bosconet.org: chocolately writings

I gave up on my Eye-Fi card about a month ago when I pulled out my camera to a dead battery, yet again! Since then I had it on my desk at home. I tossed it in my bag for holiday travel just in case I wanted to use it as a last minute gift.

Here at my sister-in-law’s house I think it would make a great gift. Bother her and her husband have beter things to do with a new baby than deal with plugging the camera in to upload pictures to flickr. The Eye-Fi seems like a natural fit, it will automatically do it for them. EXCEPT for they idea you need to effectively disable the power saving auto shut off feature of the camera for it to reliably upload all your pictures. What this would mean, is that like in my case, their newborn would be doing something very photo worthy but the camera would be dead from the last time they took a picture of her.

So back in my bag it will go. And until the card is ’smarter’ about powering down a camera when it is done transfering pictures I can’t recommend this neat gadget to most people.

I’m currently away for the holidays. Both the ISPs my kind hosts use filter out port 25 traffic to mail servers other than their own. As someone who hates spam I can understand why they do this. This helps limit spammers from using the ISP to pump out their spam.

However I have noticed a couple things at my current location. One is related to incompetence on the part of ATT the other on my employer’s part. First ATT’s incompetence:

My in-laws have BellSouth DSL service back at their home in Florida. Their Outlook client is configured to use port 25 to send mail. This doesn’t work here in Chicago where the DSL provider is, ATT. Now just in case you don’t keep up with the acquisitions in the telecommunications field, ATT & BellSouth are the SAME company. So in effect they are filtering port 25 traffic to other ATT mail servers. I can certainly understand why this would have been the case for a period of time after the acquisition but it has now been 2 years. One should reasonably expect them to allow port 25 traffic to mail servers controlled by the same company. Sadly this isn’t the case so my in-laws are forced to use the less functional webmail client to send any emails.

Now my employer’s incompetence:

For remote access if you aren’t using Outlook (with its Exchange hooks) you set up your client to use IMAP to receive email and port 25 (with authentication) to send mail. Sadly as noted above many ISPs filter port 25 to combat spam. This means that you can’t effectively use non-Outlook client to send mail from outside the corp network. The incompetence here is that they haven’t opened up port 597 (mail submission) to accommodate these situations. Why is this the case? I don’t know for sure but it almost certainly is for 2 reasons: 1) Outlook with Exchange is the supported email client 2) the people in charge of running the mail servers aren’t competent enough to think of such situations and accommodate them.

We recently set up a TWiki install on a server that doesn’t have email nor is allowed to use port 25 to communicate out. This means that the normal way a user would reset a forgotten password won’t work.

Since the assumption by the Twiki community is that you will have email access no thought has been made to document how to do this in any other manner.

In my digging I found it to be fairly simple to do this.


cd $HTTPD_ROOT/twiki/data
htpasswd -b .htpasswd


tada all done. Oh you do need to either be root or have write access to the .htpasswd file.

Saturday I made the long (5 minute) drive down to the University of Baltimore’s Thumel Business Center Building for SocialDevCamp East. SocialDevCamp is a bar camp which means the sessions are self organized by the participants at the beginning of the day. For this camp it worked out very well.

The self organizing of sessions and with times and rooms worked out very well. The only improvement I could suggest for this process is to have the proposed sessions and schedule more visible to the entire room before finalization. A quicker update of the wiki might have solved this, or using the projector to make the schedule would have also accomplished the same thing.

None of the actual sessions I attended were quiet what I expected based on the title of the session but I enjoyed all of them.

Session 1: “Can you really find work using social media?”

This session started off with a presentation by Shashi Bellamkonda who blogs for Network Solutions. While his presentation was good it wasn’t long enough to fill the time slot. Steve Fisher was in attendance and decided to file the remaining time with an impromptu presentation on his 22 rules for entrepreneurs. Steve’s presentation was good and enjoyable.

Session 2: Evaluating & Hiring Developers and hosting providers

I don’t recall the leader of this presentation. The presenter was looking more for the insight of the audience to help her more effectively find developers for her needs. Again not exactly what I was expecting. But it turned into a good discussion about hiring people what to look for beyond the resume and even experiences with using overseas developers on projects. We also touched on hosting including some attendees experience with Amazon EC2 and S3 services. In the end I also enjoyed this session.

Session 3: Crowd source data quality

This ended up being a very small session (just 5 people total). We mostly just talked about the difficulties that can be associated with crowd sourced data but didn’t really come up with any good solutions. One the people in this session was Patti Chan one of the co-founders of 600 Block. Since her site accepts user submissions for content we (well I) used it as an example for crowd sourced data. The discussion also took a turn towards security when accepting data.

Session 4: Data portability

I was looking forward to this based on my assumption from the title about what it would be, Data Portablity over time. But it wasn’t that. The presenter was a gentleman who works for an insurance company and the thrust of the discussion was having data portability of health care information and how to help empower consumers in controlling the data. It was and interesting discussion and worth my time.

