Commentary, Rants, and Raves

The new year was heralded with fireworks well into the night. That would've been all good and well if I wasn't too tired to watch the show, but I was. They sounded like they were going off next door, although I knew that the good stuff was being set off about two blocks away. It also didn't reassure me any when I heard voices worrying in a panic, the sound of a firework going off, and the same voices in a higher and louder state of panic. But as far as I know, nothing burned down and no one was hurt.

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In the meantime, I've upgraded to Ubuntu version 7.10, and I got to see whether the wonderful out-of-box experience that was Ubuntu 7.04 could be repeated.

The answer is largely yes. I did run into a few problems with the upgrade, and the download was itself on the huge side, although in my defense I do have about six gigabytes of programs and documentation installed. The only serious problems I had were that I couldn't print to my shared printer anymore and some weird behaviors with KDE. However, offsetting those relatively minor problems is the improved restricted device manager, which at last enabled me to use the Smartlink winmodem built in to my laptop. Other improvements were subtle but much welcomed, such as the ability to change the screen's resolution without hacking the xorg.conf file anymore.

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I also finally set up encryption as complete as possible on my hard disk, thanks to the Encrypted Filesystem LVM Howto in Ubuntu's Community Documentation. It required a complete format and reinstall to do it, but the preparation was as simple as archiving my root and home partitions (although I could've just lumped everything into a single tarball), and the restoration was as simple as unarchiving everything back. That, and burning Ubuntu 7.10 to CD, of course.

I did deviate from the howto in a couple of ways. First, I didn't make nearly as many partitions as the howto suggests. I made /boot, which needs to be unencrypted in order for booting to work, as well as root, swap, and /home, all three of which are now encrypted. After making, encrypting, and formatting the encrypted partitions, I unmounted the /boot partition and dumped everything back from the backups I made. Unmounting /boot was necessary so that I didn't overwrite the kernel and initrd with copies lacking encryption support. I also made a /home partition separate from the root partition so that I can format and reinstall the operating system if I ever need to without losing any of my personal data or settings.

But now I have a system that is completely inaccessible from either cold or warm start without the correct password, even if the hard disk is removed and subjected to forensic analysis. And I tend to use extremely long and cryptic passwords. I don't have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean I want to bear everything to every single Tom, Dick, and Harry out there. And I hide my nothing-to-hide from the law as well because, if the law has access, then so do the lawless.

If the Department of Veterans Affairs felt the same way, then my identity would not have been stolen along with the laptop containing it, because the hard disk containing it would've been encrypted. And it could easily happen again according to the government itself. Yes, it's been a year and a half, and I'm still upset about it.

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It just strikes me as fascinating how quickly Linux-based operating systems evolve. In Ubuntu's case, they've had for the last couple of years a rigid six-month release cycle. And each version has gotten nothing but better. Contrast this with the many years between releases of Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS, and how releases of Microsoft Windows have consistently brought along more problems than improvements. I personally find it awe inspiring.

You can get Ubuntu by downloading a CD image, buying a CD, or requesting a free CD. For downloads, it's available by HTTP (through your Web browser), FTP, and the BitTorrent file sharing network. (And yes, it's as legal as lending someone your phone book.)

Ubuntu is widely regarded as the most consumer-friendly distribution of any Linux-based operating system, and I have to agree. Since Dell, among the biggest names in PC, are still selling computers with Ubuntu pre-installed, I'd say they agree as well.

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Speaking of Dell, imagine the Dell Dude telling you, "Dude, you're going to Hell." That is a fair and upbeat description of what Dell's support is like if you ever need to deal with them. I feared having to deal with Dell for support, but how could they possibly turn something as money-grabbing as an unsolicited sales call into a month-long nightmare?

I don't know, either.

Before I begin, I need a bit of set-up. Early last month, I had a client's Dell in for repair. The power supply was going out, and it was a Dell proprietary part instead of a standard ATX. That was a shocker to me, but it would've been much worse if not for this Dell warning I found at the Hardware Guys: replacing either the proprietary power supply or the proprietary motherboard would've resulted in one or both instantly being destroyed when plugged in.

So I essentially had two choices. First was to replace the power supply and motherboard together with standard components, probably replacing the CPU and memory modules as well because of compatibility issues, or to order a replacement power supply from Dell. As a repairman, I like to keep the customer's costs down; I'd fight tooth and nail against any repairman who does otherwise to me. Furthermore, replacing anything that Windows XP can see runs the risk of reactivation nightmares or the valid and expensive product key being declared a pirate's key and, hence, worthless. That left as the only practical option ordering the part from Dell.

