The f8 platform will allow web developers to add a ‘like’ button on their sites, and if you’re a content publisher, face it — you’ll WANT to add that to your site. But this HTML iframe will give Facebook access to every site you visit that includes the LIKE button, however those sites won’t be able to *publish* anything on your Facebook wall, for example, unless you specifically permit them to. However, FB will still know you’ve been there, and who knows what they’ll do with that information (they’ve declined to specify what they’ll use that information for). It seems the only

Also included in the f8 platform is a means to set up partnerships between Facebook and groups like Microsoft, Pandora and Yelp which will gain access to any public information you have on Facebook, including your name, gender, profile photo, and friend connections. Even if you set your own privacy settings to opt-out of giving these partner sites your information, your friends could still unwittingly give this information to the partner sites without your consent. To fix this, Facebook says you must manually visit each of these partner sites and ALSO opt-out of their f8 platform settings. To recap, to restrict my public information from being given away, I must:

1. DE-select a checkbox in my Facebook privacy settings that FB has already turned on without my consent
2. Find a list of partner applications at Facebook and manually block each application from within Facebook
3. Visit each partner’s web site and click a “no thanks” link
4. Convince every one of my hundreds of Facebook friends to do the same. One friend not complying will undo all the work I do myself.

That’s an awful lot of hoop-jumping to protect my privacy. Not to mention the first point that every site that starts including their LIKE button will give Facebook a means to log every page I visit which I have no way to opt-out of.

Granted, this platform will certainly, in Facebook’s words, make web “more open and social.” But at what price? How is my web experience going to be better if I have to lock down my social network profiles and spend time opting out of these partner sites when my friends who do NOT do this work will end up sharing my information any way, without my consent?

In the 90′s, there were tons of computer viruses that would infect a person’s PC and upload their address book to a central location which would then attempt to re-infect those users via Email. This feels eerily similar. Even if I lock down my settings, a friend who doesn’t will sent their entire friends list to these partner sites which will include my Facebook information. How is that a better experience for me?

From Facebook’s own help FAQ’s:

What data is shared with instantly personalized partner sites?
When you and your friends visit an instantly personalized site, the partner can use your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and connections. To access any non-public information, the website is required to ask for you or your friend’s explicit permission.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17100

How do I opt-out of instant personalization?
You can opt-out of instant personalization by disallowing it here. By clicking “No Thanks” on the Facebook notification on partner sites, partners will delete your data. To prevent your friends from sharing any of your information with an instant personalization partner, block the application: Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, Yelp.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17105

For example, a coworker and myself, while we were both employed at Rubicon and playing darts all the time, came up with the idea of a mobile web app (thus, usable on any mobile device that could access the web) to track dart scores, perhaps let users register and track scores over time. I registered “dartscore.mobi” and we put up a basic scoring system for 501/301/x01 games, and promptly got way too busy to ever carry on the idea. Now, at the risk of an expiring domain name, I’m left with the decision of paying money to renew the domain for one or more years, and dream of a time when I could work on the project, or just drop the idea. Or, write a blog post about the idea, and see if there’s enough interest to carry on the idea.

So now I’m debating building a web site just to list these ideas, since very few people read this blog at all.

First off, my apologies for lack of photos. I thought about documenting it while I worked, but it was late last night. However, I do need to replace some of my handiwork with proper stuff like heat shrink and insulated wires to cut down on some radio interference.

First, I cut the iPod/iPhone adapter from the Pixxo unit, and saw that there were 8 wires (red, black, white, green, yellow, brown, purple and orange). Next, I cut a micro USB cable and saw that while it was well shielded on the outside, inside the foil insulator were only four wires (red, black, white and green). I twisted the matching wires together, taped it up enough that nothing was shorted, and tested it in the car, and my Nexus One started charging. w00t

Only thing left was to trim the wires back as far as I felt comfortable, shorten up the micro USB plug, and get everything taped up better. Which worked like a champ, except that I had no electrical tape, and I’m sure that as good as blue 3M Painter tape is, actual electrical tape or heat shrink would do a much better job.

Then, I shortened and spliced a stereo 3.5mm audio cable, as the one that shipped with the Pixxo unit was about two inches two short.

The net result:

(hosted at picasa)

For me, the flexibility of a multi-tasking phone with a fast processor, decent screen resolution, and the new Android 2.1 feature set. For my wife, the superb MOTOBLUR tool on the CLIQ (running Android 1.5 or 1.6, I forget) gives her a means to combine all of her social/texting/facebook/etc feeds into a single experience. She’ll get an Android 2.1 upgrade in the near future, according to Motorola, which will give her even more voice commands.

Another nice feature is that both phones sport a micro USB connector for charging — for the first time ever in our marriage, we have similar phone charging needs. Using a $5 coupon for newegg.com, I ordered two more three-foot micro USB cables for $2.99 each, so we’ll have enough cables for our laptops, desktop PC, etc. Next purchase will likely be a two-port USB charger for the car so we can keep both phones charged on road trips.

