jeremy's blog

So, my brand-spankin'-new Dell XPS 420 Media Center arrived yesterday morning, a full three days ahead of FedEx's estimated delivery date.  Yeah, I was stoked.  The first thing I noticed was how heavy the box was.  For what was essentially a tower, keyboard, and mouse, the thing was pretty heavy.  It wasn't until I actually pulled the tower out of the box that I realized why--that thing is solid.  I mean, it's gotta be one of the sturdiest cases I've ever seen.

That wasn't the only thing to impress me, though.  As I was pulling the tower out of the box, I noticed what looked like a control panel on the top, front side of the case.  I got very excited, realizing that there was about a 99% chance that it was a Windows Sideshow device.  By excited, I mean jumping up and down (figuratively--I was still holding the unit) and yelling!  LOL More...

Last week, I ran across a pretty incredible deal from Dell.  They were (and, through tomorrow, still are) offering their XPS 420 system for as much as $700 off the regular price.  I have been eying this system for a while, as it is one of the few (read: other than HP's) moderately-priced Media Center-capable systems that can be configured with Digital Cable Tuners.  Unlike HP's offering, Dell's can be equipped with dual tuners, and, if I'm not mistaken, I can pop in some standard analog tuners in addition to these, giving me the ability to record up to four shows simultaneously.  Not that I need that capability or anything...
Anyway.  I went with the mid-range base system and configured it to have just what I wanted.  Essentially, it's a fairly powerful (by yesterday's standards) system that will replace my almost-a-year-old custom-built Media Center.  I was rather amused at the inability to select an amount of RAM below 3GB, not that I'm complaining.  For under $1500, I think I got a pretty darn good deal, especially in light of competing offerings from companies like Life|ware that start at $2000.

I should receive it by Friday of this week, but the tuners are delayed until sometime in early February, so I guess I'll have a couple weeks to get the system configured how I want and all.  I guess that'll also give me time to schedule a reliable appointment time with Comcast for getting them to send somebody out to plug two CableCARDs into the external tuners.  You'd think I could just go and pick them up from the retail office in Redmond (which is maybe 10 minutes from my work).  Lame.

Fighting spam in a way we can all [visually] appreciate...


"Spamtrap" - watch the video

For some time now, one of my private e-mail accounts has been getting flooded with spam.  I host my own e-mail server, so it's up to me to take action against the spammers.

My first inclination was to revert to a piece of software I've used in the past, MailWasher.  MailWasher is awesome, allowing me to view each e-mail at my convenience and choose whether to let it through or to delete it and/or bounce it back to the sender.  It not only communicates with the public blacklist servers to identify known spam, but it also has its own intelligent spam detection for sniffing out the spam that may be coming from elsewhere.  It even tells me if it's known spam or possible (or probable) spam.

But, it seems as though the amount of spam I've been receiving has been continuing to increase.  This is extremely frustrating for me, 'cause while MailWasher will still correctly identify 99.9% of the known spam, it has to use my home Internet's bandwidth to contact my mail server to bounce e-mail, revealing a valid e-mail address in the process.

The solution: installation of a spam filter on my mail server.  This spam filter is very simple.  It will check the IP and/or e-mail address of the sender against public blacklist databases.  If one of those databases says the sender is a spammer, the mail server immediately tells the sender that it's not allowed to deliver mail here.  What that means is that any and all known spammers get stopped BEFORE their message comes anywhere near my inbox.  In fact, it won't even let them get to the point of verifying the destination e-mail address (my mail server enforces the requirement of a valid destination address).

This should block about 80% of the spam I've been getting.  I'll leave MailWasher to handle the remaining "unknown" spam.

This is freakin' cool!

I was reading a news article the other day about the potential for Google Apps to replace Microsoft Office in the productivity tools market for applications like Word and Excel.  Out of curiosity, I decided to go and check it out, since Google has made their office "suite" free for use, and I already own plenty of domain names and have a Google account.  After a lengthy and somewhat less-than-exciting sign-up process, I ended up at my Google Apps Control Panel.

The Control Panel is relatively straight-forward...except you can't really do anything until your domain has been activated, which you have to do yourself unless you buy one through Google.  Activating the domain is pretty simple, really, requiring one of two things...either upload a simple HTML file to the root of your domain or change the CNAME record in your domain's DNS configuration to point to Google.  This is to verify that you are in control of the domain name you have chosen to use with Google Apps.

