Diary of a Network Geek

I’m a resource hog.

One of my several websites has used 5856.36 megabytes of 6500.00 megabytes of bandwidth as of 13:55 today. Do you think it will make it until midnight when the counters reset?

Simpler is always better.

As far as I’m concerned, the simpler things are, the better. My life gets complicated enough all on its own without me getting in the way and making things worse. As an example, within the same five years, I was out of work for one year, got divorced and survived cancer. I’m almost afraid to find out what God might throw at me next.
In any case, one of the more complicated things I’ve done over the years is manage remote users. Under the best of circumstances, it can be a real challenge. When you consider all the ways to do it and all the tools that exist to serve these folks, well, things can get out of hand pretty quickly.

So, you can bet I perked up when I saw this article over at TechRepublic: 6 Technologies to Enhance Mobile Workers and Take the Pain Out of Managing Them. I’m not sure I agree with all their choices, or how much pain some of them take out of remote user management, but it’s an interesting place to start.

I got a kind of Christmas bonus Friday.

So, Friday, after long resisting it, I finally cleaned up my office.
I had all kinds of junk there, most of which I threw out. But, there was this older iMac. It was in decent shape, outside of a temperamental wireless card. So, rather than get rid of it, I asked the boss if I could have it. Mac lover that he is, he was thrilled to give it to someone who’d appreciate it. And, I think maybe he thought he’d converted me to the Apple camp. He hadn’t, but now I have two versions of desktop Windows, Linux and OS X in my house. Not to mention Novell and Linux server systems. So, now, when someone asks me to convert files for them, format shouldn’t be an issue.

Now, that is what I call a Christmas bonus!

Merry Christmas!

God, bless us, every one.

My laptop saved me.

As most of my regular readers know, my laptop really saved me when I was in the hospital getting my chemotherapy treatment. If I hadn’t had that, I might have just about gone crazy. For one thing, it kept me in touch with many of my friends via e-mail and blogs. For another thing, I was able to get some things done at work via that laptop and a secure, remote connection to our server. That wasn’t my intention when I bought it, but, still, it’s been a very good investment and I’m very, very happy to have made it. I’d even say it was worth going into a bit of debt to get it when I did. It was something I’d put off doing for… Well, for a very long time.

Anyway, if you’re thinking about getting a laptop, the upcoming Christmas season is as good a time as any. These days laptops go on sale just like all electronics do, at Christmas, after Christmas and at the beginning of the school year. But, with deference to the TechRepublic article from which I drew the main points, here are ten things to keep in mind when buying a new laptop:

#1: Operating system

#2: CPU#3: RAM

#4: Video card

#5: Ports

#6: Screen size

#7: Integrated wireless

#8: Integrated Bluetooth

#9: Track pad

#10: Battery life

So, if you’re taking advantage of the great sales at the last minute, keep that in mind.  And, if you’re in the market for a laptop, Microcenter is going to have some pretty great sales just after Christmas this year, it looks like.  They’ve always done right by me.
That’s NOT a paid endorsement, by the way.  They’ve just always done right by me.

I love well designed websites.

I love the look of WebUrbanist. And, their content isn’t too bad, either. As I work on my Super Secret Creative Project, and the website that will support that, I think I may well try to recreate my own version of the design at WebUrbanist.

That’s how much I like it.

I “failed” at NaNoWriMo, again.

I think November is quite possibly the absolute worst month for me to dedicate myself to a writing project. I end up with more social and work obligations in November than any other month of the year. At least, that’s how it’s seemed to me for the past several years. Hell, three years ago, when I planned to do NaNoWriMo for the first time, I was lucky to drag myself through the month at all! Last year, I was coughing blood and converting a phone system. This year I just had so many social obligations that I just got behind and never caught up.

And, I have to admit, I also didn’t plan things nearly enough. Last year, at least I had worked out a bit of research and I’d been writing a bit. This year, not only did I not do enough research, but I don’t think I’d written a word of fiction all year! Seriously, it’s kind of been a long year with a lot of physical demands on me, so I just haven’t been writing creatively, outside this blog, at all. I think it was pretty unrealistic of me to just jump in cold like that and expect to be writing over 1,500 words each day. In any case, I think what it proves to me is that I need to keep writing all the time. Waiting to get inspired is just foolish, as has been proven over and over by professional writers. Rather, if I keep writing, the inspiration will come of its own accord. So, that is my goal for the coming year: to write, every week.

