Monday, April 30, 2007

Monday Mac Attack: Lojack for Laptops!

Your laptop has just been stolen. Wouldn't it be cool if your laptop had some kind of beacon/signal mechanism to let you know where it had been taken?

Actually, it can. There are plenty of articles and blog entries on various OS X hints and tips websites about "security on a shoe string" -- using Perl scripts, shell commands, etc to "phone home" after it's been taken from you. I've got to give credit for creativity, but . . . let's be honest here, unless you just happen to be . . . I dunno, The Batman . . . you aren't going to track it down and recover it all by yourself.

Nope, you'll need cooperation from an Internet Service Provider (HA!) and police assistance (rolls eyes) to recover your laptop. If the police department in your neighborhood is anything like mine, trying to get them to follow up with an Internet Service Provider about getting customer records for an IP address is almost as difficult as getting through an airport metal detector after you've gone bird hunting with Dick Cheney! It's not that they don't want to help, but they've got plenty of other things to take care of already, and Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol isn't a topic frequently covered in most police academies.

That's where the combination of software and service called "Lojack for Laptops" comes in. You install the software on your laptop and it "calls home" approximately every 24 hours with information about its network configuration. When you notify them that your laptop has been stolen, they activate a switch that causes the software to report more frequently-- as often as every 15 minutes. If the thief connects the laptop to the Internet, this company deals with the Internet Service provider and the police for you.

I'm gonna be honest here-- I was about 24 hours away from writing a really scathing review of this product. I bought it at a CompUSA store that is closing down, so I got a little bit of a price break on it. (I should mention-- this product appears to come in versions for Mac OS X as well as Windows, and I was using the Mac version.)

When I tried to install it the first time (a strange combination of CD and Web registration/installation), I was able to register my laptop with their web service, but there was a vague error message concerning Java when I tried to complete the installation. I was running under a login that had administrator privileges, had the latest version of Java I could run under 10.3.9, etc. I scanned through the FAQ/Troubleshooting documents for any mention of Java, but there wasn't any. I tried calling their tech support number, but they were closed on weekends. At this point, I figured "Well, I'm totally screwed! Nothing left to do but write a scathing email and kiss my money goodbye."

The following morning, I received an (automated?) email to the effect of "Hey, we saw you registered a computer with us, but the software hasn't made its first report. If you were not able to complete the installation, check these four items." Naturally, one of those four items had to do with the Java error message that I was experiencing. (Okay, it really should be in the FAQ/Troubleshooting documentation, guys-- but I will give you points for eventually getting the right info to me.) Basically, I had to create a brand new account and give it admin privs, and then run the install again. At that point, everything seemed to work fine and the software completed installation.

Overall experience? 3.5 out of 5, but ask me after my laptop gets stolen! LOL

One final thought-- recovery software is a great idea, but it isn't a silver bullet for all the issues that a laptop theft can present. Do you really want someone who is willing to steal other people's property to have access to the data you keep on your laptop? Take steps to encrypt and control access to your data-- such as the FileVault feature found in OS X. And while we are on the topic of data-- you should also be making regular, reliable backups of your data on some kind of removable media or storage device, just in case something like this DOES happen. You might want to check out Mozy.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Sudoku Sunday

Last week, I posted a 5-star difficulty Sudoku puzzle, so I figured I'd better post a simple one this time around.

Enjoy!

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Racism and Evolution

Last night I had a disturbing and disheartening encounter with a black teenager. I'm sure he was trying to "impress" the girl he was with, but the whole experience has left me with a nagging question:

What if racism is a response to evolutionary competition? In other words, we are all competing for limited resources-- and the scarcity of these resources brings people into conflict. What if racism allows people to psychologically dehumanize their competition, so they can be emotionally free/capable of doing horrible things to other human beings in order to "win the prize?"

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sudoku Sunday

This puzzle appeared in the 4/21 DC Examiner; it has a difficulty rating of five stars. I'm including it here because I found some interesting stuff going on in the bottom left corner.

Basically, I'd gone through the "brute force" method (i.e. figuring out the possible values for each square and annotating them) and found the same three numbers (e.g. 1,2 and 6) repeated in three cells in a row. Although I couldn't tell which number appeared in which cell, I knew that no other cells in that row could use those same numbers. I'd seen that same approach/technique with pairs of number in adjacent cells before, but never triples.

The solution is here for those of you who don't have the time or patience to work through it.

Friday, April 20, 2007

We will not whine before it is time :( Ok, it's time now.

Well, much as I hate to say it, my idea of using Blogspot as an app platform for a wine reference via XHTML capable cell phones is apparently a failure.

