bengt-erik norum

i've caved. while i still don't understand the appeal of blogs, more people i know are maintaining them everyday. i've found acutal information in them, i've been impressed by the design of them and i've occationally thought about keeping an online diary to report on the status of something...

so, i've caved. this is a blog.

i picked up a microsoft mn-710 usb 802.11g dongle, last friday. the microsoft company store had them for $40 (access points for $70, pci and pccard nics also for $40). with the recent purchase and bastardization of a linksys wrt54gs, i thought i should at least have one 54mbit/sec capable nic in the house.

looks like we just started producing these and are discontinuing them. circuit city had them for $40 ($20 after rebate), but were all sold-out, of course. they are back in stock, but sans rebate. i found them online for as low as $34.

hoping to find that it was a prism 54, broadcom wl, or another hostap/openap/linuxap/freebsd-capable chipset, i looked at the fcc filings for it. the fcc filings were submitted by microsoft with testing done by a company called, 'adt,' (advance data technology corporation). all the chips in the photos were photoshopped black. nothing relavent. note to self: revisit for power output specs.

the device is not listed in the wlan-ng list of prism gt devices. interestingly enough, though the pci and pccard (mn-720 and mn-730) versions appear to be broadcom.

took the thing apart... sure enough, there's a prism 54, a "netchip" usb ic, and one other ic.

i used the new version of netstumbler and wardrove (wardrived?) home, picking up a number of ssid strings i'd never seen. most interesting was a pair of networks seen (albeit weak signals) while at the apex of the dunbarton bridge. "Allison South SJ Link 3" (in BSS mode with a Proxim MAC address) and "Allison North SJ Link 2" (same). wigle.net maps this right next to the newark mall, 4-5 miles away!

i picked up a pile of new networks while headed toward mission on decoto, paseo padre, peralta and walnut. one, in particular, cracked me up, having seen reference to it, only days before.

i'll take it apart, again and photograph it. i'll also plug it into a host with a more flexible os, so i can pull the vendor:deviceid pair off it and try to force the prism 54 development driver on it.

this is easily the most useful perl module i've found in recent history: Parallel::ForkManager. doing something in parallel without the overhead of actually writing really multithreaded code is quite cool.

use Parallel::ForkManager;
$pm = new Parallel::ForkManager($MAX_PROCESSES);

foreach $data (@all_data) {
# Forks and returns the pid for the child:
my $pid = $pm->start and next;
work goes here
$pm->finish; # Terminates the child process
}

highly inelegant and hardly clean, but damn this is useful.

i'm swimming in data. i need something that will let me take a stream of data (filehandle on a text file, in this case) and graph it in real-time. i need to be able to spin up a new real-time graph for an arbitrary number of datapoints completely ad hoc. i need scatter graphs and line graphs. i might occationally want a bar graph.

ideas (mostly bad) i've had so far:

• shove the data into a perfmon counter (or 56, in this case) and graph using perfmon.exe
  
• write some nasty module for a cutesy desktop widget like serious samurize. i think this might actually be useful for a hallway/conference room display.
  
• do it in perl with gd
  
• do it in perl/tk (ala the scotty/tkined graphlets)
  

i need to setup a category for blog specific stuff. i installed zempt, thinking i might post more, if the process were somewhat less byzantine. i wonder how much blog content is self-referential?

i also looked (briefly) at greymatter, livejournal, and dasblog. i think i'll probably move to wordpress, after 1.2 is released.

found via google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fbengt.norum.org:
Pages of Folks from Technomads
Bengt-Erik Norum, a self-professed computer geek, who lives in Moscow.

more than slightly out of date..

the cut and paste behavior between an rdp cilent on xp and ts on a win2k machine appears to be dependant upon the size of the window. maximized windows share the clients clipboard.

typeperf is useful, except when you are limited by the maximum command line length by cmd.exe.

i know how pagerank works. googleblogtag.

