Brian's Blog

I'm surprised. Within two hours of sending my E-mail to Tom's Hardware I had a reply and the feed was fixed. I generally expect that when a site gets large that they stop caring about the little guy sending them feedback. But it seems that hasn't happened in this case.

Darn Cool.

Today at work I was reminded of Tom's Hardware Guide. I figured that they had to have an RSS feed somewhere and I was right. However, when I added it to my aggregator I got an Invalid character at line 8, column 227 error. I've never had an issue adding any other feed to fofredux before. So I found this cool Feed Validator to check who was at fault, fofredux or the feed itself. It turns out that the main feed on Tom's Hardware is not valid, which actually surprises me as you can't get much more technical than the guys at Tom's Hardware. I've E-mailed them to let them know but I don't know if it'll actually get fixed. Still, I wanted to add it to my feeds before I forgot. To do this I stumbled on FeedBlendr which lets you merge multiple feeds into one. I only put the feed for Tom's Hardware and it seems that FeedBlendr can handle the malformed RSS just fine and presents me with a valid feed that I can actually add successfully. It's like kind of a silly way to do things but it works for now.

Back in the day Tom's used to be the place to go for hardware info. It's been literally years since I've read much of anything there. I hope they are still just as useful.

I've mentioned at least once in the past that I've been using Insipid to keep track of my bookmarks. It's been some time since I installed it so just out of curiosity I checked and found a new version was available. The new version didn't make Insipid work that much different from what I could see however it did let me use the cool Firefox extension linked to from the Insipid site. Yes, I did try it with my older install but it didn't work. For the extension I turned off the full toolbar it adds because I think it takes up way to much screen real estate, but there is a all-in-one button you can add to another toolbar that gives you access to nearly all of the function of the full toolbar anyway. The thing I like best about it in the short time I've been playing with it is that is lets you view a tag cloud which Insipid doesn't do naively yet plus it can query del.icio.us for popular tags and suggest them when you are posting a new URL. Also, the tag completion part is kind of nice too. Pretty cool stuff.

Something else I did today to was to get screen to do certain things automatically on start up. I've known it could do this for some time but have just been lazy in doing it. It's kind of nice just typing "screen" and then each thing I normally run just starts in it's own screen. I even went so far as to setup irssi to auto join a couple of channels that I'm in nearly all the time when I use irc. I know, that isn't a screen thing, but still it's useful. Oh, and I found a modification to .screenrc that puts a nice status bar at the bottom of screen so I can see what screens are open along with the time and date.

Something else that's been on my mind too is perhaps switching blogging software. I've really enjoyed using nanoblogger. It's been a great experience using it, but as Linc from my local LUG pointed out, after enough posts it takes a long time to generate your blog. Now, I know a newer version of nanoblogger is out but I'm not sure if I want to go through the hoops of re-modifying every single template I've modified in this version. It's really not all that hard. It's just very time consuming. At this point it's taking about 5 minutes to create a new post. I've been thinking of trying out wordpress. It seems to be a fairly popular blogging software so I'm hoping it has a good number of plug-ins and other support.

Now this is darn cool! You should check out what this thing does. Obviously it's a wall projector that looks like R2D2 from Star Wars but it does more stuff. The Millennium Falcon remote control rocks but I think the fact that you can use the remote to actually move the R2 Unit around takes the cake. Read the article with full details here to get some pics and find out the other things it does.

Now, if I only had an extra $2000 to spend...

RCN game by this weekend and hooked up the new cable modem. To save us all a bunch of grief I simply had them set up the modem on my work laptop to test because it's Windows and decided to do the rest of the stuff myself. No offense to the RCN guys, but from the little I talked to them it was clear they didn't know much about that "Linux thing". I can't blame them though as I'm sure they run into if very rarely.

