Windows Wireless Suckfest Part Deux

Yesterday afternoon I went back out to the golf club where we installed a wifi hotspot. My goal was to get our customer contact's laptop online, along with the PC they have in their pro shop. Both machines are running XP. The laptop has a Linksys Wireless-G adapted, while the desktop PC has a Linksys UBS to 802.11g adapter.

In short, I was unable to get either PC online, using any combination of drivers or configuration utilities. The laptop could see the WLAN but not pull an IP. The desktop didn't even see the WLAN, even though my iBook sitting right next it had very strong signal. Both machines worked OK for a couple of weeks following the initial installation but eventually crapped out, almost certainly due to some "patch" from Windows Update.

I even tried installing my Netgear Wireless-G card in the laptop, using the latest available drivers and config utility downloaded from Netgear. No joy there, either.

Supposedly, the laptop can be used with other hotspots. So, we may go out again next week with different WAPs in tow to see if we can get them online. My concern, though, is that even if we do get them online with say, a Netgear WAP, who's to say some future software update won't kill functionality.

Grrr.

Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith

One of the nice things about working for an ISP is that sometimes vendors hook you up with cool stuff. Today, it was a pass to go see a private screening of Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith.

FINALLY, Lucas has made a Star Wars prequel that doesn't suck. It's quite good in fact.

Sure, some of the dialog is stilted, but the first three SW movies aren't full of Shakespearean dialog, either. The acting in this one is much better than Episodes I and II (granted, that ain't saying much). Hayden Christiansen as Anakin Skywalker doesn't come across as a whiny little turd in ROTS, while Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi actually looks like he's not ashamed to be in the movie. Samuel L. Jackson does some butt kicking, while Ian McDiarmid as Senator Palpatine/Darth Siddious is back to his evil ways as seen in Return of the Jedi.

Without giving away any of the plot, I'll note that this movie does have one, and it's pretty good. By the end of the movie all the loose ends leading up to Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope, are tied up.

Naturally, the special effects are amazing and if you wait to see it on TV, you'll wish you'd seen it in the theater.

Note to parents: ROTS is rated PG-13 (all previous SW movies were PG.) It's definitely more violent than the other movies, and there are scenes of dead children, so you might not want to take little ones.

I give it 3 out of 4 stars.

USB to IDE Adapter

This is neat. It's an adapter that allows you to connect an IDE drive via a USB cable to a USB port. Unlike external drive enclosures, you don't stick the drive in a box, you just plug it in. Something like this could be useful for pulling data off an old drive or making a disk image of an IDE drive for forensic purposes.

The advantage that I see over a conventional external disk enclosure is convenience. I wouldn't want to employ it for regular use.

Mac OS-X Update 10.4.1

I just installed the first update Apple released since Tiger came out. You can download it, and read the Apple knowledgebase article explaining it, here. The file is a 37 MB .dmg, which opens to reveal a .pkg that's about 50 MB. That's a lot of stuff for a "patch." If I run into any issues as a result of the upgrade, I'll post about them.

Incidentally, both my connection here at the office and the Apple mirror I downloaded the file from must have huge pipes. It took me only about 10 - 15 seconds to download the file!

I sold out to The Man

You may have noticed the Google ads in the lower right. I figured that they'd be an unobtrusive way to (hopefully) make a few bucks. If they become obnoxious, they'll go.

Testing Apple's Safari and Maill.app

Even though I've had my iBook since December, I can't say that I've really tried out Safari (Apple's KHTML-based browser) or Mail.app, the mail client included with OS-X. So last night I setup Mail to access my building-tux.com and davemarkowitz.net accounts, and I've been using Safari today for browsing.

Naturally, using Mail is taking some getting used to, since it does things differently from Mozilla Thunderbird. For example, the groups the Inboxes for my two IMAP accounts together, and in general, seems to have fewer configuration options. One thing I don't like is that there does not seem to be a way to disable the preview pane, something easily done in Thunderbird. Overall, though, my impression of Mail is positive.

Safari is a good browser. I haven't hit any pages today which it won't render, except for Blogger's composition page. The row of buttons which normally appers above the compose window is mostly absent. Other than that, it's been fast and stable. Of course, I miss certain Firefox extensions like Adblock, which is a killer tool, IMHO. As with Mail, my overall impression is positive, though.


Edit: Wow. I take that back about Safari not rendering any pages incorrectly. This blog looks like shit in Safari!

