June 2005 Archives

For over a year now I have been running Cloudmark's SafteyBar product. I cannot recommend this highly enough. I get on average 100 messages a day. Of those 95 are spam. There are a large amount that are filtered out via anti-virus that aren't even in that count.

Today I installed Microsoft's Exchange Intelligent Message Filter add-on. It is a free add-on based on the same SmartScreen technology that is in the Outlook 2003 client. I decided to check it out after listening to some talks at TechEd that mentioned that this was all that Microsoft used as far as spam goes.

One of the cool features of it is that you can turn it on and let it just analyze incoming emails. I have done this so I can see what it is doing. Then as a further step you can see its rankings in Outlook as an additional column. I have turned this column on in my Inbox and Spam folder that the Safteybar uses. This way I can see how the rankings provided by IMF compare to Safteybar. After a few days I can then set the level on the server of what to block and what to just put in Junk E-Mail folder for Outlook 2003. I am interested to see how it works. Safteybar has about 95% hit ratio and I long ago gave up on searching for false positives, just to much junk to go through.

The additional benefit of the IMF is that you can stop mail at the SMTP gateway. This way the rest of your infrastructure doesn't even have to waste time and space analyzing the most obvious of junk mail.

After I got done ripping the basement apart tonight I took some pictures of my computer room. I then used Microsoft's Beta image program Acrylic to stitch them all together. I have put two versions out on my site. One is normal size (1024 wide) and the other it huge. Check them out. The feature is pretty cool however somewhat tempermental. The only thing missing a bit from the pictures is the upper shelf on the extreme left, it is also full of Star Wars books.

Today nVidia announced and had immediate availability of their new 7800 GTX graphics card. Amazingly for the first time in a long time in the graphics market you can buy the card on the day it was announced. Sure it costs $599, but it is fancy. Oh and you can buy two and run them together if you want.

It is of course touted as the fastest graphics card ever. This is a dubious statement since nVidia or ATI get to say this about every 3-6 months as one or the other leapfrog the other one. However this one does add some new Anti-Aliasing features. This picture from HardOCP shows it best I think. If you look closely you can see the fence go from a muddy mess to clearly defined. Truly amazing I think.

I believe this is the next step on the graphics side, enhancing the quality of the picture rather than upping the resolution. Once you reach 1600x1200 for normal shape or 1920x1080 for widescreen there isn't much farther to go for desktop machines. At that point all the extra horsepower can be put toward making the picture better. I can wait to see what the Unreal guys, id and everyone else does with more power.

I am really beginning to realize the um joy of living in someone else's old house that I really know nothing about. The more things I uncover and find the more confusion and questions I have. Things like the fish, the range, the power, that damn toilet in basement. I just keep finding more and more that makes no sense. Maybe at some point in the last 50 years it did, I don't know. I keep wondering what I will find next. One example is there is a three switch panel near my front door. I am unable to determine what the switches do. There are two lights in the front of the house so I assume they control it but who knows. More exploring and learning for me.

Whatever the stupid thing is called. When I went through house inspection it had several issues with burners not working. By the time I moved in non of the burners worked reliably. Also it has what is essentially a digital clock with timer on it. Only problem was the timer wouldn't stop going off. Luckily it was quiet so I could just ignore it.

I have a home warranty as provided by the seller. I was hoping I could get them to say it was unfixable and give me money toward a new one. I called them and scheduled a tech to come look at it.

He came today and checked it out. He popped up the top and looked inside. First I must say how freaking simple it is in there. It is four gas outlets with two electric sparks in between them. Really like four old school Bunsen burners hooked together. He scrapped a few contacts and tightened a few things and had all four burners working. One of the problems was the knobs were all busted and had been fixed in such a way that they wouldn't work. Knobs aren't covered under the warranty. Also since the clock doesn't control anything it too is not covered under warranty. So I have a working range with no knobs and no clock. Yeah me.

Now I have to decide if I want to spend money on a new one or what. Ugh.

If you have looked at the pictures of my house you may have noticed there is a pond in the back yard. When I first looked at the house in late April I saw this and it was all full of leaves and seemed to be empty basically. Then when I moved in in lat May it was even more of a mess. I figured at some point this summer I would clean it out and see what was in it.

