Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

i have an update to my recent post on troubles sending mail. I finally called Cincinnati Bell (they didn't answer my e-mails) to inquire about the problem. They told me that outbound port 25 is blocked permanently "for my protection". How irritating. If I want to upgrade my service, then I can send out via port 25, but otherwise I can't. That pisses me off completely. I don't want to pay more per month just so I can send e-mail. What a shake down. Cable modem is looking more and more attractive.

Update September 15, 2003: We now have a work around.

Here are the fireworks photos. Our friend Ib, gaciously had us all over to his aprtment in One Lytle Place that has a great view of the river and the fireworks.

Blogzilla: Very simple and straightforward procedures to change the icon in Mozilla Firebird. It was a breeze.

18-Feb-2004 Update: The instructions still work in Mozilla Firefox.

I love learning culturally quirks and differences. I just came across "Case mapping in Unicode is hard" by Raymond Chen. Its a wonderful post that shows that case senstivity rules are actually ingrained in regional cultures, not just a language. For example, what is a case insensitive match in Quebec isn't one in Paris. Very crazy indeed. Check it out and keep all the poor souls that have to write Unicode String manipulation libraries in your thoughts and prayers.

I absolutely hate Windows Media Player when it allows content to open and control the web browser. Its cool technology when used by benevolent people (think an only training class that autoflips the slides appropriately) but of course most people aren't. Spammers and marketing use this "feature" to great length and its highly irritating (and probably filled with security holes). Thankfully, I found a site that shows how to turn off scripts in Windows Media Player. The machine that I tested it on was a Win98 machine with media player 7. So, I went the registery setting route and that fixed up the problem. It is nice to see that version 9 actually has an options setting to turn this kind of thing off. I can't believe it is enabled by default.

I was reviewing a presentation for my colleague, Josh on log4net, the .Net port of Log4J when I came across that log4net supports logging to a MSN Messanger chat session. How cool and interesting is that! While Log4J does have appenders like Socket and Log Factor Five, which sort of provide this capability, they are somewhat of pain since you have to configure your appender with your current IP address. An IM based appender uses the disintermediary of the chat server to overcome this problem. Its a clever solution to a niche class of problems like getting debugging help from somewhat outside of the firewall or does not have credentials (like a vendor) or to a mobile user who only has a mobile phone (or similar device) on them.

I immediately looked for a Log4J equivilent of this and found that last month, IBM dev works published an article on how to do this with Jabber, the open source, XML based IM server. Very cool.

Also while doing research, I came across this gem, IMTask, which lets you send IM messages as part of your Ant build process. Very cool, very cool indeed.

I am proud to announce that the eTango Blogs now have quite a few index pages.

Home Page (listing all blogs and some stats):

http://people.etango.com/index.html

Recent Entries (last 15 posts across all the blogs):

http://people.etango.com/recententries.html

RSS Feed: http://people.etango.com/index.xml

Recent Comments (last 15 comments across all the blogs):

http://people.etango.com/recentcomments.html

RSS Feed: http://people.etango.com/recentcomments.xml

All of these feeds are updated at least once an hour and potentially more frequently depending on when I post.

All of these links are also located on the eTango Blogs main page.

Just came across Barbecue, which is an open source, Java based API for generating bar codes. It can generate them to a graphics object suitable for printing, or as Swing or SVG objects. I can't testify to quality of the product, but it does seem neat. The API is licensed using an Apache/BSD style license. I look forward to finding a project that would need to use this.

Will has a very nice piece about what he remembers from September 11th. Mine start around the same time his except I was in a car right before 9am driving to the bustop. Its only a 2 1/2 block drive (yes I am lazy). I had the radio tuned to Bob and Tom and they seemed a bit more serious than usual as they mentioned that they was some reports of a plane crash in New York. I wasn't sure if it was a joke or a skit or something but couldn't stick around since my bus was coming. While riding in on the bus there was a lady wearing a walkman who said "something" had happened, but she didn't know what. It wan't until I got to the office did people tell me what was going on. P&G was streaming CNN across the network so I spent a great deal of that day with others watching and listening. I remember Billy and the rest of the crew couldn't get tv coverage at their office in San Francisco so they called me and I place my phone on speaker so that they could listen to CNN.