CPAN revealed that someone has already created a UPS screen scraper. it is outdated and it appears that the ups license doesn't allow for this type of activity, anymore. shame.

dell flatpanels appear to be really cheap, as refurbs. i may have to spring for a 20.1"

grabbed a demo of newsgator. pretty spanky. it integrates with outlook and turns an arbitrary folder into the base for it's "news" articles. the integration is really tight and it doesn't hog much screen/toolbar real estate. i have not yet played with moveableposter, a newsgator plug-in that allows posting to moveable type blogs, but probably will in the next few days.

i picked up a pair of 15 dbi omni-directional antennas. one of them is destined for peet's roof, the other for mine. with two 84mW radios, we should be able to build an ESS/extended service area using WDS or a layer 2 tunnel.

tried talking nicole into a 6-foot mast to mount the antenna on, up on the crest of the roof. she looked at me like looked at her when she suggested doilies for my stereo system's pre-amp.

been awhile since i've posted anything. been somewhat hectic at work, even though i'm only peripherally involved.

osnews.com points out that beos lives. ebay didn't turn up any beboxes, i wonder how many made it out the door before they stopped building hardware.

how long until we're selling these in target?

i've been looking for a good off-camera external flash for awhile. steve man (wearcam.org) raves about the metz flashes.

price is a bit steep for me, but if warren can convince me to get a nikon d70, it might be worth it.

i just ran across hackingnetflix. it makes my hacks look trendy. one of the articles in there states that national penetration is at 1.8%. nicole and i had debated/wagered on this number a year or so back. neither of us would have thought it would be even close to this successful.

here's proof that drugs and shockwave flash don't mix. note the titles of some of these ("gangascope"). the author has kindly inluded source. it's too bad i have no desire to learn flash.

the domain name (phong.com) makes me want to grab a newer pov-ray and play with all the features added since i knew it. radiosity wasn't implemented in the 'stable' release when i used it.

gizmodo points out that the new portable media center edition have shown up on amazon for pre-order.

my worst fear incarnate -- Web E-Mail: The New Hard Disk (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

here's some concrete evidence that my worst fear may already have come to light.

combine this with an indexing system and par and you've got a pretty robust mechanism for duplicating xdrive's basic functionality.

i'm still more intrigued by peer-to-peer backup systems. examples i've found are:

pStore, an mit paper
dibs, a python-based package using a custom erasure correcting implementation
dbs, an abstract at ucalgary
exercising dhash with distributed backup[.ppt], another mit thing built on chord
secure distributed document storage through peer-to-peer technology [.pdf], an ibm zurich effort
dbackup, a jini-based project that doesn't even appear to be in the planning phases

and while they may not meet the definition of peer-to-peer, these are projects i've been watching:
oceanstore, oceanstore is to storage as now.cs is to computing
koh-i-noor, check the ppt slides -- they were going to solve "the hotmail problem"

i started an index of filesystems, awhile back. afs, bfs, cfs, dfs, etc..

while looking for other peer-to-peer backup/storage systems, today, i ran into this. there's a reference to bfs in there. it is described as:

This project is aimed at developing algorithms and implementation techniques to build practical Byzantine-fault-tolerant systems, that is, systems that work correctly even when some components are faulty and exhibit arbitrary behavior. We believe that these systems will be increasingly important in the future because malicious attacks and software errors are increasingly common and can cause faulty nodes to exhibit arbitrary behavior.

as if to prove a point, someone wrote a linux filesystem driver (in python!?!) to front a single gmail account.

not that i'm suggesting it, but davfs seems like the ideal candidate for someone trying to do the same to another large webmail provider. cadaver has been used for this, in the past. i validated that it works, last year.

great, and i was finally sleeping again...

hell yeah. someone took the python filesystem driver idea to its logical windows concluson. witness the gmail drive shell extension.

is there still a market for the xdrive/.mac style "drive in the sky"?

see also:
http://bengt.org/archives/2004/08/gmailfs.php
http://bengt.org/archives/2004/07/my_best_hopes_i.php
http://bengt.org/archives/2004/07/my_worst_fears.php

made the change to moveable type 3.11.

nicole's considering blogging. there are lots of knitting blogs and she's inspired. figured i'd get this all up-to-snuff before she delves in.

in a messenger conversation with reeves about an rss reader he's trying that does favorites as an rss feed (and let's you access them from a toolbar), i got inspired and started rooting around trying to find something to fill the "syncronized favorites" void in my life.

it appears that others are looking for the same thing.

i looked at a pile of 'services' and decided against them on the basis that 90% had popups and the other 10% timed out...