With my laptop connected directly to the cable modem I was blown away to see I was getting actually above the 10Mbits that I has signed up for! I don't know how long that will last, but maybe they won't notice. Or read my blog. So then I connected the new service up to my IPcop box and ran another speed test getting only about 2.5 MBits. WTF! After much poking around I noticed I had my traffic shaping set with a max speed of 3Mbits causing it to throttle back. I figured I'd turn it off and all would be golden but with traffic shaping off I only got 8Mbit. Much better, but not what I was expecting. I went crazy and mostly gave up on it but then I realized today that my WAN side had a 10BaseT NIC in it! Well, DUH. THAT'S what my problem was! Some switching of NICs and a bit of configuration later I was running full speed.

So, I guess the speed problem I had with SECTV wasn't actually their fault but rather mine. I wonder what speed I'd get back on the old service with the traffic shaping off? Still, I'm not going back. They had to many other things that pissed me off. So far RCN has been sufficient. Their tech support isn't Speakeasy but they aren't as brain dead as SECTV. I had to buy a static IP to make sure all inbound ports weren't blocked and RCN assures me they don't filter any spam unless you ask them to leaving it up to me.

Keep the power of control in the users hands...Just the way I like it.

I checked in today on the status of my Speakeasy order. I found that they have already shipped out my installation kit which is nice, however, I also saw that there was a note from Covad that if I didn't switch to Verizon for my phone service from RCN that they couldn't provide me service.

For anyone who doesn't know Verizon sells phone lines to other services like Covad and RCN. Now Covad provides DSL links for the ISP Speakeasy. Other than the system being stupidly complex this entire thing normally didn't effect me other than to delay service setup due to the extra steps. That is until now. For some stupid reason Covad can't provide DSL to my residence simply because my phone service is with RCN an not Verizon. Never mind that RCN is selling Verizon lines already. I'd have to change to get DSL with is utterly ludicrous. Now, if I was close enough and was essentially guaranteed a solid connection I may go for it. But as it stands now I am at 14070 feet and the max is 15000 feet. Meaning that if I go through all the stupid hoops and change my phone company I still may not get a serviceable DSL line.

Now, to be fair, Speakeasy has nothing to do with this. They are an awesome ISP with an incredible reputation. And they are known the be very geek friendly. They are simply at the mercy of Verizon and Covad. Due to the circumstances they waved the order cancellation fee when I asked them to as there was no way I could have known this would happen. So they get bonuses for customer service and keeping a potential future customer happy. I have every desire to use them and I told them that. It just makes no sense to go through the pain. If things change and they can provide guaranteed solid service here then I'll change to them in a heartbeat.

Until then though, it's time for Plan B. I'll be calling RCN to get service setup with them. There should be no problems there as I already have RCN Phone. I'm thinking the 10M/800k service sounds nice. I guess I better put the sales rep through the ringer though to make sure they aren't brain dead too. Or at least not as brain dead as SECTV/Prolog.

Well, I'm finally fed up with my idiotic ISP. I've had multiple issues usually stemming from them (SECTV/Penteledata) not being geek friendly in the slightest. I loose E-mail due to spam filters that they won't let me adjust. They bitch about me using to much bandwidth from time to time. One month I went on a Linux distribution download binge, aka using my bandwidth that I give them money to use, and they sent me a stern letter. And now I've just gotten another one so enough is enough. I've placed a call with Speakeasy, who it seems finally has a chance of being able to give me service. I'm on the hairy edge for ADSL service so the only thing I can do is get it installed and see if it works. I have a month to decide if I want to keep it before the one year contract kicks in.

I've been wanting to get on Speakeasy for ages. I've heard nothing but raving reviews on their service and they are absolutely geek friendly. Geek friendly being things like no blocked ports and it being OK to run your own web/mail server if you wish.

The only down side is that I will be taking a step down in my bandwidth. Currently I top out at a theoretical 7 Megabits per second. But, I must admit, that I've been falling far short of that. The most recent speed test coming up somewhere around 1.5MB to 2.2MB down. So, now that I think about it it's not that much of a step down as long as I can get the DSL line at about 1.5MB.

We'll see I guess. If Speakeasy can't provide sufficient speed I'll have to fall back onto Plan B which is to switch to RCN. RCN recently (finally!) ran fiber in my area so they can (again, finally!) offer Two-Way cable. I checked their Internet Usage Policy on their website and it doesn't look nearly as limiting as SECTV/Penteledata but I highly doubt RCN will be nearly as geek friendly as Speakeasy.

