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NekFit, hokey but useful

At Macworld, I saw an iPod Nano case called nekfit. I have been running with my iPod Nano using an armband, but the wires always got in the way, so I was intrigued by nekfit. When I stopped by their booth, the marketing guy said if I didn’t like it, give him a call and he’d make it right. So, I went ahead and ordered one. I received it a few weeks back and must say that it looked like something that was slapped together in a garage. If you take a pair of sunglasses, but them on backwards around your neck and attach an iPod to it, that’s what the nekfit looks like.

I’ve taken it for a few runs and after I got all the wires tied up the way I wanted (one of the wires kept getting caught on the side), I think I like it. It’s pretty comfortable and definitely keeps the wires out of the way. I had to turn off the rotate mode on my iPod Nano 4G as I couldn’t switch tracks when it was rotated (it kept going to CoverFlow mode). My only complaint is that I wish I could adjust the angle that the iPod hangs as it kind of rubs against my neck.

Will this last? I have no idea. My previous armbands had to be replaced as the neoprene started breaking down and smelled so bad that I couldn’t use it anymore (I went as far as bleaching it and that didn’t help).

For $35, it is definitely a viable alternative to an armband as long as you don’t mind people thinking you’re a little crazy for having this thing around your neck!

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iWeb, the hidden gem?

I bought iLife ’09 and installed it, but all I’ve had time to do is launch iPhoto a few times and play with the facial recognition which is pretty cool. The other night I was watching CNET’s weekly TiVo videocast and they reviewed or at least introduced iLife ’09 (which is kind of surprising as they seem to not like Macs). One of the things that was mentioned is that iWeb ’09 now has the ability to upload to FTP. Hmmm…I only played with iWeb a few times way back when, but ignored it as I don’t have a .Mac/MobileMe account. I fired up iWeb ’09 and immediately looked for the FTP export. Not only did I find it, I found that it also did SFTP (Secure FTP, which is FTP over SSH). To top off that, it lets you specify the SSH port (I changed the port on my server from the standard 22 to another port to reduce the number of attempts to get in; while people we’re getting in, it bogged down the system denying the requests). Very, very cool. I played a little more with iWeb and am quite impressed; I like the ability to place pictures wherever as it seems more flexible than anything else I’ve used. Publishing worked well and this might be my new web tool of choice (for the little web work I do).

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Hurting the environment by conversing

Prior to our son being born almost 2 years ago, my wife and I decided that we’d use cloth diapers with him (she did the research and I just nodded my head). They are a bit of work to clean and wash (my wife does most of it), but we figure in the long run, they will be better for the environment. How can we say that? Well, we believe that there will be clean energy in the future (solar, wind, etc.) and we’ll (as a society) be able to cost effectively desalinate water.

On the other hand, disposable diapers possibly use less energy to make, don’t require any water to clean, but they will end up in the landfill where they can’t decompose (decomposition requires sunlight and most items in a dump don’t get any sun).

Our mayor has announced that we’ll have water cutbacks this summer and there will be fines for excess use. Since we use a lot of water to do diapers, we have to consider if we’re going to eat the fines or switch to disposable diapers. So if we conserve water and are unable to wash diapers, we’ll have to use disposable diapers that will basically hurt the environment.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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The joys and pains of a VPN

After many years of securing each service, i.e. email, web site, etc. for my servers and servers I managed, I came to realize that the only way to secure a company with more than 1 server is with a VPN. Now that I’ve used a VPN for about a week, I’m extremely happy with it. This will allow us to stop maintaing the firewall on 7 separate servers! My IT coordinator has done an amazing job at getting it running and when he was stuck, he called in a pro (knowing when to say that you don’t know something scores points in my book).

This week, we were trying to connect our San Diego office to our main Minneapolis office. This proved to be much harder than it should have been. We have Cisco routers on both ends and used the EZVPN in the router to establish the connection; turns out it wasn’t very easy. We had it working yesterday, but when I took it into the office, it failed to work. I took another stab at it today. After lots and lots of Google searching, I stumbled across some information about MTUs and made a few changes that amazingly got the VPN working flawlessly! The problem was that I could make connections that only sent a little data, but SSH connections and full web pages over the VPN failed.

The following are changes I had to make to the Cisco 871 on the remote side:

crypto isakmp keepalive 10 periodic

For the Vlan and Ethernet interfaces, I set:

 ip mtu 1400

and on the Vlan1 interface, I set:

 ip tcp adjust-mss 1200

(The last bit was the key.)