Our experience with the Android Market has been pretty nice. I’ve found myself looking over her phone to see which apps she’s found, and she’s found some great apps and widgets. She found some text-to-speech tools, and is looking for a decent voice recording app. I found Android versions of the iPhone apps I used the most: Bump, Pandora, last.fm, Dropbox (Droidbox), a mobile Bible, Stitcher, Shazam, Instamapper, Flixster, and a Starbucks Card manager. Sadly my Starbucks Gold card has been so overused the card’s numbers have worn off.

We’re both spoiled with the voice search tools, and yesterday I transferred our family calendar into a shared Google Calendar so our phones will update with appointments, etc., so we both have a better handle on who’s where and when. No more “I’ll have to check the calendar when I get home…”

Overall, it’s really nice to finally have a decent multitasking phone, not a uni-task setup like previous Nokia/WinMo/Pantech/Samsung models or the iPhone. Finally, I can stream Pandora music, use turn-by-turn directions, while constantly updating my location on Google Latitude all on one device.

There are a few key differences in our phones, but they share many commonalities thanks to the Android OS. The Nexus One is a touch screen device only, whereas the Motorola CLIQ has a slider keyboard (which isn’t always needed, but my wife needs the physical keyboard. Both have a 5 megapixel camera, and I think the CLIQ’s cpu runs about 600MHz to the Nexus 1GHz speed. They both have similar RAM/ROM sizes, and I may upgrade her microSD memory to a 16GB card for her birthday (shh!)

Moving to a new platform wasn’t without its hiccups of course.

We had difficulty getting her old contacts from her AT&T SIM to her CLIQ. Ultimately, we put the SIM in an old Samsung Blackjack II, sync’d it with Outlook, used a third-party tool to sync Outlook to Gmail, then had to set those Gmail contacts to family/friends labels, at which point the CLIQ sync’d them over the air (OTA). What an ordeal.

We also had to figure out how to get the camera gallery to send photos to Facebook on the CLIQ. While MOTOBLUR has Facebook integration (it only does status and contact sync’ing), the CLIQ doesn’t include the full Android app for Facebook; simply installing the app immediately gave us an option to ‘share’ a photo with Facebook. The CLIQ also came preconfigured to show weather in New York, which we really only need to know to tease a SoCal friend who recently moved to the frosty NYC area, and it wasn’t completely intuitive how to fix that. There were some other minor things she asked me to handle for her.

On the Nexus One, my only pain point was getting my productivity apps installed as soon as possible, and that T-Mobile took nearly two days to get the data plan working on my phone so I didn’t have to rely on wifi. Nowhere was it documented that I needed to remove my battery to cold-boot my phone.

Now it’s time to learn some Java so I can tinker with some app building of my own. Now that I have a commute to work, I may revisit my old w98podfetch application and build a nice UI for it. There are a handful of podcast downloaders for Android, but I see a lot of comments about how there are too many limitations.

In a quest last night to find a cheaper alternative to giving AT&T $180 of my hard-earned cash every month for our two cell phones, I decided to take a page from BillShrink, and include some of the other phones that their users were requesting, along with additional phone features.

I’ll add more to the list as I have time, but this was my evening project last night. It’s ugly, it’s not written well, but it gets the point across. I’ll work on the overall look of it if enough people find it useful. Specs were gathered from several sites including the carriers, the phone manufacturers, a site called “pdadb” and a few items from the BillShrink chart.

http://iandouglas.com/cellphones.php

My chart will let you view specs from a single phone in the list, or multiple phones side-by-side so you can see their capabilities. I thought it would be interesting to list screen resolutions and DPI (calculated from the diagonal size), internal vs external storage, USB connector types, and more details about what the minimum/maximum carrier plans would include for the money you’ll pay for the phone over two years of ownership.

I’ll be moving my blog to a new server, so most of my content will be offline for a few days. I’ll get it back up and running as soon as I can. I’ll start scanning my error_log shortly to see which articles people want the most and use that as my priority list.

I’d love to just format my portable drive as ext4 and be able to mount it under Windows, natively, and have Windows recognize my symlinks. That’d be a dream come true. I’d also love to have a way to run Thunderbird/Firefox/etc right from the USB drive and use the settings on the drive, without having to manually tweak any .ini files on the host. Is that really too much to ask?

I decided the Nokia E71x is a great little smartphone if you use IMAP for your Email, and general overall support for the phone is decent. Unfortunately, the “Mail for Exchange” client didn’t work well for me, and I wonder if there’s something funky with the Exchange server at work because I had trouble using two separate apps to sync my work mail on the Nokia, and also had issues with work Email on the Blackjack II which prompted me to ‘upgrade’ to the Nokia.

So I went to an AT&T store, and asked them to exchange the phone. Oops, sorry, been more than 30 days, you’ll have to pay full retail price for a new phone because you’re not eligible for extending your two-year contract for another 21 months. Oh, and we’re out of stock for the iPhone you asked for. The rest of the conversation went something like:

Assistant Manager: You could try another AT&T store, see if they have any in stock.
Me: I don’t really know the area, can you check for me?
AM: (sighs) Yeah.
(searches and types enough on his keyboard to make me wonder if he was writing a blog article about the guy who went past his 30-day exchange period etc)
AM: The Beverly store has lots in stock.
Me: Okay, where’s that?
AM: On Beverly. Do you need the address?
Me: Considering I don’t know where on “Beverly”, yes, I need the address.

