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Thu, 21 Jun 2007
What causes those landline "ghost rings" late at night?
Late at night, almost at a specific time, your phone ringer chirps or may even make a complete ring. Pick up the phone, and nobody is there. It does this around 10:23pm at my parents house, and 1:00am at my home. I just happend to be awake at the time to finally confirm that all of these "dreams" of the phone ringing late at night, only to wake up and notice that it isn't, were actually factual. No, hackers are not trying to hack into your house, nor are the feds charging their wiretap batteries. Apparently, all of our lines are subject to routine, automated testing of line quality. A small voltage is asserted on the line, but this apparently is enough to triger hyper-sensitive ringers in newer digital phones. Read the article for an interesting history, suprising awareness, and root cause of the "problem".
Sun, 26 Feb 2006My wife's phone broke after about 3 years of life. The hinge gave way, and it was in two pieces. She usually takes the car during the day, and I just gave her my cell phone for "just in case" purposes. At least it sounded like a good idea at the time. After work, I took the bus home, stopping at Frys to pick up a replacement handset for my wife. I jumped back on the bus and then realized something really silly: she has no idea where I am going to be and at what time I need to be picked up. No worries, I can just find a payphone, right? HAH! Bzzzt...WRONG! I got off the bus at Kent Station, a new shopping center in the Kent area. Someone thought it was a bright idea to build a completely outdoor mall with no covered walkways in the Northwest. Its winter, its raining, and nobody wants to really be there. The only good thing is in the middle of the plaza is a giant gas firepit that becomes almost the centerpiece of all activity. The Kent Station shopping center lacks a lot of things. There are no ATMs. There are no payphones. Infact, its amazing how hard it is to find a payphone these days. They are all gone. Thats okay, I have the internet, right? Kent Station is supposed to have WiFi, but it doesn't work. The coffee shop has WiFi, but it doesn't work. There are no outlets to plug my WiFi/cellular hotspot into, my PCMCIA slot isn't working, and I have 5 minutes of battery left. And there I was, in the rain, with a cell phone box in hand, uncharged of course, and no way to activate it even if it was. Spent a few hours combing Kent for a damn payphone, and I finally found one. Dialed my 800 number, which is forwarded to all my phone numbers. Guess what answers first? Yup -- the broken cell phone's voicemail popped up before it even could ring any of the other numbers in the list. Great, now I could talk to no one. But it also has a credit card slot. I swipe my card, it wants to bill $7 for 4 minutes. Uh..no. But thats okay, I have change. Now its just $1 for 4 minutes. Come on guys...I can buy those minutes for $0.01-0.02/min with 6 second rounding from like 20 different providers...I bet they get it even cheaper. What made me even more mad is that I spoke of changing my 1-800 number to our dial back system on the VoIP server during hack night -- and just didn't get around to setting that up :/ But, I was able to get ahold of someone and have someone finally pick me up. What really upset me is how disconnected and isolated someone can be without their cell phone. It seems like the world does not work without them. Wed, 22 Feb 2006With the popularity of XM and Sirius growing, there is something interesting taking place on our roadways. To find out what I mean, tune to 87.9 FM on your dial. Give it a good listen for about 20 minutes. This is a popular pirate frequency, so I always check it from time to time, but I usually hear somehing completely different: A bunch of XM radio! Now, you would have to follow someone's car around for a while to really even listen to one song, but its kind of fun to do. Give it about 20 minutes, and count how many XM car transmitters you hear! Wed, 03 Aug 2005After a flawless escape, one particular passenger was not too impressed with the entire operation. Here is an excerpt from this MSNBC article:
Passenger criticizes flight attendants Lets imagine...the plane has landed on the ground, rolling down a hill, and filling up with smoke. Typically, smoke indicates that there is some combustable reaction abound. I know! Lets totally violate FAA regulations, dump lots of pure oxygen into the cabin! Yeah, I know that its only intended for depressurization, BUT WHO CARES?! I'm so glad customers aren't allowed to fly the airplane. Congrats to the crew, a two minute evacuation is quite a feat! Tue, 31 May 2005They are still alive! They seem to have some sort of sleeping pattern, as I usually have to "wake them up" in the morning. I typically do this by holding them in my hands for a couple minutes....this warms them up enough to get them jumping. I expected them to die off pretty quickly, but this is going on a month today of Jumping Bean ownership. Fri, 13 May 2005They are magic! I figured everybody had these when they were a kid, but thats not the case.