Thus begins the nightmare. I scoured the site for the power supply, and I couldn't find it anywhere. I called and ordered it over the phone on the Fifth. My card was charged, and I got all the information I needed to satisfy myself that this would be just another ordinary purchase. I was a bit disturbed that they wouldn't ship the order until the Twelfth, but I figured it was because I was ordering a rare part.

The Twelfth was heralded by news that my order was canceled. The news was rather cheerfully written but obviously form-generated. Why was the order canceled? Get this: "Customer did not want." If I was to believe the notice, they couldn't contact me by either phone or email. If I was to believe the notice delivered to me by email. Naturally, I have spam filtering, but I inspect my spam to make sure my filter works right. I immediately called them back and explained to them that, yes indeed, I did want the part. The order was resubmitted, and they took all my details again. I was disturbed even more that, despite my shipping being upgraded to overnight for free, it would still take a week to ship my order. With little choice, I waited for the Nineteenth.

They insulted me by sending me a customer satisfaction survey two days later about the order canceled. Not the best thing to send to an extremely dissatisfied customer. I forgave the insult by filling out the survey with all the details they would allow for my unflattering sales experience.

The Nineteenth came and went with no news about my order whatsoever. I checked online, and my order was gone. Not canceled or in processing or shipped or delivered or anything. It just suddenly didn't exist. I called them back, and they found that I had indeed placed the order, so it existed somewhere. But as before, it was canceled with the reason, "Customer did not want." I restrained myself and simply asked to place the order a third time. They assured me that it would ship by the 26th (exactly one week plus the holiday), and I reminded them that I had received the exact same assurance twice before. Now I was upset. I resolved to track this order at least daily by telephone.

Yes, I resorted to the immature chant, "Is it here yet?," but after two weeks of having to keep the customer updated combined with my own frustration, I felt that I had little choice. My other choices were to mail Michael Dell personally for a resolution or to publicly embarass them in high-profile media such as news outlets and a letter to The Consumerist. I wouldn't unless they hammered up this order as well.

I started calling, and it took only one call to set me off. After asking about the status of my third order, I asked why the other two had been canceled as "customer did not want." I got two different answers. One was that it was standard policy when the item ordered isn't available. Yes, you read that right. "Customer did not want" means that the item isn't orderable. One was that both previous orders were improperly submitted, so when it came time to fulfill them, they got canceled instead. That hurt. That flimsy excuse cut deep. I asked if the power supply was even available, and one of them told me that they had 75 in stock. He offered to transfer me to the right department to find out how many were committed to orders ahead of mine in the queue. I was naturally transfered to the wrong department, but when I was transfered back, the next sales rep I spoke to told me that there was no way in the world that any of them could tell me how many were available, or even if any were available at all. That did it. I remarked that I was sure Mr. Michael Dell would love to hear how well the company bearing his name handled simple one-item orders and politely ended the call.

I sent the letter that day, complete with all the details that I could find and at least as well written as any of my journal entries, addressed to Mr. Dell. A response landed in my inbox early the next morning from the Dell Notification Team. They expedited my order the previous night, a few hours after I sent my letter.

But as the parting insult to the ordeal, I asked for the name of the shipping company and the tracking number, and they thanked me for writing and assured me that my request was documented. That's right; they never answered. It arrived, at last, and I set to work. Even today, after the ordeal is over, they didn't answer that humble request.

Strangely enough, I never got a customer satisfaction survey either. I wonder why. Hmmm.

Dell have become such a nightmare to deal with that they don't even want my money. That is beyond sad.

Back to work, and what a day it was. I'm getting caught up on both sales and support tasks, and overall it was a very satisfying day.

A friend I met online introduced me to a kind of adult beverage called mead. He often talked about brewing spirits both straight and spiced made out of honey, and I got him off of Windows ME ( "Miserable Edition" among other flattering names) and onto Linux. He's tried a few distros for his older hardware, and his results have been rather hit-and-miss. But anyway, since I never had mead before, he got me some bottled by Chaucer's online as a combined Christmas, thank-you, and surprise gift. I received it today.

