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Archive for December, 2010

Last post for 2010

31 Dec

 

    2010 is coming to an end so this is my last post for the year. I am not fond of 2010 which except for a couple of noteable exceptions, did not even come close to meeting my expectations – so goodbye 2010 and don't let the door …. 
 
    I am looking forward to 2011 as a year with a lot of potential. This blog, now heading into its third 'calendar' year, was one of the exceptions for 2010 in that it did exceed my expectation. One of the unexpected and now, rewarding, parts of writing this blog is the reader interaction, sometimes with very succesful blog authors and entrepreneurs that I might otherwise have never communicated with.
 
   I have been trying to keep up a consistent average of one post per week. The post-a-week objective still stands, however 'Real Life' has a tendency to change plans so adaptation is key. I have just started a new Project Management gig which is good, unfortunately I'm back to that 5 hour a day round-trip commute which is not so good. I don't have a whole lot of time to do much of anything at home during the week after spending 45 hours in the office and another 25 hours commuting. 
 
   So, blog posts may be a little less predictable even as I find that I have more topics to write about. Perhaps blogging during some of that commute time will make that time more productive. I'm not complaining though, it's great to be involved in fairly complex, enterprise-level technology projects again.
 
   I'm not going to say anything else about the project other than it is very large scale and heavily using server and desktop virtualization technology. While I was already familiar with, and have even used a lot of the core technology in the past, there is quite a lot that has changed. Operating system virtualization techniques for example have improved significantly over the last three years and while I have some 64-bit capable hardware at home I have not yet installed or worked hands-on with any 64-bit operating systems so I do have some catching up to do. 
 
  I'm probably going to write some more Project Management theme posts in 2011, particularly as this project progresses, but there are still a couple of draft technology articles in the pipeline, that I haven't quite finished including some of my android development experiences. 
 
That's about it. What else have I been doing? Working, getting ready to enjoy the holidays, spending time with the family and playing with technology.
 
Hope you all have had a great 2010 and even more so that you will have an even better 2011. 
-Winston
 
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Posted in Observations

 

Email theft

27 Dec

I ran across the article "IRS employee uses Outlook rules to intercept boss's e-mails, convicted of wiretapping" irs employee uses outlook rules to intercept boss's e-mails. Essentially the former IRS worker setup a rule on the server to forward copies of his boss' email to his email so he could monitor the emails to see if anything was said about him. 

 
The question from the article was do you charge him under the Wiretap act for intercepting messages or Stored Communications Act for copying them. Apparently he got hit with an 18 month sentence under the wiretap act. 
 
I wonder how common this is? Clearly the rule implementation is in place for corporate and government owners of email systems to meet all kinds of monitoring and compliance regulations. But I've run across this same situation a couple of times. I have no idea what the motivation  was, but in the situations I've seen, a manager (both cases were managers) sets up or has someone with admin access setup a rule to copy messages sent/received by another manager to his email account.
 
In each case, I ended up disabling (but did not delete) the rule and strongly suggesting to my immediate supervisor that they audit the email and firewall rules as there were signs that the system may have been compromised – it was not really clear what other action I should take and I hadn't actually thought about this in terms of legal/criminal activity (unethical, yes) until I saw this article.
 
Unlike the government action these cases occurred at companies small enough (fewer than a thousand employees) that they didn't even have a formal HR department so there was not a whole lot of formal policies in place for IT systems or anything else although they did have the standard login boilerplate "systems belongs to the company and only to be used for company business e.t.c". 
 
Of course the government case might have ocurred at a small regional/branch office, large enough to warrant its own email server and managed more or less locally, which is why the employee thought he could get away with it so the IT situation there may be very similar to a smaller company.
 
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Posted in Observations, Security

 

Google broadband – still waiting

20 Dec

Google high speed Broadband

 

Google has delayed selecting the town to receive a free fiber-to-the home network. A lot of towns are hoping to see their location selected for the 1 gigabit fiber network.

Of course being on the cutting edge of new Google apps designed to take advantage of all that bandwidth is also an incentive – but for now everyone will have to wait because Google still isn't saying.

I'm pretty sure that my town is not in the running for GoogleNet – but it's safe to say that if Google delivers widespread fiber in say the next decade, they will still beat out Verizon. Verizon has advertised FIOS existence in my town almost from day one of its (at least four years now) that is, until you try to actually order it – then they will cheerfully tell you about the wonders of the DSLservice that they also happen to provide.  
Somewhere in my town there is a house
A house with a FIOS link
 
Only Verizon knows for sure 
you can ask, but will ask in vain. 
 
You will get DSL,likely ADSL,
have patience – do not ask for more, 
 
The reps will shrug and with a wave 
point you to a Cablevision store. 
—–
(apologies to the The Animals)
 
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Posted in Observations

 

Virgin Mobile MiFi is a good deal

15 Dec

This is a very quick review on the Virgin Mobile 2200 MiFi device. First some background, I have been using my iPod Touch for years and have gotten used to the fact that at least around where I live, free WiFi hotspots are pretty easy to find so I never considered the need for 3G service. 

Now that I'm back to commuting into New York City, there's no WiFi on the train and there's essentially no free WiFi in the city. Even areas that supposedly have free WiFi hot spots seem to be either severely overloaded, unresponsive,  or just very very slow. So, I'm a little bit annoyed because I can't easily check my email or do quick searches on the net whenever I would like.

I had started looking at Android phones as you know from my Android Development posts but the cell phone plans are going to run me well over $80.00 per month and probably very close to $100.00. My current cell phone is prepaid and I still have $30.00 credit on the phone from the last time I filled it up six or seven weeks ago, so I really would prefer not to have an overpriced pay-as-you-go contract phone plan if I can avoid it.