I just got finished reading Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World by Bruce Schneier. This was an excellent book and covers security and terrorism topics with a layman in mind and doesn't cover any topic that the average person couldn't understand and appreciate. The book uses lots of real world examples to describe security practices and their related trade offs. It also provides a five step decision making process to determine if a security mechanism is worth implementing. To me this is the security world's equivilent of The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Norman's book opened my eyes to thinking about usability in everyday objects. Schneier's book has had the same effect on me regarding security and its technological and civil-liberties related trade offs. I can't recommend this book any higher and I also encourage people to signup for the author's monthly newsletter: Crypto-Gram.

Just heard a great by Eric Burns, moderator of Fox News Watch. He said, "Now its time for our third and final break and we'll be back with your questions. Wouldn't you like to take 3 breaks every half hour at your job." Yes, yes I would.

I have now posted Paramount's Kings Islands photos from P&G Dividend Day 2003.

Overall it was a good trip. We had a nice large group and the threat of rain kept most people away from the park. Also, the cloudyness made for a relatively cool day. We got plenty of rides in across most of the rides in the park. The only downside was on the Backwards Racer. I was taking a few shots with my camera while on the ride (the camera was securely around my wrist) and the attendant got pissed and stopped the train at the top of the lift hill just so he could walk up and take my camera. I shot on a lot of the other rides and no one gave me any hassles. Oh well.

I did get to ride the new rides for this year, Delirium and Scooby's Haunted Castle. Delirium is a flat ride that is a big pendulum that rotates about 300 degrees of a complete circle. At the end of the pendulum is a round car seating about 40 - 50 people facing outward in over the shoulder restraints. As the ride rocks on the pendulumn, the car spins counterclockwise. Its a nice effect. The large circumfernce of the car plus the wheel turning relatively slowly made for some nice effects that just bordered on nausea for a few brief moments. If it spun any faster they might have to do some frequest cleanups at that ride.

The other new ride, Scooby's Haunted Castle is a dark ride in the style of Universal Studio's Men-In-Black ride. While not as elaborate as the MIB ride, King's Island did do a good job hear with nice sets, "mini-Mystery Machine" ride vehicles and decent plot. The ride is probably good enough to go through without playing the laser tag game. With that said, MIB is better because of the faster moving ride and the multiple endings. Scooby's wins points for having better targets and an in-car scoring system that is easy to see.

Thanks to Will and Andrew, I can now relay mail at home to a remote SMTP server without Cincinnati Bell blocking my access. Andrew found the right syntax to use with natd to have incoming traffic on port 2525 be redirected to port 25 on the internal network segment. This gets around Cincinnati Bell's stupid new restriction that blocks outgoing port 25 for "security reasons".

Here is the configuration items added to the natd.conf file:

redirect_port tcp internal_address:25 external_address:2525

redirect_port udp internal_address:25 external_address:2525

Just replace internal_address and external_address with appropriate values and you are all set.

I have now added per entry RSS feeds for this blog. For example, here is the feed for this entry:

http://people.etango.com/~markm/archives/000074.xml

I was a little bit confused about how to handle the RSS Auto-Discovery tag on the individual entry pages. So I have gone ahead and created two rss auto discovery tags, one for the entry and one for the whole site in that order. That seems to be my best guess.

Jennifer, Jason, James, Angela, Barb, Rob, Lisa and I had a great dinner at Cumin, an upscale Indian resturant. I had the Murgh Chettinad which was excellent. There are more pictures available.

Harry, James and I went to Oktoberfest Cincinnati this evening. We had a great time drinking beer, eating Goetta Balls and having some nice cream puffs. There are more pictures.