I didn't have a bottle opener, so I went and bought one. Walley World had a made-in-Red-China winged corkscrew as their only selection, so I bought it. However, when I got home and tried to use it, it fell apart. The corkscrew went in well, but when the wings were brought down, the key lifted clean away from the screw with absolutely no effort at all. When pulling the truss away, the base stayed stuck to the bottle's top as well, and with so little effort that it took hours for me to notice it happened. I gathered the corkscrew pieces, packaging, and receipt, and I put them in a plastic bag to return tomorrow.

The enjoyment of a new dinner spirit (22-proof) would have to wait.

I had business out of the office today, and I took advantage of its timing with my lunch hour to return the corkscrew pieces. Wal-Mart took it back and refunded me without any of the usual questions or delays. I'd have to guess that this isn't the first broken corkscrew they've sold recently, and since it's the only kind and only brand they have... Well, the only sensible conclusion I could draw was to look for somewhere else to buy a corkscrew.

I stopped by the package liquor store, but surprisingly they didn't have any corkscrews at all. The clerk did say that he spotted some at the local Dollar General, so off I went. They had only one selection, but it's a much better design. At the head is a bottlecap lifter, and at the tail is a combined punch and prop. It folds over top the fold-out corkscrew, and with that the cork came out more easily and smoothly than I've ever had a cork come out with a truss. On the opposite side of the corkscrew is a small blade for cutting away the foil. This is a well-designed bottle opening tool, and it cost only one-fourth as much as Wal-Mart's wing.

I sampled and enjoyed the mead with my dinner tonight, and I realized why my friend sings its praises so much. I'll definitely have to try it with the mulling spices that came with it. My preferences in dinner drinks or after-dinner drinks has just been expanded.

My father told me about a problem he has with Netscape 7. He still used it because some of his bookmarks were there and he occasionally used it for mail. Turns out that, for whatever reason, Netscape decided to nuke his profile and make a new blank one. The solution was to completely remove it. He uses Firefox now.

There's a computer maker I'll have to check out: System 76. They sell desktops, laptops, and servers preloaded with Ubuntu and offer free "Powered by Ubuntu Linux" stickers.

When I got home, I discovered that my answering machine hadn't taken any calls. What I usually get are telemarketing calls fitting into very familiar classes.

• Great news! I can get a great deal on a complete digital satellite package by calling an unknown company's 800 number.
• The warranty on my car is about to expire, and this is the last chance I have to extend the warranty. I'm urged that it's dangerous to drive a car without a warranty. All I have to do is call "Warranty Division" or some other unknown company.
• A debt collection agency is looking for "Edward Diamohar Dee" and urging that this individual's credit will be harmed unless I call an unnamed 800 number. The names vary, I get the same names at work and elsewhere, and they've even called looking for a blank name.

Anyway, I was curious but not yet concerned. On to the phone, I noticed no calls. Not even a wrong number call. I looked over at my DSL modem, and that's when I got concerned. The broadband light was red, indicating that it either couldn't log in or couldn't sync up. I picked up the phone and got complete silence. I hung up and picked up a couple more times to get complete silence every time. I had no dialtone.

The law requires phone companies to provide emergency telephone access to all phone customers, paying and otherwise, which means that even an account delinquent enough to ruin a credit score will always have a dialtone. That meant I had a serious problem on my hands. My first task was to find out whether it was a wiring problem inside the house or a genuine telco problem. That would determine whether I should call the landlord or the phone company.

I've never seen a telephone network interface box belonging to any of the big telcos, but the one from this small-time Bell is very accessible. It's divided into a telco access section, sealed by a hexbolt, and a customer access section, accessed by a flat-tip bolt. Inside the customer access section are interface slots for eight two-pair lines, one of which was used for my phone service by an interface block. Inside the block are the terminal screws and a modular test jack. I plugged a phone into the test jack and got nothing. That pretty conclusively meant it was a telco problem.

I couldn't really call on my cell phone because the battery has a memory, and it's been getting worse lately. It won't be able to hold a usable charge much longer, and service out here is flakey enaugh already. So I trekked about looking to see if this affected more than me, and it was only me. Off to the parents' ranch to make a call, then back home to work offline.

They found and fixed the phone problem. Apparently, someone had dug up a sewer line and hit my phone line. Aside from that, the day was largely uneventful, but I found links worth sharing.

