In Valid Logic

Rob posted a teaser of something new coming from Telligent.  I don’t think he could resist himself.  Find out why for yourself next Tuesday.

I hate Comcast.  I’ve posted before about how much I dislike them.  Now they’ve gone and ruined my ideal testing environment.

I am a total fan of using virtual machines.  I spin a new one up whenever I have a new piece of software to test in an environment other than my own, or if I want to try out some software before installing it on my desktop.  I have a nicely equipped server specifically for virtual machines.  I use VMware Server running on top of Windows 2003.

Earlier this week, I had an idea for tweaking it out to be the ultimate test environment.  I could install a mail server on it and add an MX record to my DNS for *.subdomain.qgyen.net, that way I could run lives tests on things like Mail Gateway.  And on top of that, I could have the server run ISA Server and easy make sites on the various virtual machines publicly accessible.  It know that when it receives a web request for test1.subdomain.qgyen.net, to redirect it to the proper internal virtual machine.  It was working delightfully.

Then Comcast laid the smackdown on me last night.  I haven’t gotten any confirmation, but around 7pm, my connection went down.  Finally, after a couple of hours, I started getting intrigued and was messing around.  The cable modem showed it had a full signal, however it wouldn’t pair up with the public network card.  So then I switched it back to my old Linksys router with DD-WRT, and it works flawlessly.  Go back to my server, nothing.  Arg!

So after 3 days of utilizing the server for some testing, mostly doing some test emailing, Comcast decides to block it?  What gives!  Heck, years ago, I used run my entire domain from my home server.  Email, website, and all.  And they never blocked me.  Now, maybe a couple of dozen emails over a few days and I get blocked.

I could do the same set up for email with DD-WRT no problem, but don’t know about making the websites accessible (unless I did them using port translation).  But even then, I think I will try to get some confirmation from Comcast before I do, since if they block my Linksys router, then I am really going to be pissed.  I hate Comcast.

It is that time of the year… election season.  When we are bombarded with an endless stream of political advertisements that make us want to poke our eyes our.

I think the local government guys often times get a little bit more creative.  They aren't noticed as much, so they have to do things to stand out a little more.  With the mail today came this flyer for this guy Patrick Hume, running for Elk Grove City Council.  In big, bold letters it said "Elk Grove City Council: Leadership 2.0".  I instantly rolled my eyes… now politics is making a play on the "Web 2.0" buzzword.

Our of sheer curiosity, I decide to flip it open to read something to the tune of: (I threw it out, so going from memory)

I have been a small business leader for the past X years.  Over that time, I've learned two important lessons: to change with the times, but to not forget the fundamentals.

Our City Council has failed on both of these.  I represent new leadership.  Leadership 2.0.

[speechless]

I do have to hand it to his campaign crew though… they are creative.  While it may make me roll my eyes, it is fairly creative.  And he  has some pretty good tactics.  A couple of days ago, we get some mail from his campaign.  It is a letter that is supposedly from his mother urging people to vote for her son.  It even included a free hotpad!

One thing I can’t really resist getting amusement from the is the development cycle of Helm 4, the Windows hosting control panel suite by Web Host Automation.  A while ago, I was looking for some control panel software to run on my server (which has since been parted out) and ended up buying a license of Helm 3.  In the process of researching the options, I found out about the history of Helm 4’s development cycle and became rather intrigued.  In the Windows server market, the choices for control panels are pretty slim, so while I ended up buying Helm over some of the others (Plesk, DotNetPanel), it wasn’t exactly because it wasn’t the best one, but rather the lesser of other evils (DotNetPanel probably would have been notice, but not as mature).

Version 4 of their product has been in development with continually delayed released dates for over a year and a half now.  Initially, they had talked about a beta release mid-last year, with an official release in late 2005.  That never happened.  Fast forward to October 2006, Helm 4 is still being the Duke Nukem Forever of the webhosting industry.  They did finally release a “beta” version in in July, and had posted about a final release of October 2nd.  October 2nd came, and literally that day, they pushed it back to the 9th.  However, the kicker is they said it was 90% complete and that there would be an announcement about timing on the 9th (not a release).  How is a product that has been in development for over a year, in beta for 3 months, and supposed to have RTM’d that day only 90% complete?  And if you quantify it as 90% considering all that, how do you expect to make enough progress in a week?  As you might guess, the week delay to October 9th became an additional two week delay to October 23rd and then an additional three week delay until November 13th.

They now have released Beta 4, and my opinion is that 4 betas is too many.  If it takes you 4 test releases and you still haven’t nailed things down, is it really anywhere near being releasable, or for that matter, stable?  I’ve seen a number of product releases (from other programs) that were labeled as a Release Candidate that are anything but that.  The Wikipedia definition has always been my opinion of what qualifies as a beta, an more importantly, a release candidate:

“The term release candidate refers to a final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge. In this stage, the product features all designed functionalities and no known showstopper class bugs. At this phase the product is usually code complete.”

