Slamland 2

The spammers have decided that us little guys are not to be allowed to run our own email servers anymore. They didn’t do it via legal machinations rather, they did it the old-fashioned way; brute force.

This is the end of a 7+ month battle between spammers and myself. Until 3 months ago, I ran my own self-hosted mail server. All my domains were on it. I have just taken that system off-line permanently.

What happened is that I was getting barraged by 250+ spams per day on each account. My normal email was getting buried to the point that I couldn’t even find it. My mail bins were over-flowing with spam and I couldn’t even sort it from the legitimate stuff. MS Outlook was no help either. The Outlook rules processing was taking loads of time from my laptop and it still wasn’t effective. Long story shortened, after trying some seriously hefty solutions, including some paid front-end services, I had to give it up. There is no way to keep ahead of the spammers and still get my real work done. I was spending hours per day on it instead of on writing, marketing, and sales. It wasn’t doing my blood pressure any good either.

I have now gone to the dark-side and opened Gmail accounts. After months of testing, it is confirmed that Gmail does what they say on the label, they kill all spam. Yes, my new email addresses no longer have my personal domain names in them but I don’t get the spam either. Neither do I have to spend the hours of maintenance required to keep the mail server alive (it was continually choking on the sheer volume of spam).

It will probably take a few months before I get around to updating all my accounts with the new addresses but then contacting me will be easier and I will be more responsive. Sometimes we have to pick and choose the battles that we engage in. Are they worth the bother? In the end, what is more important, focusing on core activities or fighting over principles (principles that don’t put a single dime in my coffers)? No government could have passed a law that would get me to do this but the spammers simply wore me down.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Last June I wrote about my new phone, an LG Optimus 2x. For a few months I was quite pleased with it and then the performance started to slowly fall off. This is the very first dual-core phone to hit the market. However, it did not deserve its software. It was Android 2.2.2, Froyo, which LG had promised to upgrade to v2.3.n Gingerbread ASAP.

For various reasons, and I am not surprised, the upgrade never happened nor do I expect it to happen anytime this year. To make a long story shorter, I rooted the phone to try and get a handle on what was slowing it down. Android is, after all, a special version of Linux. Much research and customization later and the single thing that stands out is to upgrade to the Gingerbread version, leaving Froyo back in the weeds. I grabbed the most popular and prevalent ROM distro out there, Cyanogen Mod7 (Official website).

I won’t get the nightly builds because I have to rely on this beast and I don’t intend to upgrade it that often. What I learned a long time ago, with Linux, is that the furthest out you dare go is the current Release Candidate for the next stable version. Any further and you are dancing too much on the Bleeding Edge. It’s not a question of if it will cut you but when. Ergo, I got the current RC1 version.

Lot’s of techy stuff later, including getting my phone stuck in a boot-loop, aka bricking it¹ , for three hours and the new ROM²  plays.

I can now dial out immediately, instead of waiting five minutes for the background processor to decide to let me have enough CPU to dial out³ . Now the damned thing does everything but dance jigs   The only unfinished bit is the sync software betwixt my laptop and the phone. SyncCell has already been acquired and I can then properly torpedo the POS⁴ that is LG’s PC Suite IV⁵ .

So, there goes my first foray back into Tinkerland (Linux-ware and the Open Source Community). My next Foray will be an expedition into Ubuntu Linux. It turns out that the current WordPress now requires version 5.2+ of PHP and the highest version I can run under Win2K is 5.1.4. This means that we either have to fork over some serious dinero to M$ for many copies of their current server offering or I set up my web server with Ubuntu Linux and remember how to play with the fools at the Apache foundation again (sigh).

For the moment, my break is over, and it’s back to finishing the current book.

1. Technical term for turning your multi hundred dollar phone into something only suitable for defenestration. The NV flasher  was instrumental in breaking it out of the loop. It turns out that I hadn’t wiped the working RAM properly. I also had to install the ClockworkMod boot loader into Non-Volatile NAND RAM (hence, the ‘NV’ and the bootloading tool is called Nandroid) [↩]
2. This is a pet peeve of mine. As a EE I used to play with real Read Only Memory(ROM) chips, including EPROMs. The Android binaries actually get loaded into flash RAM, or NAND RAM, which didn’t exist in the late 70’s. What Android folks call a ROM is actually a executable binary software image file. There are no more actual ROMs these days; it’s all RAM. [↩]
3. This is the very first ever dual-core phone, remember? [↩]
4. Piece Of Shit [↩]
5. One major argument against client-side software written in Java. Client-side code needs to be native compiled to perform well (at all?). [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Last Friday, amidst other things (which I will discuss in another post), I had to go down to the SwissCom shop to deal with my Piece-of-Shit HTC s740. What I walked away with is this:

It is an LG E900, aka the LG Optimus 7. As far as the hardware goes it is pretty cool. Good looks, excellent performance, and good accessories. I was even happy with the wired headset.

