The World Models T-34 Mentor would never win any beauty awards for scale looks or accurate renditions of the original airplane, but it was a hardy, reliable and very easy to fly craft. If not for some poor covering material that was shedding after years of faithful service it could have been one of the best planes ever built.

While it will never truly be replacable, I am sure there will be another plane to take its spot in the garage in the future.  Goodbye and farewell T-34, you will certainly be missed.

World Models T-34 Mentor

During their f8 conference in April 2010, Facebook introduced a platform called the Open Graph.  On its face, it seems to do what users want: go anywhere on the web and see information about what their Facebook friends think and let them report their own activities back to Facebook.  Unfortunately, as a “feature” of this new roll-out comes the serious drawback: you are now watched, tracked and exposed everywhere on the web that Facebook has a deal.  What this means is that any data in your Facebook world is now available to any web site that uses the new Open Graph API.  Worse, these sites need only ask for permission once and they can reach in and grab all the data they want and keep it forever.

If all of this weren’t enough, some extra bits of bad behavior from Facebook are now becoming visible.  To “assist” in the social web expansion Facebook wants, they are now automatically opting-in every user’s private profile data to share with the web.  No longer are your favorite books, music, movies or your home town, education and events just between you and your authorized friends.  Nope, now Facebook is pretty much telling you “share it all or else you’ll have no profile page.” This is bad news, indeed.

So far, Facebook hasn’t caved on any of this.  Things have raised enough eyebrows that the US Senate has started asking Facebook to back down. It is likely, however, that Facebook will do nothing about all the controversy, chalk it all up to people not understanding how the web works, then plowing ahead with their own plans to completely own your identity and personal data online.  If you need a hard reason to believe that this will all end badly, look no further than the young Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself who tells the press “he doesn’t believe in privacy” online.  If that doesn’t get people to wake up I’m not sure what will.

I think it is time to own up to the generational gap: I believe that there must be the ability for me to control my personal information online.  I don’t think that a company should have unfettered access to all of my personal data, my friends and then be able to go off and give it to anyone, anywhere for as long as they like without letting me decide about it.  I feel there will always be a public forum on which to share certain parts of my life, but it should be on my terms and with limits that I set.  Yes, the future may be all about “the personalized web” and how great that will make discovering new things… but if it comes at the cost of all of my online privacy I think I’ll stick to hanging out with the uncool kids and their old-school, legacy information and decision-making processes.

UPDATE: after the original post went up the EFF put out this helpful summary of how bad the new Open Graph API is to your “private data.”  In short, if you want to have data shared between just you and friends, you can no longer be on Facebook.  Read Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections for more details.

I had a few sites and about 5 gigabytes of data sitting on this host, so moving isn’t trivial. That’s what makes the decision to leave even more instructive to others: if I have to put up with the serious pane of moving my site, email and data plus that of other friends and colleagues to another provider, something must be really wrong.

Over the course of my time with them, Bluehost.com steadily worsened in the support department. It seemed that each month brought some new problem or distanced the customer further from their support staff. Just last week on a support call I had to wait nearly 45 minutes on the phone for answers, only to have my call dropped. When I called back I got the now-standard line from them:

We don’t know what the problem is, but we are looking into it. No, we can’t tell you when it will be fixed or what caused the issue. We have tens of thousands of customers and it would be too difficult to find out what the issue is each time this happens.

It’s not too difficult for them to take my money but it is too difficult for them to explain why they can’t provide the service that I paid for? Along with complaints from folks who simply couldn’t reach me or had their emails bounced, this explanation pushed me to move to a new host, Arvixe.com. Will they work out any better? Only time will tell, but for now anything is better than what I am leaving.

I’ve had people accuse me in the past of acting impulsively or overstating the situation when it comes to customer service and bad company behavior. Luckly, on the Internet the service you pay for can be monitored and quantified, and what I will show below is just a snapshot of the service, or lack of it, that I suffered over the past few months.

What should be noted is that this is a snapshot of the overall service reliability, with 100% being the best case scenario. Whenver there is a dip on the chart, web, email or DNS service was impacted for some period of time. The further down the graph dips, the more issues there were on that date.  This isn’t some arbitrary graph, this is hard data provided by Basicstate.com, thanks to over a year of service monitoring of my account every 5 to 30 minutes.

In closing, I cannot recommend using Bluehost.com at the service level I paid for. They may offer better service for higher paying clients, but as I found when I moved to my new host, there are plenty of other companies out there providing better service for like-or-lower prices.

For now the key is to find out if any of this works out and so far it looks like it does, or mostly does.

