Tag: Technology

Lately I’ve noticed that my machine is quite slow and appears to lock up for seconds at a time causing me to pound the keyboard. It is a 2 year old first generation MacBook Pro so that could explain a lot. However, I installed iStat Menus and turned on the CPU and memory items. It turns out that my processor isn’t maxed out all that often (usually only during compiles). When memory usage tops 50%, things start to slow down. As long as I keep memory usage below this, I seem to be OK. This indicates to me that once the OS starts paging to disk, all hell breaks loose. Of course, this is obvious as hard drives are much slower in RAM, but I always like to have lots of stuff open and never paid much attention to RAM usage; with virtual memory, it is easy to loose sight of RAM.

Is there anything I can do about this? Nope. My machine has 2 GB of RAM and that’s all it can handle. Once Apple releases new MacBook Pros, I’ll be ordering one immediately and loading it up with at least 4 GB of RAM (the new machines can handle 4 GB of RAM; hopefully newer ones can go higher). This also brings up something interesting; Apple’s RAM prices are no longer completely outrageous. The current price for loading in 4 GB of RAM in a MacBook Pro is $200 whereas The Chip Merchant sells it for about $100. While it is double, it is significantly less than it was in the past.

I was doing some testing today and had to re-arrange my USB hubs to put certain devices at the beginning of the chain. Hubs, you ask? Yes, I have 3 powered USB hubs and a ton of devices. Does it all work? For the most part, yes. I really wanted a 14-21 port hub and not have to chain hubs together, but I’ve been unable to find one, except for one that someone hacked together. Am I that unusual to have so many devices? OK, I may have a few more devices than most people, but aren’t people collecting more devices? Here’s my current list of what is plugged in:

• iPhone
• iPod Nano (2nd generation)
• Fujitsu ScanSnap
• DocketPORT 465 scanner
• NEAT Receipts scanner
• Playstation 2 headset (actually a Logitech headset)
• Garmin Forerunner 305
• DYMO LabelWriter 330
• Generic Flash Drive
• EVDO Rev. A modem
• EPSON CX9400
• Sewell DisplayLink
• MacAlly Keyboward
• Logitech Trackball
• UPEK Fingerprint scanner
• WiebeTech TrayDock

My wife sent me email (yes she sends me email even though she is in the next room) asking for help with a rejected message. She was trying to send to a hotmail.com address; since my domain is hosted on Google for domains, the rejection message was from the gmail postmaster. The error message was:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Gmail tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient
domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about
the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 SC-004
Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed
against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming
from that IP address. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your
E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, we recommend
enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended
to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail list:
http://postmaster.live.com (state 13).

So basically this means that Hotmail is rejecting all email from Gmail. Wow! This is going to be a huge mess. After a bit of searching, I found that my wife wasn’t the only person having problems. In the comments of a year old post, I found 2 references to this issue.

I hope that Microsoft and Google can work out their differences quickly as both are major email providers and the rejecting of email is going to confuse a lot of novice people and piss off even more.

For years when I ran my own server, I made up email addresses for each site I visited and had to enter an email address. They were in the form of somedomain.com@mydomain.com. I then entered an alias into sendmail to forward the mail to me, rebuilt the alias file and all worked well. When I switched to Google for Domains, I couldn’t move over those aliases as I had several hundred and Google limited the number of aliases, so I opted to just use a catchall address. As more and more spammers forge return addresses, the amount of “returned mail” I receive has increased. Spammers use addresses like jorge_1975@mydomain.com and when other servers reject it, I get the bounces. Over the last week, I received almost 25,000 pieces of spam and returned mail.

What do I do? Google’s filters aren’t sophisticated enough to let me only accept mail from *.com@mydomain.com, so I setup another account on my Google for domains to catch all the mail. I’m now in the process of setting up filters to forward legitimate mail to my main account. This isn’t ideal, but at the moment, it is the only way to keep all this garbage out of my main mailbox. What is interesting is that it appears that Gmail’s spam learning is on a per-account basis (at least partly) as my new account has only had a few pieces of spam make it threw even though it is getting the same stuff my other account received.

Now if Gmail supported wildcards in filters, this problem would be much easier to solve.

I can’t give up my catchall address as I’ve forgotten all the sites I’ve signed up for and don’t want to potentially lose stuff (like my bank statement), so I guess I’ll just have to live with this current solution.

Yesterday we had lunch at the Bondi Bar and Kitchen. The restaurant (the restaurant part is a bit of an afterthought; I’d consider it more of a club). I noticed that the waitresses were carrying Palm OS devices, possibly Zire 72 devices. The silk screenscreend buttons were clearly visible and it appeared to have a mag stripe reader underneath it. I’m not sure if they had 802.11 connections or they used IR to transmit the orders, but it was interesting. However, the waitress seemed to spend a lot of time using the stylus to enter the order. I don’t know if this is the most efficient way to enter orders.

I’m kind of surprised that someone decided to use Palm OS for a vertical application these days; the availability of non-Treo devices is kind of questionable and the number of developers still writing Palm OS applications is dwindling rapidly.

Today I received a Sewell Direct USB to DVI adapter which uses the DisplayLink technology. The other day my father received his new iMac and said that I could have my 20″ flat panel display back that he had hooked up to his Windows box. At the same time I saw that DisplayLink had released beta drivers for the Mac, so I couldn’t resist trying out this technology. I haven’t used 2 displays in a long time since I’ve been using laptops (I don’t like using the built in laptop display as a second display as it feels awkward). Installing the drivers was a breeze, but the release notes kind of scared me and I realize that performance is not going to be that of a regular display, but I figured I’d give it a try. I hooked up a Dell 20″ display and it was immediately recognized. It seems to work well, but you can definitely notice the lag. I wanted to get it to have fairly static stuff displayed on it like my iChat buddy list, probably some iChat windows and maybe iCal. It won’t be very usable to Safari or things that change rapidly. It seems to work OK for mail and even composing a message wasn’t all that bad.

I have very high hopes of liking this and if I do, I might have to get another one for a third monitor. Of course, I’ll be pushing the limits of USB; I already have 2 USB hubs that are almost filled.

UPDATE: Setting the desktop picture to solid white makes a HUGE speed difference. While this sounds obvious, I just went with the default which is the same picture as on my main display.

As I was watching our TiVo the other day, I saw that they had a new promotion; watch ads and get Amazon gift certificates. We had nothing to watch, so I watched some ads. This promotion is supposed to go on until sometime in June, so it looks like I’ll be watching more commercials! Talk about a way to get my to watch ads; if it only takes a few seconds and I can get free stuff, sign me up! This is much better than going to the movies and having to pay to watch ads.