In years gone past I had an extensive collection of bookmarks (aka favorites), stored links to a variety of pages and websites all over the internet. They were hard-won spoils from the search for useful information and I looked after them, backing them up and carefully moving them across whenever I got a new PC.

These days? These days I don’t even use them and my carefully maintained collection is lost amongst the digital detritus somewhere on my storage server. So far I’ve managed to come up with the following list of reasons (technological and behavourial) that caused this change.

• Domain names are easier to remember (there’s a general consensus on the grammar and patterns of domain name choice) and because I use them so much I’m better at remembering them. It reminds me of how I used to be very good at remembering phone numbers because I used them so much, but then I lost that ability when I started storing them in my mobile phone.
• I recently spent 8 months travelling around Central America without a laptop. Internet usage was reserved for internet cafes so I just got in the habit of not having my bookmarks available (I never got into using any of the sites that store your bookmarks for you).
• Searching on Google is a good substitute. Don’t bother remembering the site, just google for the relevant search terms and there it is.
• I use an RSS aggregator (a fancy term for website reader). This not only makes it easier to keep track of news from multiple sites, it also means I don’t have to enter their URLs.
• My web browser remembers the names of sites I visit a lot so I only have to type in the first few letters and then choose the relevant site from the drop-down list.

Of course, there is one exception to my rejection of bookmarks, and that’s my mobile phone. Using a standard phone keypad to laboriously type in long URLs is definitely something you try and avoid!

I imagine we’ve all been annoyed by spam selling viagra, watches, penny stocks and penis enlargement creams, but at least they make a certain sort of sense. Spammers send out millions of ads, get tens of sales, and make some money while annoying everyone else.

But what about the spam that isn’t selling anything? What is the point of sending out spam with a string of unrelated words that doesn’t even mention a product name, let alone claim that it will make your stock portfolio larger and more satisfying? To understand this kind of spam we need to think about the entire spamming process and how it has developed over the years.

Sending Spam

Originally spam used to be sent fairly directly. You’d sit (virtually at least) at your internet server or PC and send out your ads to unsuspecting mail servers all over the world. This approach didn’t work for long – blacklists were created to block known spam servers, anti-spamming clauses were written into internet service providers’ contracts, and anti-spam laws were passed in a number of countries. The spammers had to go under the radar.

At the same time this was happening, PCs all over the world were being infected by spyware, trojans, adware and other malware (a catch-all name for ‘malicious software’). Some of these were just annoyances that generated popup ads everywhere, but others would take over your PC and hand control of it to someone else.

The spammers saw this happening and realised that they could write malware that would send out spam – what could be stealthier then getting someone elses PC to send your spam for you? You’d infect their PC with spam-bot software, the spam-bot would connect to the spam server to get the latest ad campaign, and off it would go merrily sending spam out to all and sundry. If you could infect thousands of PCs with your software it didn’t matter if some got shut down, there were always plenty more to keep pumping it out. Spam was not only back, it was back in enormous volume.

Blocking Spam

However, the battle against spam wasn’t solely concentrated on stopping spam being sent. The other major front was stopping spam getting in by blocking incoming email that met certain rules. Originally these rules were fairly simple, looking for key-words like “viagra” in combination with links to websites. These worked somewhat, but they weren’t very effective (“Hey, let’s spell it as v1agra!”) and blocked too many real messages.

The anti-spam filters had to get more sophisticated and the new technique was something called bayesian filtering. Simply put, this technique works by taking a large body of email that has already been sorted into spam and non-spam. When a new email arrives, the bayesian filter is used to ask a simple question – does this new email look more like the emails in the spam group or more like the emails in the non-spam group? This method proved to be much more effective at filtering out spam and the anti-spammers were once again winning the battle.

Naturally the spammers fought back, this time by adding extra bits and pieces to their ads. A typical spam message would have the ad followed by a few paragraphs of pseudo-random generated text, with the hope that the email would look more like a real email and therefore get past the bayesian filters. (The pseudo-random text was quite surreally pretty at times and some geek-literateurs got quite excited and ran off to write learned papers about it.)

Tying it All Together

So the pieces are in place now but how does this explain the nonsense spam? Simply put, the spam-bot software isn’t very well written. It works something along these lines:

1. Infect PC.
2. Connect to spam-server and download the latest ad campaign.
3. Add nonsense text and other anti-anti-spam measures.
4. Start sending spam.

I believe that the nonsense spams happen when step 2 fails, either because of a bug in the spam-bot or because the spam-server has itself been shut down.

Well written software would just stop at this point, but spam-bots don’t have to be good and the software just marches on, adding the anti-bayesian text to the non-existent ad and sending the resulting ad-free nonsense spam out to the world.