I get to the Beverly store, and took me 10 minutes to realize there’s a “sign in here” sign that isn’t close enough to the door for me to realize there’s a waiting list of about 8 people in front of me that are tying up sales reps.

An hour later, I got Brett (very friendly guy, super service) to find a 32GB iPhone 3GS for me, bought a neat dark red “luxe” shell from iFrogz, upsell me on the upgraded warranty, and sell me an overpriced car charger.

Oh, the best part. I didn’t have to pay full retail price after all. Turns out there’s a nifty little loophole in AT&T’s terms.

For $9.99, I can “add” a new line on my existing account. After telling him my wife was complaining about me adding a new line which would require her to memorize a new phone number when I’ve had this old number for like 7 years, he switched my old number to the new phone, and put some random 310-area code number on the Nokia. New data plan (business class, unlimited data plan, (hooyay for expense reports). New year 2-year contract with the iPhone saved me $400 on the retail price.

So now I can just cancel my Nokia line, which will charge me the $175 cancellation fee, which means I’m still ahead $225 on the retail cost of the iPhone.

And I’ve spent about $20 on apps and a few catchy tunes (like Natasha Beddingfield’s Pocketful of Sunshine).

The drag, I’ve come to realize after a little bit of Google searching, is that I can’t develop any apps for my iPhone without having Mac hardware. Bleh. Apple needs to release some Windows/Linux tools to develop iPhone apps on other platforms. Restricting it to Apple-only hardware seems ridiculous. Anyone got a used Mac Mini for sale?

Aion closed beta was fun. I got a Scout/Ranger to level 11, a Priest to level 6 and a Warrior to level 5. I think I enjoy the pure warrior class, to be honest. Usually I’m a ranged-DPS kind of guy, but the Ranger class seems overly complex. Found a bug in the game, dutifully reported it to NCSoft, and put the game away. Too bad the open beta doesn’t start up for a while.

I still have to move a bunch of sites from my old hosting provider. That’ll probably happen this weekend so I don’t get charged another $114/month. Although part of me wants to hold in until October which means my one year lease-to-own contract will be up, and I can go pick up the computer from them and cancel my plan… Decisions.

The answer is ‘no’, of course. As much as I’ve been enjoying the performance of Win7, even on my old laptop (P4 2.66GHz, 512MB of RAM, old Trident video, 802.11 a/b only doing WEP, etc), I have to say that MS has really outdone themselves at sending out a DVD install of the ‘Windows 7 Ultimate’ release package that works so well on older hardware as well as higher end hardware.

My rig at home is running the 64-bit version, and haven’t had a single hiccup yet, other than needing Vista drivers for my Asys mobo, LAN and separate Nvidia graphics. Windows Update *claims* to have new Nvidia drivers for Win7, but I get a steady 60fps in World of Warcraft whenever I play, so I don’t want to risk screwing anything up by going to beta video drivers.

I was a little disappointed to read this morning that the actual Release Candidate (RC) of Win7 will require a full wipe and reinstall, but I do understand their reasoning — they want people to test real-world upgrade/install scenarios, and upgrading from a beta version to a beta version isn’t really a “real world” scenario.

Windows 7 has a lot of nice features, now including native NFS support, both as a server and client. Of course, I was digging way down inside Control Panel and Windows features to enable/disable (like web services and the like) to find it. My buddy Jorge had this to say about NFS support over IM:

(11:50:40 AM) ian douglas: oh, and win7 has built in nfs now
(11:50:48 AM) jorge: it’s about time
(11:50:53 AM) ian douglas: found it last night in a setting, it’ll act as an nfs server and mount nfs stuff natively
(11:51:02 AM) jorge: when are they going to add unix tools to the shell, lol
(11:51:07 AM) ian douglas: no kidding
(11:51:10 AM) jorge: wow, slick
(11:51:21 AM) jorge: can you mount it from linux?
(11:51:24 AM) jorge: using nfs?
(11:51:25 AM) ian douglas: yeah
(11:51:29 AM) jorge: wow
(11:51:29 AM) ian douglas: and vice versa
(11:51:40 AM) ian douglas: mount linux in windows via nfs so we can finally kill samba
(11:51:48 AM) jorge: yeah
(11:51:53 AM) jorge: samba kinda sucks
(11:51:57 AM) ian douglas: yeah, i was pretty impressed, though it’s buried in the settings of windows features to turn on/off like web server, etc.
(11:52:05 AM) jorge: sure
(11:52:43 AM) jorge: typical M$ (let’s hide that feature so people don’t discover it too easily and start to figure out our stuff is crap)

But Jorge does bring up an excellent point, which I’ve made clear to other Linux geeks out there — I won’t be switching my desktop full-time away from some flavor of Linux (current is Ubutnu 8.10 64-bit) until Windows starts natively supporting Perl and a full bash shell without having to install an add-on like cygwin.