• The Mom Song [YouTube, 3:15] - Sung to the tune of the William Tell Overture by Anita Renfroe. It is what a mom says in 24 hours condensed into three minutes. This link includes lyrics in the description.
• Historic Moment #1 on The Price Is Right [YouTube, 3:50] - On the show that aired April 17, 2007, host Bob Barker called what transpired a historic moment. The contestants on Contestants' Row bid on an item.
• Historic Moment #2 on The Price Is Right [YouTube, 4:47] - On the same show, a contestant demonstrated psychic powers in the "Half Off" game.
• One of the worst The Price Is Right players ever [YouTube, 5:20] - A contestant plays "Ten Chances" with no idea how to play the game, but the reaction by Bob Barker at the end is just priceless.
• The stupidest bid on The Price Is Right [YouTube, 3:11] - The runner-up in the Showcase Showdown is completely clueless about how much the showcase passed to him retails for. He tried to bid $250,000 on it, but the displays can only show five digits. (That's a hint about how much a showcase can never cost.) "Two hundred and fifty thousand? Think about that for a moment now."
• There's Nothing Wrong with Windows Vista [YouTube, 1:33] - The LockerGnome (Chris Pirillo) rants about Windows Vista, blaming Vista users for buying "junky hardware" and running "junky software on top of an excellent operating system." The end, however, is priceless. He posted this himself, and among the tags are pranks, parody, and blooper. I don't know if this was scripted or not, but I seriously doubt he needed to script it.

Two computers in for repair. One was a Windows XP with an absolutely horridly partitioned hard disk. The owner has an 80 GB disk, but it was partitioned into a tiny 8-GB system partition (C:\) and three huge (and mostly empty) data partitions. Needless to say, not even Windows XP likes that. Every program must be on the system disk, as must all the user settings and caches and "my documents." That's definitely fixable, but not at all in an intuitive way. In fact, it's less obvious on Windows than it is on Linux or Unix, and not even Windows Vista has changed that.

The other PC runs Windows Millennium Edition, and it runs slowly and unreliably (but then I repeat myself). I can try, but there's only so much I can do to fix that. It's about like keeping a Yugo running after a problem.

But in the midst of it all, I was given this:

• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams [YouTube, 2:46] - If any of you remember "NiGHTS Into Dreams" for the Sega Saturn, then look at this. After seeing this, I want a Wii and this game.

General fun stuff:

• How to paint the Mona Lisa with MS Paint [YouTube, 4:45] - A recreation of the Mona Lisa using Microsoft Paint, among the least powerful and buggiest art applications available at any price. I'm targeting this one at all the pundits who think that nothing good can be made in any paint program less expensive or less capable than Adobe Photoshop.
• Art apparently [YouTube, 24s] - The only thing I know from watching this is that it's a walking wall. Can you imagine the look on graffiti artists' faces if they saw a wall do that?
• Rednecks build spider mech [YouTube, 2:31] - I have no idea who these guys are, but they managed to build an 8-legged, gas-powered spider mech in their spare time. Screw NASA and DARPA - turn them over to rednecks plus Burt Rutan and we'll have a Mars colony and Robotech in 10 years.

News from the Electronic Frontier Foundation today. These are the good guys. These are the guys standing up and saying to courts that ripping CDs to iPods is legal and already stated in the letter and spirit of the law, no matter how much the recording industry and their slick lawyers may disagree.

