Category Archives: FAIL

2008/01/08 · 14:49

6 Qualcomm laywers sanctioned over discovery failures

A federal magistrate just hammered six Qualcomm lawyers for failing to properly handle and produce evidence in the long-running Qualcomm vs Broadcom patent dispute.

The judge concluded that their declarations and other evidence lead to “the inevitable conclusion that Qualcomm intentionally withheld tens of thousands of decisive documents from its opponent in an effort to win this case and gain a strategic business advantage over Broadcom,” according to 48-page order released late yesterday.

“Qualcomm could not have achieved this goal without some type of assistance or deliberate ignorance from its retained attorneys,” she added.

Ouch! I’ve written about this issue before, and it’s not going to go away! You’d better have an effective discovery strategy in place before your organization ever gets involved in litigation, and this strategy should probably extend to making sure your inside and outside counsel aren’t stupid enough to try to “lose” e-mail messages. That trick never works.

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2007/02/16 · 16:15

2007 Despair catalog, brought to you by…

Today’s mail brought a welcome surprise: the 2007 Despair.com catalog. (Despair offers a collection of very funny faux motivational posters like this and this, and my current favorite). I’ve never ordered anything from them, so I checked the address on the catalog. It was addressed to me at my home address, “Suite I”.

Now, let me explain. I don’t actually have any suites (well, unless you count the kids’ rooms) but I often assign one-letter suite codes when doing business with a new company. Guess who the letter “I” belongs to? Yep: IBM. So, someone at IBM apparently decided to sell customer data to these folks (or, more likely, to a broker who resold them). Perhaps I should start ordering Despair products for the Notes customers I occasionally work with? Now there’s an idea…

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2007/01/31 · 14:39

Conference etiquette: avoid the cellphone while in the bathroom

Charles posted a list of etiquette suggestions based on his recent visit to Lotusphere, and Josh Maher posted a list of cell phone use social norms. Unfortunately, neither of these address a real problem I encounter when traveling: people who talk on the phone while in the men’s room. I’ve seen a wide range of offenders, from CEO-looking types in Armani to flannel-shirt-clad, John Deere-cap-wearing rustics. It amazes me: if you wouldn’t talk to your boss through a bathroom door, why on earth would you do it with a cellphone?

Let me make this perfectly clear: under no circumstance would I make a phone call while in the restroom, unless perhaps someone needed immediate medical help. Nor would I stay on the phone, chatting away, while I stood in front of the urinal doing my bidness. I’m pretty sure none of my friends, customers, family members, or co-workers want to talk to me that badly.

So, to summarize: no phone use in the bathroom. Thankyouverymuch.

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2007/01/19 · 11:21

GRYNX Greylist, multiple recipients, and Verizon Wireless

For the last few weeks I’ve had an odd problem with mail sent from my Treo. The solution ended up being unexpected.

I carry a Treo 700w pretty much everywhere I go. It’s connected via Exchange ActiveSync to my home Exchange server and via IMAP to my server at 3Sharp. Combined with Entourage (and Pocket Outlook’s ability to accept a meeting invite on an IMAP account and put it in the main calendar) this gives me on-the-go access to pretty much everything I need. However, since December or so I haven’t been able to send from my 3Sharp account to some recipients, or so I thought.

This morning I finally got irritated enough to figure out what the problem was. Turns out it was the GRYNX greylist tool Devin implemented back in November. For some reason, it had decided that mail coming from some IPs (including the entire Verizon Wireless network) should be greylisted if the message contained more than one recipient. I guess this was expected behavior, since that’s what a greylisting tool does.

The oddest thing is that I’d get an NDR message on my Treo telling me that there was an invalid recipient and that the message had been filed in the Drafts folder. This was a result of Pocket Outlook attempting to be helpful, but its message didn’t really tell me what I needed to know.

I verified that this was the problem by using telnet from my desktop to log in, issue AUTH LOGIN, and try to send a message with one recipient– worked great. I then did the same thing with two recipients and boom! I got grey. The fix was trivial: I had to add my sender address to the greylist whitelist (huh? did I just say that?) and now mail is working properly.