Click Here to watch the video! I work at a technology company with various engineers and mathematicians...and while you'd expect a very simple answer why these beans jump, thats not the case either. So far, several engineers have narrowed down the potential cause of these beans' jumping habit:
Observations:
I currently loaned out a case of beans so he can show his wife/friends/etc. Do YOU know why these beans jump? I do, and I can't keep from laughing. Fri, 09 Jul 2004
New "9/11" Policy
Since I can't exactly take a bunch of frozen meat product on a 2-lag 1900 flight, I needed to ship it frozen airfreight. And in no way at fault of the airline, I could not airfreight this product due to federal 9/11 policy. After 9/11, you can only ship airfreight if you are a known shipper. Being a known shipper requires you to have airfreighted more than 24 pieces of parcel before 9/11. How one gains this status after 9/11 is anyone's guess. But here's the kicker: If I just write "Keep Frozen" on the box, they will check it and put it in the freezer--this ends up being the same exact freezer the airfreight uses on the airplane. So what is the point? One may argue that because of the fact I am flying with my own cargo, I would be less likely to commit a terrorist act. But what is more interesting is that under the particular status I was flying under, they would not pull my checked bags if I did not show up or was bumped from the flight. They would simply be sent to the destination--without me. Its funny how such a double standard protocol ends up screwing me over, but also violates their own policies; basically making the flight no safer than it was without the regulation in the first place. But at least they kept my meat product frozen. Mon, 03 May 2004
The Hype of "Mesh Networks"
I have to admit, the concept is pretty cool. I throw 30 "devices" in random Seattle locations, each discovering one another; creating relationships of some sort; and being able to transmit information (seamlessly, of course) from one end of the cloud to the other. If a few die, it would route round them. If there was a building in the way, it would find another path to send my information. And, last but very not least, this mesh network would provide such high QoS, I could send voice and video over it. And then we fall back to the real world -- none of this idealistic crap exists. Ouch, that hurt. Sure, there have been many attempts.....but no one has come to the table with a true, innovative, open solution. And no, configuring a bunch of radios to random IP addresses (just hoping we avoid guessing the same number) doesn't count. With the state of technology today, we may be asking for too much. First, we are burdened with half duplex radio technology, ie: 802.11. Strike 1. In order to have a true, dynamic mesh, we need omni directional antennas. Strike 2. Efficient distributed trust systems, resource allocation, QoS, and lack of spectrum to provide this. Strike 3. You're out! Its the omni-mesh paradox, and until we can somehow configure multiple full duplex pairs while talking to multiple hosts on the fly, I dont see our issues going away. MIT RoofNet (and a few other solutions popping up on the scene) might mitigate some of these hurdles. But if there was a widely available mesh routing solution, trust me, we'd be running it. I do have to say that some routing protocols, like AODV, are some nice attempts at mesh routing -- even though they have little to do with wireless in particular. I am not a big fan of stateful on-demand routing, but its a great concept, and has its place in the world.
Mon, 05 Apr 2004
RFID: Privacy?
Like barcodes, RFID does not contain specific information. It is simply a static number. And unlike UPC, there is no common shared database containing what these numbers mean. RFID is not a globally visible beacon. It only works within proximity of a scanner. Most scanners only work a couple feet, at best. RFID sniffing cannot yield useful data without data sharing. A hypothetical road-side or store scanner has no idea the difference between my cat, my parking garage access card, and the Walmart shaver I just purchased. Currently, my access card saves me time at the parking gate, my shaver package's RFID chip keeps prices low, my poor lost cat can be identified at the animal shelter (instead of put to sleep with the other strays), and my work security access card keeps people who shouldn't be on my secured floor from entering. At a price of privacy? Absolutely not. If I don't want my building to have my cat's RFID number, i'll keep him away from the scanner.
Gmail is Evil? Right...
I guess this kind of thing is expected, especially with Google's vague April 1st press release boosting email storages of 1 gigabyte -- completely free. Very little information has yet to be released on the gmail page about this service....so little that people are even reading the privacy policy in effort to uncover details.
The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account. No...Really? You mean after my file system indexes are removed, they aren't going to do bit scrambles across the massive, distributed petabyte monster we know as GFS? How dare they! Maybe people should read more about how files are actually deleted in most file systems.
Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie. If you are going to do something illegal, and leave an orgy of evidence scattered around on webmail services, search engines, and your personal machine, you probably deserve to be caught. For past blog entries, check out the archive on the side or click here. |
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