I said that activating the domain is pretty simple...that is, if you very carefully pay attention to the instructions (assuming you're doing the file upload method--I didn't even bother with the CNAME record option).  Being a "power user," I tend to skim instructions and just extract the necessary information from them.  Most users will do this, whether they're a power user or not, because users hate to sit around and read instructions and confirm prompts (that's why so many users automatically click "Yes" or "Ok" or "Install" on dialogs).

So, I messed up on my first attempt at activating my Google Apps domain.  Turns out that you need to put this seemingly-random string of characters into a HTML file and upload that file to the root.  I incorrectly interpreted the instructions as saying that I needed to upload the file to a folder named with that string of characters.  But, even though I messed it up, I didn't see a "you messed up, you idiot" message...in fact, it just politely told me that it could take up to 48 hours to verify my information, until which time I would not be able to use any of the Google Apps applications that require a verified domain name.

Ok...dumb...I went back and re-read the instructions, this time very carefully and thoroughly, for activating the domain name.  The directions are not very clearly-written and can be confusing if you don't read through them a couple times.  I finally got it figured out, got the file uploaded, and went back through the activation process.  This time, after about 5-10 seconds, my Control Panel (after a refresh, of course) showed that I was now golden and could start using the applications (except the Gmail account, which takes a bit longer to activate).

Sweet!  I was in, and I could now see what all the hype was about.  I'm still trying to figure that part out...

The Google Apps applications are a bit disappointing.  Ok...they're a lot disappointing.  The Word-clone is about as sophisticated as the editor I'm using right now to type up this blog entry.  The website builder is VERY restrictive and doesn't have a lot of options, though it does allow you to plug a number of widget-like items into it (ala Konfabulator, Vista Sidebar, or Apple Dashboard).  Yeah--being a web developer, I am going to be a huge critic of such an app, and I'd recommend FrontPage (which has been discontinued) over Google's incarnation.  Dreamweaver, anyone?

I haven't yet checked out the spreadsheet app, though it's supposed to be pretty cool.  I'm sure I'd have plenty of complaints, though, and once I do take a look at it, I'll add some information about it.

I have had a Gmail account for quite a while now.  I don't use it and probably never will.  There's nothing particularly wrong with it, though the UI could use some improvement 'cause Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail have MUCH better interfaces and are a great deal easier to use (and take up about 4x as much bandwidth for their initial load!).  I simply have no need for ANOTHER e-mail account.  I hardly use my Hotmail accounts as it is, typically only for Microsoft Passport-related stuff or for anything where I absolutely must have web-based access.  The nice thing about Hotmail is that I can sync it with my phone...same with Yahoo!, using Yahoo!'s Go application for Windows Mobile, though I don't use my Yahoo! account, either.

Another drawback to Google's web-based office applications is that you can't use them from Windows Mobile devices.  I frequently use Excel on my phone, and now that Microsoft has written a version of Office Mobile that works on the Smartphone platform, too, all users of newer Windows Mobile devices will be able to create/edit/share Microsoft Office documents easily.  Hopefully, they'll update the software to work with the new XML-based Office formats...and that's another point: Microsoft has gone to great lengths to make sure users can share their documents with other users on other platforms by providing support for additional file formats and even creating a new one of their own that is human-readable (ie: you can open the file in a text editor, like Notepad, and edit the document right from there, because you can actually read it!).  Hell...you can even use older versions of Office to read (and possibly edit--I'm not sure) the newer formats with a FREE update Microsoft has created for those versions.

It's going to be a long time before a web-based clone of Word, Excel, FrontPage, or PowerPoint will be able to knock Microsoft Office off balance.  I, for one, prefer using an application on my computer for editing documents rather than a web-based application.  Granted, there are some advantages to using a web-based version (especially document accessibility from any location, but that's why we all carry around USB drives!), but I will stick with my PC-based applications for now.  As for e-mail...I still use Outlook, 'cause it still does plenty of things that I can't get from a web-based version, and I never have to worry about running out of storage space (not that I have 2GB of e-mail to store anyway).  Plus, it works with all of my primary e-mail accounts AND my two Hotmail accounts all from the same interface.  If only I could get the data stored in SQL instead of a PST...hehe