After session 4 I was going to head out to Brewer’s Art for a drink or two with Jason and Greg Cangialosi (of Blue Sky Factory. We got side tracked into a session “Entrepreneurial discussion” before we left though. Again I found teh discussion interesting. We ended up cutting out about half way through the session and enjoyed a drink at Brewer’s Art before heading up to the official after part at Metro Gallery.

Over all I enjoyed the time I spent there and expect to head back for the spring 2009 edition.

For one simple reason you have to effectively disable the power saving features on your camera to have it effectively work. If you don’t do this file transfers can get cut off in the middle when your camera decides to power down and save your battery.

Because I have no power saving features enable on my camera at the moment I have found on several occasions when I pull out my camera to take a picture it is dead.

Oh and I don’t find the wireless transfer of pictures so much better than using a SD to USB adapter that that will make me reconsider getting rid of it.

Yesterday Danielle and I took a ride over to the new(ish) Target located close by at Mondawmin Mall. Our goal was to take advantage of the 10% discount on all items not purchased on our wedding registry. The literature we received when we set up our registry was lacking in any details about this aside from saying we got a 10% discount as part of the ‘marketing’ part of the literature. Because it wasn’t clear we decided to stop at customer service first to get clarification. The ‘front line’ person we initially asked wasn’t sure, she called over a supervisior. HE wasn’t entirely sure, suggested the ‘front line’ person to call the internal help desk and find out. When that didn’t work out they called over another supervisor. She didn’t quite understand what we were looking for initially but once she did her and the other supervision told us to ‘Find them when we wanted to check out and we’d get our discount’. Yes they might not have know exactly what needed to be done per corporate policy but they did know what was the right thing to do.

We went about our shopping, found everything we could and returned to customer service to see about checking out. Since we had fewer than 10 items they checked us out there. The woman checking us out wasn’t the one who had helped us initially but was there and knew what needed to be done. She had a little trouble figuring out what 10% of $151 was but once that was cleared up we got our discount and were out the door.

Say all the bad things you want about Apple but my experience at the Genius Bar in Columbia Mall with Steve today was great. I opted for Columbia over Towson because I had another errand that I needed to accomplish there.

My appointment was for 2:40 and it was right on time (if not a minute or two early that they called on me). I explained my problem and Steve immediately dove in to trying to solve my problem. At first he suspected it might be a video card problem and tried to nail it down to that. He wasn’t able to and called Apple support and one way or another Apple decided to cover the cost of whatever repair is required to get me running (logic board seems to be the consensus to people I’ve spoken to about the problem). I don’t know why they decided to make that decision but it is a cheap way to keep me a happy Apple customer.

I couldn’t leave it with Apple today since I needed to remove some confidential files (even though it is an encrypted drive) because it is just the right thing to do. But Steve left me with his card and a reference number so everything e did and they fact Apple will take it back to fix it is recorded.

So while I am away for the next week my MacBook will be getting fixed. And unless there is some compelling new netbook type Apple being released I won’t feel compelled to venture to an Apple store in Jacksonville.

My Macbook Pro failure yesterday has reminded me of the importance of having not only a backup of your data but of automating it in such a way that the user never has to think about backing up their files. Someone on I think it was the podcast “Week in Photography” said ‘It (a file) doesn’t exist until it is in at least 2 places at he same time’. That is so very true. It is all too easy for a file to be corrupted, a drive to fail, a user to accidentally delete a file that unless you have a backup your data is at risk.

And I can speak from experiences that this is so true. In addition to the MacBook Pro failure I experienced yesterday I also had a hard drive on another Mac die. In both cases he lose of use of the hardware hurts (more so with the MacBook since swapping a new HD in is easy and something I could do at home). But in both cases I have been able to recover and get working again fairly easily because the majority of my critical data is backed up.

My strategy for years has been to use a great program called rsync. Since I have chosen to avoid Windows as my primary desktop OS rsync is an easy option for me to use. The remainder of my strategy is to set up a cron job to automate it. This means every couple hours my machine automatically backs up my ~/Documents folder to another computer. After verifying that this is working I can just forget about it. So when something like yesterday’s failure of my primary machine happens I still have access to my critical files. (oh and my music)

So thanks to good backups and extra computer hardware I am back and mostly productive with my data.

This morning it appears that my MacBook Pro is dead.

This is bad, but made even worse because on Tuesday Apple is announcing new laptops of some fashion or another. Meaning my first instinct of going an buying a new MacBook Pro today is a bad idea. To compound the problem I fly out to Jacksonville Tuesday night.

So I might end up at the Jacksonville Apple Store Tuesday to buy a new MacBook Pro.

Like the initial release of Apple’s iPhone I’ surprised at how many people are panning the phone before we have any real devices in people’s hands. I’m also noticing some similar themes between the iPhone initial comments and the G1. Here they are:

Personally I’m tempted, especially since unlike the iPhone I can buy one unlocked (for what the original iPhones cost IIRC). But I’m going to wait until I hear back from some hands on reviews and the first adopters.