Last night I went out to mow the lawn, not sure if it really needed it but I would rather cut it when it is shorter and easier than wait a long time. Anyway as I am mowing I walk past the pond and something catches my eye. I look over and there are two goldfish. I was amazed at first to see this since I thought the pond was empty other than trash. I figured they must be dead and somehow washed to the top. Then I noticed they were attempting to breath, not well since they were in so little water.

At this point I was so stunned I wasn't sure what to do. I went in side and got a big mixing bowl and filled it with water. Then I carefully scooped them up. Arthur was easy since he was in pretty bad shape. Ford on the other hand was still very jumpy. I then looked around some to see if I could see anymore, but no luck. I finished mowing the lawn, since I really wasn't sure what to do with them.

Then I decided if they had survived in that mess they deserved another chance. I went online and looked up water treatment for them. One thing I found was fish antibiotics. Arthur had a fairly large gash in his side so I figured he might need it. I looked up pet shops and there happened to be a store specifically for fish close by.

I went and got a 5 gallon tank, some pH balancer, some food, some antibiotics and a filter. I went home and prepped the tank and the filter and added a does of the antibiotics. I was worried about Arthur since he hadn't been doing much other than laying on his side in the bowl and even ford had been pretty still, it might have been the color. I used a fish net to move them to the tank. Right away ford was zipping around and seemed in much better spirits. It took Arthur longer but he seemed to perk as well. I have fed them a few times and added more antibiotics and they seem to be ok. I am going to get some rocks and stuff tonight since right now it is just them and water in the tank.

Amazing I must say and I figured I couldn't do any worse to them then had happened out in the pond. I just wish the previous owner would have told me, I would have helped them sooner. So now I have some pets, maybe I can get there mansion back and get them out of the studio apartment they are in now.

Tonight I decided to go out and change my address on the magazines I get. There were a few strange things that popped up though. First, apparently most of my magazines are published by the same mother ship company. You would think this would make changing my address easier since in theory they would all be tied together. Apparently they aren't totally. I mean all of them know my address and email so I would think just link them all together. Then when I go to one site to change address it would just pop-up and say would you like to change address for these other magazines. I actually had this happen when I called in to the company that does Ziff stuff now, however they also tried to sell me other magazines at that time so I went the online route this time. The second weirdness was that some had already updated me address. Some of these were at primedia (the big one) and some weren't. Again how did some know already but yet others don't. Weird.

I saw a entry today that reminded me about this. When watching the masters earlier this year I noticed that all the commercials were in HD. Now there were only 2-3 sponsors but still it was cool. I only remember IBM and Exxon-Mobil. Hopefully the trend will continue. Advertisers should know that currently there are hitting a very good audience in the HD market, I mean they bought an HDTV at least. Take advantage of this and do some good commercials. Something like BMW's mini movies would be awesome if they bought a whole 2.5 min commercial set.

As I am putting away stuff in my new house I have come across an interesting item. It is a gift I attempted to give someone once. I have now moved it three times. Why I keep this I have no idea. It is still wrapped and has the note refusing it attached. Odd.

There were other similar things such as Valentine cards and gifts from previous relationships that I was able to dispose off during the recent move. However this keeps moving with me for some reason.

Oh and who the gift was to is a story for another day.

While down in Orlando, FL I went to see Mr. & Mrs. Smith with my friend at the theater in downtown Disney. Before I talk about the movie I want to talk about the theater. It had a lower level that I am not sure was stadium seating but I think it was and then it had almost a balcony level that went up like standard stadium seating. We sat in the second row of the upper level and it seemed closer than usual but pretty cool.

Back to the movie. It was a great summer action flick. Lots of chases, explosions and fights. It had a pretty good story too. The idea of professional killers and their non-work lives. Also Angelina looked pretty good in it and I was told Brad did too if you are of the female persuasion. I recommend it.

Yesterday after the TV I wanted to get some new shelves for my basement in the new house. I was going to go to IKEA and get various pieces of Gorm to assemble. Between my house and Roger's there are two IKEA's, one in College Park and one fairly close to my house in Baltimore.

I thought about going to the College Park one on way home just in case, decided it wasn't necessary. Went to Baltimore one, they had everything except the posts which are kind of important. I ended up having to go back down to the other one to get those pieces.

I also did my good deed for the day. As I was checking out the ends for the posts didn't get rung up. I went back and had them ring up all $7 worth of them. Just didn't feel right walking out with them.