To console myself, however, I bought my camera yesterday.
Ritz/Wolf Camera had a sale, which ended yesterday, that got me a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi with an 18-55mm lens and a 75-300mm zoom lens for just under $800 before tax. I added a 2gig memory card and the two-year protection and maintenance plan as well. The maintenance plan seemed a little expensive, at first, until one considers that it will repair or replace the camera and either lens, no matter the damage, for two years. And, it included an annual cleaning, each of which were almost half the price of the plan. Well worth it, I think, considering the investment I made. Oh, and the package deal specified a regular 55mm lens, but they were out of that, so I got a free upgrade to an 18-55mm lens with image stabilization built in. Super cool!
To be honest, I felt a little guilty about buying the camera.
I mean, sure, I did “earn” the money via ad revenue and I have wanted a really good digital camera for a while now, but, well… Well, the guilty, co-dependant in me feels like I shouldn’t spend money on myself. Rather, I should be spending that money on some charity or other. Giving it to the church or feeding starving children in Africa or something. Naturally, I called a friend to churn this over in my head and his response did help put things in perspective for me.
“Look, you just survived cancer this year…” And, that was as far as he got before I had already gotten the point. Yes, it has been a rougher than usual year and I have really wanted a good camera with which I can make art for some time. But, I do want to avoid that whole feeling of entitlement. I don’t ever want to get back into a mindset of “I deserve this because things have been rough lately.” In the past, that kind of attitude has not served me well. Not at all.

So, I’ll try to avoid that feeling and still make use of and enjoy the camera.
I do deserve good things and I do deserve to have fun, cancer not with standing. I do work hard for most everything I have and I am grateful for the opportunities that God gives me, both to get good things and to give good things. And, I do appreciate every, single person who has ever clicked on an ad on my website that earned me the money to buy this. It has made me think more and pay more attention to advertising on other people’s websites, if nothing else.
And, of course, you all will get to see more photos as time goes by and I get better with my new toy. I know at least one unusual feature of Houston that I want to capture, though it may take some time. Oh, in case you hadn’t figured it out, all the pictures in this post were taken with the new camera.
Tomorrow, I’ll lay out the camera itself and take pictures of it, per a challenge from Peter, the Brit. Until then, though, enjoy these!

Oh, I’ll never learn.

So, I read a lot of blogs. Not a big surprise, really, all things considered. One of the blogs I track is the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog. Recently, they ran a post titled “Spy on your spouse’s online habits, go to jail“. Now, as a currently unmarried person, you may think I don’t have a dog in that fight, but, well, I kind of do. Allow me to explain.

See, about three years ago, my now ex-wife was cheating on me with her latest husband. (in fact, tomorrow, it will be three years to the day that I told her I “knew” what was going on and she bolted rather than face up to any problems we were having.) I was tempted to install spyware, or do other kinds of traces, on her communications. And, I think I would have been within my legal rights, since the computer was in my house and, technically, shared property. Now, I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but as part of my job, I do have to be fairly up to date on legal issues regarding computer security.
It’s unclear from the article whether or not the man in Austin who got four years for installing spyware on his wife’s computer had physical possession of the PC in question, but I’d imagine not. Now, I got confirmation of my suspicions by reading a raw mail file on a server I rented space on. The account was one I paid for, but my ex-wife foolishly used to tell nasty lies about me. (And, yes, also some uncomfortable truths, but they were mostly obscured by the rather outrageous lies.) At the time, my lawyer’s office agreed with me that it seemed like I was legally in the clear when I read the e-mail file. Though we didn’t actually have to test the law, in general, I would have been considered the rightful owner of the file in question, ergo, I had the right to read it.  And, ownership, to me, is the issue.  If I own the computer in question, don’t I have the right to install software on it that captures information?  In that situation, in a private residence, who has the right to expect privacy when using that machine?
In any case, I made comment and then, later, read some other comments on the post.
One person made some rather sweeping generalizations with which, naturally, I disagreed. A small, tepid debate ensued. The other commenter made comments about legality in an absolute sense, as in “…it is illegal to crack a password of another adult, for any reason, no matter where the software comes from – the guy is going to do 4 years in jail?” And, therein lies the rub. It’s NOT illegal to crack a password of another adult “for any reason”. There are, in fact, many legal reasons I’ve cracked passwords at work. For one, someone illegally locked files with a password to hold a company hostage. The company in question clearly had ownership of the password-locked files, but there was no way to recover the file without cracking the password. There are other examples, but any time someone starts talking in absolutes about the law, I know they’ve had no real experience with actual legal matters. A good lawyer can argue for a lot of exceptions to any law and, if they’re good enough, win. The fact that this guy is going to jail means that his lawyer couldn’t do that, if he even had anything more than a public defender. That’s all.
And, to me, the real question here is one of ownership. If I own the computer, I can install software on it to make sure it is being used the way I see fit. On the other hand, there is the question of a user’s expectation to privacy. If the user on the computer I own expects a certain level of privacy, for whatever reason, and hasn’t been informed otherwise… Well, let’s just say the law gets a little hazy at this point. Really, in most things legal, there just aren’t any absolutes. Ask a lawyer, they’ll pretty well tell you the same thing.
The other points that the commenter made about raising children and marital affairs leads me to believe that he is simply inexperienced or naive. When he wrote, “I guess how you raise your kids is your choice, unfortunately. None of mine have ever been in any trouble whatsoever so I will keep my ways going…”, it never occurred to him that his kids might be in trouble, but he hasn’t found out yet. Same thing about the state of his marriage.
Again, I’m not saying I’ve got the only answer, just that there isn’t any absolute answer to this whole issue. What’s more, he falls into the fallacy of ascribing meaning and intent to my disagreement that was not there. When he said that the better way to check up on your possibly cheating spouse was to have them followed by an “ex-cop”, I disagreed. Strongly. Being an ex-cop does not guarantee any level of success in trailing and catching a cheating spouse. And, while “pictures speak louder than words”, often, words from incriminating e-mail speak loudly enough.

