Random Neuron Firings

It’s not clear to me if I should post this as “I told you so!” or “Why didn’t I think of this?”

It was only a month or so ago that I gave up on Facebook, and one of my reasons was all the silly posts about people going someplace (usually a vacation) and posting publicly to everyone on Facebook. My question was not not just hang a sign on the front door to all burglars, “House unoccupied and available for burglary!”

Seems I wasn’t the only one with that thought – Some clever guys in the Netherlands have created a website (http://www.pleaserobme.com/) that scours twitterspace and Facebooks posts from idiots (can I call them that?) who announce they’re out of the house.

Now why didn’t I think of that first!?!?

Guess it’s not a good month for my computers – Starting about a month ago, my PC would BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) 10-15 minutes after waking up from sleep. The error message was a mysterious (and not very helpful) DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE  that didn’t offer much information. Debugging the memory dump file provided a little more information; turns out a USB.SYS file was causing the BSOD.

There’s not much to do except unplug one USB device after the next, wait two or three days of sleep cycles and see what happens. First the iPod went, then the Blackberry got disconnected. Third went my nifty USB flash card reader. Then I dug up an old PS/2 keyboard and mouse to replace the USB ones. Two weeks later I’m still seeing BSODs … But there’s nothing left to unplug! It’s got to be the motherboard itself.

A couple days later the UPS guy shows up with a brand new Gigabyte P55A-UD3 motherboard. Now normally I would erase my hard disk and rebuild from scratch, but … this new motherboard uses the same processor and chip set, so why not just plug it in and see what happens? Worst case, I’ll rebuild the PC from scratch, which is what I was originally planning to do anyway. No big deal.

Two hours later everything is plugged in and power is applied. No smoke and no sparks – So far, so good. Windows churns for almost ten minutes installing new versions of drivers and offers to reboot. Everything works perfectly! I’m pretty much done except … that I’m expecting Windows, Office and all my Adobe programs to need another authorization. I run them individually, ask them to check for updates and they’re fine as is. Wow! This is going easier than I thought! Even today, a week later, everyone is still happy … except …

One program flags itself as unauthorized – iTunes – And wouldn’t you know I’ve used up my five authorizations over my history with no less than five iPods. I can still copy “my” music files, but Podcasts and purchased music is restricted. I’m not a very happy camper.

For years I’ve tried to rid myself of iTunes. This my have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Songbird and/or MusicMonkey may not have the same clean interface, but iTunes doesn’t like me any longer and I’m only too happy to return the favor!

OK, I’ll admit it – I’ve been up the last couple mornings at zero-dark-thirty waiting for the 33rd edition of the America’s Cup challenge. It’s not being broadcast on TV, just on ESPN360.com, so here I sit, at 4AM, watching the race on my computer.

This America’s Cup challenge is unlike any other – Rules have been litigated for 2+ years in courts, and since this is just a challenge between two boats, their was no preceding Louis Vuitton Cup race. Best two out of three and it’s over!

But these boats are spectacular! With 90m sails (or wings), they’re larger than a Boeing 747! And it’s precisely that size makes them so fragile – Twice the race couldn’t be started because the waves were too high and could have jeopardized the boats. They’re gorgeous pieces of composite materials and engineering design, but like a butterfly, ineffective in high wind conditions.

The first race is now (finally) underway, and even though the USA 17 boat was squeezed at the start, it has now passed Alinghi 5 (at high speed) and is clearly the faster boat. This isn’t a race any longer.

This is amazing. These boats are doing 20+ knots in 7 knot wind. They’re going three times faster (!) than the wind! But …

There’s a part of me that would prefer to see two normal sized, mono-hull boats race. I’d prefer to see men hoisting sails instead of electric motors and gears. And I really wish they could race in most water conditions, not have to wait for specific wave heights. And most of all, I wish the race were closer.

But still, amazing! Simply amazing!

The other day my trusty old iMac didn’t wake up from sleep. Instead it made a bit of a “groaning” sound – Sorry, I have no better way to describe it. Powering on and off didn’t do any better – It just froze after a minute or so with a big, white screen. This is not good!

There are only two moving parts in a computer, the fan and the hard disk – The hard disk seemed like the more likely suspect. My brother suggested running the Disk Utility program from the Snow Leopard install disk – I was able to do that but the number of disk error messages was overwhelming. There is a technical term for this condition – Screwed up!