1. The economy – I really should not have to explain this one. If you had stocks, bonds, a retirement account or any kind of savings you know it sucked this year. Enough said.
2. Employment – or the lack thereof. By ending the year at 10% the US finds itself in bad shape for those wanting work. In California where I am it’s a cruddy 12.3%.
3. Healthcare – one of the “benefits” of working as a self-employed or small business owner is acquiring your own healthecare. It is neither beneficial nor cheap, I’ve learned. And it seems that Congress would like to make it worse. Way to go, elected officials.
4. The Financial system – big bailouts, too-big-to-fail thinking, insane back-room deals to help out insurance companies, messed up mortgages and bank failures. Oh, and your credit card APR is going way up.
5. Climate Change – yes, the Earth is getting warmer in some places. But it seems to do that on its own from time-to-time. Now the truth is coming out and it looks like global warming is all about getting fatter government grants.
6. Sarah Palin – enough already! Between her book tour, crazy fans, crazy family or just plain dumb things to say this would-be candidate really needs to be given a reality TV show so the rest of thinking American can tune out.
7. AT&T – their network bites, they are beginning to losing money on services and they really have bad customer service these says. It may be time to start looking for other options.
8. Apple’s walled garden – better known as the App Store to most folks. It’s been a bad year for Apple on this front and next year doesn’t look to be much better given recent events.
9. Netbooks – this abomination of technology really needs to die. It may be doing so already. There are no profits in making them, users are unhappy after buying them and most of the internet won’t run on them. I know people are cheap, but come on, spend an extra $50 and buy a laptop.

I thought about going on and listing some hopeful predictions for 2010, but let’s just think about the track record for such things: they just don’t pan out. If you can’t predict the easy stuff, like tomorrows weather, then trying to guess how a whole year will turn out like is just nuts. I will stick with my current belief that next year will just be a bit like this year, only with a “ten” at the end of it. We’ll see.

Why is it that technology gets faster/better/cheaper and yet it is just as hard to use as it ever was?

Clearly I missed that day in marketing class.

First off, this guide is for Windows users, so folks using OS X or any of the Linux flavors need to find some way to live temporarily in the Microsoft world. Sorry, but the best and most usable tools only exist for Windows, so you have to deal with it.

Next, I’m going to assume (a risky thing to start with) that the user has some level of decent PC hardware to work with. For the purposes of this article and at the time of this writing decent is a system like this:

• A Core2 Duo or Phenom II x2 with a clock speed of at least 2Ghz
• At least 2GB of RAM
• At least 500GB of free hard disk space, preferably on a SATA controller
• A DVD + Blu-ray combo reader optical drive, preferably on SATA
• The OS should be at least Windows XP
• Some kind of useful Internet connectivity (to acquire the software)

With that taken care of, let us look at why the requirements are set at this level. First off, if any kind of format transcoding is required you are going to be spending a lot of time waiting for things to get done with a slower system. Next, virtually none of the original format media will be usable as-is for streaming, so plenty of memory and disk space are needed to pull apart and re-assemble the video into just the right format. Finally, since there are so many formats out there that are not compatible for streaming there will be at least some time spent buffering up and on-the-fly encoding the stuff you want to watch into a usable stream, and that takes a fast disk and RAM.

The work-flow to accomplish physical media disc video to file based streaming usually goes like this:

1. The video you want to stream exists on a DVD or Blu-ray disc
2. Place the disc into your PC DVD/Blu-ray drive and…
3. Use some software to move the parts you want off the disc and onto the hard drive
4. Check the files that make it onto the hard drive and re-constitute them into files that can be streamed
5. Save the new file in a stream-worthy format
6. Point your streaming software at the new file and…
7. Navigate to the PC on your gaming console, select the filename and stream away

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately the process is anything but simple. But here are my steps to getting the job done in as few hops as is possible.

Unless you are a glutton for punishment, enjoy troubleshooting endless registry settings and numerous software incompatibilities, just go get AnyDVD HD and call it a day.

So much work can be saved by just following this one step. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve read of people trying this or that only to end up with files that don’t work or messed up audio and video sync. Save yourself a whole lot of pain and just use the one thing that works every single time: AnyDVD.

Eventually you’ll need to get rid of that extra “stuff” that you don’t want surrounding the video that you do want, so grab tsMuxeR for all the Blu-ray tweaking.

There is a lot of junk packed onto discs these days and most of it isn’t what you want to watch. TsMuxeR will help you pull out the stuff that matters, dump what doesn’t, then reconstitute a new file that will stream just fine. Major space savings can come from just firing up this tool and pulling out all of the languages and extras that eat up so much of the space.