When I try, for example, to pull up the list of red wines on my cell, I get the message that the amount of data being processed (by the browser? by the proxy??) is too large. When I read Nokia's browser specs, it says it has a 32 K maximum. When I download and save the page on my desktop computer, it only weighs in at 20K. The only hypothesis I have is that the iframe at the top of blogspot pages somehow isn't "counted" by my desktop web browser . . . but it's just enough to push my cell phone past its limits.

Since there's no apparent way to get rid of the blogspot toolbar at the top (while still hosting it on Blogspot.com, I mean), I can't even test my hypothesis very easily.

So, it looks like Wine411 gets sent to "the farm" . . . where it can run free and play with other web projects of mine that never quite worked right.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

WWW Wednesday: Google's GOT CHARTS! YIPEE!

GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS HAVE CHARTS!

GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS HAVE CHARTS! :)

GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS HAVE CHARTS!! :D

(This spontaneous outburst of joy was brought to you by Lifehacker and the number 12.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Trivia Tuesday

Aussies call this rock band "Acca Dacca." The rest of the world knows them by a different name. Who are they?

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Wine411, revisited

I gave my Wine411 web reference a "dry" run today at lunch. Although it did work, it had some issues that kept it from being a smashing success in my mind. First, the navigation is far from intuitive-- so I need to find a better way to manage that. Second, the pages take too long to download on a GPRS phone-- so I've reverted the template for that blog back to a Classic Template and pared it down as thin as I can manage.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

World Wine (sic) Web ;)

Sorry I haven't made a blog entry for the past several days, but I've been immersed in my latest web dev project. It's far from ready for prime time, but I think it's far enough along that I can at least debut it with a huge asterisk that says "BETA" on it.

(Hey, Microsoft and Google do it all the time-- so why not? LOL)

Several weeks ago, I was listening to the GQ Magazine podcast, and the topic of discussion was "All you need to know about wine." This rekindled in me the interest to try learning more about wine again. After some trial and error, I discovered that I seem to like red wines better than white wines, and my favorite red at this moment is the Cabernet Sauvignon.

Of course, you aren't supposed to have wine all by itself-- if you want to really enjoy it, you need to pair it with a complimentary food. I have some acquaintances who are fantastic at this, but I have no sense for this sort of pairing. Fortunately, there are reference guides and books for people like me, but who wants to walk into their favorite restaurant with a copy of "Wine for Total Friggin' Morons" tucked under their arm? Nothing says "NOOB!" like a black and yellow book.

Having a condensed version of a food pairing guide on your cell phone, on the other hand . . . .

So, I created a relational database, worked out all the various tables, the foreign keys, the relationships, etc. only to realize that I'd need to host this somewhere that had mySQL and PHP or Perl! Well, don't get me wrong-- this is an entertaining diversion, but spending $8 or $10 a month just so I can have my own personal wine/food pairing reference seemed pennywise and pound foolish.

So, there I sat with my glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, stymied. Perhaps it was a flash of genius, or perhaps I was just a little drunk (???), but that's when it occurred to me that you could use Blogspot's search capability, its tags, etc. as a form of application platform. You'd need to cut the template down tremendously to get it to display on older cell phones properly. At this point, it had become more of a novelty and challenge than a practical solution-- so I started entering each wine as an individual post, and labeled them with matching food pairs.

I still need to cut the template code down quite a bit, but it seems to function on my old Nokia 3100 with a few glitches here and there.

And that is how Wine411 came to be. Enjoy!

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Wine, Ham And Lamb

Try Chenin Blanc or Rose w\ ham and Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot or Zinfandel with lamb.

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Saturday, April 7, 2007

Google MyMaps

Go figure. I burn several days trying to figure out screen scraping so I can do a Google Maps mashup . . . and then Google introduces MyMaps, which allows people to create and share their own customized maps without all that complicated Javascript API coding. Here's mine, for example.

Don't get me wrong-- I think this is very empowering for the average end user who doesn't have the time, skillset or web hosting resources to do their own mashups. But if you want to do something cool and interesting with publicly available data found elsewhere on the World Wide Web, you are still going to need to go the screen scrape or API/Javascript route.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

"Someday" is the busiest day of the week

Things I could and should blog about, but won't because I never seem to have the time or energy . . .

1) Cox Cable's Security Suite software and the problem it caused with my friend's Belkin wireless USB antenna

2) HOW-TO: fast and easy way to convert a database with two tables in a one to many relationship into three tables with a many to many relationship

3) Cool stuff with Outlook customized forms and public folders

4) Screenscraping and Google Maps-- which friggin' Shaolin temple do I have to travel to learn about this???

5) Allegations of racism in an affluent school system-- how appalling!?

There's more rattling around in my brain somewhere, but those are the ones that jump to mind at the moment.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Neologism: Impedimentia

IMPEDEMENTIA (noun)

the mass of irrational, insane beliefs (e.g. I'm cursed, God hates me, etc.) that stand between a person and a goal they would otherwise be able to easily accomplish.