I've been a bit lazy about updating this blog again - nearly two months! Sure, I have my excuses, but who wants to hear those? We're all busy.

Anyways, back in March Talitha and I ventured into faux parenthood when we adopted our dog Honey from Tri-Valley Animal Rescue. She's a 2-3 year old Chihuahua-Dachshund mix, and very cute. Her hobbies include: treats, treats, and visiting the dog park. She has garned the bulk of our attention over the last month and a half!



She's slowly been getting adjusted to her new life. Before she spent all of her time outside, and from the looks of her undercarriage, the poor thing had been overbred. She's also got a bit of separation anxiety that she's been slowly getting over. Despite being part Chihuahua, she's not much of a barker. She does have that high-pitched "yip" bark when she's distressed, but she also has a deeper "I think I'm bigger than I really am" bark that she uses for the paper boy, strangers, and other dogs.

That's really the only big thing that's happened since I last posted.

Also, worth noting if you plan on moving to California; DMV records are used for jury duty selection. I got my first notice last month and ended up not having to serve, but it counts so I'm off the hook for the next year!

Adios CompUSA

CompUSA recently announced that they were closing a bunch of their stores. I heard on the radio that 4 of them would be in the Bay Area, and of course the Pleasanton store (closest to me) was one of them. Now, I don't shop at CompUSA very often because they price things way to high in comparison to Fry's and Newegg, but its nice if they have a decent sale going on, or if you need something in a jam and don't want to wait for shipping.

Last night I stopped in to see if I could pick up an Nvidia card on the cheap, and wouldn't you know it, they were putting up all of their going out of business prices. I went into the store almost sure that I would find what I was looking for and maybe something extra. Of course, I walked out of the store empty handed.

There's a sad irony in the fact that even while trying to liquidate their merchandise, they still managed to be way over priced. The most they were giving in sale was 20% off. Of course this was in all of the crap that they probably have a horribly high mark-up on. You know, iPod accessories, cables, and some Apple peripherals. However, all of the good stuff, like computers and TVs were only marked down 5% - not even enough to offset the CA sales tax! Video cards and some networking gear were marked down 10%, but even then that didn't really make the prices any more competitive than Frys.

David mentioned something about people picking up MacBooks for $700, but if that's the true, its certainly not happening here because I would have picked up one in a heart beat.

Oh well, the 20 minute drive to Fry's isn't that bad.

Felt my first earthquake since moving to the bay area. USGS says 4.2 about 32 miles North of here. I didn't even realize what it was until my wife and her friend told me that it was one.

Wasn't really a big deal, but the local news is making it into a bigger deal than it probably was.

experiencing the vista firewall

So I got a chance to play with Vista and its firewall today at work and I have to admit, it had me a little befuddled. As a brief background, I'll say most of my firewalling experience has been either using OpenBSD pf, ipchains/iptables, or ipfw. So I was happy to see that Vista brought with it a stateful packet inspecting firewall to replace the joke that was in XP.

Unfortunately, Microsoft assumes a lot of things and abstracts a lot from the user. The best example of this is with the network profiles. The network profile is straight forward; it allows you to create a set of networking configuration info for a specific network or scenario in a network. By default, they provide a "public" (most restrictive), "private" (less restrictive), and "domain" (domain specified) profiles. You can create your own profiles as well. This is a nice addition, but really makes the firewall configuration more difficult if you don't agree with Microsoft's rulesets provided with their profiles. The simple control panel interface doesn't help with this at all either.

For example, lets say your computer is on a large private network (using some IANA reserved space, like 10.x.x.x) and your computer is not part of a domain. Now, lets say you want to allow remote administration via RPC either for vulnerability scanning, or your own remote control from other points on the network. You'll find that even when you enable "Remote Administration" in the Vista control panel, that unless you are on the local network segment, you won't be able to access those ports.

What makes it that much more irritating is that the dummy firewall control panel doesn't really provide you with any useful information about how its restricting or not restricting access to specific services. In order to find out what's really happening, you have to either find the Advanced Firewall adminstrator tool, or you have to use the netsh command line tool to inspect the firewall rules directly.

After doing this, I realized that by default, the applications listed in the dummy control panel interface are nothing more than their ruleset "Groupings" and within each of these groupings are one or more rules which may be configured differently for each default network profile. So, going back to our Remote Administration via RPC example, I noticed that for the "Remote Administration" grouping, there were two rulesets: the first applied to public and private network profiles and inbound connections were only allowed from LocalSubnet. The second profile applid to the domain network profile and allowed inbound connections from Any. Even though both rules were enabled, only the former was being honored since the computer was using the private network profile.

This is fine once you realize it, but its not very obvious from the perspective of a new novice or power user of Vista. There's no link in the Firewall control panel to the Advanced Firewall interface, and the command line interface is one of those things that most Windows users (even the power users) likely won't use. Hell, even for a nix junkie like me, I found netsh to be a horrible pain to use.

