FP10 on it through the barrel a couple of times, and then once through each chamber. I then wiped down the Ruger's outside, including the frame recesss, with a patch wet with FP10, then stuck it in a pistol rug. I repeated the exterior wipedown this morning, following up with a dry paper towel to get rid of the excess FP10.

Mac Mini

Unlike RBT, when I saw the Mac Mini and was impressed. Yes, expandability is limited. Yes, the specs don't "wow" me. Yes, you can get an equivalent PC cheaper. But, this is the cheapest way to get a box that will run Mac OS-X.

Let's say you get a cheap PC with Windows. It still needs an antivirus program, multiple antispyware apps, and a lot of ongoing maintenance to ensure it doesn't get rooted by viruses, trojans, and other assorted crap out there. And while Linux has made huge strides in usability (in many ways it's better than Windows), many specialized commericial apps won't run on it but are available for Mac. Also, Linux printing often remains a real bitch and a half to get running.

A Mac Mini, on the other hand, basically allows you to unbox the unit, hook everything up, and it all just works. The form factor of the Mini gives greater flexibility in where you stuff it, and compared with an eMac or iMac, you won't be tossing a perfectly good display when you replace the box in a few years. For a power user a Mini Mac isn't the right solution but as a second computer or a computer for a kid's room it looks like it would do nicely.

Clueless

Shortly after I transferred into my current position I sent out requests for info to various vendors of content filtering, domain registration, and web hosting serivces. I did so either by sending an email to an address given on the respective vendors' web site, or by filling out an online "contact me" form.

The other day I got into work and there was a message in my inbox which just floored me. It was a reply to an online RFI form that I filled out on 7/27/04. This vendor replied to me nearly six months after I clicked the submit button on his website. I was just floored. How clueless can you be?

One of my coworkers had a great idea. I should save his email and reply to this moron sometime in June or July.

Multiple updates to The Shooters Bar(SM)

While home, I took advantage of the time to post multiple updates to The Shooters Bar(SM), my list of pro-RKBA attorneys.

Additionally, I've started a Yahoo! Groups mailing list for TSB. To subscribe visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theshootersbar/.

Blecchhh Part 2

I made it into work this morning but only lasted until about 1130. I hate head colds.

Blecchhh

Between a nasty head cold and Amanda waking up at 0330 this morning, I didn't get much sleep last night. So, I called in sick and spent most of the day sitting in front of Bagend reading THR and AR15.com.

I did get to install the new Eagle rosewood grip panels on my Springfield M1911 which I got from Cabela's. The Pachymar rubber grips which the gun came with were functional, but oogly. The Eagle grips needed a little fitting, for which I used my Dremel with a sanding drum set on 1,000 RPM. One of these days I'll post a pic, since the Springer much nicer looking now.

Along with the 1911 grips, I also got an Otis "Tactical" (I hate that marketing term) cleaning kit. It's a pretty neat concept. Instead of a rigid cleaning rod, it's basically a pull-through system using nylon-coated stainless steel cables. You can attach to the pull-through a slotted tip to hold Otis's special cleaning patches , or a bore brush. The cable is rigid enough to be used for clearing obstructions from the bore, something you can't do with a BoreSnake. I don't view the Otis kit as a replacement for a proper cleaning rod, but it's a good kit for field use.

Blogroll

You may have noticed the beginnings of a Blogroll down on the right. I'll add more as time permits.

Meanwhile, any reciprocal links are of course most welcome.

PC install

This morning I went down to a client's office in Wynnewood to install two PCs he picked up during the week. This is the same client I visited last Monday.

The PCs are HP Pavilions running XP Home. Yeah, they're consumer-grade but he's had very good luck with Pavillions in his small office for several years. The new boxes have P4/3GHz CPUs, 512 MB of RAM, a DVD+RW and CD-ROM drives, and 200 GB hard disks. He got them for about $800 each.

After he physically installed them, I got them on the LAN, removed a lot of the crap HP loads on the hard disks, and installed stuff like MS Office, antispyware apps, and created limited user accounts for the two girls working for him.

I also setup a Maxtor One-Touch 200 GB USB hard drive on one of his existing PCs. It's going to be used for offsite backups of the data on his e-Smith 5.5 Linux fileserver. For backup software we're using SyncBack, a nifty, free program I found last year and which I have running every night at another client.

A couple of the PCs needed updated to their antivirus software as well as Windows, so after taking care of that I automated much of that with the AVG and Windows Update schedulers.

While we worked, I mentioned to my client -- who's company does commerical property management -- that along with a partner I do network cabling. So he may be able to use us for jobs on sites he's renovating. A few cabling jobs each year the size of the one we did last Fall would be a nice supplement.

