My* MacBook Pro tends to run really hot. It’s apparently common, but it drives me crazy to see it at 70+ degrees Celsius. It’s also something you do not want on your lap. If you find a photo of the innards, it seems that there are two fans under the keyboard (by the F1-F12 keys). I’ve never really heard them spin, though. And judging by the temperatures, they don’t do much.

My friend Ryan just pointed out my salvation: a little (500kb!) program called smcFanControl. I just cranked my fans to their apparent maximum of 6000rpm. They were sitting a little under 1000, which is par the course.

I’ve fallen from about 65 Celsius to 43 Celsius. The machine is quite noisy with fans spinning at 6000rpm, but I think I have them much higher than is needed. Dropped down to 2500–more than twice their normal speed–and it’s pretty quiet. Good to keep around, though, to ensure your machine runs cool. And they can evacuate a lot of heat in short order if things get uncomfortably warm.

• My employer may disagree with the phrase “my MacBook Pro,” but legal ownership isn’t the point here.

With a 2+ hour commute in the morning, I’ve discovered the dirty little secret of radio stations: they have about 10 songs that they just cycle through. I’ve also discovered that it’s not at all uncommon for all six of the presets on my radio to have nothing I want to listen to. There’s a huge swath of music I can tolerate. Unless the radio has completely faded from my conscious recognition, though, I can’t stand to sit in my car listening to commercials, and a couple dozen songs get under my skin enough that I change the station. So sometimes I just turn the radio off, enduring a really awkward silence by myself.

But then one day, I had an epiphany. I have an iPod, and it has some really good music on it. It’s kind of like listening to the radio, in that a lot of music on it gets the “Meh” designation I so desire in Pandora. It’s not bad (or it wouldn’t be on my iPod), but it’s not anything special, either. But one day I just let it play, and after a while I’d forgotten it was my iPod. And I found myself wondering what station I was listening to that had played so many good songs in a row.

One of the things I really like is music that was overplayed in years past, but has pretty much been forgotten since. And for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I tend to accumulate really neat remixes of songs, including some great songs remixed into different genres. Nappy Roots’ “Awnaw Rock Remix” might not win any awards, but when was the last time Juvenile or Bawitdaba got played on the radio? I think both would elicit the reaction I had to when they come on: a sort of fond recollection of something I haven’t heard in years. Or maybe Blue (Da Ba Dee) is more your thing?

True, I’d probably end up overplaying songs from Guitar Hero, plus my own Top 50 list of songs.

I forget who, but I heard someone talking about how, when they retire, they want to start a radio station, more as a pasttime than a business. I want to do the same, but I don’t know if I can wait until retirement.

It turns out that a 50,000 Watt FM transmitter is pretty expensive, though, as is a set of FM bays capable of taking that power. And then you have music royalties, electrical costs (for a 50 kW transmitter), plus you have to actually buy all the music.

I really think a station playing songs from my iPod (and that of a few friends for diversity) could give some of the local stations a real run for their money. And a couple promises: the ads for our show, inexplicably advertising what you’re actively listening to, wouldn’t be sexually explicit or even profanity-laced, and our news would be spoken at a speed slow enough for mere mortals to comprehend.

I mentioned in passing that I ordered the 22″ LCD BestBuy had advertised for $50. It was a crappy monitor on clearance in their Outlet, so I thought there was a decent change it was listed correctly. Still, I wasn’t too surprised when they canceled it a couple days later.

I would contend that they were contractually obligated to fulfil the order given that I had already paid (or at least, presented payment: it’s not as cut-and-dry with credit cards, and even less so when it’s online).

I was a bit surprised when, after they informed me that my answer was canceled, they sent me another e-mail informing me that the order was backordered. As I sat there trying to figure out what this meant (was my order un-canceled? Was I double-charged? Or was it just a pointless e-mail?), another e-mail came in, informing me that the order had been canceled a second time.

I laughed it off as further evidence of incompetence on their part. They put it up with the wrong price, canceled my order due to their mistake, un-canceled my order, and immediately re-canceled it. That was a couple weeks ago. Then I got a survey from them asking about my shopping experience, when I gleefully ripped them a new one, pointing out that they not only failed to honor their product listing, but then sent me a barrage of confusing, contradictory e-mails. I secretly hoped that if I turned up the pressure a little, they’d decide to honor the deal. Of course, I never heard back, and ended up laughing it off as massive incompetence.

I’d pretty much forgotten about it, until tonight. I just got an e-mail informing me that my order has been canceled.

Yes, BestBuy has canceled my order–which was only submitted once and never reopened–three times now, over the span of several weeks.

I’ve found that a decent sub-set of software developers have huge egos. Hardly all of them, but hardly none of them, either. (And no, no one any of us know comes to mind.)

