Tech Tricks

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Here are a few low-tech computer tricks I’ve started doing lately:

  • I’ll periodically bump the wrong keys and find keyboard shortcuts that I didn’t know existed for sending an e-mail mid-sentence. It’s one thing when you’re e-mailing a friend ramblings about cheese (they may even be glad the e-mail got cut short?), but when you start e-mailing important people, it becomes a bigger deal. The last thing you want to do is e-mail the chief of police and say, “I’m working on an article and I’d like to mee”… The simple ‘fix’ is to not let your e-mail program dictate how you compose a message. The “To:” line comes first. Do it last, so you can’t mess up.
  • When attaching files, do it before you write the e-mail. I can’t believe how often people (myself very much included) send e-mails referring to attachments, but forget to add the attachment. If you can get in the habit of making attaching the file first, it’s a lot harder to mess up.
  • When downloading things from the Internet, always, always, always click “Save” instead of “Open.” I tend to do Open instead, because it seems like a needless step to save it to the Desktop and then open it. But in the past week I’ve lost two files because I click “Open” on a draft someone sends me. I spend a long time revising it, and hit Save every minute or so. But it gets saved to a temp directory that’s virtually impossible to find. Today I spent considerable time poking around the directories, and found that what’s stored is VERY limited. If you’ve visited any sites after you last saved the file, it’s practically assured that your file is 100% gone, because the cache will get purged. As I’ve said before, I’d consider this a fatal design flaw, and I can’t believe more people don’t have problems with this. So always, always, always save to your Desktop and then open. And, if you’re working on a file and about to close, don’t close it unless you’re positive you know where the file is being saved.

All of these are things that take some time getting used to. But I think they’re like, say, using a PDA: you have to commit to doing it 100%, or it’s utterly useless. If your calendar doesn’t contain everything you’re doing, it’s worse than having no calendar at all. I need to work on automatically clicking that “Save” box when downloading a file, and I need to work on re-ordering, into a non-intuitive way, the way I write e-mails. But if I can get the habit down right, the first time, in mid-sentence, I get an error that I can’t send an e-mail with no recipient named, it’s paid off. And the first time I don’t lose an hour’s worth of revisions and additions, it’s paid off.

Wireless Networking

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I’m yet to see an OS get wireless networking right. I’ve now worked pretty extensively with configuring and fixing wireless network configurations on XP (SP2) and Linux (Ubuntu). And frankly, both are disappointing. A few comments…

  • (Linux) I can see three wireless networks. Why am I connected to none of them, even after clicking on one of them?
  • (Both) I have a good connection, and all of a sudden, I have no network connection. I spent fifteen minutes fiddling and it still won’t come back. Windows includes a “Repair” function, and I’ve seen lots of people use it. I have never had it do anything, nor have I have ever seen it work for someone. I’m fairly certain it’s an inside joke at Microsoft or something.
  • (Both) You reboot and the wireless usually comes back up just fine. What the heck is going on? Why, with all the amazing developers working on both platforms, has no one ever figured a way to just bring the network down and back up? (Actually, you could argue that both OSs provide this — Linux lets you disable it and re-enable it, and Windows lets you “Repair” it. And yet neither of them works.)
  • (Windows) Why, when you can’t connect, do you give me a fake IP? There’s some bizarre netblock that Windows users get put on when they don’t actually have a network connection. What gives?

You’d think that WiFi was some technology that had only been out for a few months… But there have been years to get it right. Why has no one ever made it work right?

First-Impression Reviews

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Flock Web Browser:

Wow! It’s replaced Firefox on both Windows and Linux for me. (And it runs on OS X, too.) It’s actually built on Firefox, so I’ve got all my favorite extensions added in. I’m not going to do it the injustice of trying to describe it. Download it and spend five minutes with it. You’ll thank yourself.

Verizon Juke

(Link here). It sucks less than I expected. Our first reaction to seeing the commercial was, “That must be impossible for a left-handed person to use.” So when Kyle was given one to review, we called over a left-handed friend. Sure enough, it’s virtually impossible for him to use. There are some other problems: it comes in three colors, and Navy is the only one that’s not hideously ugly. The way you hold it closed (I’m not sure what you do when it’s closed; I couldn’t get it to do anything but it apparently has media features) is upside-down from how it opens. And when it’s open, there are two things on the back: the camera and the antenna. You cover both with your hand. The antenna has a big warning not to do that. But there’s no other way to hold it that’s not incredibly awkward. But otherwise, I was pretty impressed. Despite a tiny keyboard, I could dial fine. And despite a tiny screen, I could see the screen fine. The picture I took seemed to come out okay, once I figured out that it was all black because my hand was covering the lens.

Would I buy one? No way. But would I relentlessly mock someone who had one? Despite what I thought after seeing the commercials, no.