How do you find out what is the good stuff to keep and what is the stuff to throw away? BDInfo is there to help out with your Blu-ray needs.

This handy accessory can help you zero in on just the right parts of the disc that you need in order to keep what you want and dump what you don’t.

Eventually you will run into something that just won’t stream no matter what you do. When that day arrives turn to RipBot264 and make your own file format.

VC-1 video and DTS audio do not stream well, and by well I mean not at all. When you encounter these codecs you must convert them into something that will stream, and RipBot264 does that for you. The scary bit of this tool is it’s requirement to install a few other geeky video tools on the PC, but don’t worry. It will use them and you’ll never have to worry about seeing them again.

This stuff is all fine and dandy, but I just want to take a normal DVD and stream it. For that you need one more tool, VOBMerge.

If you have a standard DVD and you know exactly what parts of the disc you want to keep, VOBMerge can take those parts and turn them into one large streaming file. It is really as simple as anything gets.

Great. I have streaming files but I need to get them to my game console. The simplest way to do that and the one that works with the most success for the PS3 is PS3 Media Server.

The great thing about this software is that it runs on Windows, OS X and Linux (if you have the patience to get all the bits compiled). You simply point it at a directory of streaming capable files, let it index those files, hook your game console up to the network and stream away. On the PS3 your system shows up as a “play button” arrow, so it is easy to find. Simply find and hit play on any file that you see and its streaming video time for you.

So this is my short list of things people can use to take video and stream it. There isn’t a full set of instructions because, frankly, there is no one right way to do things. Instead, there is an entire Internet full of guides out there with thousands of people who’ve done things one way or another. I encourage you to seek those forums out and have a look at what other folks have tried before embarking on your own disc to stream adventure.

]]> http://www.msinsights.com/2009/11/14/video-disc-tools-for-happy-streaming/feed/ 0 http://www.msinsights.com/2009/09/11/attempting-to-break-the-surly-bonds-of-voicemail/ http://www.msinsights.com/2009/09/11/attempting-to-break-the-surly-bonds-of-voicemail/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:32:04 +0000 mstroud http://www.msinsights.com/?p=434 Now that I’ve become more of a nomadic worker, without a full-time office location, I’ve been looking for ways to make my phone presence consistent and available no matter how a client might reach me. Switching to AT&T U-verse was one step in that direction, as they offered custom options for forwarding calls and personalize rings.  Using Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) was another, as it allowed a “call one number and reach me anywhere” capability.

Until today I was unsure of how to loop my mobile phone into this world. That did make things a bit difficult as many contacts try to reach me using that number first. Further complicating this connectivity is the fact that in some locations, like my home, I have virtually no wireless signal strength at all.  This left many people thinking that I was ignoring their call when actually I could never hear the phone ring at all.

I decided to do a bit of hunting today and came across this great link for AT&T Wireless customers and forwarding… and it had information to do almost exactly what I wanted to do. I now have things setup in a circular but I believe usable manner:



If this all works I hope to rarely, if ever, listen to another voicemail message again as I’ll be talking to the person who is calling or Google Voice will transcribe the voicemail into text for me.

]]> http://www.msinsights.com/2009/09/11/attempting-to-break-the-surly-bonds-of-voicemail/feed/ 0 http://www.msinsights.com/2009/06/21/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-fail-fail-again/ http://www.msinsights.com/2009/06/21/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-fail-fail-again/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:46:09 +0000 mstroud http://www.msinsights.com/?p=430 I’ve had a tough week, technology-wise.  Over the course of the last three days I’ve had two relatively new hard drives fail, a gigabit switch started having some ports go slow and a servo that controls the throttle on an RC airplane went nuts.  I think it may be time for some time away from the keyboard.

I believe my new saying for hard disks should go something like this:

“There are no such things as good, dependable or safe disks.  There are just disks that have failed and those that will fail.”

On the recommendation of some people on the Internet, I bought and tested a Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1TB SATA drive.  It seemed great: it was big, fast, very quiet and energy efficient.  Windows seemed to like it and a couple of my other PCs with very finicky SATA controllers took a shine to it as well.  After about a month or so of using it I decided to purchase 5 more, 4 to put into my ReadyNAS storage box and one “spare” to use for shuttling data around. I also convinced a partner of mine to pony up for an additional 4 drives for his NAS.  All seemed right in the world.