I will, however, happily dual-boot my system with Windows 7.

The Mac fanboys out there will of course cry foul, that Mac OS is essentially a really pretty OS with all of the *nix support you could want, which is true. But for what I’d pay for a Mac (OS license and hardware) to get comparable hardware to what I currently run, I could at least double the horsepower/RAM of my rig right now.

So when pigs fly and hell freezes over, and Mac lowers their prices or Windows supports Unix shell, I’ll consider switching. Until then, keep my name on the “linux fanboy” list. Right at the top.

The biggest complaint people have when switching to Linux is that the software they’ve gotten used to using on Windows is no longer available to them because so many software vendors aren’t producing Linux-capable software. I’d switch my parents’ computers to Linux in a heartbeat if I could be sure that all of their necessary Windows applications would still work.

Thankfully, some companies like CodeWeavers and Cedega are working very hard on cross-over application support so you can run native Windows applications, like Office, within Linux. Of course, there’s the Windows emulator, called ‘wine’, that natively runs a *lot* of Windows-based software, but more complex software bundles like Office won’t work in ‘wine’ alone. But then you don’t need Norton or McAfee any more either.

I can’t envision a day where I don’t need Linux any more. A GUI is a GUI, it’s the underlying technology that changes things and makes a difference for me, and I have way too much flexibility in Linux that I feel very constrained in Windows, like “I want to _____, oh, wait, I can’t, I’m in Windows…” I’ve added lots of add-on software to mimic a Linux shell (cygwin) and have similar development tools available within Windows (ActivePerl), but like the author of that article said, the more you add to Windows, the slower things get.

I’m guessing the lady who wrote the article had XP preinstalled, which has some definite performance issues. Then again, Linux can have performance issues too if you misconfigure it. In her case, it was all of the add-ons that caused her laptop to boot so slowly.

I have a beta version of Windows 7 running on my laptop, and frankly it is SO much faster than XP (even running the 32bit OS on the 64bit cpu). I’m actually considering taking XP off my system at home and putting Win7 on there. Of course, the only reason I even boot into Windows any more is to play World of Warcraft. I *could* play WoW within Linux using Cedega, but frankly my video hardware is better supported in Windows, so I don’t mind dual-booting. I’m a firm believer in using the right tool for the job, so might as well keep Windows around just to play a game ’cause that’s all I need it for anymore.

“But Ian,” you say. “You run Linux, why not do it all there?”

Frankly, the recent fires around Los Angeles, and paranoid need to keep stuff backed up and immediately packable should we ever need to evacuate, plus the need to organize our digital life a little at home, all culminated in this purchase. The last time I changed anything on my home network, Samba broke (badly) and shared files and printing capability got kinda hosed.

For $320, the NAS unit has a wealth of features that ultimately came cheaper than buying a whole machine to manage:
- gigabit interface
- two USB ports on the back, one will be used for the printer so we’ll have proper print sharing on our machines
- eSATA port on the back which I’ll use in the near future for mirroring the data on the NAS in RAID fashion
- USB port on the front with a button above it that copies all files from whatever device you plug in (like our digital camera), and copies the files into a unique folder name on the enclosed drive
- runs embedded linux and formats the internal drive as ext3, so hard symlinks have become my new best friend for getting rid of duplicate files on the drive while giving Elizabeth and I the flexibility to store our music/photos how we each see fit.
- only runs at 14W at maximum usage — far cheaper to run this than a full system with a 300W or 400W power supply.
- no fan, so the only noise it makes is from the hard drive
- Samba functionality is very seamless on my wife’s Windows PC, and the Pro version has NFS capability for mounting somewhat more natively on my Linux workstation.

For another $129 ($99 after rebate), I picked up a duplicate Hitachi DeskStar 1TB drive that I’ve currently got in my workstation — once I get files moved to the NAS unit, I’ll ask Santa for an eSATA enclosure to plug into the TS-109 to set up RAID mirroring of the data.

It’ll be nice to have this unit available on the network (though all 4 ports on my wireless router are now completely full), which will also give me the flexibility to dual-boot my workstation into Windows from time to time, though I rarely have any free time to do any gaming whatsoever. But at least the headaches of configuring Samba for file/printer sharing are all taken care of with this box.

A really great, really long review of the unit is at this URL:
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1137&pageID=

The unit has plenty of other features like an iTunes server, a photo slideshow engine, a built-in web server with PHP, MySQL and SQLite, and opkg for package updates. Oh yeah, and a bittorrent client built in to download torrent files for you in case you want to shut off your computer.

Setup of the unit was pretty simple, though there’s no option to configure it for Linux, you need a Mac or Windows machine to install the initial setup software, though in retrospect, I probably could have accessed it via its web browser to configure everything.

The longest part of the setup was letting it format the 1TB drive as ext3 — it took about 20 minutes — then I mounted a few of the folders onto my wife’s PC:
Z:\ is the Public folder where we can share files with each other
Y:\ is the copied-from-USB folder where we’ll retrieve camera photos and anything from a USB key drive
X:\ is a ‘multimedia’ folder where we’ll put our music and photos.