New scope on the way

Tonight I ordered a Hakko COL-4211 ER 4x21mm scope to mount on my Colt AR-15A3. Thus, I'm one step closer to putting suitable optics on all of my EBRs. I'm doing this because everything else being equal, I shoot more accurately with optics and illuminated optics like the Hakko work better in low light (which is a factor under SHTF situations).

If you've ever seen the short Colt scopes mounted on the carrying handle of an AR-15 or M-16, you've seen a Hakko, who made them for Colt. The Colt/Hakko units have a good reputation for sturdiness and optical quality at a decent price. Yeah, I'd love to have a Trijicon ACOG, but one would cost me as much or more than I paid for the rifle.

You might wonder why I ordered a scope designed to attach to the carrying handle when I have a flattop rifle. One, this way I don't need to buy a mount or a backup iron sight, and should the optic go tango uniform, the irons are instantly usable.

A full report will follow, of course.

Mozilla Thunderbird Inbox Size Limit

I did an emergency site visit yesterday to a client who I migrated over to Thunderbird last month from Outlook Express. He called me Friday explaining that when he tried to POP down his mail, he got a dialog box saying that Thunderbird was unable to write to his inbox.

It turns out that there is a known bug/issue in Thunderbirdbird when the Inbox reaches 2 GB in size, at least when running on XP. Even after compacting the Inbox three times and moving a lot of mail out of it to other folders, the actual Inbox file didn't shrink when viewed in Windows Explorer, and I wound up having to delete it and the associated index file.

To avoid running afoul of this issue, you should organize your mail. Create folders for your saved messages not within the Inbox folder, but rather, under the Local Folders hierarchy. Also, saving file attachments to your hard drive rather than keeping them within email will go a long way to keeping the size of your email folders down.

NeoOffice/J

I've mentioned previously that my preferred office suite is OpenOffice.org. I've used it on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS-X. The Mac version requires X11, which while not a terrible thing, isn't ideal. Since it's not a native Aqua app, it doesn't fit in with the rest of the Mac desktop and doesn't behave like a normal OS-X application.

The good folks behing the NeoOffice/J project aim to fix that. I tried it out a couple of months ago but went back to OO.o running in X11, because NeoOffice/J's font display wan't quite right on my system. I'm not sure if it was OS-related or NO/J-related.

Anyway, this morning I downloaded the latest release candidate, and noticed an improvement in how things display. Before, when viewing a document created on Bagend in OO.o running on SUSE, a lot of words would run together, especially around punctuation marks. I am happy to note that this doesn't seem to be the case anymore with NeoOffice/J. Again, I can't say if the improvement is due to upgrading my system to Tiger, or if its due to improvements in the NeoOffice/J codebase.

I was prompted to try NeoOffice/J again after corresponding with a Mac-using attorney. He's using it in his law practice, running on an iBook with good results. So, I figured it was worth another shot. It's looking like it'll pan out.

Twenty Years Ago Today

On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb out of a helicopter onto a bunker built by members of MOVE in a house on Osage Avenue in Philly. Several members of MOVE were killed by the blast and the ensuing fire that was allowed to spread until 61 homes were destroyed.

No members of the police department, fire department, or Mayor Goode's administration were ever prosecuted. Wilson Goode went on to win reelection two years later.

Remember, only the government can be trusted with weapons.


Edit: Welcome InstaPundit readers!

Forwarding Remote X11 Connections to Mac OS-X

I've become smitten with Mac OS-X largely because it is desktop UNIX that Just Works. Most other forms of desktop UNIX, e.g., Linux or FreeBSD, use an incarnation of X11, such as XFree86 or X.org, for their GUI. One of the neat things you can do is run a graphical application on a Linux or BSD box but have it display on your Mac.

I used this tonight while doing some online bill paying. Rather than saving my receipts on my iBook, I SSHed into Bagend, exported the display over to the Mac, and paid my bills using Firefox running on Bagend but displaying on the laptop. So, when I saved the receipts, they went straight into the appropriate folder on Bagend.

Another point in favor of forwarding X rather than using something like VNC is that performance is somewhat better, in my limited experience.

Rather than repeating what's been said on several other sites, I'll refer you to this article, which explains in a clear manner how to get this working securely by tunnelling X through SSH.

Wireless Site Survey

For someone who's supposed to be in product development I seem to be going on a lot of site surveys lately. This morning I went on one at a five-star hotel in Philly that we're in negotiations with to sell them our hospitality product. In addition to Ethernet-based Internet access in all the rooms, the hotel's IT manager wants a complete wireless overlay.