And, for a final ironic twist, because the nonsense spams don’t have ads in them they’re more likely to get through the bayesian anti-spam filters and end up in your inbox!

My current lifestyle tends to mean I move around a bit, connecting and disconnecting from the internet as required. However, I still want to use IRC to keep up with my online friends. One of the things about IRC is that ideally you want to leave it going all the time so that when you return you can see what’s been happening in your absence.

The simple answer is to use an IRC proxy (often called a bouncer) hosted on a well-connected system somewhere on the internet. The proxy remains connected all the time and logs everything that happens, you just then connect to the proxy as required and it plays back everything you missed.

The problem is that it can be hard to find a suitable system to host your proxy on. My normal solution would be to ask a friend if they would host it – but many IRC servers ban multiple connections from the same IP address so that would cause problems for their own proxies. The next option is commercial hosting, but a lot of hosting companies ban IRC proxies. So, it was time to look for a specialised hosting company and I decided to go for Spexhost.

They offer a suitable shell account (one login, up to two concurrent users) with a pre-configured IRC proxy called psyBNC for US$4/month. I signed up online and paid by Paypal and they responded with my login information within 12 hours. However, the documentation for setup wasn’t as good as I’d have liked, particularly around logging/history, so I decided to write this to help the next person.

Setting up MIRC with psyBNC

1. Use MIRC (or your favourite IRC client) to set up a new server with the details from Spexhost (Tools – Options – Servers). Remember to include the server name, port number and your password.

2. Change the ident and the first part of the email address in MIRC to your spexhost username (Tools – Options – Connect).

3. Connect to the server. psyBNC will open a private channel to you that you can use to send it commands.

4. First you need to setup the IRC servers you wish to connect to. In the psyBNC channel type the following (these are obviously my settings for undernet, modify as required):

/addserver us.undernet.org : 6667
/addserver eu.undernet.org : 6667

5. Next up we have the logging. I want to log everything that happens in my usual channels (psyBNC automatically logs private messages so this doesn’t need to be setup):

/addlog #wellyhaven : *
/addlog #nz : *

6. At this point you should be connected to one of the servers and logging your desired channels (use /listservers and /listlogs to check). Next we need to set MIRC up to automatically retrieve the contents of the logs when we reconnect. I added the following commands to the Perform section (Tools – Options – Options – Perform):

/playprivatelog
/eraseprivatelog
/playtrafficlog last
/erasetrafficlog

And that should be it. You can close MIRC (or, in my case, take your phone out of bluetooth range of the laptop and thereby lose your connection) and when you restart it and connect to your IRC proxy you should be back in the same channels with everything you missed.

This may expose me as being a sad and geeky person, but I’m completely enamoured with my new phone (Sony Ericsson k770i). A repackaged version of the k810i, not only is it small, svelte, purple and a good phone/text device, it’s also doing quite a lot more. This includes:

The Really Useful Features

• Access to Google Mail and LiveJournal from wherever I am. This is particularly useful at the moment as my temporary workplace blocks access to these sites.
• Internet access device for my laptop using 3G UMTS (up to 384kbps).
• High quality 3.2 megapixel digital camera, complete with direct upload to Flickr or LiveJournal courtesy of Shozu.
• Listening to music using the included headset and a 2GB M2 memory card.
• Using the Google Maps application for on-the-go navigation.
• Easy synchronisation of the phone calendar with my Google calendar using GooSync. If only it supported contacts as well (yes, it can be done in a two step Google-PC-Phone process but I don’t want to).

Bits of Good Design

• Sony Ericsson have replaced the sometimes fiddly joystick with a functionally equivalent but easier to use directional pad.
• They’ve replaced the superior Xenon camera flash with a LED photo light. While this isn’t so good for photos it means you can use the phone as a flashlight. I used this feature a lot on my last phone, especially when going down dark paths on steep Wellington hills at night.
• It multitasks! You can receive/send texts while connected to the internet while listening to music.
• You can set multiple alarms and even specify which days they operate. I’ve got one setup to ring at 6:45 from Mon-Fri but not in the weekends. (I cunningly remembered to turn it off for Labour Day.)
• While the connector is the same old ginormous Fast Port plug, it’s been moved from the bottom to the side which seems to work better, especially for headphones.
• It charges itself from USB.
• The shiny metal lense cover is beautifully integrated both physically and electronically. Once you get over the initial hesitation about using enough pressure to open/close it, it works very well and switches the camera immediately into camera mode.

Bonus advantage! We got a Sony Ericsson k530i for Kim the week before and the way that they both use the same chargers and cables and so on just makes life easier.

