T Bryce Yehl: Bryce's Tech Channel

Moving

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 20:15:07 GMT

I'm finally taking the plunge and switching to "MT". I'm not going to bother importing this weblog, at least not initially. Too much work for too little benefit. My archives can stay here indefinitely.

My new home page and weblog. Feeds are available in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 flavors. I'm not going to set up RSS redirects. I don't like Userland's solution because any aggregator that doesn't understand the format will barf on it. HTTP 301 redirects are better supported, but I don't feel like reconfiguring Apache to allow .htaccess files.

For the couple of people that subscribe to my category feeds, I'll get around to re-creating those eventually. Stay subscribed to the current feeds and wait for an update.

Distributed Tivo cracking

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 15:02:59 GMT

With the newest version of the TiVo software (Version 3.2), TiVo has once again changed the secret password to enter "backdoor" mode, which lets advanced users enable hidden features. Unlike last time, people were not able to quickly find the new code, so a distributed computing project was started to find the backdoor codes. You can read about it Here, grab the Linux or Windows clients and pitch in some CPU time for a good cause." [Slashdot]

POPFile, Part III

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:48:27 GMT

The mail parser has been updated to handle Outlook .MSG files.

There's a thread on corpus drifting that covers my thoughts on using positive reinforcement to help POPFile to learn. On the mailing list I am training POPFile on, it has missed 3 of 22 messages today. I'm thinking that POPFile needs about 100 messages in the corpus to get accuracy into the high 90s for mailing lists.

On the spam front, I seem to be in the middle of a drought. POPFile has missed 1 of 5 messages since yesterday.

I've found another bug, POPFile seems to top out at 8 simultaneous connections. I have 10 POP accounts in three of Outlook's "Send/Receive Groups." They have staggered times for checking mail but every so often they all overlap...

POPFile, Part II

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 17:16:30 GMT

I got "POPFile" working, at another user's suggestion I exported some mail folders as .csv text files instead of individual .msg binary files. So far I've put 5500 messages into the corpus, with about 5% being known spam and half of the remainder coming from 16 mailing lists.

I'm keeping all of my Outlook rules in place until I am confident in POPFile's classifications. I've added two rules for POPFile, for spam and a mailing list that I just joined. The new list is a good test of how quickly POPFile can be taught. The intial corpus was just 15 messages, so far it has correctly classified 3 out of 5 new messages.

One problem I see with teaching POPFile is that the web interface only allows for negative reinforcement, ie: this message is classified wrong, it should be this. For a small corpus, my gut feeling is that positive reinforcement would be more beneficial. There's probably a tipping point where that sort of feedback loop would have a negative affect on accuracy, but that is something for a math genius to figure out.

POPFile's author will be on TechTV today at 19:00 Eastern.

I wish I'd known about these types of filtering programs years ago. From 1998 until 2001, I would receive 10,000 messages on a normal day and several times that on really bad days. I needed over 100 Outlook rules to manage the chaos and focus my attention on the 5% that mattered to me. ifile was first released in late 1996.

I Have a (Backup) Dream

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 15:46:05 GMT

A few months ago I wrote about the pains of backing up large drives. I use a 60GB drive for backups of important files from my main 120 gigger, but I think that I'll outgrow this solution in 6 months. Fortunately I have a pair of 30 giggers lying around...

Looking at the files I am backing up, well over 90% of the space used is static -- changes are rare, additions are infrequent. I need a long-term archiving solution. Burning those files to CD isn't very appealing, I would need about 100 of them (I'd want two copies of everything because I have little faith in CDRs for long-term storage). DVDs would be more practical, I could probably find a Firewire burner to borrow...

What I'd really like is a hybrid online backup service. My upstream bandwidth is about 8KB/s on a good day, doing an initial backup of this data over the Internet would take an insane amount of time. NetFlix has the right idea for moving large quantities of data around: the US Postal Service. Send me a Firewire/USB drive for that initial backup, use the Internet for incrementals. Archive my static data to tape and warehouse it somewhere -- if my system crashes I won't mind it taking some time to retrieve that data, so long as I get it back eventually. Keep my last incremental online and recent ones near-line, that's the stuff that I'll want back quickly.