However, the hardware doesn’t deserve it’s software. Windows Mobile 7 is a pile of stinking pre-composted manure. Since I have a 14 day trial, it’s going back in the morning. Windows Mobile 6.5, what I have in my IPAQ, is loads better than Mobile 7.

My main reason for getting a Windows OS for the phone is sync. I have had major problems with sync I the past and without sync, the damned thing might as well be a brick, for all the good it does otherwise. There are three things that I need sync’d;

• Contacts: My address book is huge, with over 800 entries. These are definitely more numbers than I am willing to try and remember. Loosing them would also be a major catastrophe. Right now, Outlook, on my laptop, syncs with Plaxo. This is an online service that I have learned to trust. The master copy is in Outlook. This is a part of Office Premium 2007. As a writer, it is my main tool these days.
• Calendar and appointments: See above.
• Notes

Note the conspicuous absence of email in that list.

In any case, I fully expected the damned thing to use Active Sync with no problems. It doesn’t. It uses an app called Zune. One problem, Zune does not sync with Outlook or any other Office 2007 application. You have to have a Windows Live account to make that happen, along with an available MS Exchange server. I do not use Exchange. I use hMailserver. Guess what? I’m hosed

I had to upload my Contact list with Windows Live manually and it still will not sync it. I have to do the sync manually. That’s a show-stopper all by itself, right there.

Okay, I think, can I buy an app from Handango? No, Handango doesn’t sell Mobile 7 apps. I have to go to the Microsoft Marketplace. Okay, I think, I’ll just look there. Listen for the screeching halt terminated by the sound of crunching metal here folks: I am an American ex-pat in Switzerland and I was forced to tell my phone that (it goes with the Swisscom SIM card). Consequently, it only allows me to speak German or French. Well, at least they deal with French. My problem is that I don’t do French worth a damn and while my German is scads better, it still isn’t up to legal contracts and I prefer US English. Will it deal in the language that I want? The answer is not a resounding ‘no’ but a blastingly loud ‘HELL NO!’

So no, MS Marketplace will only sell me stuff if I want to switch to German or French. Argh! This is yet another showstopper. The putzes that do Internationalization for American software firms have their collective heads up their asses! They are doing it wrong! This is another post topic for the future.

I will swap this pile of excrement for an Android in the morning. LG is a good company and the hardware is beyond reproach but the OS on this thing sucks.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Part 2 (methods)

There are basically only two forms of vehicle available today; Electric Vehicles (EV) and Fueled Vehicles (FV). Hybrids are a special case of Fueled Vehicle¹ . There is some very cool stuff on electric transportation at Jay Leno’s Garage.

EVs

What makes an Electric Vehicle (EV) unique is that it only uses energy. It does not generate any energy. It gets all of its energy from external sources and stores it on board in a battery. It then converts that energy into motive power as needed. When the battery is depleted, it needs to be recharged from an external energy source. This is where the zero-pollution and zero-emissions hyperbole stems from.

I had a link to the video of Jay Leno’s 1909 Baker Electric but it won’t load properly. Therefor, I only present you this link to the original article.

Note that I am making a careful distinction between energy and power. Energy is measured in Watt-Hours (Wh) and power is measured in Watts (W) . This is not just a semantic difference. It isn’t energy that moves you down the road, it’s power and that’s measured in Kilowatts. The power of automobile engines are often rated in horsepower (HP) rather than kilowatt (kW)² . The word "horsepower" may give you an intuitive idea that power defines how much "muscle" a generator or motor is capable of, whereas energy tells you how much "work" a generator or motor performs during a certain period of time³ .

Batteries are rated in Kilowatts-hours (kWh)⁴ as they are actually energy stores. Batteries are Direct Current (DC) storage devices but power can be much more efficiently manipulated in Alternating Current (AC) form⁵ . Therefore, there is a converter between the battery and the rest of the system ⁶ .

This becomes very useful later when I convert the fuel stored in an FV into kWh in terms of comparison. This very important in terms of avoiding comparisons of apples and oranges or cumquats and bananas. I will not be comparing the Tesla Roadster versus the Honda Civic. Performance-wise, it is much more fair to compare the Tesla Roadster Sport against a Shelby Mustang GT, given their relative performance specifications. Likewise, the Aptera⁷ is better compared to a Smart Car although a better comparison is Smart’s own EV⁸ .

Power (W)=Current(A) * Voltage (V) ;Where current is measured in Amperes (A) and Voltage is measured in Volts (V).

Energy(Wh)= Ampere-Hours (Ah) * Voltage

History

EVs have been on the scene for over 100 years⁹ . The oldest one that I know about is the 1909 Baker Electric.