So for what its worth, if you're using one of Microsoft's default profiles and/or you've enabled an application to accept inbound connections via the firewall control panel, but you can't connect to it from computers outside your local subnet, you probably need to pull up either netsh or the Advanced Firewall Configuration interface to tweak or add new rules to do what you want.

This and that

David reminded me today that I hadn't update this trash heap that is my blog, so I figured I'd take a go at it since I have the day off. So for starters, I'd like to say hello to everyone out in the midwest, and I'd like you to know that its supposed to be sunny and 62F here today.

Anyways, I've got my birthday off from work for the first time since I was in grade school. It seems that the last time I got President's day off was also that same day; fourth grade, I imagine. So, today I'm spending it relaxing, chatting, and maybe a little coding. I'm brushing up on my Python threads for a new multi-threaded web spider I'm writing. I'll try to put up a quick tutorial on Python threads soon.

Also, Talitha and I have decided that we will be moving into the City (San Francisco) after our lease is up. We're interested in giving city life the go around, and with my job going well, we won't likely be leaving the bay area after one year.

So, stay tuned as we go on our apartment/cardboard box hunt.

Macworld Disappointment

I'm glad I'm not the only one that felt this way. I, like most of us, spent the morning (or afternoon for you ESTers) working and sneaking peeks at one of the many Apple websites who were covering the Keynote address. I saw the few snapshots on engadget showing the phone, and when it got to 11am and I read "That's it. No "One more thing."". I felt letdown. I've been really itching to buy a Mac Mini for the home - where was the C2D minis? I'm eagerly awaiting more information on Leopard but got zilch.

Granted, when I got home later that night I watched the whole Keynote I felt a little better. The Apple TV, was well, ho-hum in my opinion, because you could do most of the stuff with a mini and Frontrow as it is. The iPhone, though, really was incredible, and you could tell Jobs knew it. I just know the smartphone makers all collectively died inside, because we haven't really seen one real k-rad innovation in smartphone technology in the last few years.

I guess I can only hope that more stuff is announced over the next few days.

Happy New Year

An obligatory Happy New Year to all! No resolutions for me, life carries on as usual and I continue trying (somewhat half-assed) to better myself.

But enough of that. Here's a few random things.

If you've not heard of Andy McKee, he's a composer and acoustic guitar player. Any way, I'd never heard of him until I saw this pretty cool video of him playing his song Drifting. It's neat because of the way he uses the guitar to provide the percussion to the song. But the intriguing way he plays was only a secondary thing to me. I really got into the song. So I listened to a few other snippets in iTunes from his album "Art of Motion" and found that I really liked it. It's labeled folk by iTunes, but to me its mostly soothing good music. I bought the album, and will be keeping an eye out for more.

Someone finally wrote a sigalert widget for the OS X dashboard. I say finally, because there are all sorts of traffic monitor widgets for every major metropolitan area in the U.S. except the the bay area. I can finally drop that Yahoo! Local traffic widget, because I really never used it. Also, this one would be worth dropping a couple bucks donation to the author just for kudos, but I refuse to use PayPal, so until something trustworthy comes along, all I can offer are my thanks.


Finally, just a quick rant. I was listening to NPR on the way home from work the other day, and they did a short piece on gas prices and how they are on the rise again, starting higher in '07 than they did in '06, despite Katrina, etc.. One of the themes that I heard at least twice in this piece as well as most other pieces like it done by other media outlets, is that us lowly consumers aren't really upset about the prices or are "accepting" them, because as they say, we keep driving our gas-guzzling cars, and we keep paying the piper for our magical go-liquid. Well, to that I can only muster a plebian "Fuck You". The consumers aren't complacent about, or accepting of the high gas prices: we have no goddamn choice. We're bent over the proverbial barrel. It's not like we can all drop our current cars (even if they are gas-guzzling beasts) for hybrids or natural gas, or magic beans our whatever alternative energy automobiles exist. For one, their way to damned expensive (relative to equivalent traditional gasoline engine automobiles), and unless its a hybrid, you're limited in your fueling options. I know I've never actually seen a hydrogen filling station, or a magic bean plant that people can just drive up to fill up, and drive off.. And we all certainly can't turn to public transportation for the simple fact that, most implementations of it are a clusterfuck and probably aren't any cheaper. Now, don't get me wrong, I like the fact that Talitha and I can walk down to the BART station and take the train into the city for the day, but I certainly can't do that to get to my job everyday, since actually doing so would require that I spend 3-4 hours a day commuting and just as much money on fares as I would spend on the bullshit high priced gasoline. I'm sure somewhere there's a buried news story or local reporter who is willing to point this out, but it seems to get glossed over by the society-programming idiot news media. That is all.