I’m tempted to get Cisco certified, but I’d probably pull my hair out if I encountered a problem like this again.

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Picking the right shoes

When I was young, the only shoes that would fit were the blue ones! That was then, now things are a bit more complicated. Up until I started running, I just got some cheap shoes and didn’t really care. Road Runner Sports has a free service called Shoe Dog that helps you pick the right shoe based on so criteria, a tread mill test, and an analysis of your arch. I had been using the same series of shoe, Asics GT-2100 series for a few years. When I went to get my latest pair of shoes, I went with the GT-2140, the latest in the series. Turns out that they made some major changes to the shoe that made them very painful when running. Luckily Road Runner Sports has a 60 day guarantee on the shoes (if you’re part of their “club”) that allows you to run in them. I ran a few times and had such pain, that I returned to Road Runner Sports, did the Shoe Dog again and picked a Saucony shoe that so far is a bit more comfortable.

I’m amazed that I never paid much attention to shoes even though I have spent a lot of time walking and running; if I had known how much a shoe could make a difference in comfort, I would have spent the money for a good shoe a long time ago!

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Courteous neighbors

Last Sunday, I went to take in our trash can and found a surprise, dog poop wrapped in a paper towel (no, I didn’t touch it). The trash got picked up on Saturday, but I didn’t get around to bringing in the can until the next day. To make matters worse, it rained, so I had to attempt to clean out the trash can by scooping out the poop with a stick and then hosing it down. What kind of neighbor, a) puts their dog’s poop in someone else’s trash can (I always take my dog’s poop in a bag back home as I think it is rude to deposit it in someone else’s trash can and b) didn’t use a bag to scoop the poop!

Uggh. We live in a pretty decent neighborhood and have friendly neighbors, but I guess when people aren’t watching people just do whatever they want.

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Tough decisions

About 4 years ago, I became a trained member of my local CERT, Community Emergency Response Team. I attended meetings did training, and even helped out during the 2007 wildfires here in San Diego. As my Disaster Service Worker card expires in June, I started looking at what it took to renew it. There was a lot of email flying around about the requirements and they changed a few times in the last few weeks (about 1.5 years ago, the CERT coordinator for San Diego left for a new job and was replaced by someone that seems bent on making life hard for us volunteers). Last night I went to my local CERT meeting and they talked about the requirements to renew the card and then brought up the topic that they’ve been talking about for 4 years and that is how to outfit a container box that it has with supplies as the money is coming from the city. The box is a huge step forward (it actually exists), but the money still hasn’t been released by the city (it comes from “developer funds” that people paid when our community was first built). Will the city ever release the funds? I don’t know and I’m a bit tired of it.

When I came home last night, I made a decision that both saddened me and relieved me at the same time. I decided not to continue with CERT. I really like the concept of being a community volunteer in case of a disaster, but the hoops that I’d have to go through to continue to be a volunteer are just not worth my time. I will be renewing my EMT certification which I’ve done every two years for the last 16 years, so that I can continue to be trained in case a disaster strikes or maybe I cut my finger and I need to patch myself up.

Judging by the low attendance and some of the discussion at the meeting last night, I won’t be surprised if CERT membership declines rapidly. I really like the concept of CERT and believe it can be an invaluable resource, but it seems like there is far too much politics involved in my local CERT (the new coordinator won’t let anyone email her; we must go through our area people who then talks to a liaison who then talks to her or something like that; the old coordinator responded to a number of my email messages and never made people go through hoops like this).

In any case, I liked being part of CERT, but it is time for me to move on. I wish CERT the best of luck and I hope that things turn around and interest in CERT goes back up.

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Cash vs. Credit

People have speculated that we’d become a cashless society years ago, but this clearly hasn’t happened. While I try to use a credit card for most purchases, sometimes I use cash. For me, they are effectively interchangeable as I pay off my credit card every month and use a credit card with no annual fee. There are a few advantages to credit for me: 1) cash back, 2) easier to keep track of expenses, 3) consumer protection in case there is a problem with the charge. I use cash for purchasing gas to get the cash discount and for the very few places that don’t take credit.