I've got no idea if such a service could be made affordable for consumers, but it would certainly be more useful than a purely Internet-based backup service.

Client-side Spam Filtering

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 14:43:39 GMT

I've always wondered why client-side spam filters for Windows are designed to work only with certain mail clients. SpamNet and Spam Assasin Pro only work with Outlook 2000+, SpamNix for Eudora 3+, etc... These tools could reach a wider audience if they were built as generic POP/IMAP proxies.

Open Source to the rescue. POPFile is a POP3 proxy that uses "Naive Bayes" for classification, written in Perl but geared for Windows users. Pop3proxy and IMAPAssasin use the Spam Assasin engine.

Microsoft Introduces New Solution for Windows-Based Hosting

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 20:36:07 GMT

Microsoft Corp. today announced a new solution for Windows-based hosting that offers service providers a comprehensive set of tested software tools and scripts with supported architecture guidelines. [Press Release, Information, via ActiveWin]

Finally, justification for five years of paranoia with my former employer. Automation of provisioning, monitoring, and patch distribution are the key ingredients for sustainable growth. We spent years perfecting these systems, now anyone can just cut a check to Microsoft...

Goodies

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 23:44:09 GMT

The replacement motherboard for my 1.1GHz Gateway and my new 1.3GHz Celeron arrived today. Neither system has any love for the 1.3GHz chip

Scrounging on eBay for a deal on a motherboard that will work with the chip. I'd wanted to avoid that because I really hate mucking around with PC innards, especially motherboards... but I've spent so much time in there lately that it no longer matters.

Multi-Head

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 15:38:57 GMT

Saturday on Ask Slashdot:

I'm looking for some definitive, legitimate studies/research that show that using a multiple-monitor setup yields increased productivity for code development. (or disproves, as the case may be.)" [...] I'd like to submit a proposal to our IT and Process groups recommending a "trial run" on some small project, but am having a difficult time finding enough empirical evidence to crack the budget-clench.

Microsoft's Center for Information Work includes a wrap-around display that is essentially a triple-headed design using 17" LCDs.

I went dual-head at home in Y2K, but could never convince my own manager in Germany of the benefits. My protege from the US came to visit once, however, and got his whole team outfitted with dual-head setups shortly therafter. For anyone who often needs to view two windows at once, the productivity gains are obvious and immediate. Compared to putting a second computer on someone's desk, the cost of adding an additional display is minor.

The worst thing about a multi-monitor setup is that they are addictive. I had to give up my second monitor a few months ago, and it feels like I am trapped in hell. I can't get a meaningful, simultaneous view of two windows a 17" screen. The drain on my productivity while coding is so severe that it's hard to work up the motivation to start...

Plug-n-Play still needs work

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 04:45:21 GMT

I had to re-arrange all of my USB peripherals today. The way that Windows XP handles the situation is less than desirable, prompting for the locations of many driver-related files. Changing the location of a device should not cause Windows to "forget" that drivers were already installed and working...

And then I got this dialog:

How the hell does Microsoft not have Windows Logo testing on their own drivers? What a great example for them to set!

Upgrade Woes Follow-up

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 20:34:40 GMT

In Upgrade Woes I wrote about my motherboard supporting a maximum of 8x for the clock multiplier, making any sort of CPU upgrade unattractive on a price/performance basis. Yesterday I did some IT work at a friend's office and decided to take home a dead 1.1GHz Celeron system in trade. Plopped the CPU in my box, figuring the worst that could happen is that my system would run it at 800MHz. Turned it on, POST shows 1100MHz, BIOS settings show the 11x multiplier, benchmarks prove it is running at speed, and it's about 10C cooler than my PIII 733MHz.

So now I'm ordering a 1.3GHz Celeron chip and hitting eBay to get a replacement motherboard for the 1.1GHz system. Looks like $200 worth of my time and money will net me two computers that are much faster than the one I had...

I love a good bargain!