A release candidate should be capable of turning into the official release of no showstoping, fatal issues arise within a week or so of testing (for smaller products, not big things like Operating Systems… they could take longer).

The thing that struck me most about WHA was how loyal many of their users are despite almost no project management and a poor track record of continually missing deadlines.  The users actually defended them!  I love our Community Server users, but we would never get away with that kind of track record.  There would be chaos in the streets if we set hard dates and continually pushed them back.  Especially if we had official release delays of a year in length.  The amazing thing is that their customers are usually business owners as well… surely they must understand a missed deadline would affect their own business.  I just don’t get it.

With the release of the betas, I did try out Helm 4 on their online demo and was anything but impressed.  It had the same confusing interface, it seemed slow and bloated, with a seemingly heavy dependence on third-party UI components, and not a lot of “Web 2.0″ functionality built into it.  This is what people have been waiting for?  This is the future of the program I bought?  What was all that time spent on?

Throughout the delays, there were a number of mentionings that it was due to features being stolen and such… they had to go back to the drawing board to one-up the competition.  In my opinion, they were most likely referring to DotNetPanel, though I find it difficult to believe in stolen features when DNP has been out with a stable release for a while, and Helm has yet to have an official release of those features.  So if they aren’t first, can you really call them stolen?

I may sound like I am bitter.  Perhaps I am.  I bought Helm without actually getting to try Helm 4, and then I was disappointed.  Either way, I am now no longer using my Helm license, and I’m instead waiting for them to finally release Helm 4 so I can upgrade my license and then sell it (if I sell it now, it won’t qualify for an upgrade).  Then as a developer, I am just amazed a small business could operate like that.  It doesn’t seem as though there is a lot of business experience backing the company, and not a good recipe for a long-term future.  I was also just in a mood to stur *** up.

The other day, I mentioned that I’d decided to do a fresh install of Vista RC2 to give it a try.  Part of the reason for deciding to try Vista was because last week I had a bit of an encounter that prompted me to need a complete reinstall.

About two months ago, one of my friends got “keyloggered”, where he found that a keylogger had made its way onto his system, unbeknownst to him, and had been logging all his keypresses for nearly a month.

On Thursday of last week, I managed get keylogged as well.  Though as a small bit of luck, I had recently installed Windows Defender to give it a try and it caught it right away.  The keylogger I got was the Ardamax Keylogger.  Defender caught it right away and removed it, but everytime I rebooted, it would redetect it.  I did a full scan with Defender, but it didn’t find anything.  I had downloaded some spyware tools, but none of them found everything.  I went over everything in HijackThis, but couldn’t find it.  Most likely, it had embedded itself in something.  And, lucky me, my most recent backup of my system was over a month old.

So the only logical solution was to reformat and reinstall… completely fresh.  I’d decided to give Vista RC2 (and Office 2003 B2TR) a honest try this time.  I took out my problematic Creative sound card and I’m just using the onboard sound support (more on that later).

The good thing though, was that I detected it quickly and got rid of it promptly.  If it even managed to send them any of its logs, I know I only typed in two passwords while it was on, both of which have been changed and were only used on non-trivial things (ie, email, IM).

As a result of all this, I’ve learned some important lessons:

• Everyone is susceptible.  When Jayson got a keylogger, I was surprised.  He is a developer.  Developers should be competent enough to avoid them.  Wrong.  Developers and other tech savvy people have a false sense of security.  It can cost you big.
• Previously, I used to run without ongoing spyware and antivirus protection.  I’d scan suspicious files before I ran anything, but didn’t have continuous checking before I didn’t want any performance drain.  Forget it.  I’d rather have a small performance hit than face identity theft.

And as a result of the lessons, taking some actions:

• Running spyware/antivirus protection with continuous checking.  Since using Vista right now, somewhat limited in options.  For now, using Windows Defender and OneCare.
• More aggressive maintenance.  This includes nightly defrags (currently using PerfectDisk) and nightly incremental backups (using Acronis TrueImage).  I will likely do a full backup once a week, and keep the backups for 2 weeks to 30 days, so I have good range to fall back on.  Also, will likely FTP the images to another box which has a RAID1 array on it, to protect against anything that might get on the system and corrupt the images.

Also, since I’ve found whenever these things come up, someone always says “just use Apple, just use Linux”.  That is not a solution, that is simply someone else with their own false sense of security.  Spyware attacks Windows because the majority of people use Windows.  Using any operating system without spyware and antivirus protection, and going around saying “I’m safe… I’m safe” is simply an open invitation.  A false sense of security is probably one of the things scammers like most.

Is there really any point to the new HD Radio rave?  I mean, please give me a solid reason why I should care.  I am tired of all the stupid HD radio commercials, and I am hardly ever in my car to be able to hear them.