Stuff That Isn’t So Great

• I’m now paying $86/month to the dreaded Vodafone for my voice and data plans.
• The video quality is still limited to 176×144 pixels (aka crap).
• I miss the clock screen-saver on the k750i. This meant you could check the time without having to press a button.
• Why does the little power bar show the battery to be about 80% full when the phone status reports it’s 55% full?
• Power consumption when doing 3G data is high. When plugged into the mains it still manages to charge but only very slowly.
• I have no idea why the PC software takes 10 minutes to install itself.

My Next Phone

But no matter how good this phone is there’s always something more to desire. Some things I’d like in the next one:

• An even higher res screen. 320 x 240 pixels on a 1.9″ screen is pretty good but a bigger screen with even more pixels would be even better.
• Better text entry. I’m not sure how this would be down while still keeping the same size – and not losing the tactility of the buttons ala the iPhone. Maybe haptics will save me.
• An even even faster data connection.
• It’s going to have be an even better internet terminal (see all three points above this one). I’m impressed with what this one does but it’s still far short of a ‘real’ internet terminal. I wonder whether I’m going to have to sacrifice my desire for small size to get what I want.

And to finish, I’d like to mentally apologise to the very helpful woman at Etown who got me to change my mind from buying the k810i to the superior k770i. Yes, I shouldn’t have been surprised when you were reasonably knowledgeable about the product lines even if you were female and young and dressed like a [classist epithet deleted]. If only stereotypes weren’t so useful much of the time…

I had some web development work to do for one of our old website clients. They want some changes and a few new features added – nothing major and it should take just a couple of days. However, our current living quarters are really not well suited to working (no desk, no comfy chair, unstable internet). The obvious answer was to go out.

So, there I was sitting at Katipo Cafe working away. I had my pot of tea, my laptop, and the Vodem for internet. I was busily editing, uploading, chatting, reading, testing, researching, emailing – and it all felt very normal. When I did this two years ago I felt “hip and cool” in a geeky kind of a way, but now it just seemed routine. It doesn’t help that laptops are pretty damn common these days or that mine isn’t particularly ‘cool’!

Note: the Vodem worked much better in the Wellington Central Public Library and at Katipo Cafe than it does in our flat in Mt Cook.

I’m currently staying in a small flat in the Mt Cook area of Wellington. The place has no internet connection so a friend kindly lent me his Vodem (aka the Huawei E220).

The Vodem

This is a cute little USB modem that plugs into your computer and connects you to the internet via Vodafone’s 3G network (supports GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA). It’s quite stylee in curvy white and has a fully Hardware 2.0 blue LED light on it.

One of the cool things about the Vodem is that it not only installs itself as a communications device, it also includes a built in flash-drive that contains the software and drivers you need to make it all work. This means there’s no need for a separate CD. Also, when you update the modem firmware you’re also updating the built in software. Nifty.

The Network

The idea was that I would plug the Vodem into my laptop and then share the internet connection over our internal wifi network so that Kim could also use it. Finally we’d plug the NAS storage device into the wifi access point and our little internal network would be all set up with both of us able to get onto the internet. Even better, we’d be able to do this wherever we went as long as we had power and a Vodafone signal, so it would be a perfect way to keep connected during our planned South Island touring/camping trip.

While none of this was incredibly complex I was a bit wary at first – Vista’s built-in networking does some odd things at times, partly because it’s trying too hard to help. I see what they’re trying to do with it (easier to setup and good default security settings) and I think it’s a good idea in principle but they haven’t got it right yet. I look forward to the whispered-about SP1.

However, in this case I was pleased to see that it was all very easy. Install the Vodem, share the connection, plug in the AP, plug in the NAS box, tell Kim’s laptop to connect through mine – and everything worked. Yay, we had ‘net! And then the connection dropped. And came back. And dropped. And then it wouldn’t come back at all, with the software reporting some nonsensical error message about an incorrect broadcast address.

The Problems

The first problem was the Vodafone supplied software. For some reason that I completely fail to understand, it appears that telephone companies and manufacturers of telephone equipment are incapable of writing good PC software. Fixing this wasn’t too hard – discard the software and set up the connection within Windows as a normal PPP connection using the Vodem. Problem #1 solved.

Sadly there was a problem #2 as well. While the PCs and internal parts of the network were happy, there was still a problem with the Vodem and Vodafone’s network. They support three of the multiple data standards used for mobile data (GPRS at up to 60kbit/sec, UMTS at up to 384kbit/sec, and HSDPA at up to 3600kbit/sec) and in theory the Vodem will seamlessly switch between them depending on what network is available. And it’s that word “seamlessly” that’s the problem.