The last part of the day was trying to put it all together. I went home and realized the IKEA bolts were 10MM size. I went to my socket set and I had 4MM-9MM and 11MM-20MM. No 10MM, ARGH. It isn't that I lost it, it wasn't included in set, why? Went over to Home Depot and got the socket as well as adapter for my impact driver. Definitely a well spent $5. I drove about 100 of these bolts in about 30 seconds a piece instead of using socket driver and killing myself.

Well on Sunday I went down to Roger's place to move out the last item. The Toshiba 65" projection TV. My friend Jeff was buying it and was coming to get it. At least on this end it went pretty well. Jeff backed his truck up to the back door of house. Then all we had to do was lift it up into the truck bed. I haven't heard what happened on the other end yet.

The other thing that happened was I gave my key to Roger. Since there was nothing left in the house of mine. This is kind of an end of an era. I have lived with Roger since Christmas of 2000, about 4.5 years. I even moved with him from one house to another. It was the last step to drive home that I am now living alone for the first time since May of 1999 when Jerry and then later Karri moved in with me.

It is a weird feeling.

Well after a week of non-stop food and snacks and then another week of not working out I only gained half a pound. Not bad. Hopefully I will start working out again next week. Just seemed to tired all of last week.

Sybari KB Article
This problem has bothered me for almost a year if not more. Basically during the upgrade from Win 2000 to 2003 it changes the permissions on a reg key. This prevents the scanner from updating files. Today to try and troubleshoot the problem I tested some on Hoyty.com before trying it at school. During the uninstall it said it couldn't remove the key in question. That seemed strange. So I went and tried to delete it, no dice. Figured it was permissions, checked, reset. Still nothing. Rebooted and ran chkdsk, still nothing. Hmm... Finally after an hour of trying things I finally realized I was changing permissions at root key rather than the sub key, DOH! After I propogated the permissions down the tree I could delete. At work I was able to just fix permissions. Yeah.

About 2 weeks ago after catching my pants on them over and over I pulled out about 20 staples from the doorway of my computer room. This took me almost 30 minutes. Why there were 20 staples in about 36" I have no idea. Then last night as I was organizing my closet in the computer room I repeated this process. Only this time it was about 20 staples and 20 carpet tacks. Now again this is a 4' x 2' closet and there are at least 40 things holding carpet in place. I think this might be a bit extreme, but that is just me I guess. Hopefully I won't find any more stashes like this scattered about house.

Well I am back from TechEd and my mini vacation. Now I must go back to cleaning up and putting away my house. Yeah.

Well I went to a party hosted by the Exchange group here at TechEd tonight. It just reinforced that those type of things just don't seem to be for me. It was bascially a bar. The environment was loud, dark and I knew no one. I grabbed some food and left.

Luckily my friend will show up tomorrow to go to Universal Studios with me. Hopefully it will be more fun.

Somehow since I am paying $9.95 to use the Internet right now I feel the need to get the most out of it. Although on the other hand I really need some sleep and should get to that. If you want to see what am I up to in Orlando check out my TechEd Blog.

Before I left for the airport Sunday I helped Roger get the cable modem service switched over to him from me. It wouldn't work with their online sign-up becuase the modem was still linked to my account. Cox had to remove it there before it could be succesfully added to my account. Also the Cox support people kept asking the maker of the modem, the damn thing had no names or anything on it.

Anyway the original reason for this post was the fact that Cox is really upping the ante for High Speed Internet - Press Release. First they lowered the prices by $15 dollars for each level of service and increased the speed to either 4 or 5 MB download depending on cost. Now starting in June both levels of service will have 2 MB upload speed and will either have 5 MB or 15 MB download speed.

I have a feeling this is a direct response to Verizon's FIOS service which has the similar 15 MB / 2 MB speed level. Isn't competition great.

Today Steve Ballmer announced in his keynote that Exchange 2003 SP2 along with an update to Windows Mobile 5.0 will support push email delivery to mobile devices. This was what has made a Blackberry special for the last 6 or so years; the ability to integrate with Exchange and have nearly instantaneous and automatic delivery of messages. Now that Exchange will natively support it and for free no less it may just be the end to RIM. Sure they have expanded to multi-function cell phone devices, but their hook was still email. Now there are just another average cell phone with a mini keyboard.

Maybe this will help me kill off Palm at my school too, since anything other than the Treo can't even come close to this functionality.