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2006/11/03 · 09:31

Discounted Microsoft Office, indeed

I’m shopping for a new laptop; I need one that has a TPM chip that can run Windows Vista’s BitLocker disk encryption software. I’ve been very pleased with my series of ThinkPad machines, so I went shopping for a new one. Lenovo was kind enough to offer me a discounted copy of Microsoft Office as part of the deal, too.

Safariscreensnapz001

Only $1,000? Wow, for that price I wish I could buy one for each of my computers!

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2006/10/23 · 14:15

A PowerShell epiphany

From Devin, my cow orker:

Windows PowerShell could, with an unfortunate bit of whitespace, becomes “Windows Powers Hell”

Let’s be careful out there. (btw, congrats to Devin on his 100th 3Sharp blog post!)

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2006/10/19 · 11:57

Separated at birth?

A friend at Microsoft just e-mailed me to ask if I had a brother… named Julian.

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2006/10/13 · 09:36

Watching what you eat

From this morning’s New York Times, a fascinating article on Dr. Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell who studies food psychology . No, he’s not a dietician; he’s a marketing professor. He studies factors that influence what, and how much, people eat. Check out his popcorn experiment for a sample of his findings. He also has a new book out, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, that I’m just ordered from Amazon– sounds really, really interesting. (Sample: if M&Ms all taste the same, why will people eat more of the colored ones?) (nb. Dr Wansink has a blog, but it’s worthless so far.)

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2006/10/12 · 09:58

Red bra causes traffic crash

From the “Only In Toledo” department, news that a recent crash on I-75 was triggered by… a red bra.

Emily Davis, 17, of Bowling Green admitted that it was her bra that broke and later flew from the car’s antenna on Sept. 26 along I-75 in Middleton Township, according to a 24-page state patrol crash report released yesterday.
Two Toledo men in a trailing 2006 Dodge Neon were injured when driver James Campbell told troopers he swerved to avoid the flying bra and his car flipped several times in the grass median.

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2006/10/09 · 11:14

Opening beer bottles… with a helicopter

I thought competitive eating was a crazy sport, but little did I know that there was something crazier. Check out this video of a competition that revolves around opening beer bottles with a helicopter. I think I’ll stick with playing soccer.

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2006/06/05 · 15:19

Ed and I finally agree

Back to the cubicle? Never, I say.

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2006/04/20 · 09:32

Newsgator outage explained

I posted about NewsGator’s outage on my personal blog, and got a comment pointing me toward the official explanation. If you’re interested in messaging and collaboration HA, it’s worth a read. The money quote:

Frankly, this was a pretty frustrating experience. We have a lot of redundant systems – pretty much any piece of hardware in our data center could fail, and we can absorb it without a significant outage. For example, if an entire SQL box would have lost power, fallen on the floor, and broken into pieces, no problem, we’d have an approximately 10 second outage. But this case, where the database gets into an inconsistent state, wasn’t helped by the redundant systems.

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2006/02/20 · 11:29

Hey, Fifth Third!

If I want to open some certificate of deposit accounts for my sons, I’m not going to drive all the way to one of your branches just to see what your rates are. Forget that. BankRate is much more convenient. There’s this new thing called the Internet.. you should check it out sometime.

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2005/10/26 · 13:42

Comments disabled

My hosting provider reports that their hosts– or, more precisely, my blogs– have been under a comment spamming attack. They’ve disabled my comments executable until further notice; I’ll probably have to either rename it or figure out some way to prevent drive-by comment spams before they’re willing to turn it back on.

Update: we’ve applied some prophylactic changes that will hopefully tamp down the spammers. Comments are now back on.

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2005/09/20 · 09:44

My latest royalty e-mail

I just got a mail message from my agent. Here’s what it said:

Hi Paul,
A direct deposit request has just been sent to our bank for you. Your
money should be deposited into the account you have on file with Studio
B within 2 business days.
The amount of the deposit is: $1.11
The payment is for: Digital Think royalties Q1 2005 – Windows NT Server 4.0 in Enterprise

w00t! ‘Scuse me while I run down to the store and buy a candy bar.

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