About two weeks ago I started noticing my ReadyNAS box getting slower and slower when trying to copy files from it or put files on it.  It also has a web page where the admin tasks get done, and most days I was fortunate to see that page in two to three minutes after trying it.  Great, I thought, some kind of firmware mess up (the box can offer and upgrade its own firmware) has happened.  So I slapped on a new version of the firmware, rebooted the NAS, and then nothing. Truly nothing, as in no web page, no network shares, no ping returns.  A few more reboots and things appeared to be working, so I left it alone to worry about it another day.

In the meantime I reformatted my main PC to be a full time Windows 7 x64 RC1 machine, so I fed it my existing Samsung 1TB drive to run from.  That worked for about 24 hours, then Win7 just stopped responding.  Thinking that I fouled it somehow (it happens, I go nuts on new installs from time to time) I hammered the whole install and did it again.  This time around it lasted for about 6 hours before Win7 coughed up an error message that roughly translated said:

“Dude (it’s California, work with me here), this drive is busted and you should back it up. Oh, and I won’t let you write to it any more. Have a nice day.”

Flash forward to June 19, just 24 hours after the desktop drive was rejected by Windows and now the NAS just disappeared.  I checked it to verify that it still had power but beyond that it did nothing but sit there and blink.  Reboot and try again.  The NAS works, but very slowly.  I finally get the admin web page up to view what the matter might be.  To my surprise there are no alerts in its log of “very bad things” that happen on it when I’m not looking, but there is another page where I can see the raw details of each disk’s S.M.A.R.T. report.  This is where all the scary data is on errors, retries and the like.  Imagine my surprise to find that one of my disks, labeled “2″ by the NAS, has gone off the deep end with over 100K of errors in less than a weeks time.  I shut the box down and pulled that drive, replacing it with that “spare” Samsung I had been using as my portable disk.  26 hours later the NAS is up and running and it seems happy again, but I’m not so sure.

Along with my panic and rage, I notice that a few of my machines are running slowly when connecting to each other on my network or talking to the Internet.  That’s odd, I say to myself, since I often have self referential conversations, my network is all Gigabit Ethernet enabled save for a few older devices.  I check the gigabit switch and find that at least two of the ports are lit at 10/100 speeds.  The PCs confirm this and I sit puzzled.  It worked last week, I thought, but now it’s gone and slowed itself down for no reason?  A quick check of the Internets using some Google-foo and I have my answer, this Netgear 8 port switch, the GS608, has a history of dying slowly and taking one port at a time down to a crawl.  It just decided to make itself known to me while I’m fighting my hard disks.

Normally, three big failures at once is plenty, but since this is my life I had to make it more exciting.  I drove off to the RC airfield to fly my “reliable” airplane and the servo that controls the throttle goes nuts. It decides there are two settings: full on and off.  Stranger still is the fact that this has never happened on any airplane I’ve had before and after tinkering with the airplane and changing nothing it “cures” itself.  Knowing the week I’ve just had I packed everything up in the truck and took my toys home.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is supposed to be, other than when I seem to have bad luck in a portion of my world it happens in clumps.  I’ll certainly want to be extra careful the next time I get in something fast and dangerous to go somewhere… come to think of it my car was just in the shop for a safety system malfunction. Hmmm….



]]> http://www.msinsights.com/2009/06/21/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-fail-fail-again/feed/ 0 http://www.msinsights.com/2009/05/19/all-about-scams-and-id-theft/ http://www.msinsights.com/2009/05/19/all-about-scams-and-id-theft/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 21:48:47 +0000 mstroud http://www.msinsights.com/?p=425 Two different events conspired to make today suck: an email purporting to be from the FBI and US Mail from a former employer telling me that my identity may have been stolen.

The FBI mail is the typical Internet scam, but this time with more legit looking information and 50% less bad grammar.  It tells me that:

your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.

Of course, I completely forgot about that lotto ticket I picked up when I was in London five years ago.  How silly of me, and how wonderful that the FBI took the time to track it down for me.  I’m sure someone will fall for this but it’s just another hoax in my inbox.

This second one is more serious.  It seems that a former employer who will remain nameless contracted with an accounting firm which had my personal identification (and that of others) on a laptop.  That laptop was stolen and the firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, says it had all kinds of security to keep my information safe, and that I shouldn’t worry.  Sounds fine until you read the next paragraph:

… as the laptop was in use at the time of the theft, we cannot be certain that these security measures were enabled.

So now I’m told that someone can go out and masquerade as me, creating new bank accounts, credit cards and personal loans and that all PWC can say is sorry, we’re not liable?  I realize that the 21st century was going to be new and exciting but I didn’t realize that personal or corporate responsibility wasn’t one of the 20th century carry-overs. Shameful, I say.



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