i looked at sourceforge and uncovered sitebar. it looks like it'll serve my purpose well.

i imported an old (read unclean) bookmarks.htm from my work machines instance of ie. it renders nicely and after a reg hack to add a "sitebar" button to ie in lieu of the "favorites" star, i'm happy.

http://bengt.norum.org/sb/sitebar.php

by the time you read this, hopefully it won't be a mangy old list of outdated rc stuff. ;)

mock-up of emoticon we're getting!

we'll be famous.

microsoft has a giving campaign once a year in which they encourage employees to donate time and money to charities. they match employees donations to tax-deductable organizations throughout the year, but make a concerted effort during the 'give' campaign and provide (albeit minor) incentives. banners in the hallways, placards on the tables in the cafeteria, email from executives, and reminders from managers are standard fare.

this year, ms sponsored a unique fund-raising activity. employees auctioned 'gifts' with the proceeds benefitting local charities. highest bid fetching items included tours of bill gates' house (guided by bill), a guitar jam session with jim allchin, and basketball with ballmer. there were a few hundred auctions in all, most not as high profile as the '...with an exec' ones. some of the most creative ones i saw:

• pick my hair color
• i'll be the president of your fan club (and send you fan mail)
• fly on my personal plane, anywhere within 2 hours of seattle
• music lessons, learn to improv
• day sail on my boat

...you get the idea.

the msn messenger client team put up an item of particular interest to me. "create the next msn messenger emoticon." the text of the auction (paraphrased) said, "you're excited about messenger, etc etc. work with our developer to put the only new emoticon in the v7 client."

so, i sent mail to a fairly wide swath of co-workers soliciting contributions to get a goat into the client.

there's an inside joke at hotmail about the "hotmail grumpy goat." a number of years ago (5?), a goat was drawn on a whiteboard in the ops office with the old hotmail logo (the red "stamp" one) painted on it's side.

anyway, we've had a perennial battle to get a goat emoticon into the messenger client. we got close with the sheep, but never more than custom emoticons for the goat.

i managed to round up $1435 and we'll have a goat in the new client! with the 11th highest bid fetching auction, i'm suprised at how much people were willing to pitch in on this.

when the final artwork is finished, i'll "leak" it here. i'll also figure out a $/pixel figure, as that'll assuredly be absurd.

well, it's happened. roamdrive, a "company" has produced a "product" called roamdrive.

the app uses hotmail's implementation of the webdav api to shove zip'ed and base64 encoded files into users' mailboxes.

i've been concerned about this for awhile and it's come to (rotten) fruition. it's really far less elegant than the gmail hacks, but does get the job done.

more later, when i know how much i should say.

see also:
http://bengt.org/archives/2004/10/gmail_drive_she.php
http://bengt.org/archives/2004/08/gmailfs.php
http://bengt.org/archives/2004/07/my_best_hopes_i.php
http://bengt.org/archives/2004/07/my_worst_fears.php

msn spaces (beta) went live. it's not rocket science, but i'm suprised at how well it's integrated with messenger (v7 beta).

http://spaces.msn.com/

upgraded to moveable type 3.14.

mostly not stuff that will i'll care about, but they moved to defaulting to full rss feeds, instead of just excerpts. that'll keep me from having to hack the rss 1.0 feed to include formatting.

omar posted about a very cool app in beta by microsoft (via the GIANT acquisition) for combatting spyware.

as someone who's reasonably savvy when it comes to keeping ie from accepting stuff it shouldn't, i didn't expect it to find anything. previous, even somewhat recent, runs of lavasoft's ad-aware had only turned up doubleclick cookies and a few smaller names in the same type of business; hardly suprising. "microsoft windows antispyware", frighteningly enough, found "myway" on my machine. note that the bho wasn't active nor was i able to find any open handles or fingerprints anywhere indicating that it was actually a problem for me.

a few complaints, though. the ui is completely distinct from any other windows app i use. the main window is modeless but minimizes a 'tree' off to an unobtrusive tab on the left. note that i actually like the ui, just didn't adjust quickly. i'm sure this is a remnant of it being an a completely different dev team.

overall, it looks to be a pretty comprehensive set of checkpoints with a pretty decent user-facing bit.

mt-blacklist installed. i've manually deleted over 40 comment spams in the past week; no more.

it's really sad how primitive the blog spam prevention stuff is. even the concepts adopted from email spam seem to have taken a turn for the unsophisticated.