The equipment we're planning to use is from BelAir Networks. This gear is high-end, not your average Linksys, Netgear, or Cisco. E.g., the units can be used to create a wireless mesh, run RSTP, and can be setup with multiple SSIDs bound to different VLANs. Very cool stuff.

So, today we hauled a BelAir 200 over to the hotel, set it up, and walked around with laptops checking signal strength around the hotel. I used MacStumbler running on my iBook. Based on the information gathered today, another engineer in my department will be putting together a proposal.

Mailserver Followup

I've been running BitDefender for Qmail on my mail server at home for a few days now and so far it looks good. I am seeing fewer worms and spam making it into my Inbox. I'm planning to recommend a trial on my client's SUSE/CommuniGate Pro server as a potential replacement for ClamAV.

And I've also been considering that I may want to move to a "Qmail Toaster" for my own mail server. This one, in particular, looks very interesting.

BitDefender Antivirus

I would appreciate it if any of my readers who have used BitDefender Antivirus on a mail server would let me know via email or a comment what they think of it. My larget client, running a SUSE/CommuniGate Pro mail server needs a better solution than ClamAV, and I'm looking at BD.

Thanks.

Edit at 2030: I installed a evaluation version of BitDefender on my mail server. We'll see if it makes a difference in the mass of spam/viruses I receive.

New Apple Powerbook

Not for me, alas, but for my brother Josh. Last night Josh and I went to the Apple Store in King of Prussia and he got a new 12" G4 Powerbook. I went because my employer has a deal with Apple for discounts on their products -- we got 8% off. And since I charged it on my Discover Card I'll be getting cash back, I'll actually make a few bucks.

Anyway, the new machine is very nice. The keyboard seems a little nicer than on my iBook, and it should give noticeably better performance with the better video card and fast hard drive.

We took it back to my house, plugged it in, had Josh go through all the initial setup stuff, and then upgraded it to Tiger, since it came with Mac OS 10.4 on a DVD in the box, the hard disk had Panther on it. The OS upgrade was simple: insert the DVD and double-click an install icon. The machine rebooted and proceeded with the upgrade. It took about 40 minutes; I expect that when I upgrade my iBook to Tiger it'll take a bit longer due to the slower CPU and hard drive.

After completing the upgrade, Josh played around with it for a bit, and after seeing something particularly neat about OS-X, wondered aloud why anyone would use a Windows machine after trying a Mac.

(Teal'c)

Indeed.

(/Teal'c)

If only you knew the power of the Dark Side...

In a way you can. Just read Darth Vader's Blog.

Windows Wireless Suckfest

Well, it wasn't the SMC gateway that was causing the problems out at our customer site. Nor was it the SMC WAPs. It was our old friend, XP's Wireless Zero Configuration.

As I noted yesterday, my iBook worked as you'd expect out at the customer site. I replicated the basic setup today in our lab, but substituted a Netgear WG302 WAP for the SMC WAP. Again, my iBook just worked, while my Dell with the Netgear Wireless-G card choked. But if I disable WZC and used Netgear's drivers and configuration utilities, the same card worked just fine.

I even tested to make sure it wasn't the SMC gateway's DHCP server, by connecting the WG302 to an old Cayman NAT box I had laying around. When using WZC, the connection died after 10 - 15 minutes. With it disabled I was able to maintain a connection for over an hour and pass significant amounts of traffic.

I wish Microsoft would just ditch WZC, since they can't seem to get it to consistently work, and leave wireless configuration to the cards' vendors. Now I'm going to have to call the customer back and explain to him that he's going to have to tell anyone who wants to use the hotspot that they need to disable WZC and use their card's manufacturer's driver and utility. That's going to go over like a lead balloon, because it means they're going to have to find someone to provide client support.

Out of the office today

This morning I did a now rare service call, back at the country club where I helped install a wifi hotspot. Last Thursday our contact there called in and let us know that members were having major problems getting online using the hotspot. So, I setup a site visit for this morning.

Since everything was working just peachy just a few weeks ago, I had figured that what probably was happening was that users' PCs were infected with malware that was hosing the Windows networking components. It turns out I was wrong.

I got onsite with my Dell D600 which has a Netgear Wireless-G card and my Apple iBook with its Airport Extreme 802.11g card. The iBook got online without any problems. The Dell, on the other hand, had problems pulling an IP via DHCP even after associating with the SMC access point. The customer's Dell, with a Linksys Wireless-G card, experienced similar difficulties. So did the laptops of a couple of members who were a couple of rooms over.