I was still trying to find a reasonable android phone plan, when I saw an ad in the subway for Virgin Mobile Mifi and Broadband2go. I did some quick research, saw that some folks had problems getting it activated and decided to try it out for myself. I plunked down $150.00 at Best Buy for a unit and brought it home. There was supposed to be some sort of special promotion with a huge discount on the $40.00 monthly unlimited if you bought it from Walmart, but none of the three Walmart stores that I went to carried the unit, or knew anything about it or the promotion.

I plugged in the unit at home for about 8 hours to make sure it was well charged and then went to connect. At first I thought it was broken because after nearly 10 minutes the Mifi was not showing up as available to either my Dell Latop, my iPod Touch or my Mac G4. Just as I was about to give up and say the unit was not working, it showed up. I entered the router security access key (printed on the bottom of the unit) and then I connected to http://virginmobile.mifi and proceeded to setup my account. The system gave me my account number, msid new password etc. Then. after disconnecting from the MiFi (as directed) in order to complete the activation, I could NOT connect again. The unit would no longer connect to any of my machines – it just sat there saying it was available but not responding.

The next day after trying several times, I called Virgin Mobile Tech Support and got a friendly assistant named Mike. Mike ultimately could not find this problem in his troubleshooting script and since I had been assigned an account  and an MSID number it was obvious that I must have gotten the unit to work properly at some point. Mike promised to escalate the problem to his manager and they would call me back in a couple of hours . 3 days later I still haven't heard back from Mike or his manager.

I packed up the unit and drove over to Best Buy, as it  happens, a different one from where I bought the MiFi. The Mobile sales consultant named Chris sat down with me and after I booted up my Mac and the MiFi he proceeded to get the unit authorized, which took about 15 minutes. I think that my problems may have been in part, because I had an existing wireless network at home that the computers were seeing at various inopportune moments as being a better connection than the MiFi – completing the authorization at the Best Buy I had no such interference to worry about. When it came time though,m neither Chris nor I could get the system to accept my American Express card  to add minutes. Chris eventually added two $20.00 cards (which I bought) to the account but still could not get the unit to see that my account had unlimited internet now. Another mobile sales consultant (also named Chris ironically enough, came over and tried as well. Eventually it worked but it took roughly an hour from start to finish to get the unit authorized and working. Definitely a thumbs up for Best Buy in the customer support department on this one – I've got the feeling that if I had bought this unit from Walmart it would have ended up returned because they clearly do not have the same level of expertise in the stores to trouble shoot the problem. So if you're going to buy one, bear this in mind. Also if you have a home WiFi network TURN OFF YOUR ROUTER(S) before trying to activate your MiFi – it may run much more smoothly for you.

 How does it work? So far, very well! I used it on the LIRR to pick up my email on the iPod Touch and then in the office to send a couple of email and download a couple of RSS podcasts. The unit also takes maybe a minute or less to show-up as available, not the ten minutes that I was seeing before activation. I bought this primarily to have internet access WITHOUT a contract. The broadband speed is about on par with my Verizon home DSL (which is just adequate) for DSL. So. while it isn't blazingly fast it does work and so far, I like it and its a keeper.
 

 
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Posted in Just Business, Review

 

Repairing the iBook G4

06 Dec

iBook G4I didn't use my iBook  for a couple of months but when I turned it on to the sound of a small plane taking flight, I assumed the hard drive was going bad and backed up everything that seemed important. Just in time as it turned out, because within two days, the drive just disappeared. 

A quick trip to the local Apple Genius bar confirmed that the drive was indeed dead. The Apple folks did allow that they could replace the drive for $260.00 and they would even upgrade the drive from its native 30Gb to 60GB for no extra charge.  I declined that offer since with taxes they would essentially be charging me nearly $300.00 for a 60GB drive. I do understand that Apple pricing tends to be towards the high end of the market but even for Apple that was ridiculous. 

 

After a quick search on Ebay, I picked up a 160Gb, certified Ibook G4 ready drive, for about $50.00 shipping included. I figured that I would install the drive myself, save $250.00 and get a little experience with Apple hardware since the only thing I had installed in the machine was the Airport card. Of course, I was assuming that the drive, like the memory and network cards was meant to be accessible and I hadn't actually looked at what was involved in replacing the G4's drive otherwise I might never have attempted this.

 

The drive arrived, I cleared off my desk, or to be honest the kitchen table, and then I finally looked around online for information on how to open up the iBook and replace the drive. It quickly became obvious that this was actually a pretty involved task and required some decent hardware hacking fu.  I finally landed at the ifixit.com site which had provided an excellent description and about 50 step by step photos on how to do the deed. Of course none of the dozen or so Torx wrenches that  I already had (including my twenty year old Mac cracker) were up to the task and I had to run out and buy a Torx 8 before I could begin.

 

I am writing this post on my restored iBook G4 with its new 160GB drive so I did manage to get through the task. it took me about two and a half hours and many creative phrases directed towards Apple and Steve Jobs.  I had to take the iBook almost completely apart in order to change the drive and there were probably more than seventy screws in numerous threads, lengths  and types.  Allow plenty of time to do the task and think about how you are going to keep track of all the screws that you remove, where you put them and how you will find them in the correct order when you need to put the laptop together again. If you are thinking about doing this yourself go to the ifixit site and just follow the instructions. 

 

While I am glad that I managed to replace the drive myself, it is not something that I want to repeat. As for Apple, making your customers feel like they are being somehow ripped off is not a great marketing move.  I like the products but I do get the feeling that they are designed  to actively discourage your customers from doing basic hardware and sometimes even software maintenance. The intent behind that may not be to keep up high profit margins on everything from hardware to warranties but that is the message that you appear to be sending. 

 
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Posted in Technology