Well, I've finally finished my huge, and largely annoying, "MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exams 70-292 and 70-296): Upgrading Your Certification to Microsoft Windows Server 2003" book. I've posted multiple times on my dislike for it so I won't go into it again. I'm just hoping that it gave me some good info that I can possibly recall during an exam. I believe it presented all the pertinent data, it just was very light on the review questions and even lighter on answer explanations. In other words, I need some reinforcement to bring up my confidence before I pay money to take a test. For this I'm falling back on the Exam Cram 2 series, which I had used as review material in the past. The nice thing about these books is there are about 10 questions at the end of each chapter with an answer key that gives the right answer along with an explanation on why the answer is correct. Additionally, it explains why the other answers are wrong. And the two 50 question practice exams in the back are very useful for figuring out what your weaknesses are.

Hopefully I'll be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel soon as get these exams out of my way. I'll only take them when I feel I'm ready and not a day sooner. No sense in giving my money to Microsoft for nothing.

I just noticed that all of these embedded videos I've been putting on my page has made me no longer XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. I do my best to keep with the standards so a quick Google came up with this solution. I can't take any credit for this at all. But I'm still going to post it here on my own page in the event that the original page would go down for some reason.

Basically, all you do is use the following instead of the supplied code from YouTube:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:350px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/7_6B6vwE83U"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7_6B6vwE83U" /></object>

Then just replace the data= parameter and the value= parameter with the URL to the video. This method also seemed to work with the one embedded thing I have in from break.com.

Hey! Look! It's a technical post for a change!

I currently have Service Electric cable modem which, for the most part, I am happy with. I miss my ADSL and would just love to sign up with Speakeasy if they only had decent service in my area. Sure, I'd be paying more for less bandwidth more than likely when compared to cable modem, but then I'd have an ISP with a clue. Actually, I'm not picking on Service Electric in any way on this one. The situation is that Service works with PenTeleData (PTD) to provide service and that service, of course, includes E-mail. Prior to changing to PTD I had Fastnet, which is now USLEC. And they did zero spam filtering, which is fine by me, as I liked having control of that aspect of my Internet usage and the ability to see just what is being blocked in the event of a false positive.

Oh, as an aside, the reason I changed from Fastnet to Service is because I had to. See, I moved and Fastnet didn't have service at the new place, actually, no DSL service was available here. Even though I moved at tops about a 5 minute drive away. Now, supposedly you can get DSL here but it is slow and expensive.

Anyway, back on topic.

After using PTD for some time I noticed a sever reduction in the amount of spam spamassassin was catching. I called and confirmed that PTD was doing filtering which for the most part is cool. However, after roughly two years I've noticed that I wasn't getting messages that I wanted. For instance, the latest being confirmation/activation messages from forums that I have intentionally signed up for. If these messages were tagged as spam in my own system it would just gotten dumped into the spam directory and I'd still get it. But PTD seems to think it's better to dump things that they think are spam into the void. Knowing how easy it is to adjust spam settings I attempted to find their on line tool to adjust my inbox filter settings only to find none, which prompted a phone call to them. They claim that they can't change the filters at all or turn them off as they apply to everyone. Additionally, they swear up and down they don't dump anything to /dev/null but only tag it as spam for the user to filter. That last part is very obviously a 100% lie because if it was true I would have gotten the tagged messages. I've heard other stories about the same kind of flexibility problems with other ISPs before so I know I'm not unique.

I mean, what the heck is it with these brain dead ISPs? Why is it acceptable for me to loose E-mail because they are over aggressive in their filtration? I'm paying them money to get all of my legitimate E-mail. Depending on the content of the E-mail it could have negative impact if a message is lost. What if I'm corresponding with a potential employer and suddenly a message sent gets dropped? Here I am oblivious to the message and the sender sits around wondering why stupid Brian isn't replying and, oh well, he mustn't want the job anyway. How unprofessional of him.

PTD seems to be OK with this, I mean, it's not screwing them so why bother keeping a customer happy?