The Windows machines kept giving reporting an error contacting the DHCP server.

I verified the configurations of the SMC WAP and our SMC8013 gateway/modem. I rebooted all our equipment, and even factory-defaulted the gateway, then reconfigured it. No dice. For some reason, Windows boxen associating with this WAP or the second WAP we have onsite are having difficulty pulling -- and retaining -- IP addresses. Throughout the three hours I was onsite, my iBook's connection never bobbled.

I'm therefore pretty sure something is hosed up with the SMC8013 gateway. I called in to tech support and requested a high-priority dispatch to get the modem replaced. That was supposed to be done this afternoon after I left. I haven't heard back from the customer so I'll follow up tomorrow.

Time to get back into reloading

When I lived at home with my parents, I did some reloading so I could shoot more for the same amount of money. But since I moved out I haven't had a place to set up reloading equipment, so all I've been shooting has been factory ammo. That's about to change.

Tonight I placed an order with MidwayUSA for equipment to get me setup to reload .38 Special and .357 Magnum. I'm getting:

• Lee Hand Press kit
• Lee .38/.357 4 die set
• Lee primer pocket cleaner
• Frankford Arsenal (Midway) dial caliper
• 500 Speer .358" 158 LSWCHP bullets

I'll pick up a toolbox at Lowe's to keep the tools in. I already have a ton of .38 brass and a few hundred .357 cases, so I'll be good to go once I pick up some powder and primers locally.

Range report

Last night I went to the range with my dad. He had his new S&W M-625, while I brought my Ruger Service Six and Old Model Single Six.

I'm finding that the Service Six take a lot more concentration to shoot well than my Smith &Wesson Model 15, due to the DA trigger. But when I get in the groove, it shoots really well. I put two boxes (100 rounds) of Winchester white box .38 Special 150 grain LRN through it. I kept a target with 18 shots fired double action into a hole that's about 1.5" edge-to-edge. Range was seven yards. The more intense practice should pay off in spades when I pick up a S&W.

I only put about 30 rounds through the Single Six. It seems to like the Winchester Super-X Power Points that I was shooting. When I didn't jerk the trigger the shots clustered together nicely on the paper, right near point of aim.

On the other hand, Dad's M-625 has the worst DA pull I've felt on a S&W revolver. And I thought Rugers came from the factory with bad triggers. It's a new gun with only a few hundred rounds through it, but it felt gritty, and it stacks badly. He attributes the grittiness to MIM (metal injection molding) parts. The contrast with the very smooth trigger on my older M-625 couldn't be more stark. If this is typical of new S&Ws coming from the factory, you couldn't pay me to buy one if they came out and used the agreement with the Clinton Administration as toilet paper. At least Dad shoots it well.

Foreign felony convictions don't bar gun ownership in the USA

So says the United States Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision. I haven't read the case yet but it appears that the Court reached its decision on the grounds that an act that's a felony in another country might actually be behavior encourage here, or vice-versa. Also, other countries may not have the same procedural safeguards as our legal system.

Strangely, two of the dissenters were Scalia and Thomas (joined by Kennedy), both of whom are on record as recognizing that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right. Their line of reasoning is that Congress barred gun ownership for persons convicted in "any" court of a felony, and they saw nothing to indicate that "any" is limited to US courts. Thus, they are being consistent in their method of interpreting legislation, i.e., appplying textualism.

After some consideration I have to conclude that while Scalia and Thomas (whose opinions I generally respect more than the other justices') missed the point. The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental individual right, as recognized by the Second Amendment. It's bad enough when American laws infringe upon it, but it would be worse if we allowed decisions made in foreign jurisdictions, many of whom have little respect for individual rights of any kind, to serve as the basis for denial of a fundamental right.

If we frame the question as, "Should rights recognized under the Bill of Rights be abridged due to felony convictions rendered in any foreign court," the answer has to be a resounding no. If not, then they aren't rights, just priviledges, subject to revocation at the whim of those in power.




Edited at 19:58 to correct the numbers on the Court's split, and to fix a spelling error in the title.

Fugu - SFTP and SCP for OS-X

I've been looking for a good GPLed GUI to SFTP and SCP that I can run on my iBook. It looks like I found it: Fugu. I installed it last night and it seems to work OK. If I run into any issues I'll report them here.