The Vodem would rather spend time endlessly hunting between GPRS/UTMS/HSDPA, flicking its little indicator LED from blue to greeny-blue and back again, then actually moving data back and forth. Each time it switches there is an interruption in your internet connection that lasts 10-30 seconds, and there’s no guarantee that when the connection is re-established that it won’t immediately switch back again.

The Verdict

In practice this means that you have a tremendously annoying and frustrating internet connection. You’re happily surfing/chatting away and then suddenly it stops. You glance over at the vodem, see the light flickering, sigh, and wait for it to re-establish itself. It does so and you get the next page and …wham, it stops again. It’s frustrating to press submit on a web form, see the LED change colour, and know that there’s definitely going to be a service interruption and there’s only about a 50% chance that whatever you submitted will actually get there.

It’s got to the point now that I’m looking for the commands I need to disable some of the connection types in the hope that it will be more stable (because it’s treated like a modem it uses a very extended version of the AT command set). GPRS may be slow but I’d rather have a stable slow connection than an intermittent fast one. Sadly the documentation isn’t very good and the Huawei website doesn’t let commoners like me download the manuals. Time to go googling, I’ll post an update when I find the solution.

Verdict: The Vodem is a neat idea and I really want it to work but I can’t recommend it at this time.

When I got my new laptop with Windows Vista, I decided I was going to try out as much of the built in software as made sense to me. In particular, I thought I’d try Internet Explorer 7 and see if it really was a decent competitor to Firefox. My initial impressions were good:

• It had tabs just like Firefox.
• It seemed nice and fast.
• I liked the look and feel, and how they had minimised the space used by the user interface in order to maximise the space used to display the website.
• The search bar worked well and was easy to configure.
• It seemed stable, and the times that a website did get bound up I could kill just that window without losing all of the others.
• It didn’t do that incredibly annoying thing that Firefox does when it steals the cursor focus on a screen where you’ve already started typing stuff into the form fields.

However, while the IE7 core browser was better than Firefox there were some features that I missed:

• Web Developer – an amazingly useful extension if you’re ever doing any web development work. The in-place CSS editor has saved me countless hours tweaking and reloading style sheets, and that’s only one of the features.
• AdBlock – Web based ads never used to worry me too much. I’d ignore them most of the time (often without even noticing that they even existed) and very occasionally I’d even click on one if it looked interesting. Then came the ads that covered the webpage or had audio/video of music or people talking. Something had to be done and AdBlock just cleaned all that crap out.

I used IE7 for a while but then I had a development project – and suddenly I had to install Firefox so I could use the Web Developer extension. And day by day those damn ads were annoying me more and more and finally I installed AdBlock in to Firefox and switched to using it as my default browser.

That was about a month ago and so far it’s been going well. They seem to have got the instability and memory leak issues under control in the latest version, and using AdBlock has made reading material online much more enjoyable. Firefox is still the best option as far as I know.

I find it interesting that the Firefox browser wasn’t as good as that in Internet Explorer, but that the quality of the add-ons more than makes up the difference.

Fifteen years ago I had a good home entertainment system. I was pretty cool with my biggish-screen TV, four-head hifi stereo video recorder, five disc CD player and Dolby Prologic Surround amplifier and speakers. Sure, you could get bigger TVs and louder stereos but this was as good as it got (ignoring such fringe technologies like laser disc).

But the world has moved on – DVDs replaced VHS tapes, MP3s are replacing audio CDs, TV’s have got wider and shallower, we’re downloading TV programmes from the internet, and the analogue Dolby Prologic audio has been replaced by digital five channel plus a subwoofer systems. Then there’s the really big change – the integration of our computers into everything else to give us new ways to create, store and enjoy media of all forms.

I’ve been through a few system generations over the last 15 years but I got rid of it all when I went overseas last year, so now is a great chance to set up a new system from scratch. This article describes what I’m doing and why I’m doing it that way. It’s aimed at a general audience but you’ll need at least some IT skills or the help of a geeky friend for a few bits.

This is the second article in my “How I’m Doing It” series. The first one was Geek Backpacking in Central America.
Continue Reading “The Compleat Home Entertainment Network” »

I’ve seen a lot of articles telling you what to do and take when travelling, but I thought it might be worthwhile writing one about our experiences with what we did take and how well it worked out for us.

Kim and I recently did our big trip around Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama) and southern Mexico (Yucatan Peninsula, Oaxaca, Mexico City). Most of the time we were backpacking so were deliberately travelling quite light – I allowed myself one medium size backpack and one shoulder satchel.
Continue Reading “Backpacking Geeks in Central America” »