Using A VPN With A Tethered Wireless Broadband Connection

Posted by jerry as technology

I have a Blackberry 8703 from Verizon Wireless, and use it extensively.  I opted to buy the plan to use the Blackberry as a tethered wireless modem for a PC, for an extra $10/month.

I’ve used the blackberry as a wireless connection on many occasions, and it generally works pretty well, though often seems pretty slow.  One thing I had never been able to get working was the VPN client to my employer.  I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, but one day I really needed to connect and had no other options.

Now, the VPN connection would establish, but I could not reach any systems on the company network.  I had spent a good amount of time as a network engineer in a former life, so I’m fairly adept at troubleshooting such things, despite my management lobotomy.

I opened up a DOS shell, and tried pinging the intranet web server  Sure enough, the pings were getting through.  But, I still could not get get a web browser to connect to the site.  After pondering it for a minute, I knew the answer.  I tried the ping again, but this time I set the packet size to 1500 bytes, the normal TCP maximum size.  Viola!  The pings did not get through.  I retried the ping, decreasing by 100 bytes each time, until I got to 1100 bytes.  At 1100, the pings worked again.

Next, I went out and found this document on resetting MTU size in Windows.  I followed the instructions in the section labelled “Change the MTU Settings for VPN Connections”.  I followed the directions to reset the VPN MTU to 1100 bytes.  A requisite reboot, and I was connected.

I have since observed that web browsing in general is much faster as well.  Originally, I had thought that the overhead of the VPN client was causing an overrun in the size of the packets, forcing them to be fragmented, which is generally not handled elegantly.

Hopefully someone is able to find this tidbit useful.

Maintaining Musical Groups As A Brand

Posted by jerry as finance

I was driving home the other day, listening to Squizz on XM. A new song started and a glanced down at the screen on my dash and saw that it was the group Dokken. I listened, but I didn’t recognize the song, though it was clearly Dokken. At the end of the song, the DJ announced ‘that was a new from Dokken’. Holy smokes, Dokken is still making albums!

I have a long drive, so my mind tends to wander. I started to ponder the question: “why don’t musical groups continue to maintain an ongoing brand, even after the original artists fade away?”, like Pantera and the Beatles. It seems that successful groups spend many years, and millions of dollars in building their brands, and that the brand essentially dies once the group disbands.

Allowing popular bands to dissolve is akin to the management of a successful company saying ‘well, that was quite a ride, time to go our separate ways’, and the company dies then and there. There is one clear problem with this example – musical artists continue to make money after the group disbands, because their works continue to sell without additional effort by the former group.

I suspect that the major problem with the continuity of musical groups is the pervasive use drugs, and general bad behavior and even worse business decisions.

Lowering The Price Of Oil Through Supply Increases

Posted by jerry as finance

I have read and heard repeatedly by analysts, economists and politicians that say “drilling for oil is not going to do a thing for oil prices now”, mostly in response to the latest actions by George W Bush to allow off-shore drilling again.

I understand the logic behind those comments. Drilling for oil now means that we may have more supply in 10 years, because of the time to actually find where it is, and the infrastructure build duration. But, that assumes the price of oil is simply a matter of supply and demand. We have more demand than we have supply.As much as many people don’t want to hear it, we DO have enough supply, on a daily basis at least. It’s true that we are burning through a resource that will one day be completely gone, but we’re not there yet.

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What To Do About The Shortage Of IP Addresses

Posted by jerry as technology

For years now, we have heard about the impending end of the Internet as we run out of IP addresses. For a while, it was so persistent and frequent, it became background noise to me. The only way to save the Internet is to move to IPv6, the story goes.

I’ve spent a lot of the past decade in various networking, programming and technology management roles, and dabbled a bit in web hosting work. One thing that is obvious to me is that we are not going to be moving wholesale to IPv6 any time soon.

I was surprised to see an article the other day bringing up the dreaded doomsday of the Internet, predicting that we have 3 years until the end.

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Vacation in Panama City Beach

Posted by jerry as Fish

Last week, I took my family to Panama City Beach. I know what you’re thinking – what a dump. I don’t mean Panama City, I mean Panama City Beach – a few miles down the coast. It’s not the concrete jungle that Panama City is… Yet.

When we arrived, I was standing at the back of our van in the unloading area of our condo. As I was waiting for my wife to come back with a luggage cart, a fire truck with lights and siren pulled up behind me. Two firemen jumped out and yelled at me to get out of the way (I wasn’t in the way).

After settling in, we went to the pool. While we were there, a Coast Guard helicopter kept slowly flying over the beach about 200 yards away.

As it turns out, somewhere between 50 and 100 people (the exact number is not clear) had to be rescued from the Gulf. Two people drown as we started our vacation.

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What happened to Chuck E Cheeze?

Posted by jerry as finance

When I was a kid, the highlight of my year was to get to go to Chuck E Cheeze.  They had many cool games and the singing, dancing animitronics.  I hadn’t been there is a long, long time until last year.  I went for a birthday party that my son was invited to.  It was pretty well run down.  And the store is a very nice part of town.  At the time I dismissed the experience as catching them on a bad day. 

So, yesterday I get to go again for another 5 year old’s birthday.  Nearly a year later.  The first thing I notice as I’m walking around is that ALL of the games are the very same as my last visit.  I also notice that the same games that were not working last time are STILL not working this time.  I would estimate about 5% of their games are broken.