Well apparently the rumors were true. Steve Jobs announced today that Apple will be switching to Intel. Apparently it is not the usual Apple announcement with products immediately available. However it looks like you can order a preview copy of Tiger for Intel. Not sure of the limitations of its installation. This should be an intersting year.

I am leaving to run some errands and then go to TechEd. I probably won't update here much, but I will be on my TechEd Blog a bunch. See you all in a week.

Well I figured I would weigh myself prior to the feast that is TechEd. You get fed there all the time and as much as you could possibly want as well. The last time I weighed myself was three weeks ago and since then I have lost 7 lbs. I am back to where I was before Thanksgiving of last year. Still about 10-15 lbs away from where I was in early 2003. A goal I guess.

Ok so my spam filtering is client based. Since my desktop was off from last Friday night until mid-day today I had no easy way to filter the spam. In that time period I collected 1058 pieces of spam as processed by cloudmark's safteybar. I found probably another 5-10 it missed. That is just a silly amount. Averaging over 8 days that is about 133 pieces of spam a day. I guess that is what I get for publishing my email and not changing it in about 7-8 years. Luckily my desktop will be on next to filter while I am away.

Well I spent more of today unpacking boxes. I probably only have 3-4 left not including the 9-10 that encompass my DVD's and CD's. Those won't be unpacked for a while since they are going in the basement. I also hung some more shelves as well as got even more to hang. I tried to fix some electrical things as well. That didn't work out so good since there is no ground wire in the boxes. I will have to have Ralph or Charlie come out and help me out and run some new electrical. Shouldn't be too bad once I get the celing and walls down in basement. I think I am done for now, until I get back from Orlando and TechEd.

I am also finally done moving stuff out of Roger's place I think. I went there last night and loaded up the car and the little that is left should easily fit in my trunk. I will be going down tomorrow to help Jeff get my TV. He is buying it and will taking it tomorrow. I will be sad to see it go, it has server me well for 4.5 years. I got in March of 2001 in hopes of seeing the Illini play in the final four. It was the first year it was in HDTV. They lost in Elite Eight though and I had to watch Maryland. Oh well.

Well I just finished my first mowing of my yard. It took a good 2+ hours. It was complicated by two factors. One it hadn't been cut in probably about two weeks. Two it rained a lot yesterday and the sun didn't come out much today so the grass was still damp. I decided since it was so long I would bag it. This might have been a mistake, since I had to empty the bag probably 30-40 times. Also it began to get dark by the time I finished making it even more challenging.

I finished listening to Micheal Crichton's latest State of Fear the other day. I highly recommend it. It is as usual a good mix of reality and fiction. It is really thought provoking on the whole climate / global warming front as well as the media battle being fought for mind share.

Last night as I was unpacking I started listening to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I got about half way through the unabridged audio book last night. The really cool thing is the book is read by the author and he lends a great voice to it. It is amazing to hear how many things in pop culture and especially sci-fi or games have come out of this book. I can't wait to get to the other ones. It is book 1 of 5 in the trilogy.

I finished hanging shelves in my Computer Room/Office/Library last night I think. Mostly because I am out of available wall space at this point. I unpacked about 8-9 boxes yesterday. I got all of the kitchen unpacked I think. It is interesting to see what I do and don't have in there. The rest I unpacked were in computer room. I am probably about 50% done in there. Lots of odds and ends that I need to put away somehow this time, as opposed to last place where they were all just piled up.

As I mentioned I moved my server last night. I think I got all the IPs switched and also got all the sites back up and working. If anyone notices something wrong let me know. Hopefully the site should be much quicker now. Previously I was on a really distant DSL which allowed me to only get about 1 Mb down and 256 Kb up. Now I am much closer to the CO and I currently am getting 5 Mb down and 640 Kb up. I am paying for 6 MB down and 768 Kb up so hopefully I can get it up to that speed.

The other problem is that the only phone jack active in my house is the one in the kitchen. Right now that is where the modem and the server are, on my kitchen table. I will try to fix that tonight, just was a little tired last night.

I got home yesterday to the nice surprise of my new DSL modem. I hooked it up and luckily Covad (Speakeay middle man) had chosen to use the same line as Verizon so I had no problem locating it. I tested it with my laptop and all seemed well. I decided to make another trip to Roger's to retrieve the server and whatever else would fit in my car. I think I was able to load enough such that a single future trip will allow me to be done moving my stuff. Of course I just have it all in various piles around new house.