A friend of mine, Ricardo works at a company called Pobox which provides some darn cool mail services. I signed up for the basic service for $20 a year, which is essentially a forwarding service which points to my current E-mail address. I found a message sent to my Pobox account and then forwarded to me would get through, while the same message would get dropped when sent directly to my ptd.net address. I'm guessing PTD is dropping a broad range of IP addresses and the forums I've been trying to participate in happen to be caught in the crossfire. It happens, but I should be able to whilelist things that I want. So far Pobox has taken care of my problem and the nice thing is if I change ISPs I can just keep my pobox address and change the forward. No need to inform everyone of the address change. Once I'm on more financially solid ground I may upgrade to the Mailstore service so I can have a separate POP/IMAP/webmail account from my ISP and bypass all the idiotic ISP stupidity completely.

I just wish ISP's would wake up and become a bit more geek friendly. They can fool the average user who doesn't know any better with their bullshit but must start to realize that geeks will call them out on it. And it's not good to piss of the geeks as they are the ones that usually recommend service providers to non-geeks.

My experimentation with amarok prompted me to search for a system tray replacement for my preferred window manager, windowmaker. At the time I found docker which is more than sufficient with the only drawback I saw being it could only hold for system try icons and that's it. I mentioned this to my friend, Chris, and he pointed out wmsystray which does essentially the same thing except that is puts little scroll buttons on the dockapp to allow more than four icons. Also, docker is written for openbox and is compatible with windowmaker using the -wm switch whereas wmsystray is made with windowmaker in mind from the get go as far as I can tell. The only crappy thing I ran into was it just won't compile on Slackware-current (almost 11 at this point). I had to resort to grabbing the rpm, using rpm2tgz to make it a Slackware package, and then installpkg it. It seems to be working fine now. And I think it looks a little bit nicer than docker. Not that there is anything wrong with docker. It's more than sufficient for the job I think, I just like wmsystray better.

I know, a boring entry again. Maybe I'll get around to posting something interesting sometime soon.

I've been a die hard xmms fan pretty much since I started using Linux about 5 years ago. I've heard good talk about amarok though and gave it a half-hearted try some months ago and decided I didn't like it. I found it to be slow and difficult to use at the time. Looking back I don't think I gave it a fair shake though. So I decided to try it out again and I'm kind of glad I did. I mean, it's still way to system intensive for a music player but it's got some really cool features I didn't realize were there. Ones that make me willing to use a heavier music player than xmms. So far I really dig the cover art manager. It's kind of nice to see the CD cover art of whatever song is playing. The only thing that is somewhat annoying is that it doesn't always guess the correct cover is. But, to be fair, that's probably because I don't have all of my stuff tagged properly so it just goes the best that I can. It's just a but odd seeing it display a kids music CD when Green Jelly is playing. I also never knew it had a tab to pull artist and album info from the Wikipedia. I often Google for artist info when I hear a song and this just saves me the step. Pretty cool. Still, I don't think I'd use it on a low power system, but I've got CPU cycles to spare on my main workstation so why not?

One other hang up I had was that amarok didn't play the way I wanted with windowmaker. I like having my music player pretty much hidden, but amarok always left the big app icon on the bottom of the screen. And I couldn't easily control it with right click menus. After a bit of searching I found a cool dockapp called docker that creates a small "system tray" area. The only thing is when it's in windowmaker mode you only have room for 4 icons or so. But that's better than none. And it lets me put gaim in it too so I can clear up a little clutter by putting two icons into one.

Oh, one more cool thing is that it can be setup to transfer songs to and from your digital music player. Up until now I've plugged in my player, opened a command prompt, mounted the device, copied over what I wanted, then unmounted and disconnected. Amarok was easy to setup to essentially to that for me. It won't mount the player, but the connect button makes it easy. Then I can tag a bunch of songs in my collection for transfer and as soon as I hit the transfer button it just copies them all over. Then I can hit the disconnect button and I'm done. I know, it's the same steps, but it's still nice to queue up a bunch of things then have them go over to the player in a batch rather than all the cding to directories and cp -R over and over to get what I want.