As I mentioned, Elizabeth and I store our photos and music entirely differently. Elizabeth has stated several times, no joking intended, that she’d rather share a toothbrush than share a hard drive.

With hard symlinks, the underlying file system will only store one copy of a file, but make it accessible as many times as we need to. Soft symlinks don’t give the same functionality, and Windows doesn’t seem to handly soft symlinks well over the network.

So now I can simply move all of our music into /artist/album/song.mp3 folders, hard symlink the same structure to a music folder I created for her, and she can move the files via Windows into /year/genre/artist-song.mp3 or whatever format she wants. Though my suspicion is that she uses the Zune software to manage all of her files now so she probably doesn’t even care where the music lives. But the other nice thing is that we’ll have copies of all of the music on the NAS for ourselves, and we can delete whichever music files we don’t want to keep — for example, I’m not as big a fan of her swing music, and she hates most of my music, but there’s a lot of overlap like 80′s rock, the Wicked soundtrack, stress-relief music, etc.

Photos can be managed the same way, though since our Sony camera has reset the filename counter a few times, we’ll have several copies of files like DSC00001.JPG which I’ll need to figure out … I’ll probably work something out with MD5 checksums to determine which photos are duplicated, and sort them by content. Does anybody know if there’s an f-spot equivalent for Windows, or should we both start using Picassa or something to tag our photos?

As I use the drive more, I’ll write another review in a couple of weeks, but so far I’m extremely happy. The only drawback I’ve found so far is typical of any external hard drive — you’re limited by the connection. Even with a gigabit network, copying music and photos from my wife’s PC at the same time as copying about 15GB of files from my PC, plus testing the USB-device-copy to pull photos and video off our camera, slowed the little unit to a crawl. Then again, it’s only got a 500MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM, so I’m sure I taxed it pretty hard last night. Under typical usage, I’m sure it’ll perform just fine.

I’ll also share any scripts I write for detecting duplicates or symlinking files.

Keep in mind, I’m not the author of SpamAssassin, nor its included utility called “sa-learn”. My Perl script simply tells the sa-learn utility how to find your mailboxes to train it on spam/non-spam.

After fielding several support requests over the past year which usually result from basic syntax errors or confusion over which option(s) to use, I decided to write a front-end for the script, asking which of several scenarios are best suited to the user, and then have PHP do a search-and-replace on the Perl script to build the configuration the user ultimately needs to install on their web hosting account.

So far this has been very successful. I’ve had several users write in saying it’s much easier for them to manage.

I’ll have to tweak the next version of the script, though, to alert other users to visit the build-it-yourself page to download a new copy of the script whenever I make a change.

The other thing that might be handy, of course, is to separate out the logic of the scanning script from the configuration, and just have the main portion of the script download a new copy of the scanning logic whenever a new version is detected … I’ll have to think about that one a little longer.

I also promised about a year ago to write a PHP version of the training script, since some users just don’t understand Perl or execution permissions or what a “500″ error means or how to work around it, etc., but truth be told, PHP is a bit of a pain to write output of shell-executed programs while they run. In my experience, PHP waits for everything to be finished before displaying any output.

Does anyone know of the equivalent command in PHP that unbuffers output like $|=1; does in Perl for PHP calls like exec() or passthru()?

Hey Buddy,

Today is the 4th anniversary of you leaving us. I’m tempted to make you a Facebook profile so friends can coordinate online, but frankly, many of them do already. I often wonder whatever happened to the two police officers who hit you head on, how their recovery was, and what they’re doing today. I’ve tried contacting the various writers who wrote your story in Ottawa newspapers to find out (not their names, just their recovery) but never got a reply.

Whenever I have some free time and want to do any gaming and think about loading up EverQuest, I remember the good times we had playing, and running various guilds together, etc. Good times. Did we ever play anything but EverQuest or WarCraft 3?

I have a confession to make — I don’t drink Coke any more. I’m a Dr Pepper guy now, and prefer Diet to Regular, but since I’ve declared August 27th “Drink a Coke Day,” I’m sure to come home from work thoroughly buzzed on Coca-Cola. I can’t help but think of the many poker nights with you and Paul and whoever else was around, playing with whatever we could shake out of our piggybanks, and one of us inevitably walking home with 50lb of spare change at the end of the night, amped up on caffeine from drinking WAY too many cans of Coke.

I’m gonna be a daddy soon, and wish you could come visit California. You’d love it here.

As usual, this time of year tends to make me very introspective of my beliefs as a Christian, and wondering if I’m making any sort of positive impact on people around me. A coworker and I have discussed various churches in the area, and Elizabeth and I found a church we think we like (finally!) and hope to get into a new home group next Sunday, and I’m hopeful that that works out for us. I wish I’d been able to get you into a home group in Ottawa, I think the positive influence of some other Christian friends might have helped you through any rough times that I couldn’t be there for.