Naturally, I don’t advocate breaking the law, but there’s a lot of question about where that threshold is in the digital world. And, simply trusting everyone you have a relationship with is, well, naive at best.

But, all that aside, I wrote this here because I had something left to say, but didn’t see the point of continuing the “discussion” over there.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
   --Albert Einstein

A “new” technique that’s more than three years old.

Huh. So, there was this article on MSN recently titled Lock Bumping: A new burglary threat. Now, I remember reading about this in 2600, the Hacker’s Quarterly a really, really long time ago. And, I seem to recall it was a topic at DefCon a number of years ago, not to mention that Bruce Schneier talked about it in 2005.
But, what gets me is that the article itself mentions that the technique was mad popular by a video in Germany back in 2004.

So, how is this a “new” technique again?

I’ve been doing some guerrilla blog marketing lately.

Nothing underhanded or even sneaky, but I’ve been doing some different things to promote my blog.
For one thing, I’ve been leaving comments on other people’s blogs with links back to mine.  Not the usual suspects, mind you, but new blogs that I haven’t really read before or read on a regular basis.  And, to find those places, those blogging “undiscovered countries”, so to speak, I’ve been following links in comments on blogs that I do read on a regular basis.  But, beyond that, you may have noticed the BlogRush widget on my sidebar.  I’ve been looking at blogs from there, too, in part because I’ve never read them, but also because they’ve probably never read me.  So, I go and, if they seem interesting or cool or whatever, I leave a comment with a link back to my blog, hoping that folks will find my comment interesting and come take a look.  No idea, yet, how BlogRush is affecting my overall traffic, though.  I like the idea in theory, but in practice… Well, who knows.  If it brings me even one more reader, that’s good enough.

The other thing I’ve been doing is leaving stuff with my blog’s name and address on it in physical locations.
So, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had to go to the clinic a couple of times for various reasons and I thought it would be a good idea to leave business cards on tables with my blog information.  Again, if it brings even one more reader, why not, right?  Oh, and for those of you who are new, the “clinic” isn’t the free clinic to find out if I have a sexually transmitted disease, but the lymphoma clinic at M. D. Anderson.  Nothing to worry about, just blood work.
Yesterday, I left magazines with stickers on them that said “This magazine donated by: Diary of a Network Geek” and, again, gave the web address.  I left old copies of Men’s Health and 2600, The Hacker’s Quarterly in a couple of spots in the clinic waiting room.  Next time, I’ll have both Men’s Health and Wired magazines.  In fact, today I was sorting a couple of old Wired magazines and stickering them in preparation of the next visit to a waiting room.

Honestly, I don’t know that any of that will be very effective in driving my readership up at all, but, I have the old magazines and stickers and business cards, so, I figure, what can it hurt.
Have any of my readers done anything similar?  If so, what were your results?