• mt-blacklist is almost identical to the auto-fetch procmailrc scripts i had what 7-8 years ago?
• moderation (ala majordomo) for comments
• i've seen a couple whacks at integrating the ez-gimpy captcha.
• typekey

it will certainly be interesting to watch where this all ends up in the next 12-18 months (critical mass and all that).

nicole and i bought ourselves a "big-ass photo printer" for christmas. i spent some time looking for one that met our requiremnts.

• printer manufacturer must produce acid-free ink and photo paper for said printer. (nicole scrapbooks and this is important for "lasting memories" or something)
  
• printer must print b&w text on letter sized paper pretty quickly.
  
• printer must accept different ink tanks for each color (no "oh shit, this one's almost out of red, we should use it for swimming pool pics only").
  
• printer must do usb and firewire; usb 2.0 optional.
  
• printer must be produced by major name manufacturer (i once had a tektronix phazer something or other SCSI printer that i couldn't get drivers for without a $14K/year contract. i can only imagine trying to find a longhorn driver for 'billy joe jim bob's pretty good photo printer').
  
• printer paper and ink must be comperable in price to other major manufacturers' paper and ink. ($.29 to $.34/page)

the canon i9900 came close to meeting all of these. canon doesn't sell acid-free ink in all 8 colors required for photo printing, but 3rd parties do.

it's a big ass printer. i was immediately suprised by it's size when i opened the box. the picture above shows it printing an A3+ sized photo. A3+ is 13x19 inches and i must have visually scaled the image to match an 8.5x11 inch letter paper.

i'm impressed with the quality of the photo printing. it produced solid vibrant colors that are true to the image; my laptop screen isn't. the paper is realllly nice. i got some 9.6mil "pro" glossy 4x6 photo paper and it's easily the heaviest paper i've ever had any of my pictures on (including some pretty pricey 35mm kodachrome negative slide-to-print work i had done). i printed on the back of some 8x10 pro matte paper and it looked like shit; same image, same paper, other side? looked great.

i printed a couple calendars for celeste on 12x18 construction paper, mostly for the novelty of printing big. looked amazing.

i hate canon's driver packaging, but that's an infrequent pain. "Easy PhotoPrint" is an app that was bundled. it has rudimentary red eye/crop/resize type editting functions, but largely is useful for it's knowledge of the printer's geometry. the driver does include a really cool visualization of the amount of ink left in each tank.

overall i'm really happy. amazon has it for $409 with free shipping, right now.

playing with sharpreader (rss aggregator, recommended by aditya), i left on of the default feeds: wired news. the feed was showing a "URL error" with extended text showing a 404. "hmm.. someone hosed the xml." hit http://www.wired.com/news_drop/netcenter/netcenter.rdf with a browser. yup, 404. up one level? 404. up another to /news_drop? 404. wow. up to the root? 404. maybe it's a CDN's fault. verified with the command line HEAD that ships with perl's LWP.

> HEAD http://www.wired.com/

404 Not Found
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:50:42 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:50:42 GMT
Client-Peer: 209.202.221.21:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
P3P: CP="IDC DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa CUSa PSAa IVAa CONo OUR IND UNI STA"

i'm sure there are people madly watching cnet news for a sidebar on the outage.

since
i dropped mt-blacklist in, i feel much less of an urge to buy viagra.

not too bad for just under 3 weeks.

i'm a nerd. appearantly, a really big nerd. according to wxplotter.com's slightly banal and outdated questionaire, i scored in the 99th percentile.

i guess the fact that i'm really bothered by the statistical claim they are making (and the lack of visibility into sample size, et al.) goes to prove the point, more than vindicate me. so, without belaboring the point, i'm a nerd.

i bought a sirius satellite radio. local radio is pretty good, but the content on sirius is suprisingly good.

purchasing it for home, i wasn't particularly excited about any of the off-the-shelf offerings for tuners. none of them fit with my pc-centric entertainment. i vaguely remembered something about a company called "timetrax" that was doing pvr/tivo-style software for sirius and xm. i looked them up and found that they produce both software and hardware. so... i bought a full "kit" from them including everything needed.