• EFF Files Brief in Atlantic v. Howell Resisting RIAA's "Attempted Distribution" Theory - The RIAA are saying in an Arizona lawsuit that the attempt alone to infringe copyright makes you guilty. This is a theory that has been shot down in court before, and not even the DoJ could get the theory made law.
• Are Personal Copies of Digital Music Files "Unauthorized" or Not? - Leave it to the RIAA to muddy the otherwise-clear answer: perfectly legal under "fair use" provisions of even the DMCA portions of copyright law.
• Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - Washington Post - The (post-correction) source of the last link.
• What It Looks Like Trying to Get a Straight Answer from the RIAA - Wired Blogs. Whoops, it looks like I'm breaking the law as I write by listening to ripped copies of my CDs. Oh, wait, no, it's not illegal. It only irks the RIAA because they're not milking a hidden per-listen fee from me.
• Scrutinizing Comcast's Apologists - Comcast interfered with their own customers' use of BitTorrent by spoofing reset packets. This is obviously unethical, as no one expects an ISP to shut down an entire high-level protocol over perceived legal problems. But Comcast denied ever doing such a thing, even to regulators, and it took an insider leak to finally get them to admit it was happening. That crosses the threshold from legal but unethical to clearly illegal. Would you believe that some people actually support Comcast abusing their paying customers like this?
• EFF's "Test Your ISP" Project - Is your ISP interfering with network protocols you often use? Network slowdown and lag are one thing, but shutting down "undesired" protocols is something else entirely. Especially if your ISP doesn't tell you, even in the fine print.
• House Committee Issues Report on TSA's Website Security Flaws - This ought to scare ya. The Web site that was supposed to let innocent Americans get off the secret "terrorist watch list" had some incredibly basic security flaws. First of the most obvious was that your sensitive information wasn't sent over an encrypted connection, which would allow an eavesdropper to capture your identity in transit. Second was that the Web site was not hosted by the government, but by a no-bid contract-winning private business.
• Report on Information Security Breach at TSA's Traveler Redress Website - House Oversight Committee, United States Government. The source.
• NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber 9/11, Top Spy Says - Wired Blogs. Essentially, the argument is that the liberty that is your right to privacy should be next to be forfeited in the name of security. A false sense of security, at that. The only measurable effect such a move would have is to expand a bureaucracy, removing it further from accountability by enriching its power to spend money. Oh, and by the way, the NSA (No Such Agency) is not supposed to be operating within U.S. borders to begin with. [Corrected (finally) on Friday, April 3, 2008. I was thinking of the CIA. -ArielMT]
• DRM Is Dead, But Watermarks Rise from Its Ashes - Wired Magazine. Secret serial numbers embedded in your online music purchases will allow RIAA to trace shared files right back to you as the purchaser. I see two astoundingly easy abuses of this.
  1. Digital watermarking is so obviously easy to defeat that I'm sure a million genuine pirates figured it out before me: re-encode to another lossy format, and among the data lost will be the watermark. Some deterrent to genuine piracy this is...
  2. More worrisome for you who wouldn't even think about piracy should be this: Ever take your computer to have it repaired? It's been a public secret for years that many of the more unscrupulous repair technicians will take your computer into a cameraless back room, search your computer for anything they want, and copy things off to their own disks. And if they want your watermarked music purchases, guess who's going to court if the same techs share your files and get caught? Not them. You.
• AT&T, MS, NBC Working on Solutions to Filter Copyrighted Material at the ISP Level - If they get their way, then ISPs will become the copyright police. It's not the job of private businesses known as ISPs to enforce the law; it's the job of the government agencies known as the police. And ISPs dumb or gullible enough to implement content filtering will deserve exactly what they get: a mass exodus of paying customers switching to ISPs who don't filter content.
• Wiretap This! - Are you afraid that your emails are being wiretapped by the NSA? Send them a message through a weakly-encrypted signature block. The whole point is to gain their attention and enable them to decrypt your encrypted message, to let them know you're on to them.

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The pirates can't be stopped. This is the story of how the company charged by big media companies with frustrating pirates was itself cracked by pirates with ease. In the war of giant media corporations against their paying customers, guess which side is winning.

The Pirate Bay says that Demonoid is welcome in Sweden. Wikipedia has an entry describing Demonoid as well as its fate.

You are a pirate yarr!

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Guess what some of the most expensive liquid on the planet is. It's not gasoline, and I'll bet that most of you use it every week. The story's more than a year old, but nothing's changed much.

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I knew there was a reason I switched off automatic withdrawal on my card... That was a hard-learned lesson last September 1st. Anyway, somebody at DreamHost fat-fingered the billing program and wound up over-billing their clients, potentially including me, to the tune of $7.5 million. (Um, whoops!) I don't know whether I was one of the clients billed because, if I was, it was taken off my statement before I saw it. TechCrunch wrote about it as well, but they focused on the fact that DreamHost used Homer Simpson in the apology. That seems to ignore the fact that DreamHost have a sense of humor (which has always been close to the edge), and it ignores the fact that they used other analogies in their mea culpa post (among them, Office Space).

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In light-hearted news, meet the Disintegrator: 24 barrels of rubber band minigun madness. It can fire up to 288 rubber bands per charge at a rate of 40 bands per second. Engadget embedded this YouTube video [5:28] which demonstrates the wooden minigun in action. This is the ultimate office goof-off toy.