Month: August 2003

E-mail Hell

I’ve got to get my e-mail filtering system back in place.

I’m not being overwhelmed by spam as much as a lot of other people — I only get maybe a dozen pieces of spam a day. It’s still the majority of mail that I recieve though, and they’re getting sneaky enough to use subject lines that make you hesitate and think it just might be relevant, especially when you run a web site. You get a piece of e-mail with the subject “I think this link is broken” only to find out it’s for GENERIC VIAGRA CHEAP! when you open it…

Unfortunately spam is getting trickier to filter out no thanks to things like the use of HTML in e-mail. HTML was never meant for e-mails, but some wiseguys got the idea of making it show up in mail readers if it happened to be present, which encouraged people to use it, which made e-mail client explicitly allow composing in it… Unfortunately, HTML allows things like:

1) Obscuring the real text of the message

I wish you could filter our just on specific words like “Viagra”, but that doesn’t work anymore due to embedded HTML comments. Although on your screen it might show up as all one word, within the raw text it actually looks something like

Vi<!--fdsatfrqrf-->a<!--gehjwghk-->gr<!--iouwhjlkh-->a

They specifically try to block matching against words by inserting random HTML comments all over the place.

2) Tracking your usage

Some e-mails are now including ‘invisible’ images which link back to a website run by whoever sent the spam. As soon as you open it, if your mail client automatically loads HTML data, it contacts the web site and presto, the company now knows that you actually opened the e-mail. E-mail addresses that are verified to be valid are considered more valuable than unverified addresses. Expect to get a lot more spam sent your way…

Time to start tuning those filters a bit more…

Scanning For Intruders…

In my insatiable quest for toys, I finally picked up a flatbed scanner. I had been holding out trying to find a 2400 dpi model around here, but after playing around with it a bit, I doubt I’ll even use the full 1600 dpi of this model all that often (those files get huge!).

There is actually a practical reason for it. As part of the process of cleaning up around here, there are a bunch of things that I’d like to keep around, but just don’t have the space for: pictures, segments from magazines, comic strips, etc. So instead I’m going to scan them in and then I can ditch the originals. Second on the list is the comics found in the back of The Gateway student newspaper I picked up when I was a student at the UofA (besides the ones that already have their own scans online, like Space Moose or Bob The Angry Flower).

First though, was a promise I’d made to my mother to try and reproduce a picture from a photographic proof (the tiny little sample pictures you get to choose from for the final picture) of her parents. She’d tried taking it to photographers and getting them to reprint it, but they wouldn’t do it — apparently they don’t work off of other peoples’ proofs on general principle since it may be someone trying to scam the photographer into getting them the free sample proofs and then taking it to another, cheaper photographer for the final work.

Unfortunately in this case we don’t know who the original photographer was, whether he’s even still in business, or whether he’d even still have the negatives after all this time, and we can’t exactly take her parents down and have another picture taken when one of them is dead… So, we’ve had to take matters into our own hands and thus I’m trying to scan and reprint the photo based off this tiny little proof picture. This is the best I have so far:

(Shrunken down for web viewing, of course. The original file is 3403 pixels by 4797!)

Papers, Please

Security is a necessary evil, of course. The keycard on the outer doors of the building? Well, there is a lot of riffraff around this part of downtown. The keycard on the elevators? Can’t have people wandering the floors after hours. The keycard on the floor doors? Gotta be able to tell the employees from non-employees.

But now they’re putting key locks on *every individual office door*. It’s not entirely new; a number of people in the company have had locks on their doors for a long time now due to expensive, portable equipment they have (we’ve had laptops stolen before, likely by delivery people who pop in and see nobody around), but now everyone gets one.

It’s not because we don’t trust each other. All of the locks will actually all work off the same key, so all of us can get into each others’ offices if necessary. What it’s actually for is to protect us from our subtenants.

A while back I had to move my office since we’re subleasing some of our space to another company to save on costs. No problem — until we discovered that we can’t build walls between us and them. The section they took is positioned such that the corridors leading between us *have* to remain open in order to comply with fire codes. We’ve put doors up instead, but again to satisfy the fire codes they have to remain unlocked.

So, next month, we’re going to have completely unknown people with access to our floor space as well, and the paranoia’s been gradually greeping upwards, culminating in the installation of all these door locks.

One more lock isn’t really a big deal, but it’s annoying to have yet another daily ritual I have to incoporate…

Do Crazy People Know They’re Crazy?

While I was out walking tonight, I caught myself doing something I’d worried about before. I was mulling some idea around in my head, and while I was thinking about it, I realized that I was thinking as though I was explaining the idea to some imaginary audience in my head.

“Is this normal?”, I started wondering. Am I subconsciously trying to counter loneliness by making up conversations with myself? Is this the first step towards hearing voices in my head?

Well of course not, one side of my head says. The fact that I can identify that behaviour, separate it, and talk about it rationally implies that it’s not some ingrained ‘craziness’. Maybe it’s just a deliberate eccentricity as a form of mental analysis.