I wish I didn’t have to live with the guilty feelings of how I remember our last conversations about money, and I must admit that I’m back to my old self of “doing business with friends”, but this time around I’m trying hard not to worry about the nickels and dimes so I can see other friends succeed, and wish I’d had the same mentality when we were trying to build our web hosting business. I see someone bought your old candigital.com domain name and has it parked with a ‘for sale’ sign in the domain record. How tacky.

Do you think you’d still be at that radar station in Gatineau, or would you have looked for other work?

If I ever get out east, I’ll drop by to say hello.

Much love,
Ian

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on a ‘personal’ level in a while, but after coming home from work with a migraine induced by stress, lack of sleep and lack of a quiet workplace these days, I found myself quite unable to sleep with everything going on around me. One of the things I hate most about myself is my complete inability to fall asleep with something on my mind. I could run a marathon (figuratively speaking) and be utterly physically exhausted, but lie awake for hours if something haunts me.

It’s not without good reason, of course. Our baby is due to arrive anytime starting about a month from now (due date is October 9th, but baby could be early). I still feel like I have a long list of pet projects to complete before the baby comes, but at the same time I know that I need to “clear my plate” of things and focus solely on family and work once the baby arrives.

I’ve put my Freerunner development on hold, I’ve pretty much let the forums at http://blackjack2.info take care of themselves, I seem to be making barely enough on my blog ads to cover my hosting costs, and I’ve halted work on pretty much all of my freelance work, save for a few very minor things for two friends.

It’ll be interesting to see how life will change when the baby arrives. I’m more likely to branch into a tech/personal dual-blog setup again, and after seeing a web site of Jorge’s friend Fuzzymonk, I think having a central wiki-style repository of programming tips might be worthwhile too. I’m debating just moving everything back to a simpler CMS engine, like WordPress, since Drupal already feels pretty “heavy” and updating it is nowhere as friendly as a cPanel-Fantastico upgrade. We’ll see.

As for my open source programming, well, the SpamAssassin trainer is still working just fine. I had planned a few features for a new release back in April as well as a PHP version for easier implementation, but I decided not to bother. Now that my dedicated server is running cPanel, I have a slight interest in building my training script into a cPanel module, but no promises. w98podfetch still suits me well, but frankly, my “commute” of a 7-minute walk to work hardly warrants downloading podcasts any more, so I haven’t touched that code in ages. I should probably look at making the configuration non-XML based though, make it easier to configure.

It’s funny how news of my “headhunter nightmares” gets around — I’ve actually had recruiters who find me on LinkedIn arrive at my site to check me out, read my “nightmares” posts, and still call me, usually starting with “Hey, I read your blog posts and wanted to let you know I’m not like that…” So I decided to change my ‘resume’ page to say that I’m not currently looking for work. I’ve been promoted to a team lead position and while I struggle to get organized and doing paperwork as well as my regular job, I enjoy where I am IMMENSELY and have no intention of leaving. It’s always great to work in an environment where others are as passionate about their jobs as you are.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openmoko.community/15738

3rd last paragraph:
Thousands of FreeRunners have been loaded into planes and fired around
the world. Many of our distributors have already begun shipping. In
about another week, Steve and Harry will announce the opening of our own
webshop.

My video chipset:
$ lspci | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

The annoyance I faced was that plugging an external monitor into the laptop before powering it on forced the laptop/monitor to be a mirrored/clone display output, which is annoying. My laptop screen is 1280×800, my external display is 1680×1050, so I was losing a decent chunk of display real estate.

After tweaking my xorg.conf file (listed below), I found the right parameters to change the display to a split desktop mode once I’ve logged into Xorg:

$ xrandr --output LVDS --left-of VGA

My laptop sits to the left of the external display, and this command leaves the gnome toolbars and menus on the larger screen, and pushes additional window space to the left where my laptop screen physically sits.

The weirdness with this setup is that the laptop’s virtual horizontal screen size has to be set to the maximum vertical resolution of the external monitor, so I’ve got an extra 250px of space at the bottom of my laptop screen. Annoying, but I’ll live with it.

Here’s my xorg.conf:


Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen1"
Screen 1 "Screen2" RightOf "Screen1"
EndSection


After hearing what The Rubicon Project was all about, I immediately saw a business plan that couldn’t fail. I’d tried AdSense on my site in the past, as well as various linked ads with LinkShare and others. I even had a guy contact me out of the blue offering to buy advertising space on my site. I made about $0.02-$0.46 per day with the advertising, with a peak of $0.75 on one day, which was extremely lame. A month of effort barely bought me a ticket to a movie or covered my monthly Napster subscription. Bleh.

The Rubicon Project changed all that.

I tried their ad tags here at iandouglas.com, then my wife got interested and we tried them on her site too (with her own account), so of course it was a no-brainer when I launched blackjack2.info that I’d include Rubicon ads.

The net result over the past couple of months since their Public Beta launch?

When I first added the tags to my site, I started out lower than my original daily take, which discouraged me, and I debated going back to managing everything myself. But optimizing ad networks based on your traffic takes a few days for the system to analyze, so I decided to stick it out, because Rubicon learns over time. As of this writing, they’ve served about 23.5 BILLION ads, and every ad they serve helps them learn and optimize even more efficiently, both over all and for just my individual site.