Tablet PCs - the cool portables that come with a free pen

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 21:37:03 GMT

How do you put people off pen computing? Easy - put out a pen computer whose pen facilities seem more or less glued onto a normal computer, with only perfunctory integration with the rest of the platform. [The Register]

To my mind, the upcoming crop of Tablet PCs are a solution in search of a problem. A regular laptop with a touch-screen doesn't do much for me. They need to be smaller, much smaller.

CDMA, Cell Phone Standards And Who "Wins"

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 20:08:08 GMT

Fubar writes "Former Qualcomm engineer Steven Den Beste, Captain of the USS Clueless outlines why he thinks the US is primed to overtake Europe and Japan as the technological leader in cell phone technology. He argues it stems from open competition and the use of CDMA."

Superior technology is irrelevant. The EU's problem is that they legislated the adoption of a certain technology before it was ready. America's problem is that it takes forever for the market to select a plurality of winners. America rarely sees the benefits of a single dominant standard unless it is legislated (think: color television) or the market is manipulated (think: Microsoft "CPU Tax" OEM contracts).

Upgrade Woes

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 05:19:11 GMT

My computer is approaching it's 5th half-birthday. I thought that I would celebrate by swapping my (formerly very expensive) 733MHz PIII for a (now quite cheap) 1.3GHz Celeron... but I discovered that my motherboard's maximum bus multiple is 8x. I knew that I had been overlooking something way back when... I can trade up to an 800MHz Celeron or 1GHz PIII. Not much value for my few upgrade dollars.

Swapping my motherboard out is pretty much unavoidable. I've grown to loath mucking about with computer innards. My previous PC was one of those Frankenstein beasts that had been through five motherboards, four cases, and at least three of everything else... "Never again", I swore.

But here I am, again, needing to create another Frankenstein.

Blind man sues airline over web site

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 03:57:55 GMT

scubacuda writes "According to Law.com, Robert Gumson, a blind man who uses a program that converts website content into speech, is suing Southwest Airlines (with the help of Miami Beach, FL-based Access Now) for its website being incompatible with his screen-reader program. The case has been filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act under the untested legal theory that ADA provisions on the accessibility of public accommodations to the disabled apply to Internet Web sites just as they do to brick-and-mortar facilities like movie theaters and department stores. [Slashdot]

Dive Into Accessability.

iPod Review

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 22:45:34 GMT

Tom's Hardware has reviewed the iPod for Windows. They like it, which ain't much of a surprise. I wish that they had focussed more on software, but they are a hardware site. What I would really like to see is a review that compares the Apple's software with third-party programs for using iPods with Windows.

GPS and Mobile Devices

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 19:00:13 GMT

allNetDevices: e911 Pros and Cons.

infoSync: Motorola touts new GPS chip. Single-chip GPS in a 7x7mm package, supposedly sensitive enough to work "under dense trees, in a parking garage, or even a chop shop."

infoSync: 1xRTT and GPS from Verizon, Samsung. The a310 features GPS-based e911 functionality and is available now from Verizon.

I've been wondering for a while now if GPS-enabled cell phones will work with PDAs. The carriers are likely to drag their feet in rolling out location-based services, and their early offerings are likely to be corrupted by their need to derive revenue from them. Not to mention the inherent usability challenges...

Old Skool

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 23:54:06 GMT

DOS Batch Files. It's old school, but still very useful:

http://www.ericphelps.com/batch/

There's a ton of information there. I was looking for ways to automate some mundane tasks and came across it. Have fun. [Richard Caetano]

Batch files, the least capable scripting environment ever. Good for running repetitive command-line tasks, and that's about it. Windows Scripting Host is so much better, full of COM goodness.

Microsoft TV/Video Connection

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 05:29:34 GMT

I installed the latest drivers for my WinTV PVR card, and now I see this in my Network control panel:

WTF is a Microsoft TV/Video Connection?!

Leaving Outlook 2002...

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 22:14:31 GMT

As Run DMC said, "It's tricky."