Installation could hardly be simpler: download the compressed archive, decompress it, and drag the Fugu app from the opened archive into your Applications folder. I also added it to my Dock but that of course isn't required.

Mozilla, SUSE, AFU

SUSE's YaST Online Update has now hosed Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird on two machines: Bagend and my Dell D600 at work. If I launch them from the command line like "firefox &" I see that Gecko is segfaulting. I need to do some more googling to see if I can find a fix.

On Bagend, the Mozilla Suite 1.7.4 still seems to work ok but I'll have to verify that. I upgrade the suite to 1.7.7 via RPMs downloaded from ftp.suse.com, and now it's hosed, too.

Crap.

I will note that this is the first time I've had any app stop working after running SUSE YOU. That said, it is a major problem when security updates kill your web browser or email client, much less both at the same time.

The GeekWithA45 rants, then get lucky

GeekWithA.45 has a must-read rant about a recent experience at Worst Best Buy. I've disliked Best buy for quite some time and this just reinforces my feeling.

He follows up his rant with some good news, though. He scored a Marlin Camp .45 last week.

Like the Geek, I got my Camp .45 last year at Seneca Arms. Mine wears a cheapo BSA red dot (got it for free). It's quite accurate -- 25 yard groups are one hole slightly larger than a .45 bullet. The furthest I've shot it is 50 yards, and there's a perceptible lag between the time you pull the trigger and you hear the SMACK of the bullet hitting the target.

If you pick up a Camp .45, definitely replace the OEM recoil spring, which at 11 lbs. is way too light. I'm running a 16 Lb. Wolff spring in mine and considering the 22 lb. spring. Also, keep the screws holding the gun in the stock tight so that you don't crack the wood under recoil. One of these days I plan to pick up an extra bolt buffer as well.

Do a search on THR and you'll turn up some good info on the Marlin Camp Carbines, which are unfortunately no longer made.

Passover

Tonight is the first night of Passover (Pesach in Hebrew), during which Jews remember the events leading up to and including the Exodus from Egypt. (Yet another Jewish holiday which basically goes, "They oppressed us, they're dead, let's eat!)

The name Pesach is derived from the sacrificial paschal lamb, whose blood was smeared over the doors of the Israelite slaves, so that the Angel of Death would pass over their homes and smite the first born sons of only Yul Brynner, umm, I mean the Egyptians.

This afternoon we're heading down to my uncle's place in Arlington, VA to get together with my mom's side of the family for our Passover seder.

10/22 gunsmithing

I did a little gunsmithing on my Ruger 10/22 tonight.

Sometime last year I installed a Power Custom hammer and sear to reduce the godawful factory trigger pull to something manageable. It resulted in a very nice pull, but I needed to do some tweaking so that the safety could be engaged. So tonight I pulled the rifle out of the closet, took down the trigger mechanism, and stoned/filed the end of the sear that bears on the safety catch. It took a couple of tries, but I was taking it slow. It's a lot easier to take metal off than to put it back.

For guidance on how to take apart the trigger mechanism on a 10/22, see here and here.

One the action was finished I mounted a Nikon Pro Staff 4x32mm rimfire scope. The rifle had been sans glass, and when the latest Natchez Shooters Supply flyer came, I saw that they were selling factory-refurbished Nikons for about $30 off. That brought this scope down to $69 + S&H, which I couldn't resist.

I used to have a Weaver 4x28mm rimfire scope on the Ruger, but have since migrated it over to my Savage Mark IIGL. Compared with the Weaver, the Nikon has a longer eye relief and larger exit pupil, which are good. I think it's a bit brighter, too, but I'll need to take both outside at the same time and compare them side by side to be sure. Both scopes normally go for about $100 or a little more.

Now all I need is a free afternoon some weekend to get to the range!

New Pope

So the Roman Catholic Church has a new Pope, and already some people are claiming that he might be an antisemite due to his teen membership in the Hitler Youth. This is ridiculous.

Maybe he is an antisemite. Hell, I can't read his mind. Somehow I think this would've come to light in the intervening six decades. But to make a big deal about his membership in the Hitler Youth or his subsequent conscription into the German military during WW2, things in which he had no choice and which occured 60 years ago is absurd. There are plenty of real antisemites out there without having to conjur up false ones.