Between the public beta launch in April and yesterday, my average CPM jumped by 170%. I only need about $3.60 per day just to cover my hosting fees, and having my daily revenue increase by over 306% means I’m pretty much at my break-even point.

Some people will read this and think “Meh, a measly $4/day, are you kidding?” Well, running iandouglas.com was never about making enough money to quit my job and blog full time, but making enough money on it to at least cover my costs for hosting makes me happy! I’m still doing a lot more SEO work on my sites to get a little more traffic, and just let Rubicon work out the details of making me more money with the increased traffic. Rubicon *has* customers who make a full-time living just from their ads.

Stop reading, go sign up for Rubicon Project ad tags, and make some “mad cash” today!

In the spirit of Full Disclosure:

This review is an honest-and-true account of my own recent dealings with online advertising. To be completely open about it, I’m currently an employee at The Rubicon Project as the lead engineer on core statistics and analytics data which helps our math geniuses do what they do best — make people “mad cash” with optimization. I was not asked or encouraged to write this review.

Despite being an employee, I use the *exact* same interface that any other person uses when they sign up, and I pay Rubicon the same 10% of the managed advertising they bring to my site. I get no discounts, I have absolutely no special treatment on my sites or ads, I use the same ad networks as everyone else that signs up, I have no hidden extras, my setup is as vanilla as they come.

On average, Rubicon Project clients see between 30% and 300% revenue increases. And we’re hiring. Come join the fun!

Spent the weekend migrating my Blackjack 2 information, hacks, app reviews, etc., to a new site where we’ll have forums to discuss topics, and so on. Thus was born: http://blackjack2.info/

If you’ve already registered a username at iandouglas.com, your username will still exist at the new site, and you’ll need a user account to post messages in the forums.

The site will still be ad-supported to cover my hosting fees since all of these reviews and hacks are done in my spare time. Thanks for your support on this!

I’ve posted a welcome message on the site for everyone, and the forums can be found at this URL: http://blackjack2.info/forum/1

Overall, the advertising on the new site should be more targeted to BJ2 users (hopefully) as there won’t be such a wide-spread quantity of topics covered.

All existing BJ2 articles here at iandouglas.com *should* redirect to the new site so old RSS feed items or saved blog articles should still bounce you over to the new site, but if you find anything out of place, please let me know.

For months, your update manager has been telling me to upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. When 8.04 came out, you didn’t offer me a direct upgrade path to the very latest, I had to upgrade one version at a time.

The upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 took about 5 hours and a handful of prompts about keeping configuration changes.

I figured I might as well open the update manager and upgrade again to 8.04 LTS.

Everything was running fine, for another 5+ hours (I went to bed), and I got up, answered a few more prompts about configuration files, and then suddenly the upgrade program crashed just before the ‘clean up’ stage, so now I don’t know if the upgrade process is finished enough to continue, or if I need to install from scratch all over again.

There’s no documentation I can find that tells me how to manually download and run the upgrader again or what needs to be finished, etc.

I’m *so* tempted to go back to Gentoo … I’ll need to go re-read my own blog to see why I gave on Gentoo last time. Given the state of my hard drives lately, I’m tempted to buy another 1TB drive and install on that, use the other 1TB just for backups, and take the other mid-size drive (I think it’s 500) and reserve that just for Windows (I still dual-boot to play a game or two every 6 months).

More later, I need to use my fancy Ambir DocketPORT 465 to scan my office documents into PDF format, to clean up the office paper load here at home. I’ll post later on some Linux-based PDF-OCR scanning packages from CPAN that work *really* well.

To do simple math, the 8GB iPhone 3G, versus the stock OpenMoko Freerunner, have very different up-front price tags. When you factor in that you need a voice/data plan for either phone, I started comparing the differences in the cost of a 2-year locked-in contract with AT&T for the iPhone versus the same service for a 24-month period of non-contract service for the Freerunner.

In the course of my research, it turns out that AT&T offers the same voice plans and data plans to iPhone users as well as other smartphone/pda users, so the minimum voice plan of $39.95 and unlimited data plan of $30, is identical for both phones. Over two years, you’d pay $69.95 per month, plus taxes, fees, and surcharges, maybe totaling as much as $80/month, for a total of $1,920. The only difference at the end of the two years is the cost of the phone.
iPhone: $199, only usable with AT&T
Freerunner: $399, international unlocked GSM phone, usable in the USA on both AT&T and TMobile networks. If you can get in on a group sale with others in your area you could get a Freerunner for $369.

Of course, if you purchase application software through iTunes that users create with the Apple SDK, your cost for the iPhone goes up even more.

Engadget also has an article outlining costs which they claim come from AT&T showing a total cost of about $2520 with a $79/month plan for the iPhone 1.0 back in 2007.

Winner: on price alone, the iPhone is about $200 cheaper over the two year span, less than $10/month.

When it comes to features, however, the iPhone has some pretty serious advantages over the Freerunner.

Phone/Data Capabilities:
iPhone: 2G/3G
Freerunner: 2G/EDGE only
Winner: iPhone
(it’s worth noting that 3G talk time on the iPhone is only 5 hours versus 10 hours in 2G mode, so maybe it’s better that the Freerunner is only 2G?)