It was a fine evening, not too hot and the Goetta Balls were nice and crispy. You can't get enough of that sweet action. I wonder why they aren't more regularly available?

I found a great burger recipe over the weekend. It called for:

2 lbs Ground Round

2 tablespoons green peppercorns

1 tablespoon thyme

2 tablespoons dijon mustard

2 tablespoons Worchestire sauce

to that I dabbled and added:

3 cloves of garlic (I had to try out my new garlic press)

1 envelope of dried onion soup

It made 8 burgers and they were fabulous with a little melted sharp ceddar and some bacon on toasted Kaiser Rolls.

I've started to use a Wiki a bit at work and it is growing on me. Couple this with some increased cooking at home and I thought, wow a cooking and recipe gathering would be a great use of the collaborative editing and linking that a wiki provides.

I thought for sure I couldn't be the only who thought of this. I did some searching and did find the Food & Cooking Wiki but there doesn't seem to be a whole going on there and most of the entries are relatively old. I did however add some info to the Bocce Cafe page.

So should I embrace this wiki for adding my recipes or should I attempt to start my own?

I went out recently to a bargin bookstore and came back with a truck load of books for next to nothing.

The Tale of the Tiger by Tom Clancy - I've always loved his older stuff (although his newer stuff has been kinda disappointing (Let's hope this falls into the former)).

The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold: The Secret Life of FDI Double Agent Robert Hanssen by Adrian Havill - I'm a sucker for true crime plus espionage.

Constructing Intelligent Agents with Java by Joesph P. Bigus and Jennifer Bigus - It looks a little old in terms of Java version used but that shouldn't have any baring on the concepts and it is always something that has intrigued me a little. This should be a very excessible introduction to the topic.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown - I admit, I am a sheep. I didn't know anything about the book but have noticed it displayed prominently in several bookstores. I took the bite.

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown - Didn't know about this one but the guy at the bookstore reco'ed I read this one before the Da Vinci Code. Hey, its an discount bookstore, its dirt cheap, I'll bite again. Note: I've started reading this one and it is a fairly fun and fast read. I like the style of mixing historical events with some fiction. That coupled with the nice memories it invokes of my visits to Rome and Vatican City makes for a good time.

Building Web Applications with UML by Jim Conallen - This is from the same series that gave us UML Distilled. I can't imagine it will be as good as that but it intrigued me enough to part with $8.

Blow by Bruce Porter - I loved the movie so as these things go, the book is probably ten times better.

Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine - This looked promising and right after I bought a colleague at work recommended it out of the blue. Also Amazon's readers give it high marks as well.

The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI by Ronald Kessler - Should be interesting.

Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe - Its a collection of short stories (with only one story being about love and sex as advertised by the title). I really enjoyed his A Man in Full, The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities so I jumped at another title by Tom Wolfe even though I hadn't heard of it before (plus it was only $4!!!).

I just came up this little concoction while preparing some bread to go with pasta.

Slice a loaf of ciabatta in very thin strips (approx. 1/8 inch thick)

Arrange the slices on a cookie sheet in a single layer

Drizzle some olive oil on the slices

Drizzle some balsamic vinegar on the slices

Sprinkle some garlic on the slices

Shread some fresh parmesan over them

Place under a broiler until golden brown (watch out, they burn easy).

Enjoy warm or at room temperature.

I've always enjoyed this show since it is so outrageous and has lots of plot twists and turns. I am watching the season premiere right now and the new characters and office are quite jarring. I hope this gets better.

Have you seen the new MSN commercial featuring Sting? Lots of MSN customers in the ad get an IM from StingFan01 which leads them to see the new String video. A few of them wonder who is sending this stuff to them. At the end of the ad we see Sting with a laptop in the back of a cab sending out IMs.

Is this really the vision of the world they want to portray? Random people will just send you ads in IM messages. Granted, getting IM from Sting would be pretty cool, although I doubt that is going to happen to terriblly often. Ugh.