Butterfinger Bars

Pros: Delicious. Great texture. Cons: I’ve never opened one and not have it spill crumbs all over my lap

Comic Critic

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A review of the Sunday comics…

  • Dilbert: An employee needs to ask his VP a question, but is told he can’t talk directly to them. Rank: something slightly short of a smile.
  • Opus: Too long to read.
  • Get Fuzzy: one animal repeatedly throws rice and blasts the other in the face with an airhorn. Rank: slight grin.
  • Ask Shagg: Facts about squid. With a joke about them playing ping-pong. Rank: less than a smile.
  • Zits: Jeremy has fantasies about his guidance counselor. Because she’s female. Rank: shrug.
  • Monty: Monty shares demotivational sayings with his parrot which has a motivational calendar. Rank: smile.
  • For Better or Worse: The kids set their clocks back. One is shocked that his toy, broken within the hour, is still broken. Rank: eyeroll.
  • Bizarre news story called “What is Innovations?” Not read because it’s not a comic, and because the grammar is abysmal.
  • Curtis: A kid doesn’t do his homework and is honest. He gets sent to the principal’s office. Rank: sigh because it’s boring, and because no one goes to the principal’s office for not doing their homework.
  • Mother Goose & Grimm: Two characters in prison, one remarks to the other, “I’m doing forty years to life. I swiped a $50,000 stapler from the Pentagon.” Rank: smile.
  • Foxtrot: Too lame and complex to summarize. Rank: bleh.
  • The Family Circus: the kid is counting nuts. “I’m making sure less than half of these nuts are peanuts,” he says. Rank: smile, because it’s something I’d do.
  • Non Sequitur: It’s seven paragraphs of text. Skipping. Rank: F, for “Failed to even understand the assignment.”
  • Rose is Rose: Some crazy lady confuses her with someone else. Rank: bleh. Might have been better if it was earlier in the comics.
  • Adam at Home: Two people get each other’s business cards. Rank: Can I have my time back?
  • Rhymes with Orange: Innovations in child care. Rank: Shrug. I’ve seen worse.
  • F Minus: A kid turns 14. His friends gossip that he’s 13 but his parents are superstitious. Rank: It’s not an F minus, but it’s no A, either.
  • Princess of Ai-land: Huh? Way too much to read. Rank: Didn’t even read it.
  • Stone Soup: Someone says she hopes her daughter doesn’t end up in therapy. Lots of people in the bar say they’re in therapy. Rank: I thought comics were supposed to be funny?
  • Arlo & Janis: The second comic about Daylight Savings Time. These ones joke, “I’d rather sleep late than go to bed early.” Rank: shrug. Which is becoming one of the highest compliments for a comic.
  • Doonesbury: Someone asks someone else for $5K for a motorcycle. The other guy rambles about how unsafe motorcycles are. Rank: F, for “Failed to even try to be funny.”
  • Zippy: I don’t even get this one. Rank: F-.

Conclusion: I’ve laughed more watching the Patriots in the first five minutes of the game. And nothing funny has happened. I thought comics were supposed to be funny.

Overcoming Errors

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I just updated PHP and Apache on this machine. Gentoo seems to have changed the way they do some things… But a few notes along the way, since there isn’t much in the way of helpful links out there…

  • I kept getting this error: 
    apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
No Listening Sockets Available, shutting down.
Unable to open logs
    The usual suggestion with the “No listening sockets available” is that port 80 is being used by something else. Maybe Apache hasn’t actually shut down and you’re trying to restart it. However, in my case, I had made very certain that nothing was on port 80. The problem is actually caused by the fact that, after an upgrade, the “Listen” directive randomly goes missing. Tucking “Listen 80” into the top of a virtual host fixed everything.
  • Keep backups of all your config files. I screwed up and let them be rewritten as I upgraded Apache.

Mirror Idea

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My server is allowed 1 terabyte of transfer a month. I would be shocked if I exceeded 10 GB any month.

Lots of services need mirrors. I’m becoming re-interested in streaming radio stations. Some of the good ones have limited bandwidth and fill up. Most open-source packages have a series of mirrors, too. Most distributions have elaborate mirror networks, in fact.

Here’s what someone should do. Set up a mirror ‘controller.’ I hit a generic name like us.something.com wanting to download something from a US mirror. This goes on all the time, and DNS does round-robin ‘load balancing’ across mirrors.

But you take it a little further. As a site admin with 900+ GB of bandwidth going unused each year, I can sign up and say, “I’ll take up to 25 GB a day,” and “I can spare 6 GB of disk space for mirrors,” and select a list of matching projects. I might end up hosting an Ubuntu mirror. I install a daemon on my server that communicates with the mirror network, but when someone someone hits the us.whatever.com pool, I’m in the list. But, it’ll detect that it’s forwarded me enough traffic for the day and pull me out. Furthermore, the daemon on my machine can also send a “temporarily remove me” notice, either for a duration of time or until further notice. That alleviates my final fear: that I won’t exceed disk quotas or bandwidth, but that serving all those files will really tax my system. When to send the signals is entirely up to me.