GPS:
iPhone: AGPS, not true GPS, so only triangulation is possible, which in my experience is only accurate to about half a mile
Freerunner: actual GPS, capable of pinpointing your location to about 9 feet.
Winner: Freerunner

Accelerometers:
Both phones have it

WiFi:
Both phones have it, but only the Freerunner will let you do Voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls over WiFi.
Winner: Freerunner

Bluetooth:
Both phones have Bluetooth 2.0

Memory Capacity:
iPhone: 8GB or 16GB FLASH, plus adding an extra memory card (unsure of capacity capabilities)
Freerunner: 256MB Flash natively, can add up to 4GB in an extra micro SDHC memory card, someone is testing an 8GB SDHC card I believe.
Winner: I’d have it give it to the iPhone here, especially since the SD card bus on the Freerunner is on the same bus as the video display making it difficult to stream movies from the SDHC card — and the 256MB Flash in the phone is partly used up by the OS on the Freerunner, so it’ll be nearly impossible to copy a movie from the card to actually play well.

CPU:
I couldn’t find any recent articles about the new iPhone’s CPU, but the v1.0 iPhone had an ARM processor running over 600Mhz. I imagine the iPhone 3G runs even faster.
Freerunner: 500MHz ARM processor running at 400MHz due to bus speed constraints.
Winner: iPhone

Display:
Both phones are touch screen, only the iPhone is multi-touch capable
iPhone: 480×320, 163dpi
Freerunner: 480×640, 281dpi
Winner: Freerunner for extra screen real estate and *much* higher dpi.

Audio Playback Capabilities:
iPhone: all of the music formats you’ve grown to love in iTunes, like AAC and MP3
Freerunner: MP3, but also OGG, FLAC, and other formats (depending on the software stack ported to the phone) that the iPhone cannot play.
Winner Freerunner

Operating System:
iPhone: mobile version of Leopard, but application time slicing, as I understand it, is ‘shared’ like the old Palm OS where running a different task pauses the last application you were running and gives 100% of the CPU to the new task.
Freerunner: runs the OpenMoko OS, based on Linux, which is a true multi-tasking operating system to run multiple concurrent applications all sharing time slices on the CPU.
Winner: Freerunner

All in all, if I were given a free iPhone to review like I was graciously given a Freerunner to help with reviews and beta testing, I’d still choose the Freerunner unless I needed the camera on the iPhone. I’ve become very dependent on the full GPS capabilities in my Samsung Blackjack 2, and would have a hard time adjusting back to just having AGPS on the iPhone. Having a true multi-tasking phone plus an open-source platform for running Perl and Python code natively on the phone makes it the hands-down winner.

I won an iPod Touch (8GB model) at SCALE 6x in February 2008 from Shopzilla, but frankly only really use it for podcast audio while I walk to/from work or for scoring dart games using a web app that a coworker and I put together. If I were to get an iPhone, I’d simply give up the iPod Touch and use the iPhone as my podcast audio device and simply use the SIM card in the Freerunner instead.

Today you alerted me that critical updates were available. As usual, an update to the “Windows Defender” definitions. But today something a little extra:

“Update for Windows Vista (KB947562)” – Recommended

Being curious about Vista’s updates for the first time since being subjected to this horrible OS (it’s no wonder Windows 7 has a projected release date late next year, this last OS release was obviously pure junk), I decided to right-click on it and view the details about what this update fixed.

“You may need to restart your computer for this update to take effect.
Update type: Recommended
Install this update to resolve a set of known application compatibility issues with Windows Vista. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.”

Love the double-reminder that I *may* have to reboot after installing it. Since the details also include a link to Microsoft to explain in more detail, I clicked on it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947562

Here are the highlights:

This article describes the May 2008 Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 Application Compatibility Update. This update is a package of software updates that address common application compatibility issues that occur in Windows Vista.

When you try to install and to run certain legacy games or applications in Windows Vista, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:
• The game, the application, or the firmware may not be installed correctly.
• The game, the application, or the firmware may cause system instability.
• The primary functions of the game, of the application, or of the firmware may not work correctly.
This update improves application compatibility in Windows Vista by using the following methods:
• The update puts a hard block on the application. A hard block prevents an application that is incompatible with Windows Vista from running on the operating system.

What, what?! Did I just read that last line correctly? Windows is hard-blocking applications that it deems ‘incompatible’ from ever running on your Vista PC. I can just imagine the folks in Redmond flagging a ton of utilities and software just to strong-arm consumers into buying more Microsoft crap.

I never thought I’d ever endorse Windows XP, but XP seems to clearly be the winner in any XP vs Vista debate. I can’t believe Microsoft would actually stoop to fully blocking Vista just by them ‘claiming’ it’s incompatible.

Of course they shoot themselves in the foot by hard-blocking their own Zune software if you upgrade a PC from XP to Vista. Aw shucks, since my wife owns a Zune, I guess that means we just won’t upgrade to Vista. Ever.