Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Phone a Friend

I received a desperate email from my friend Al

Hello
I'm in some terrible and horrible situation, I'm stuck in Manila Philippines? I was on a short vacation, Unfortunately  I was mugged at gun point last night, All cash,including credit card and cell phone was stolen away. I have been to the embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all and our flight leaves pretty soon from now but we're having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let us leave until we settle the bills.Please be so kind to reply back so I can tell you what to do and how to get some cash to us. 
Am freaked out here
He always has been a bit of a drama queen, but still he was reaching out and sounded like he was in a bad situation.  I replied...

Gosh Al.   I'm so sorry to hear about your current situation.  On the plus side it sounds like you got over your fear of flying.
A short trip to Manila?!  I thought your passport was revoked over that little "incident".  I know, I know, you were never convicted.  But still I thought those Asia pacific countries looked down on that sort of thing.
Regarding the request for money.  I lent you a simple $20 a few years back and I still haven't seen it.   The gall coming to ask for more you rat bastard. You can always "borrow"(as you call it)  from the kids piggy bank. 
You might also consider asking for a refund for those night courses on creative writing.  The quality of your writing has gone down and I'm afraid your dream of retiring and becoming a novelist just isn't going to come true.
Take care, and good luck.   I call dibs on your golf clubs.
I'm always glad to help out.  Strange part, I haven't heard from him in months.  Maybe I should drop by his house to make sure his plea wasn't real.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Jobs in Vermont

Jobs @ GE

General Search:http://jobs.gecareers.com/

All jobs open in Burlington Vermont

General Skills

HTML, Javascript, SQL Server, C#, C++, COM, ASP/ASP.NET, .NET, Visual Basic.   Look at each job description for detailed requirements.

Specific Jobs in my department

Management-ish

Software Development

Software Automated Testing


There are a few pending jobs in both Test Automation and Software Dev.  Use the "all jobs in Burlington" link to monitor them.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Apple steps back from IPv6

Apple is under fire for reduced IPv6 compatibility in their latest release of AirPort Utility version 6.

http://www.itworld.com/networking/267710/apple-under-fire-backing-ipv6-support

The article goes on to say that Comcast is planning to roll out IPv6 to the Home market soon.  It is currently available in only two cities, with plans to be offered in all markets later this year.  More details can be found here http://www.itworld.com/networking/267710/apple-under-fire-backing-ipv6-support (linked from the above article).



Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Seeking 6to4, it works...on purpose

Since first setting up my router to use IPv6, I've always wondered why it so easily found the ISP's 6to4 tunnel.  In the days since, I've spent more time reading up on IPv6.

There's a reason the router found the tunnel -- it is built into the IPv6 spec. It uses a reserved "anycast" IPv4 address to forward traffic through.

When I saw the "auto-config" button on the router setup page, I pressed it half-thinking "this'll never work" and was absolutely amazed when it did (do these "auto" buttons ever work?!)   It seems that the boffins behind IPv6 thought through many of the deployment issues.

Why repeat what better writers have already created...



The Wikipedia article also contains a link to public 6to4 relay points, however the published link has been updated and indicates that it is no longer needed since RFC3068 exists.


IPv6 RunAsRadio show 254 is up.

The interview on RunAsRadio has been published. A big Thank you to Richard Campbell, it was a great experience.

Direct show link:  http://runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=254

RunAsRadio web site

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Better UI, Please!

I use Quicken to manage my money (a.k.a herd cats).  This morning I launched Qucken and it politely indicated that an update was available and asked whether to download & apply the update now?  I selected "yes" - and the window closed.

Nothing else seemed to happen.  No other window popped up.  Thinking that maybe it had applied the update and closed, I launched Quicken again.  A dialog came up indicating that Quicken was already running and that if this message kept occurring I should reboot the computer (yes - the suggested fix was basically toggle the power switch).

Opening Task Manager and viewing the network activity tab showed a slow trickle of data.  Popping open Wireshark showed me the IP address, and using nslookup determined the address tracked back to quicken.com.  I used Wireshark for two reasons:  where was the conversation to, and was anything actually being downloaded?

10 minutes later a dialog finally came up stating the update was ready to install - and pressing the "next" button gave me an installation progress bar.

Yo!  Quicken!!   Bad UI!


Killer App for IPv6 - the home Cloud?

I was honored to be on RunAs Radio talking with Richard Campbell about IPv6.  We talked a bit about what the impact on IPv6 may be - and in a perfect world nobody should really notice, IP addresses should be under the covers.  One thought came to me was IPSec and I recalled an interview I heard on a previous show with some guys from Microsoft.  They were talking about how they could access their office network from anywhere in the world, VPN technologies were just built in.

After the interview was over another thought came to me.  With all of this talk of the cloud, what happens if the devices within our home can be included in this thing we call the cloud.  I find all of the software on my PC to be easier to use for managing my photos and music than any "cloud" app.  I also have a problem paying rent to access my own photos and music.  But wait!  What if I could stream or access photos from the hard drive in my house?

How many times have you taken photos with a fancy camera and didn't have time to upload them.  I pull out my smartphone to show picture to friends and family - and of course can only access those that I remembered to upload.

Gee, what if my home was part of the cloud?  If I could securely access all photos, videos, and music from my phone as if it were part of the cloud!   You could extend Skydrive or YouTube or Picasa to include the home.  For content that you wanted to share with the world the upload/share button would move it to a public server.  For those thousands of pictures of kids and dogs (cat people already have a web site), just pull out the smartphone and share with the grandparents.