I’d like to volunteer to help, but I don’t want to blindly commit to something. And because I don’t see any good way to let me commit to help within my means, I have at least 20 GB of disk space and 900 GB of bandwidth that the community can’t use.

It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard, either. It might require a little more CPU power on the part of the mirror network management, but it’s not exceedingly complex. I think a simple PHP script might be easiest… You load, say, us.project.com/project/latest.tar.gz, but latest.tar.gz is actually a script that grabs a list of available mirrors and throws a redirect to the file on one of the mirrors.

The irony is that the argument against this idea — that it’d require more servers — is exactly what the problem is trying to solve.

E-mail Gates

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This is surely not a revolutionary idea, but I’ve never seen references to it before. I forward my mail to my GMail account. I do own two domain names with mail services, though, but I just forward what I need to my GMail account.

Some sites require an e-mail address to sign up, and they send you a confirmation e-mail, so it needs to be real. However, I have no interest in letting them e-mail me long-term. The general solution is a “throw-away address.” You use it once and then delete it.

Here’s an idea that seems a little less wasteful to me. I call it an e-mail gate. I can set up a forwarder pretty easily. As long as I’m logged in, it’s just a few seconds of work. I can also remove a forwarder in a few second’s time.

So you might have an address like matt@gate01.ttwagner.com. (This sub-domain doesn’t even exist right now, so don’t bother trying it.) I can “open the gate” (turn the forwarder on), sign up on the site, get my confirmation e-mail, and then “close the gate” by turning the e-mail off. Consequentially, any crap they send will bounce back with a “No such address” message. But when I want to get e-mail or a lost password reminder, I can just turn the gate on for a minute. Unless you’re getting inundated with spam (e.g., tens of thousands a day), opening the gate for under a minute won’t be enough time for much crap to get through. Unlike throwaway addresses, you can use the same address as multiple sites, making it easy to remember what address you used.

It’d be neat to write some code to give a web-based interface to this. I think I need to get it working with some mail daemon that supports a MySQL database of users, though, since it currently involves putting the address in a text file, updating the address cache, removing it, and then updating the cache again. It’s quick if you’ve got a shell open, but it’s a bit of a pain to script.

Being a Smart Millionaire

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Like many people, I’d like to be extraordinarily wealthy some day. Between a string of business ideas that I’m convinced would make me fantastically wealthy, and the lottery which never seems to work out in my favor, I have lots of occasions to hope I’m rich.

Of course, as a millionaire, there are lots of extravagant purchases I’d like to make. But I think you can make them a lot less extravagant.

For example, I’m a nut about keeping my car really, really clean. It’d be nice to build a really nice auto garage, where I could do detailing, and maybe even hire a mechanic to keep up my cars. So why not buy a failing auto garage business somewhere, fix it up to millionaire-pet-project standards, and then put it in business? It might not be profitable, but it’ll at least defray the costs of running it just for your own use.

And what millionaire doesn’t own a limo or two? There are some seemingly-rare models for sale right now. So you pick them up, and start a limo company. You can make sure not to over-schedule them so that there’s always one available for your use, but when you’re not using them, they’re making you money. Again, it might take a long time to be profitable. But you view it like how I viewed the first hosting company I started: I wanted the server for myself, and if I could get people to subsidize the cost by buying space, great. It’d be great if I someday made a profit, but if I just ended up having use of a dedicated server on the cheap, that’s great too.

You can even work philanthropy in this model. Merrimack’s library is badly in need of a new building. I bet we can find a neighboring town that shares our need, too. So you build a really, really nice library somewhere, merge the two libraries, and donate it to the town. But, when you build the library, you build in a few spaces for a coffee shop and deli. And, as part of the donation, you own rights to put in retail shops there in perpetuity. Will you ever make enough to pay off the library? I doubt it. But getting a little income from a philanthropic donation? That’s nothing to complain about!

If you weren’t too picky about people using some of your properties, you could even apply this “semi-business, semi-personal toy” model to real estate. As a multi-millionaire, I’d love a few vacation homes. For example, this would be a great retreat /vacation home. But I’d only use it for a few weeks at a time. This‘d be awesome, too. Add some oceanfront property and maybe a winter retreat in a tropical location. But a lot of them you won’t live in for more than a few weeks at a time. So you file a corporation, have it own your vacation homes, and rent them out most of the time. Of course, you keep your personal property in your main home. And the others are just awesome vacation homes. And when you’re not using them (which is most of the time!) you’re renting them out, paying off at least the costs of maintaining the homes and paying their tax bills. And, ideally, making owning them a little less expensive.

Granted, I don’t quite have the money to buy a slew of vacation properties, or start a limo company, or buy a private room in Internap’s Boston data center. But if I do, you can bet that I’ll be gaming my purchases to try to make me a little money, too.