Here’s a case where I should have used credit:

The day after Christmas, I went to pick up my wife and son at the airport and parked at the lot at the airport. When I went to pay the $2 fee, all I had was $20 bills and credit cards. For some reason, I decided to put in a $20 bill and expected to get $18 in $1 coins back (at least that’s what I hoped). Well, the machine took my money, validated my parking ticket, and didn’t give me my change or a receipt. We hit the button to contact someone and after talking to someone in the box, a supervisor for Lindbergh Parking, Inc. came out about 15 minutes later. The supervisor opened up the machine, but didn’t have the key to the money box. We followed him back to the office, my wife filled out some paperwork and we were told to call in the morning. When we got home, there was a message saying that they’d mail us a check. A phone call or two the following week yielded nothing. Last week I wrote a letter to them, but still don’t have my $18. So what do I do next? It is their word against mine. If they reconciled the machine, they would have seen that it was $18 off (unless someone stole $18). It shouldn’t be that hard to get my money.

Anyway, if you don’t want to leave a paper trail, use cash, but for me, credit is far more convenient. I’m not sure why I still pay some things in cash, but I do.

Some people may ask why I don’t use a debit card? Well, consumer protection. With a debit card, money comes out of my bank account and if there is a problem, I have to fight to get it back; with a credit card, I dispute the charge and I don’t pay it. Having had my wife’s debit card stolen and dealing with this, I don’t use debit cards. I asked my bank to send me ATM cards which are different as they only accept PIN based transactions (such as at Costco) and not credit card transactions providing another layer of protection. For secondary accounts, a debit card may not be a bad idea, but for my primary bank account, I won’t use a debit card.

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The Power of Compression

Today I was investigating some slowdowns on one of our customer facing sites and after a few minutes working with our developer and Safari, I determined that we weren’t compressing files sent from the server. (Safari warned me in the Show Network Timeline option in the Develop menu.)

As we’re running Apache 2.2.x on Leopard server, I found that it had mod_deflate already installed. While the module was already installed, it wasn’t setup to do anything. After a few minutes reading the documentation and modifying the Apache configuration files, I had compression working. Yeah! Normally I wouldn’t think this would do a lot of good as the connection is pretty fast, but some of the Javascript we use is quite large and compresses quite well. I definitely saw a speed improvement with this simple change.

So my question is, why isn’t there an option in Leopard’s Web Server that says “enable compression”? I see no downside to this using the configuration on the Apache site (Leopard server actually has this enabled for Collaboration) as most modern browser can handle this and can quickly decompress the files.

For reference, I created a file at: /etc/apache2/httpd_deflate.conf that had in it:


<Location />
	# Insert filter
	SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

	# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
	BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

	# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
	BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

	# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
	# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

	# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
	# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
	# workaround to get the desired effect:
	BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

	# Don't compress images
	SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
	\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

	# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
	Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
	
</Location>

Then in each site file, I put:

        Include /etc/apache2/httpd_deflate.conf
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Macworld Recap

Everyone is posting a recap and analysis of Macworld and I won’t be any different! My trip to Macworld this year, like every year, was a lot of fun, but tiring at the same time. In some years, I’ve worked at the Mark/Space booth, but most years, I just walk around the Expo floor (I don’t find conferences all that interesting to me). I spent the first day walking around the booths to get a lay of the land and talking to people I know (there are some people that I only see at Macworld). The second day, I went up and down every aisle looking for products that would be helpful for my work. Yes, I actually glanced at every booth. There were a number of products that I would never have seen just searching the web.

There has been a lot of speculation about the future of Macworld Expo now that Apple has said that it will not attend next year. For me, Apple’s presence is secondary to all the other vendors. While I can find out about products on the Internet whenever I want, there are many products I would never have known were out there. For instance, nekFIT is a holder for an iPod Nano that goes around your neck. It looks quite interesting so I ordered one (the guy at the booth said if I didn’t like it, contact him and he’d make it right). I love running and the headphone cord always drives me crazy. In addition to that, I did find stuff for work. There is a backup program called CrashPlan that backs up during idle time. Why haven’t I seen anything like this before? Then there is the BT-1 Wireless Webcam from my friends at Ecamm Network.

Will I goto next year’s show? I ordered signed up for my free Expo pass, so hopefully that is a good sign. Will vendors pull out? Likely, yes, but I hope that many of the smaller vendors choose to come. I know it is expensive to come as a vendor, but it is so helpful to come and have so many vendors in one location. The big vendors don’t interest me all that

In addition to looking for things for work, there was some exciting news for me. Mariner Software announced that it had acquired my ReceiptWallet program.