I don’t even remember the last concert I went to. No, wait, that’s not what I meant… oh, never mind. Arlene and I are about to head up to the DTE amphitheater to see Randy Travis, the only country music performer I’d pay actual money to go see. I’ve been trying to convince her to go see him in concert at a casino, where the performance areas are typically much smaller, but he hasn’t performed near here. I’m excited. Maybe this will signal a renaissance of my concert attendance, now that I live someplace near actual concert venues. Huntsville, sadly, never drew big acts (Metallica and ZZ Top both came to town in ’92, but it was all downhill after that).
Skype peer-to-peer telephony app
According to this story, Skype has launched their peer-to-peer Internet telephony application. It supposedly combines excellent call quality with seamless configuration and an IM-like interface. Lots of folks are raving about it (try doing a search for “skype” here), but I haven’t been able to register yet. As atog says, be sure to read the EULA.
Update: John and I had our first Skype conversation a short while ago. Once I plugged my T40 directly into the DSL modem (bypassing ISA), it worked great– no setup or configuration required. Audio quality was good, although I had better reports from John when I moved across the room and continued speaking. I also talked to the world-famous and internationally known Martin Tuip, and everything worked just as well. I’ve queried the boffins to see if they know why ISA’s blocking Skype traffic, but once I get that fixed I expect to be using it quite a bit.
Update: Skype should work with the way I have ISA configured, but it doesn’t. Mailing Skype support, unsurprisingly, has gotten me nowhere. For a free app with 240,000+ users, I wouldn’t expect a large support budget. So, plan B is to break out my old Linksys box and use it to front-end my laptop instead of ISA.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
iTunes radio!
I had the Rhapsody client installed on my laptop, and I liked it fairly well; it had lots of channels, and the client had a good interface that presented a great deal of artist and album information. However, it wasn’t very useful when I wasn’t using my laptop, so I decided to fire up iTunes instead. Shazam! None of the built-in radio stations work, but a quick trip over to Shoutcast brought me more stations than I could listen to in a very, very long time. Now I can give my existing playlists a bit of a rest.
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InstantSSL for certs
I recently needed a new SSL server certificate, and I didn’t want to pay the monopolists (wipe that smile off your face, I’m talking about these guys) an exorbitant fee. Instead, I found InstantSSL, where for a paltry $199 I got a three-year 128-bit certificate. Their administration site and ordering process are well-tuned, and I was able to get quick technical support immediately when I ran into a minor snag. If you need a cert (and you will, if you’re enabling RPC-over-HTTP or Outlook Mobile Access), give these folks a try.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Litchfield does it again
From the sewer of misinformation and hype that is ntbugtraq, a rare factual and informative nugget:
For those interested, NGSS [David Litchfield’s outfit — PR] has just published a paper describing how to defeat the mechanism built into Windows 2003 Server to prevent exploitation of stack based buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Previous work done in this area presented methods that only worked in highly specific scenarios – the new methods presented in this paper are generic. The paper can be downloaded from http://www.nextgenss.com/papers/defeating-w2k3-stack-protection.pdf.
This is an interesting paper that will no doubt generate a lot of wailing, moaning, and gnashing of teeth. However, the fact remains that MS at least implemented a mechanism, and no doubt they will improve it as people (inside and outside of MS) learn how to defeat it. It’s just another small corner in the Great Security Arms Race™. I must say, though, that I’m not thrilled about Litchfield’s decision to post exploit code in the paper, but maybe I’m just an old fogey.
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Filed under General Stuff
The roof, the roof…
(No, it’s not on fire). Longtime readers may remember that our roof didn’t have tar paper underneath the shingles. I finally got around to hiring a competent roofer (Adam and the gang at Integrity Roofing), and guess what? There is tar paper under the shingles. Too bad we didn’t find that out until we had part of the existing shingles off. This posed a difficult conundrum:
- If we replaced just the shingles that had been removed (and the peak shingles, since they need to be removed to replace the roof vents), we’d have a patchwork-quilt-looking roof. This leads to lower resale value, which isn’t a big conern right now. However, ut takes 10+ years for the shingles to weather out, at which point…
- The existing roof was laid in 1991, and it has a design life of about 20 years. By the time the new shingles look like the old ones, it would probably be time to replace the old ones altogether. Making things worse,
- We need to replace or repair the roof over the breakfast area, leading to the patchwork problem again. And…
- Now I can afford to repair the roof. In four or five or ten years, I might not be able to, and I don’t want it to hurt our ability to sell the house later.
So, Adam’s merry men are busily upstairs pulling down the shingles and re-reroofing the house. I am resigned to the idea of buying an upgrade that I really didn’t need but that might come in handy later. Maybe I need an iPod to cheer me up. Yeah, that’s the ticket…
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Filed under Musings
With apologies to Jimmie Davis
To the tune of You Are My Sunshine:
During the night time
As I lay sleeping
I dreamed I’d bought a new iPod
When I awoke, though,
I was iPod-less
So I fired up iTunes instead
I suppose it’s a little scary that I dream about buying technostuff instead of flying, or being naked in front of an important audience, or books. I also, unfortunately, would have about zero use for an iPod, as cool as they are. I’ve been getting good use out of BeBopper, an MP3 player for my phone. Maybe when I’m rich and famous I’ll buy an iPod anyway, just because I can… nah.
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Filed under Musings
RPC over HTTP help
Tom Shinder has an excellent writeup on how to configure RPC over HTTP. It’s a highly useful supplement to the directions in the Exchange 2003 Deployment Guide, and it includes information on how to publish RPC-over-HTTP traffic through ISA Server– always handy to have.