All of the technical issues seem easy enough. I'll use Cygwin/XFree86 to integrate Evolution with my Windows desktop because I dislike using VMware for interactive sessions. Need to figure out the best way of routing my email, but I don't forsee any trouble once I choose a course of action. I think that what I want is to use fetchmail for retrieval to a single local mailbox, let ifile sort it, Evolution configured for local delivery, and IMAP for remote access...

The real problem is getting 900MB worth of email archives into Evolution. The manual says to import my data into Mozilla (or another mbox compatible mailer), and then import that into Evolution. Nice in theory, in practice Mozilla crashes every time that I try. Gonna upgrade from 1.1 to 1.2a, maybe they've already fixed whatever the problem is... Update: They haven't.

If I can't get Mozilla to import my mail, I'm afraid that I'll have to do something silly like migrating all of my messages via IMAP.

Bayesian Mail Filtering -- Not just for SPAM.

Sun, 15 Sep 2002 13:00:08 GMT

ifile is a general mail filtering system that works with a mail client to intelligently filter mail according to the way the user tends to organize mail. ifile uses the machine learning algorithm Naive Bayes to classify e-mail documents.

ifile is different from other mail filtering programs in three major ways:

ifile does not require you to generate a set of rules in order to successfully filter mail
ifile uses the entire content of messages for filtering purposes
ifile learns as you move incorrectly filtered messages to new mailboxes

[via OpenBSD Journal]

If I can figure out how to integrate this with my 10 POP accounts and Ximian Evolution, Outlook and my dozens of rules will be banished from my PC...

Sat, 14 Sep 2002 22:58:03 GMT

DataPlay

pocketnow.com Discussion - pocketnow News: DataPlay is Here Proving that some things actually do make it to market, PocketNow reports a device capable of playing DataPlay disks is made it to market. DataPlay was shown at Comdex several years ago, and at that time rumors (and hopes) were that there would be a way to use them with Pocket PCs since they promised to provide 500 MB disks for a low price. I wonder if the lower price of CompactFlash and Secure Digital cards have made DataPlay irrelevant? [PocketPCHow2 Log]

DataPlay will be a flop. On the storage side, they don't have rewritable media. Bzzt, game over. On the music end I do not believe that there is real consumer demand to replace CDs. DataPlay has some advantages over MiniDisc and CD-based MP3 players, but they've priced themselves well beyond that market. DataPlay is up in iPod territory. For the money, which would you rather have?

Me vs. VMware, Part IV

Fri, 13 Sep 2002 01:42:05 GMT

No difference under any 3.x version of VMware. Host-only and NAT configurations perform just fine. At this point I have to suspect an XP hotfix or one of the (many) driver updates for my NIC, an Intel Pro 10/100. I'm not even going to think about rolling back all of those...

Had a bright idea: Start with a host-only virtual network, disable the VMware DHCP server, add XP's native Bridge feature. Unfortunately, VMware's virtual network driver doesn't support that. Can't use ICS either, my physical LAN uses the IP range it wants, and I can't change that.

Bah. Switching to the NAT config.

Me vs. VMware, Part III

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 22:16:56 GMT

Re-installed 3.1, no difference.

Downloading 3.2 RC and backing up my Virtual Machines now...

Considering downgrade to 3.0, in theory I don't need anything from the newer versions.

Me vs. VMware, Part II

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 12:32:13 GMT

I am still having the problem described in VMware Networking Weirdness. This seems to have started with my upgrade to VMware 3.1. I never had trouble under 3.0, although it had been a while since I used it. The problem isn't exclusive to my Debian guest, for giggles I booted an old Windows NT 4 guest and it also experienced the same transfer problem.

I've scoured the VMware newgroups and FAQs. Disabled the NAT and Host-only adapters. Tried adding "vnet.sendClusterSize=1" to the guest's config file. Just now I disabled everything on my NIC except TCP/IP and VMware Bridge and rebooted. No difference.

At this point I was thinking I should open a support case with VMware. I head on over to their site, log in, and discover that my expected "Complimentary 30 Days Support" is Expired. Those buggers start the clock on the date of purchase.

Their per-incident rate is $90.

Today I am not a happy VMware customer.