I forget which it was, but one of the original UNIX developers was famous for a comment before a couple convoluted lines of code which read, “You are not expected to understand this.” It became somewhat famous (infamous?), though he later clarified that he meant it more in a, “This will not be on the examination” sense,  and not in a “You’re too dumb to understand my ingenious shortcut here” sense. However misinterpreted, I think it sums up exactly why I can’t stand some software developers, or Perl.

I’m sure there are some great people writing Perl code, but my general experience with Perl has been that the name of the game is writing obfuscated code. Even many of the operations in Perl make no sense, or are just different from every other language on the planet. (A developer at work today, trying to fix an ancient Perl script, ran into the fact that Perl insists on using an “ne” instead of “!=” when comparing strings.)

I’m lucky in that I work with a group of people that are of the, “Let’s do this the clean and proper way” mentality, so we tend to work with pretty readable code. But it took three of us huddled around a screen a few minutes to figure out a bizarre block of code today, when the code, once detangled, was essentially the world’s simplest if() statement.

It just seems that there’s two camps in the software world: those who write clean code and leave good documentation for others that might work on the code, and those that think the purpose of writing software is to show off just how clever you are to other developers.

So at work, I receive a copy of all mail sent to the address that we send mail to our users from, meaning  that hundreds of thousands of people have this address sitting in their inbox. As such, I receive lots of virus attempts. The Hallmark fake was a big one, probably because it looked so authentic. It even had me fooled looking at the headers, since it spoofs “hallmark.com” as its outgoing HELO string. (The IP, though, was a residential ISP customer. SPF might catch it, although Hallmark’s SPF record is set to “softfail” mail not from one of their IPs.)

But today, I received an e-mail from a random stranger with this subject line: ^Hi,friend^ download this stuff>>>>>>>>>>>>.  It just contains a link to a website, so, content that it wasn’t a unique URL (e.g., http://spammer.com/confirm_email.php?email_address=helen@n1zyy.com), I clicked through. It was made up to look like a file sharing site, except that it used JavaScript to push a file called SURPRISE.EXE to the user. There was no secret about this, really; the page indicated that you were downloading it. But it didn’t even push it out to you right away; you had to wait for the timer to count down before it prompted you to download it.

I’m really curious if anyone has been infected with this virus. You have to open the shadiest e-mail ever, click a link, wait to download SURPRISE.EXE, and then manually run it. But perhaps I give users too much credit.

Oh, bonus points: the site is its own domain name (registered by someone in the Virgin Islands), and hosted in Africa. Internet access to Africa is quite scarce, so I tend to think the server would get knocked offline if more than a handful of people tried to download it at once anyway.

Have you ever noticed that about 75% of the news stories that are so insane you think they can’t possible be true come from Florida?

Here’s yet another example. Police stopped a car because it only had three tires. Shockingly, the driver turned out to be drunk.

Bonus: “A short time later, they arrested him for having a blood-alcohol level nearly twice the level at which the state presumes a person is unable to safely drive… [The driver] registered 0.200 and 0.198 during subsequent Breathalyzer tests… Under state law, a driver is presumed to be impaired if he or she has a blood-alcohol level of 0.08.”

Does anyone else think someone failed at statistics class?

A lot of news stories have been pitching the idea of changing your smoke detector batteries when you change your clock. Probably a good idea. (Especially if you’re Tim/Hannah.)

But I’d like to pitch another idea, being the obsessive-compulsive I am. Not a replacement, but a supplement.

Don’t blindly set your clock an hour ahead. Set your clock to the precise time. GPS provides an excellent time source, though there’s no guarantee that a normal GPS unit actually displays the precision time it’s receiving. It’s probably accurate enough. Cell phones are also usually very reliable. A system running NTP is also a good bet, as it’s usually accurate to a handful of milliseconds. (Unless it runs Windows, in which case it polls for the correct time every 7 days insted of every 1024 seconds, and only if “Internet Time” is enabled. Unless you changed the polling interval in the registry.)

As Monk would say, you’ll thank me later.

As a computer geek, there are a handful of machines I’d still like to build:

• A massive, awesome fileserver that just works. Hot-swappable SATA disks, with maybe 5 disk slots on the front, and hardware RAID. And it should just work: I plug it in, plug it into the switch, and it gets an IP. I could set up quotas or permissions through a web interface, but not much configuration should be needed. I don’t want to have to deal with partitions and volumes, or to set up a 100GB “slice” for photos and then realize I wanted 150GB. I want it to just work as one big thing. I want my Windows machines to be able to see it over SMB, and my Mac to see it over whatever Macs use natively. I want to mount it over NFS from a Linux box, and I want to have a web GUI that I can use to view files. (FTP and rsync would be nice, too.) The RAID has to be good, too: when one of the disk dies, I want to pull the lever, yank it out, and put a new one in, and have it rebuilt automatically. It can run something like embedded Linux, but should have a couple gig of RAM (it’s cheap now!) to allow for big buffers and caches. It needs gigabit Ethernet (but that’s pretty much standard now). Bonus points for having USB support (both ways: let me back this up to an external USB disk, but also let me plug my computer into it and see it as a massive disk.)
• A really, really good firewall/router/proxy/etc. Our OpenBSD firewall rocks. I think I configured it such that the QoS never works, but in theory, it gives things like ssh and games priority, while things like FTP downloads and BitTorrent can just use whatever bandwidth is left over, so that huge downloads don’t impact things. It does the obvious stuff, like NAT and port forwarding. But it also does some stuff your run-of-the-mill router won’t, like using scrub to normalize packets. (And it works both ways: outgoing packets get rewritten to not “leak” data that could be used for fingerprinting, and incoming packets are stripped of any bizarre stuff that could potentially be used as an exploit.) It serves as our DNS server, which gives a bit of a speedup on a LAN. It’s an NTP server that keeps accurate time for us. Ideally, it would also run squid and act as a proxy server, too, but I never set this up because it’d be too much of a hassle. (We could set it up as an explicit proxy that browsers would have to be configured for, but since it’s the firewall, it’s also possible to make it a transparent proxy by routing all traffic through it.) With squid comes some other neat options, like the ability to use ClamAV to do real-time virus scanning of downloads, or to use blacklists so a small office or a family could, for example, prevent the viewing of known porn sites. I’m still fond of the Via C3/C7 line, which are very low-power processors that also have hardware crypto and RNG functions. Oh, and another thing: I want to be able to VPN into my house. The hard part there is choosing what you want: GRE? PPTP? OpenVPN? And I want lots of graphs of everything happening. Something like the Via chip, a gig of RAM (or more for faster cache results), and a small SSD (even a CompactFlash card?) is all that’s needed, along with dual GigE cards. Wrap it up in a nice GUI, and you’ve got something that leaves every store-bought router looking pretty pathetic, yet without being miserable to set up like OpenBSD+pf. (Hint: pfSense gets you 98% of the way there.) It’s got to draw minimal power, but that’s probably something the Via chip would be good at.

It seems odd to me that neither of these products exist. I can buy a Windows Home Media device with a 500 GB hard drive, but it would cost more than buying a 2TB disk and sticking it in an old Linux box. And the ones I’ve seen advertised don’t have RAID, or even support for RAID. Moving to a central fileserver and not supporting RAID is a horrible idea, since a single disk failure will cause you to lose everything.

Kyle’s recent post with a tag cloud for his site got me inspired.

By the way, having run the site for years, I’m a bit embarassed to admit that I had no clue where the RSS feeds were. (I should really create an aggregated one for all users?) http://blogs.n1zyy.com/USER/feed/ is the answer; obviously, substitute USER for the username. (Oh, and /feed/atom seems to be required to work with the tag cloud generator he linked to.)

Another comment: playing with the generator reveals that I’m unnaturally obsessed with fonts.

I’m slightly embarassed at the most-common words. “Actually” and “though” seem to take first palce. And then it’s words like, “pretty,” “really,” and “like.” I should probably cut all of these words from my vocabulary.

I do contend that it’s not quite fair, since it’s only looking at a handful of posts. Without further ado:

Since my phone is under warranty, and since the main reason I have it is that I’m on call 24/7 for work, I’m not too eager to jailbreak my phone yet. Sure, it’s tempting, but I’m just not going to do it yet.

But here’s my problem, and the really roundabout way I want to solve it. A monitoring script will send me a text message whenever a service fails on a server. Sometimes it’s just a few messages a week, but sometimes, when it rains, it pours. I probably have a couple thousand text messages on my phone. I’d like to clean them out. For some reason (everyone I know has asked for this feature), there is no way to delete all your text messages.

People who have jailbroken their phones seem to have found that the text messages are stored in something like a Berkeley DB file. That’d be pretty easy to clean out. (Actually, people who have jailbroken their phone can install one of many applications meant specifically for purging your SMS inbox, but I digress. Further digression: someone else mentioned that it seems they’re ‘marked as deleted’ when you delete them, but not actually removed from the .db file.)

Is there a way to mount your iPhone as a disk? I’m yet to find it if there is. There exist tools to create a folder on the iPhone and let you access that on your computer, but not to view the ‘guts’ of the iPhone as a filesystem. I was able to make this happen on my old iPod, but not on the iPhone.

There seem to be a handful of ‘secret’ (not anymore, thanks to the Internet…) ways of resetting the firmware and whatnot. I’m wondering if any of them allow disk access. Thoughts, anyone?