First, I have a stock deck.  I like my stock deck.  It integrates very nicely with the styling in my car.  I don’t want to change it.  Is HD radio supposed to so outstanding it would motivate me to buy a third party deck, leaving behind the nice flush integration?  No.

Second, third, fourth, and fifth (because it is a big reason), all the radio stations around here suck!  All the radio stations when I go into the Bay Area suck!  They all have lame DJs, tons of commercials, small service area, or play the same played out music.  The content of the stations is horrid.  They always have the “listen to us in HD radio… ooooo ahhhh” plug.  Why?  So I could listen to all their commercials in “HD”?  Get a 3 minute song, 10 mins of commercials, and then 10 mins of some DJ running his mouth?

Honestly, as your average consumer, I see absolutely no motivation to buy an HD radio.  On the flip side, I could totally go for satellite radio.  My main reason for not getting it is because on average, I hardly drive.  Though whenever I go into the Bay Area, I find myself wanting it more and more.

On Friday, I decided to do a fresh install of Vista RC2 and actually give it a good attempt.  Encountered two things that others might want to be aware of…

Tip 1: Make sure you hard drives are the first boot device other than floppies/cdrom.

I had previously done a fresh install of Vista RC1 and it worked just fine, but this time around, it kept saying “Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation”.  What the heck?  I was doing all kinds of stuff… fresh install of XP, fixmbr, fixboot, full scandisk, everything.  Finally, a little blurb on Google pointed out the tip to make sure it is the first boot device.  Well, mine surely was… I had no other hard drives or anything else.

Then, for the heck of it, I decided to go into the BIOS and noticed I had USB Mass Storage device first.  Later, it clicked.  My USB printer was plugged in, and it has a card reader built into it that Windows sees.  So it must have thought the card reader was of higher priority, even though it didn’t show in the installer anywhere, or have any media.  Moving up the hard drives fixed the problem.

Tip 2: When you change hardware, be sure to have Vista re-evaluate your system for performance.

When I first installed Vista, my video card was my way old Nvidia Quadra NVS280 with 64mb ram.  It supported Aero at 1600×1200 on one display, but not on two.  I had a new video card on order and it arrived later in the day.  I figured going from 64mb to a Geforce 7600GT 256mb, it surely would support 1600×1200 on dual monitors.

Got the new video card, popped it in, but still no go.  1600×1200 on one display worked, but not two, then found 1280×1024 on both displays worked, and then 1600×1200 on one and 1280×1024 on the 2nd worked, but not 1600×1200 on both.

Finally, I went to view my Windows Experience Index with the new card.  Previously, I only had a 2.0 due to the video card.  On the screen, it said it had detected new hardware and should rerun.

After re-running the performance test, it occurred to me that Vista might base its features off of the tests.  Sure enough, it does.  After re-running the test, I was able to update to a flawless 1600×1200 on dual displays with full Aero support.  So when you upgrade your hardware, be sure to re-run the tests, as Vista may base its settings off of your old statistics.

As Rick announced yesterday, started October 30th, he will be joining the Telligent Support Team!  Rick (aka "The Wizard" on the CommunityServer.org) is one of the CS MVPs and was previously on the support team for ASPnix.

I am sure ASPnix will miss him, though I think he'll be a strong asset for Telligent as well.  He already has a ton of experience with Community Server through his work on the forums and at ASPnix, especially in regards to running and managing Community Server in a hosted environment.  I was very glad to hear he was joining.

Please give him your congratulations!

A couple of days ago, I decided to upgrade the ROM on my Verizon XV6700.  I’d heard that the latest ROM introduced some new fixes, added the ability to lock the screen, and, most importantly, introduced the new push email support when using Exchange.

So I had downloaded the ROM and the instructions on upgrading, but either I completely missed the note, or they just neglected to point it out, but it completely wiped everything off of it.  Gee thanks!  All the programs I had installed, all the tweaking I’d done on my home screen, my top scrores in solitaire, all gone.

If they had pointed out that it would erase everything, I wouldn’t have cared.  I would have just downloaded the latest versions of my programs and saved the latest version of some of the configuration files for my home screen widgets.  But no… I figured it would reset everything, but not erase everything I had saved.  And unfortunately, I didn’t have copies of the files on my miniSD card… only on the ROM itself.

So, for anyone else looking to upgrade the ROM, and a note to myself for the future, back up your stuff before upgrading!

Scott had posted earlier about being in San Francisco the second week of November for a conference and was planning on having a CS MeetUp the night of November 9th to meet and talk about Community Server.  I will definitely be there, and Jose said he was be there as well.

If you’re going to be at the Web 2.0 Conference or are in the Bay Area, definitely drop Scott a line and come out!  Don’t know where yet, but most likely will be Thursday, November 9th.  Would definitely love to meet up with some people.  Great chance to voice your complaints about CS 2.1 and find out what is coming in CS 3.0 and beyond.