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Filed under General Stuff
First workout today
John’s anniversary gift is extremely cool, but I think Arlene topped it: she got me a Crossbow. It’s like a Bowflex, but about $1400 cheaper. Supposedly it gives you much of the same benefits as free weights, and anything would be an improvement over my current physical condition. Thomas is particularly excited, and David went on at length about how I would look better “just like the real people in the Bowflex commercials”. Oh joy.
Tim and I set it up on Labor Day (actually, Tim did all the work while I yelled at Dell over the phone), but I haven’t been able to use it until today thanks to a combination of residual vasectomy soreness, laziness, and overscheduling. Today, though, I got up at 0515, dashed off a quick workout plan, and hit it. I feel great! The unit is solidly constructed (see why) and gave me good resistance throughout the range of motion. I need to buy the lat bar, because when doing pulldowns or raises with the individual cables it’s hard to keep the cables stable.
I found out that ICON offers a manual with a six-week workout plan; I’m going to order a copy when I order my lat bar. In other news, the running battle between the Bowflex and Crossbow trademark owners continues; the latest is that ICON can continue to use the “Crossbow” name despite the earlier injunction that found it confusingly similar to “Bowflex”.
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Filed under Musings
Let them eat cake
Scoble says a Krispy Kreme wedding cake is going too far. I say, where was this bright idea twelve years ago when Arlene & I got married? As a matter of fact, we had to settle for a traditional cake this past December when Julie and Paul tied the knot. Time to plan to renew our vows, I guess. Just remember: one doughnut per guest, please.
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Filed under Musings
Two more interesting blogs
First, my old pal Tara Calishain (author of the NYT-bestselling Google Hacks) has a hysterical new blog. She reads press releases and sorts the wheat from the chaff. Today’s installment: Hello Kitty Tongue Tape, along with items both obvious (apologizing can often deter lawsuits) and unexpected (Sony introduces new robot dogs). Go there now.
Scoble’s blog turned me on to this fascinating blog, where Loren is busy building learning applications (like WritingPractice) for the Tablet PC. I may have unloaded my Tablet a little too soon…
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Filed under Friends & Family
New Heinlein novel
It’s entirely possible that everyone in the SF world already knew about this, but it was news to me: Robert Heinlein, dead these sixteen years, has a new book forthcoming: For Us, The Living. The full story of its emergence is here. You can order a copy from Amazon (via a link that benefits the Heinlein Society). I’ve ordered mine. (Hat tip: my sharp-eyed and well-connected brother Tim).
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Filed under Reviews
The Exchange library
Microsoft maintains a page of Exchange 2003 documentation here. There are some very cool things here, not least of which is the little “freshness” icon that indicates when each paper or article was revised and how long it’s valid. There’s not an impressive volume of documentation there (yet… just wait until you see what’s planned), but what is there is quite good. My current favorite is the S/MIME quick-start document.
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There is no conspiracy
Tom Clancy has a new book, Teeth of the Tiger, out. It’s not a very good book, IMO, although it’s better than his last two pieces of crap, err, novels. However, I notice that Amazon doesn’t have any user reviews! This, for a book whose current sales rank is now 4, and which has been shipping since 8/11 or so. I find that suspicious. Given how many readers (if, perhaps, no longer fans) Clancy has, one would expect a torrent of reviews on such a hot-selling book, but there are none. That makes me wonder why there aren’t any reviews, and none of the possible answers (incompetence, systems failure, reviewer latency, desire to keep sales up by failing to post bad reviews) are good for Amazon.
Update: BN.com does have reviews listed on their page for the book. Of course, BN also has reviews for John Grisham’s latest, as yet unreleased, book, so maybe they aren’t the most reliable source. I just sent email to Amazon to ask where the reviews were for Clancy’s book; we’ll see what they say.
Update: I got a return email from Amazon’s “community service” team. They claim that the review problem was a temporary technical glitch; indeed, there are now 219 reviews averaging 3 stars. (The number of reviews hasn’t changed since late Thursday, which seems a little unusual.)
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Filed under Smackdown!
Red Thunder (Varley)
Somewhere, Robert A. Heinlein is smiling. John Varley, whom many of the current generation of sci-fi readers probably don’t know about, has returned with a pitch-perfect Heinlein juvenile, Red Thunder. Calling it a “juvenile” isn’t a slam; it’s a reminder of the time years ago when authors like Heinlein wrote books that were nominally “young adult” in scope but had enough sophistication for adults. (Stephen Barnes is still doing it, bless his heart!) The plot of Red Thunder is simple: idiot-savant Cajun inventor discovers a new physical principle that can be turned into a high-acceleration space drive. A group of plucky mixed-race kidscreative young adults pair up with a disgraced former astronaut, and the team is off to Mars to rescue the American crew of the Ares (and, not incidentally, to beat the Chinese to Mars’ surface). In large measure, the book is predictable, but Varley’s such a good writer, and obviously takes such joy in his stories and characters, that it’s never boring.
If RAH were still alive, this is very well a book he might have written, with a few caveats. Varley is known for larding his work with lots of bad language and graphic sex. I was disappointed to find that in what would otherwise have been a terrific book for young adults; I thoroughly enjoyed it, and when David’s older he’ll probably enjoy it too. (Bonus: there are tons of in-jokes and references to Heinlein’s books… the protagonist is named Manny, for instance.)
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