Although a crude electric carriage was originally created in Scotland in the late 1830s, the first functional electric car in the United States was produced in 1891. For the next decade, the clean, quiet electric car was the king of the road. In 1899, an electric car broke the vehicular land speed record, and by 1900, there were more electric cars than any other kind in the U.S., accounting for 38% of the nation’s car market. – Jay Leno

In contrast, the first gasoline powered FV didn’t appear until 1898.

1. Interestingly, steam powered cars are also a Fueled Vehicle but that’s out of scope for this series. [↩]
2. 1 kW = 1.359 HP. In Europe, engines are actually rated in terms of kW, rather than horsepower (HP), by regulation. I may sometimes give both but, I will be using kW in the actual calculations.  [↩]
3. Windpower.Org actually has a very good description of this. This will actually be very important later when we discuss energy density issues under the energy sources portions of this series. [↩]
4. 1 kWh= 1 thousand Watt-hours [↩]
5. This is why you have AC power on the electricity grid. [↩]
6. A DC-AC power inverter going out and a rectifier, going in. As a trained Electrical Engineer, I would be sorely remiss in not pointing out that AC and DC power calculations are very different. However, at these scales, they do not result in significant variations to prevent using DC calculations as a First Order Approximation, which is all we need here. Were we designing an actual EV, we would be requiring the  actual AC formulae. Were we designing at the scale of a power grid (Megawatts, mW, 1mW=1 million Watts ) then I would perhaps be using the AC calculus as well. [↩]
7. The Aptera appears to be on the road to extinction due to the massive stupidity of the current CEO. [↩]
8. If I can obtain the data. ATM, this is doubtful. [↩]
9. a crude electric carriage was originally created in Scotland in the late 1830s. The first functional electric car in the United States was produced in 1891 [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Still in Coppet,CH. The in-laws are now down in Aigues-Mortes because it’s warmer down there (7C v. –4C here). We stayed here to house-sit for a few days and will be going back on the 28^th.

Zhinn is having a wonderful time even if it is damned cold outside. This is good as he isn’t completely an apartment cat. He’s now a 6 kilo adult male athletic Tabby that keeps himself amazingly fit. He’s also turning out to be a pretty good mouser. Although he gets fairly disappointed when the new active bat-toys break. He keeps bringing them to me for repairs. He did that with sparrows for a while too but gave up on them because they break too easy. He is now easier on the mice and voles, even letting a few voles get away.

Zhinn is the sort of cat that will not eat raw meat. We get him the gushy food with veg in because that is what he prefers. He prefers it to the point that he picks out the veg first. Strange cat, that. Obligate carnivore? Yeah … sure. The only way he would eat a mouse is sauté in butter and garlic. Zhinn likes burrito filling, chili, curried anything, cheddar cheese, cooked turkey (new discovery, that), gushy food with veg in it (mostly zucchini, peas, and carrots; try to get your child to each much of any of that), shrimps in butter and garlic, sardines, tuna, and grilled chicken with lots of paprika and cayenne. He otherwise shies away from most human prepared food, straight all-meat cat food, and any form of raw meat. We definitely have a strange cat here however, his coat is gorgeous so the diet must be okay.

Tech: Goshawk—>Gyrfalcon

The night before Christmas Eve, I finally got around to rebuilding Goshawk. Goshawk was my main Web Applications Server for years but it’s always had this memory problem that required me to reset it at least once per week. Last month, right before NaNoWriMo, it finally died due to a corrupted boot sector. There is a long story behind Goshawk but Ï plugged in a spare 30GB PATA drive and installed a new Win2K server OS, leaving the old drive in place, as a slave.

Due to the fact that Goshawk was a Domain Controller on my Active Directory Domain, it’s sudden demise left an orphaned object in the AD which I couldn’t assign to the resurrected Goshawk. Therefore I took the expedient of naming Goshawk to Gyrfalcon instead, and will delete the old Goshawk objects later. The really weird thing is that the memory glitch seems to have gone away, or is successfully hiding from me. In either case, that’s a task necessarily left until I finally get back to Nyon.

Yes, my VPN setup is working really well from here in Coppet. It was a PITA to initially setup but I am very glad that I did it. I have a 300GHz, host (Eagle) that is dedicated communications controller, with RADIUS, MS RSA, etc. It’s not much of a host (slow) but that’s all it does and has been working reliably for years (I think of Apweiler fondly for sending me that old motherboard).

New Year wishes

Anyway, the new year’s acommin’ and I hope that it treats everyone well. From here, things have a much better chance of looking better than worse. Keep working at whatever is working for you, mitigate your losses as best as you can, and don’t take on any risks that you don’t have to. There are still economic storm clouds on the horizon, both here in Europe and in the US.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.