their hardware is a small black box about 2 inches by 2 inches and maybe 1.5 inches tall. it is a usb device, powered by a 12vdc 2 amp wall-wart transformer with an 1/8 inch mini-phono audio out. the usb, audio, and power are on one side of the box with the opposing side housing a 14-pin block molex looking connector. it's designed to plug into a car tuner, in place of the "sirius connect" adapter.

typically, one purchases a car tuner for use with a given (in-dash) head unit. sirius manufactures one tuner and adapters for jvc, kenwood, and alpine. the tuner and adapter mate at the 14 pin connector with metal flanges and screws to secure the two pieces together. timetrax takes the place of the adapter and presents a usb interface (actually, rs232 over usb) to their software. this allows them to change channels and pull information off the tuner, just like an in-dash car stereo does (artist/track info is displayed on most head units). pretty clever.

their software called "timetrax recast" works for both the sirius and xm flavors of their hardware. it presents a fairly simplistic ui with everything you'd expect from a radio (signal strength, channel info including chan. name and genre, artist, track title, "presets", etc.). the software begins buffering a song when the track info changes and "records" an mp3 or wav either when you hit "record" or based on your white/black lists ("record this song anytime it's on" or "record everything except this song"). id3 tags are stamped into the mp3 and the tracks are organized based on user-defined preferences for directory names and structure.

the hardware's fine, though the plastic case isn't secured to the tuner, at all. the software is complete and utter crap. it's needlessly show and cumbersome, it hangs, and the recording mechanism creates big hierarchies of empty directories.

it is remarkably cool to stream music off the satellite to work via shoutcast at higher quality that sirius' online stuff.

more about my impressions of the sirius service, itself, later. i've also discovered an excellent alternative to timetrax; again, more later. now? i have to do laundry.

not sure why a non-active directory install of windows xp doesn't default to syncing time off some microsoft service (windows update, for example), but it doesn't.

i recently rebuilt one of my home machines and just realized the clock was off. it was 2 minutes slow relative to my shortwave-mastered desk clock.

during this install, i've been making an effort to add to a setup script, such that i don't have to try to remember how to resolve all the annoyances. this example is:

w32tm /config "/manualpeerlist:clock.sjc.he.net clock.isc.org" /syncfromflags:MANUAL /update w32tm /resync

in other words: sync off ntp and to use a stratum 2 clock and a stratum 3 clock that are both very close to me, network-wise, then to sync.

i may post the whole damn script, when after i run across everything that annoys me in the default xp install.

decided to clean up some blog spam.. i junked ~30 comment spams dating back to the 3.2 install, then clicked the "Junk" tab to see what moveable type had found:

<< < Newer Showing: 1 – 20 of 2426 Older > >>

that's a big number. color me impressed.

it's been a long and productive week. i'm still at work (7:46pm pacific) as we roll back the much touted m6 release of the windows live mail beta.

it's not as exciting as it might sound, but leaves me with the reminder of why i work where i do. i work with smart people who're motivated to do the right thing. can't beat that.

the official windows live hotmail launch was monday.

a lot of very talented developers put a lot of long hours to make this specific release happen. i have the privilege of working with many of them and am frequently impressed by their desire to 'do the right thing.' this is one of the reasons i love my job.

i've worked for microsoft for 7.5 years and had something to do with hotmail that entire time. i've seen many many talented people have a profound effect on the service we run. many (most, in fact) have moved on, inside or outside the company. some have gone back to school, some have moved north to redmond, some have left to work for other companies, and a fair number have left to pursue careers with our competitors.

it wouldn't be right to congratulate the current product planning, customer support, business, marketing, dev, and ops teams on this major release and re-branding of hotmail without highlighting the incredible legacy left by their predecessors. there are hundreds of people who've worked on hotmail over the past 11+ years, most of them will go unrecognized. hotmail works, in part, because of a number of very wise decisions that were made many years ago.

congratulations to all of you who used to work on hotmail. any success we have is partly your doing.

when viewing a jpg in internet explorer (uri ends in .jpg), why doesn't "right-click, properties" get me exif data?

and where's my flying car?