Then the other side of my head reminded me that I was carrying out all this rationalization as if I were discussing it with some imaginary audience in my head…

Luck of the Non-Irish

When I think back, it’s interesting to note just how much luck has played a part of my life. Things could have been quite different…

I grew up in tiny mining towns, where there wasn’t really much to do but play outside and in the woods. By chance I happened upon a discarded smashed TV set and was curious about just what all these bits inside were. Luckily enough there was an electronics magazine available at the store, and although at 8 years old I didn’t understand 99% of it, there was still an aura of ‘coolness’ to it. It was through this magazine that I learned about these newfangled ‘computer’ thingies…

It wouldn’t have mattered much if we’d remained trapped in these little mining towns; there wouldn’t have been much of a choice in future careers besides continuing on in the same types of construction and mining jobs. As luck would have it though, the mines were running dry and jobs were harder to come by at that time, so once the town shut down we were forced to look elsewhere. We wound up staying with relatives all the way over in the big city, Edmonton, with all its greater opportunities.

In high school I barely knew anyone, and was kind of adrift socially. I thought a club might be interesting, but wasn’t sure which one was really appropriate. I took a chance on the Games Club, since I liked games of various kinds, and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met most of the people I now know best.

As high school was wrapping up, it was clear what I wanted to do: head to University and get a computer-related degree. It wasn’t clear just how I was going to do so, though. I had absolutely no money and the family wasn’t exactly loaded with cash either, so a student loan looked like the only option, and even that was questionable. One day though, my chemistry teacher mentioned a scholarship that she thought some of us might be interested in. I’d never heard of it before, but I applied and, miraculously enough, won one. The scholarship alone almost entirely covered tuition fees for all four years. I was able to get the degree without having to get a loan, and entered the workforce completely debt-free.

Any minor change in any of these events, just one small decision made differently, and my life could have turned out completely different. Thankfully I’m not stuck back in the mines of B.C. hauling rocks around all day…

Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?

From Microsoft of all places, actually…

MS is apparently trying to encourage us developers to work on PocketPC programs, so as part of a new promotion they sent free Viewsonic V37 PocketPCs out to those of us who filled out all the paperwork and such early enough. (No, I can’t get you one. MSDN members only and they’re probably all long gone now.)

Not my first choice of PDA due to the general crumminess of Windows CE, but it’ll suffice for the few things I’d want it to do. It’s not like I’m looking for a high-reliability server here. And hey, it was free, so I can’t complain too much.

Zzzzzz….

Damn I must be getting old. My alarm almost never goes off by itself anymore — I’m usually lying there awake already. Although it’s nowhere near Paul’s insomnia, my body just doesn’t want to rest as much as it did before. Heck, I used to have to worry about sleeping past noon on weekends; now I can’t even force myself to sleep in any later than 9am.

I’d better hurry up and get that house so I can start complaining about kids on my lawn…

Copy Control Can Blow Me

Having previously easily ripped a supposedly copy-protected disc I felt lucky and tried again with Delerium’s latest, Chimera. My CD-RW drive didn’t even want to recognize the disc at first, giving me the “I-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-you-just-stuck-in-me” flashing light error, but ejecting and reloading it repeatedly eventually got it recognized. My older drive in the other system just locked up any time I tried to access the disc.

Tracks 2 and on were ripped without incident, but track 1 insisted on being a pain in the ass. Each attempt to rip it resulted in a ton of ATAPI errors and a big blank spot in the resulting file. I even tried the marker-around-the-rim trick to no avail. Eventually I decided to try taking the output from multiple attempts and manually merging them into a single file, but miraculously enough after a few more ejects and reloads, on the third try I got a perfectly clean copy. It took way too long to get there though.

Stuff like this is more likely to make a person like me, who does legitimately buy most music, go and pirate even more tracks. I don’t think I’ll be buying any more Copy Controlled discs anymore, at least.

Black Magic

Behold, the first new keyboard I’ve bought in nearly 10 years:

It’s the same design as the older IBM keyboards (it’s made by a company spun off from IBM’s old keyboard/printer group, Lexmark), with the ultra-noisy solid tactile feedback. And no freaking Windows keys.

There isn’t really anything wrong with the old one, it’s just not as cool as this one. It was getting rather filthy anyway.

The Death Of The Colossal Fatass. I Hope.

As part of the process of cleaning up my life, it’s about time I did something about my weight.

It’s partly vanity of course, as I don’t exactly have women throwing themselves at me all day long. It’s partly over health concerns, as I’d rather not get diabetes or keel over from a heart attack anytime soon. And it’s partly practical, as I’m tired of jeans lasting less than a year, getting winded just going up a hill, damaging furniture, etc.

So, I’m trying to eat better. I found a nutrition program for Linux and with it I can cross-reference the food’s Omega-6/3 balance ratio against the distribution of fat types as a subset of the breakdown of calories versus the source type among protein and fiber and oh screw this… I’m a lazy, lazy man, which is what got me here in the first place.