Oh, and the search features of amarok are incredible when compared to xmms. don't get me wrong though, I still like my little xmms. I may switch back with time, but I'm still having fun playing around with something new.

Everyone who knows me knows I'm studying to upgrade my MCSE Cert for work. I've been slowly chugging along in getting ready for my two exams and have ranted several times over various things that are just plane stupid in this book. All of my previous rants can be pretty much blamed on the author(s) and the editor(s). However, I've just come up with one that is squarely a Microsoft issue.

The problem is that I've hit the section regarding the Manage software update infrastructure objective in the 70-292 exam in which it talkes in the book about Microsoft's Software Update Services (SUS). Well, SUS has since been replaced with Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) and in fact all support for SUS will stop at the end of the year. It will literally stop working forcing everyone to use WSUS. That's not a big deal, but What the hell am I supposed to study for?!

I've checked the Microsoft Press section for the book I'm using for an errata which doesn't seem to exist so it seems they haven't updated their text. Or perhaps they just don't care to update it? I've searched on various forums only to get the impression that they are still testing for SUS, but that's just an impression and nothing I could take as a solid answer. So, at this point, assuming they are going to test me on something that won't work in a few months I went to download the older version of SUS only to be redirected to a download for WSUS.

At this point I have no solid answers on what I am going to be tested for. And if it is still SUS then I have no way of actually using it before the exam forcing me to simply read, look at screen shots, and hope I don't get to many questions on it. Or, if the test is on WSUS then I have no official study material to prep for this thing. Which means I'll just have to grab a white paper, install it, and hope I accidentally teach myself the specific bits they are going to test me on.

I find this utterly ridiculous. If they want to test me on old unsupported technology then that's their stupid decision. I'd much rather spend my time learning something I'll actually use at work. Ultimately, I really don't care one way or another what they test me on so long as I know what the hell I need to learn. I just want to get the exams over with so I can get back to learning more stimulating things (aka something not Microsoft).

I've been a user of Bloglines for quite a long while now and have thus far been fairly happy with it. Just in case you've been living in a bubble, Bloglines is a web based RSS aggregator. The primary advantage for me was that I could access it anywhere without having to install a client on the PC I was at or needing to ssh into my box here at home to load up snownews. The only thing that Bloglines has going against it is you really don't know exactly what they do with all that data and usage statistic that I speculate the gather.

What I'm leading up to is a project called FoFRedux. FofRedux is a continuation of the stagnate Feed on Feeds project. Both are web based server side RSS aggregators. FoFRedux has a very simple, yet effective interface. There are some minor annoyances that I picked up on, such as the Mark All Read option doesn't mark everything as ready. It only marks all the entries currently showing on the screen. Slightly annoying but not a show stopper by far. It requires PHP and mysql to work, which was a jump for me as I've never setup a PHP/mysql app before. Once I got over my stupid errors it was up and running in a snap and crawling through all my feeds giving me a central location to check up on news that I can access from anywhere.

I know I could just keep using Bloglines, but I've been trying to get away from relying on external services for basic things such as these. Call me a control freak but I much prefer to have as much of my data local and under my jurisdiction as I can.

A few weeks back on the LottaLinuxLinks podcast various note taking apps were discussed. They sounded all OK ranging from a simple bash script to full blown postit note programs. None of them really got me excited enough to actually try them out. However, in a later podcast Dave mentioned TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is a single HTML file that uses javascript (as far as I can tell) to let you edit and save your notes and entries. It tagged as a reusable non-linear personal web notebook but it seems to me like it could be used for much more than that. I've only been messing with it for a few hours and it already seems way more powerful than being just a note taking application. In my opinion TiddlyWiki could be used as a simple blog or even a small corporate intranet if used correctly. In fact, the TiddlyWiki site is using TiddlyWiki itself. To get an idea of what it can do take a look at its list of main features and also this excellent tutorial. By the way, if you wonder how something was done in a particular entry just double click it and you'll be able to view the code for that entry.

Pretty cool stuff. I feel I must find a useful application for it just so I can play about with it more!