In class today

Today was spent attending the PBI's 2005 Internet Law Update downtown in the Wannamaker Building, a block from my office. The course was worth 5 substantive and 1 ethics credit, so I'm now up-to-date for my annual CLE requirement. (I'm in the compliance group whose year ends April 30th.)

Overall, the course was excellent.

During the lunch break I hung out a Love Park at 15th & JFK, since the weather was nice and there's free wifi. Unfortunately, while I my iBook's Airport card was able to associate with the WLAN I didn't pull an IP. I suspect the DHCP scope was exhausted. I was able to associate with a WLAN having the SSID "linksys," yes, some dufus had hooked up a Linksys wireless router and done squat to secure it. I figured, "WTF," and did a quick check of my email. The connection was dog slow, so I figure that I wasn't the only freeloader.

Arpil 19th

Tomorrow, April 19th is a significant day. On the downside, it's the anniversary of the Fed's BBQ at Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing.

But it's also the anniversary of the Minutemen's stand at Lexington & Concord, where "the shot heard 'round the world" started the American Revolution. Finally, it's also the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As one of my online friends (M.S.) said today:

Tomorrow is resistance day, where we remember everybody who stood up, and looked tyranny in the eye and didn't blink. If it gives em nightmares, well and good.

A Message from the Ghost of General Patton

Here. Needs Flash.

A Productive Weekend

Yesterday I paid a visit to one of my clients, a custom printing/blueprinting shop. This is the same client for whom a partner and I installed Ethernet and telephone cabling in their new office back in the Fall.

Anyway, yesteday's visit had two purposes: first, my normal monthly maintenance on their file and mailservers. Second, to limit Internet access for some of the workstations on their LAN. A number of the PCs are hooked up to large printers and used to control them, and nobody should ever be using them for anything else. Likewise there are two PCs used strictly for shipping items, one for UPS and one for FedEx. These need limited access. About a half dozen PCs need full Internet access.

Since they are on a budget, the way I created different levels of access was to use access control lists (ACLs) on their SMC 8013 cable modem/router. The PCs with full access were assigned static IPs in a particular range, while the boxes with no access were left as DHCP clients. I changed the DHCP scope, cutting it in half, and created an ACL which denies Internet access to those PCs within the range of IPs handed out by the router.

The UPS and FedEx PCs were special cases. We downloaded and instaleld Norton Internet Security on the FedEx box, and one of their employess who's pretty savvy will configure it so that the only website the user can go to is FedEx's. We tried the same thing for the UPS box, but this one was acutally supplied by UPS and NIS wouldn't install. So, the company's owner is just going to have to put her foot down with repsect to misuse of that PC in particular.

Finally, I also got the mail users migrated to Mozilla Thunderbird, off of Outlook Express. The main reason for doing so was to minimize their exposure to malware.

Today my electrician friend who helped me out on the big cabling job with this client came over and did some work at my house. We got most of the remaining two prong outlets replaced with properly grounded three prong outlets, got our doorbell fixed, a couple of outside floodlights upgraded, and checked out attic fans at Lowe's. He'll probably come back out next month to do the attic fan, which should save us some money during the summer.

New entry in the blogroll

Please welcome Jeff Trowbridge's Random Thoughts of a Wandering Mind to my blogroll.

Online Freedom of Speech Act

Found via InstaPundit:

Today in the House of Representatives, Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) introduced a companion piece of legislation to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's bill (S.678) to exclude the Internet from the definition of "public communication" in the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002.

Read the rest of this short article, here.
Looks good to me.

A bit of a scare, but back to normal now

We had a bit of a scare yesterday but things turned out OK.

At about 1100 the daycare called Judith and told her that Alexandra had fallen, banged her head, and they were concerned that she might have a concussion. Aside from a cut on the back of her head, her pupils were dilated.(*) Needless to say, we both left work. Since Judith drives and I had to wait for the next train she got to Alexandra before I did and had her checked over by our pediatrician. It turned out that she's OK, that the fall just rung her bell, so to speak. But as you can imagine I didn't get anything productive done yesterday afternoon. She was fine this morning.

Today I've been working on a white paper discussing the efficient use of a limited number of public, routable IPs. Its intended audience is our customers, since we're rolling out a static IP offering for our commercial cable modem service, as well as our salespeople, so that they get a better understanding of the tech they're selling.

This afternoon I have a phone call scheduled with one of our vendors of new network management system used for some of the RF-to-Ethernet gateways that we use in our hospitality product.




* - One dilated pupil is a good indicator of a concussion. If only one is dilated, something ain't right.

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.