For now I’m just going to try to limit intake to around 1200 calories a day, a number often bandied about in diet circles, and see where that takes me. I don’t want to give up too many of the foods I already enjoy now since that will just make it harder to stick with this, so the plan is to have one meal of the day act as a counterbalance against the other. For example, I intend to have my usual teriyaki chicken and chocolate milk for lunch today. I don’t have exact stats on it, but it’s probably around the same as a similar meal available at Edo Japan, so I’ll just round it up to around 600 calories. The chocolate milk will probably be another 160, and I had a cereal bar for 140 earlier, for a total of 900 so far. Thus, to counterbalance this, I’ll choose something for dinner that’s around 300. Tomorrow I might want something fairly belt-busting from BP’s for dinner, so I’d have a light lunch to compensate. My problem before was that I’d all too often have both in the same day…

I don’t put much stock in exercise, as it seems easier to just cut the extraneous calories out of my intake to begin with than spending two hours every day burning them off, but I do already walk at least 3km a day getting to and from work, to keep the muscles going and stave off atrophy.

And, since public humiliation might work as a motivator, I’ll try and keep an ongoing update of my status in the right hand section as soon as I pick up a scale.

At Least It’s Better Than A Basement

If I ever move to another apartment, I’m going to have to make sure it’s on at least the third floor. Having to lock up all of the windows most of the day and night makes it way too hot and stuffy in here during the summers. On a couple of occasions the landlord had reported people suspiciously snooping around my windows, too.

Oddly enough, I’m still hoping for a house one day, which would have these problems even worse…

I Am Not A Number, I Am A Free Domain!

Thanks to a combination of Telus and no-ip.com, you should be able to reach this site at http://www.planetcrushers.com/heide/ permanently now. (might take a day or two for all the name server changes to filter through)

Why planetcrushers.com? It’s pretty simple actually: when I first started posting on Usenet back at the UofA, one of the header fields I could change was the “Organization:” The default was plain and boring so, feeling a bit silly, I stuck in a made-up name instead. Ever since, I’ve been founder and CEO of PlanetCrushers Inc. :-)

And what the hell am I doing up this early on a Sunday…

We’re From Microsoft And We’re Here To Help

Run for the hills! Microsoft is apparently going to fix Usenet. I didn’t even know it was broken…

I can just see their Newgroup Assistance Wizard now:

It looks like you’re writing a Usenet post! Would you like to:

  • Quote 200 lines and say “me too”.
  • Post a blank message
  • Crosspost to five other unrelated groups
  • Attach a 70-line signature
  • Post in broken HTML

it difficult for the casual person to use effectively, but on the plus side that’s acted as a bit of a filter; you had to have at least some minimum amount of smarts to be able to use a newsreader, find the appropriate groups, follow proper posting procedures, etc. When AOL and WebTV provided simplified access to Usenet, posting from those domains quickly became a badge of dishonour because most people posting from them were, well, idiots. Not everyone, certainly, but enough that the trend was difficult to ignore.

It is a bit elitist to resent the arrival of ‘less worthy’ people, I suppose, but I do worry about its effect upon some of the more popular groups. The arrival of spam destroyed many perfectly good groups by making the legitimate conversations difficult to find among all the “MAKE MONEY FAST!” postings, and something similar could happen with a huge influx of clueless newbies. It’s already hard to follow some groups’ hundreds or thousands of new posts a day.

Then again this could all be the ramblings of an old geezer pining for the old “Golden Age” (if there ever was such a thing). :-) Usenet’s ‘death’ has been predicted over and over to the point where it’s become a cliche, and certainly everyone has the right to access it if they want, whether they’re able to contribute anything meaningful or not. About all I can really do is furrow my brow and go “Hmmm…”

And hey, it could mean more kooks for our amusement.

Pump Down The Volume

I picked up the latest Rush album ‘Vapor Trails’ shortly after it came out, and it’s been bugging me for a while now. Though I’ve always been a big fan and their skills are as finely honed as ever, something about it seemed a little ‘off.’ I’m not generally very musically inclined so it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, but after a bit of research and listening, it became clearer that the problem lies not within the music itself, but in the mixing.

Apparently the key word around studios right now is Volume, Volume, Volume. Now the volume of a CD track can be safely increased to the point where it just fits snugly within the 16-bit sample range, but apparently that’s not good enough for some studios. They’re pushing the volumes high enough that it exceeds that range, and exceeding it has consequences — it introduces distortion into the music. See here for a much more detailed technical article about this distortion problem.

The distortion is pretty minor though; you have to listen pretty closely to notice it. The other, more important problem this volume-mania has is that all of the individual instrument tracks have had their volumes cranked up as much as possible (a technique apparently known as “The Wall Of Sound”). The result is that the final mix sounds ‘muddy,’ with the instruments competing with each other for your attention. There are no subtleties; licks that would have worked better in the background are forced into the foreground and transitions that should have been built up slowly are instant and jarring instead.

There’s not much that can be done about it though as long as the studios are convinced that this is what has to be done to sell albums nowadays, since they seem to think that the kids won’t be interested unless it’s LOUD. Maybe the live versions will be better or a future remix could be possible…