It’s surgery time!

Replacing a hard disk is not that big of an undertaking. Turns out there are a number of good instruction videos all over the web – One such one is posted here. Roughly 30 minutes after removing the LCD screen, the old 500GB drive had been surgically removed and replaced with a brand new, 1TB Western Digital Green drive.

It probably took another couple hours to put the iMac back together, reload the operating system and applications, and get back to work.

The  guy at the ”Genius Bar” had quoted me a minimum of $250 for labor and $400 for their special (?) hard drive. I did it for three hours of mild labor, an $89.99 drive from NewEgg, and I now have ~700GB of free space.

It’s those small victories that give us so much joy, eh?

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) issues special plates in lieu of standard NAAANNN plates to veterans, environmentalists and a whole host of groups and causes for payment of a nominal fee. We’re told, although I can’t find the law, that the DMV scrutinizes every application carefully for hidden codes that could be considered off-color or obscene. Urban legend has it that 3M TA3 was issued years ago causing departmental embarrassment. (Hint: Look at it in a mirror.)

Even the SPECIAL INTEREST LICENSE PLATE APPLICATION not only requests the 6- or 7-characters, but also specifically asks for the meaning: “The application will not be accepted unless the meaning is explained.”

Which leads me to this license plate. I’m pretty such I know what it means. And if I’m right, I can’t imagine it was approved. So obviously it must mean something else. Wonder what that is?

From a New York Times article on computer hackers this morning:

“One of the U.S. government’s biggest worries is that the attackers will place that source code back into products,” said George Kurtz, the chief technology officer at McAfee.

Excuse me? First, I’d like to know who in the U.S. Government provided a list of “biggest worries,” and second, it’s incredible to me that contaminated “source code” is even in the top 100 U.S. Government problems – Something tells me Afghanistan, health care, infrastructure and many others are a helluva lot closer to the top.

If George Kurtz truly believes what he was quoted as saying, and he’s the technology guru at McAfee, then I would strongly recommend the immediate uninstallation of all McAfee products from your PC immediately. You don’t want to run software from a company with nut jobs at the helm.

With the exception of scripts, computer code comes in two flavors, source code and executable – Source code is the human-readable instructions, and executable is the actual program that’s distributed online or on CD/DVDs.

Essentially, source code is the cookie recipe, and executable is the cookie itself. Imagine someone contaminating your chocolate chip cookie recipe by adding a line that says “Stir in 3 oz of chili pepper.”

The two problems with Kurtz’ argument are that first, contaminating source code would require access to the secure areas of the company. Source code is highly proprietary and considered company jewels. It’s not something that Joe Hacker has easy access to. If a hacker gets hold of your source code, you have much bigger problems than contaminated source code.

Second, mathematical calculations done on the source code before it’s converted to executable for distribution (called check sums or MD5 calculations) will catch the contamination. Much like tasting the cookie dough would catch the cookie recipe contamination.

Kurtz! Maybe you want to rephrase those interview sound bites?

“Ew, one of my coworkers just left the bathroom without washing her hands” was a recent status update from one of my “friends” who then went on to describe the bathroom environment in graphic detail. Way too much information. I decided to hide her updates.

Shortly before that, another of my friends clicked on the wrong link and was infected. Several of her friends urged turning up her privacy settings. <sigh>

Yesterday, women were posting their bra color to “raise awareness.” What, exactly, is “raising awareness?” Who does it help? Maybe the millions of Facebook posts would have had value if a link to some organization was published. No, the posts were just ”aqua” and “red” and “black” and so on. This wasn’t raising awareness – This was just another silly fad for the legions of Facebook lemmings.

Today another friend posted a bogus Haiti Relief update with phone numbers to “help.” Actually the phone number went to the Haitian consulate whose phones were completely overwhelmed. When this friend found out it was a prank to bring down the Haitian consulate’s phone number, did she take her post down to prevent more abuse? You already know the answer.

Another favorite are the users who post they’re going on vacation in Arizona for two weeks. Why not just post “Hello to all the thieves out there! My house will be unoccupied for two weeks. Help yourself!”

So I’m not playing any longer.