So, it comes time for the party to gather.  As we sit down, the lights dim and the curtain opens and the animitronic Chuck E Cheeze starts to sing and do his bit.  Except there’s no sound.  One of the kids sitting at the table behind me asks her mom: “mommy, why can’t Chuck E Cheeze talk?”.

As I look around, there are some TV screens built into the walls.  Some big, some small, all of them BROKEN.  Two of them have only the red color gun working, the other colors making a nasty zig-zag line on the screen. 

Now it’s time for Chuck E Cheeze to make his floor debut.  As he’s meeting and high-fiving the kids, another employee is getting a large boom box out, asking a fellow co worker if the right CD is in.  She takes the stereo over to the wall near where Chuck E Cheeze is greeting his fans and plugs it in.  And hits play.  The group of kids conga’s around the store behind Chucky to music coming from the portable stereo.

After they all return, the employee lights the candles on two cakes - there are two simultaneous parties happening, after all.  She runs over and changes the song to the Chuck E Cheeze happy birthday song.  Which is interactive.  And requires the employees to dance.  The employees are trying to get the crowd to sing their part of the song: “I say happy… You say birthday… Happy…”  silence.  Over and over and over.  I would swear that I was in some kind of bad Chevy Chase movie. 

I felt pretty bad for the poor employees who kept bumping into each other as they are attempting to pull off the corporate dance moves, and being unsuccessful at rousing the crowd.

On my way home, I started to wonder: why is it like that?  Then, I remembered seeing a sign on the door as I walked in: “All of our games are now just 1 token!”.  Ah, that’s it.  When I went 30 years ago, the games were a quarter as well.  The games I can play at home on my Wii at least compare favorably to the best games at the store, blowing most of them away.  Going to Chuck E Cheeze is not the experience for my kids that it was for me.  When I was a kid, Chuck E Cheeze had games that seemed so far advanced I felt like I was in the future.  It was a maical place to me.  For my kids, Chuck E Cheeze is a challenge to get as many tickets at possible to cash in for some crappy toy. 

The margins of that store have to be razor thin. 

Some cool scripts I’ve found

Posted by jerry as Uncategorized

I have way too many domain names, and last weekend I decided to try to put some of them to productive use.  I had the idea of pull all of my RSS feeds from my various sites to one common site.  Initially, I looked at LeafRSS, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for.  If you are aggregating a homogeneous set RSS topics, then it makes sense – like Bip Bip for example.  I looked around and found rnews.  It was about as close to what I was looking for as I was going to find.  So, I set up my domain www.invires.com with a rnews pulling from all of my sites (the ones that offer feeds, anyhow).

I was pretty pleased with the result.  I had the idea to aggregate the various tropical fish forums out on the Internet into one site.  So, I registered a new domain – www.tropicalfishnews.net to serve that purpose.  I am hoping to have some time to tinker with rnews in the coming weeks.  I would very much like to add an ajax type update mechanism, and some sort of scrolling ability.  So, for each of the panes, the news would scroll down and a new entry would be added to the top, as the RSS feeds were updated.

Iran’s decision to trade oil in Euros instead of dollars

Posted by jerry as finance, politics

Iran announced that it is now trading oil Euros instead of dollars. The weakness in the dollar is cited as a primary reason, though it is understood that the growing tension between the US and Iran is probably a key factor as well.

The general reaction I have seen is: “Holy Crap!”. But, I have to wonder: what is the real impact of doing such a thing, from any side? Oil is a fungible commodity. Currencies are traded on the market. Oil sold in Euros is still convertable to the current exchange rate to dollars. So, someone who wants to buy a million barrels of oil from Iran has to convert $120M to 75M Euro before conducting the transaction? That does sound grave. I suppose the net effect is that Iran will be holding $80B less US dollars per year. Since NO US institution can transact business with the Iran anyhow, Iran is most likely having to exchange them for Euros, Yen or some other currency before doing anything meaningful with it anyhow.

I suspect the risk is that the whole oil market will eventually follow suit. With the recent behavior of the US, that seems likely, but I still have to wonder: will we care?

WordPress backup script

Posted by jerry as Uncategorized

I was looking to upgrade wordpress today, and realized that there MUST be a better way.  So, I hit google up for a “wordpress upgrade script”.  Sure enough, I found a great script at http://pthree.org/2007/03/02/wordpress-upgrade-script/.  I played with it, but it still required a lot of work – looking up database usernames and whatnot.  I figured that I could pull the username, database name and password out of the wp-config.php file. And I could.

So, now the script just pauses to remind you to deactivate your plugins.  I tried to find a way to automate that, but have struck out so far.  If you know how, let me know!  I’ll give you credit.

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Authentication in the real world

Posted by jerry as Uncategorized

There is an interesting prank being pulled on CEO’s and CFO’s of many large public companies that highlights the trouble of authentication in the real world.  The wall street journal has a report about a prankster who dials into a quarterly earnings call and gives a bogus name and company to the operator.  A well known name and well known company.  See, few people are allowed to ask questions on these calls to prevent just this sort of thing.  But, there is no good way to validate the caller’s identity. 

 The story was well timed for me.  I picked my son up from preschool last week with my wife – the first time I had done so.  We waited in a line of cars and as we approached the building, my wife pulled out a paper plate that was clipped to a clothes hangar.  She dutifully hung the plate from the rear view mirror.  A worker called out plate numbers via radio to signal to bring him outside to wait to be picked up.

I was really struck by this authentication mechanism.  I have to use several passwords to connect to near meaningless data at my office, but to pick up my kid, it only takes a paper plate and a magic marker.