Had my lawyer hat on

One of the projects I'm involved with at work is reviewing the contract to renew our outsourced email service. Although my boss asked me to review the contract from a business standpoint, it's be wasteful to ignore my legal background. So, yesterday afternoon and this morning I put on my lawyer hat.

We are getting closer to an acceptable contract, but let me tell you, this thing started out as a real POS. I know that had I drafted such a contract back when I was practicing law, my boss would've torn me a new one. For example, the section of the contract dealing with material breach was some of the worst, unintelligible legalese I've had the misfortune to read. It was a paragraph consisting of two or three run-on sentences which ran for about a third of a page. Ugh. So, I broke it down into a couple of subsections and used sentences which wouldn't have resulted in a big red "F" in 10th grade English class.

Hard work, but actually pretty interesting.

I'm being quoted

After asking me if it was OK and getting approval from his boss, reader Geoff Timm, who is a geek for Uncle Sam, emailed out a document to his colleagues based on my previous posts, 10 Steps for Securing Your MS Windows PC and Secure That Wireless Network. On top of my contributions, Geoff added a listing of assorted residential gateways from NewEgg.com. The general idea is to get it into the hands of end users who are experiencing problems on their home computers.

Thanks, Geoff. It's good to be recognized. I hope the piece does some good for you.

More laptop fun

I got my new Dell D600 setup as a dual-boot XP Pro/SuSE 9.2 Pro box today. When I first tried this, YaST was able to resize the disk's single NTFS partition fine, but after creating the partitions to be used under Linux it bombed while trying to format them. It may or may not have been something I did. So, I rebooted into XP, deleted the Linux partitions, and rebooted into the SuSE installer. It was then able to create my swap and / partitions.

The rest of the installation went smoothly, including the setup of GRUB to default to SuSE, but with an option for booting Windows. (And yes, I made sure it works. XP comes right up after you select it.)

YaST pretty much automagically set things up so that I have read only access to the NTFS partition. I was able to set my home page in Firefox to my portal page saved under My Documents on the NTFS partition.

The onboard 802.11g wireless NIC was also properly recognized and after installing KWiFiManager, it's easy to setup the adapter to access different WLANs.

Based on this experience I don't hesitate to recommend SuSE 9.2 if you're looking to dip your toes in the Linux waters but aren't ready to discard Windows entirely.

New AOL IM Name

For anyone who cares, I'm now using dmarkowitz527 when I login to AOL Instant Messenger. My Yahoo! Messenger ID will remain the same at dave_markowitz.

Back to the grind

The longest vacation I've taken in years ended today. Nobody likes to return from vacaction, but today was a pretty good day.

First off, I had my annual performance review, which went quite well.

Secondly, the Dell Latitude D600 laptop which we ordered for use as a test box came in while I was on vacation. w00t! It's basically an upgrade version of my daily use machine. Same CPU (P4M @ 1.4 GHz) but with 1 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard disk, and a DVD-ROM drive. It was supposed to have a DVD burner but our purchasing department fouled up. (We got a second, identical unit for my co-worker, and his also came with the DVD-ROM, so I don't think it's a Dell SNAFU.)

The only software that came on the Dell aside from XP Pro was WinDVD, so I spent the afternoon installing stuff like antivirus, antispyware, IM clients, Ethereal, and various other utilities. Since I'll eventually need something on the box for taking notes, I decided to give Abiword a try, since it's so lightweight. I've putzed around a little bit with it on Linux, but not in quite some time. I'll probably load it onto Bagend at home.

I'll add some more stuff on the Dell tomorrow, as well as turning into a dual boot machine with SuSE 9.2 Pro.

Countries I've visited

Found this morning via a link from Ramble On!, Dave T.'s blog, is a site (link below) which will make a map showing which countries you've visited. Pretty neat. Here's where I've been:



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Edited to correct the link to Dave T.'s blog.

Updates to The Shooter's Bar(SM)

Today is a company holiday, so I get one more day for my vacation. Back to the grind tomorrow.

This morning I added J. Michael McCormick of PA to The Shooter's Bar(SM). I currently have close to 40 pro-gun rights attorneys listed on TSB. It's one of the (possibly the) biggest online lists of pro-gun lawyers, but I'm always looking to add more.

While I had Mozilla Composer open, I also did some long overdue cleanup of the index page for my Shooting & RKBA pages, as well as the Building-tux.com home page.

A rodent for the iBook

I shot down to Microcenter this afternoon and picked up a Logitech optical mouse to use with my iBook. It didn't come with a mouse, and I don't care for Apple's one button mice, so I got another Logitech. There are a couple reasons I don't like Apple mice: they're only one button and they don't have a scroll wheel.

I've always had very good luck with their mice, this is probably the fourth or fifth one I've bought. None has ever worn out, I've just moved on to newer and better models every few years.