And in spite of my general distrust of Facebook applications, I’m going to recommend one link – The ACLU has published an application, that when run, shows how much information the application writers collect. If that doesn’t slow you down, I honesly don’t know what will.

• ACLU’s What Do Quizzes Really Know About You? quiz

Good luck, everyone!

In my spare (?) time, I manage the aviation website for a 200+ member organization – A large percentage of whom were military jet pilots, and many of whom still fly for commercial airlines today. After all these years, I can confirm the stereotype of pilots is pretty much true – They’re bull-headed, stubborn, unyielding and assertive. Fortunately, I can also add they’re meticulous, precise and most of the time when they say they’ll do something, they do.

It’s probably their education and training. Flying may be a simple as matching the numbers on the chart with the numbers on the instrument, but keeping the numbers aligned is the skill. It does take training and practice. So I don’t begrudge them their stubbornness too often … Until …

Our website has a forum – It’s based on the second most popular package out there, vBulletin. Before you can post, you have to register and then log in, but it’s not structured any different than thousands of other forums out there. And I do mean thousands!

So you would think that this meticulously trained, college-educated pilot base could navigate a forum that every 11-year kid does in his sleep. Well, you would be wrong. The military pilot may be able to fly his F-16 through ground fire, take down two enemies, run out of fuel, have his right wing shot off and still make it to base safely … Then he gets a job with large commercial airline and navigates huge, highly computerized, wide-body jets with hundreds of passengers back and forth across oceans … But put him in front of a computer and he loses it.

Yesterday I received the following help requests (?) for these skilled practitioners of aviation:

• help (Note the lack of subject and context)
• Do you have my log in name and password? (No, you have to register.)
• System does not recognize my email address (You never registered. Of course it doesn’t recognize you.)
• it says i am not authorized (You’re not, you’re not registered.)

Given that there are no less than four (4) well-placed and obvious “Register“ links, it boggles my mind that these college graduates can’t figure this out. <sigh>

My point? Glad you asked. Ever checked out the front office of a Boeing 777? What do you see? Lots of computers, right? Doesn’t it give you pause to know that the highly trained and compensated professional up there may not know how to work all those computers? Maybe that’s why they have so many spare crew on trans-Atlantic and -Pacific crossings?

Just thought you should know …

According to my baby sister, I’m the only person in the western hemisphere who didn’t see this when it went viral. “It’s already been parodied on ‘The Office’” she exclaimed. It?

It is a whimsical video of a wedding procession between two Minnesotans last June, made by the friend of the groom for distribution to the couple’s remote relatives. The video went viral and seemingly only I missed it … But if there’s another like me out there …

The bride came up with the idea of dancing before the ceremony instead of after, everyone in the party agreed, and with only 90 minutes notice, several Minnesotans put their best dance moves on for display.

They selected Chris Brown’s “Forever” as the music, a good choice at the time, but it would prove problematic a month later when Chris was arrested for beating his girlfriend, Rihanna. The couple adapted quickly and posted a request for donations against violence over their video. Nice touch!

There’s something about whimsical dancing that gets me smiling. Remember last year’s Dancing Matt?

Anyway, I sure wish someone would do a follow-up on this couple. It sure would be nice to hear they’re doing as well today as they did on their wedding date.

• Jill and Kevin’s Wedding Dance

Earlier this morning I spent an hour or so updating the copyright statements on all my websites to Copyright © 2010. Copyright directives can be hidden as a variable in a database, hidden in code someplace, or as with this Wordpress program, derived from the date of the posts and then autoinserted without user intervention. So it took a while to dig through a dozen or so websites.

But why? Turns out that for publications published after 1978, copyright protection lasts 70 years after the death of the author. So if I die today (God forbid!), the copyright for this document expires 2080 regardless of the date in the copyright statement. All I can guess is the copyright year is there to identify post-1978 documents?

Since graphic web browsers weren’t introduced until 1992, it’s pretty much a given that any original document on the web is post-1978.

My second question is why bother? Two years ago, a customer of one of my website customers stole some Java code and placed it without permission on his personal website. Practically speaking, if I were to go after the customer of my customer, the end customer would vent his frustration on his supplier (my customer), and that would make my customer unhappy. So I just let it go.

I understand that persons publishing expensive works might feel differently about copyright protection but to me it’s just a huge don’t care … and an annual waste of an hour of my time. What am I missing?