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I use Gmail and I don’t empty my Spam folder. I had a habit of emptying it on a regular basis, but I found that there was really no reason to do that. I’ve not had any false positives (that I know of) so I don’t look at anything in there anymore. I also wanted to see how much spam I get in a month so I just let it pile up in the spam folder, Gmail deletes spam messages after (about) thirty days. Late last year it was hovering around 1200 with a spike when the Internet was hit with a massive botnet. As of today it has dropped below 500. I’m not don’t know of any major work over the last month or so to take down botnets, but I’m sure we will continue to see a decline since the ‘Spam King’ was recently indicted and arrested. I’m happy either way since that will mean the Internet in general will be just a bit faster since the majority of email traffic.

Enjoy your cleaner mail client!

globeandmail.com: British, U.S. kids worst off in industrial world, UN says
British and U.S. children are the worst off in the industrialized world, according to a UN report Wednesday that ranked the well-being of youngsters in 21 wealthy countries.

What’s wrong with this picture?  The hazards of misplaced priorities.

Since in America the perception of a problem is what decides the merit of a problem, it is appropriate that just changing the perception will cause the problem to go away. The whole global warming mess can all be cleared up, at least in the eyes of Americans, by simply converting to the metric system of measurement. The mass confusion the American people will experience will cloud the issues at hand and the perception of the problem will be changed, hence, it will go away.

65 MPH = 104.6 K/H
Americans will be thrilled about being able to travel at faster speeds. “Woohoo!! Look how fast were goin’ y’all! I’m doin’ over a hundred.”

20 MPG = 8.5 K/L
The car industry will be excited about the lower emissions standards (since 8 is lower than 20) and the economy will boom. The whole reason higher fuel economy standards are being balked at is because it’s going to hurt the national economy. We must preserve the economy at all costs. The national economy is a delicate balance that should not be ‘tinkered’ with. Oh but it is ok to pump the upper atmosphere with smoke-like particles to block the sun and reverse global warming.

120 F = 48.9 C
Hey, it’s not that hot. It’s not even fifty degrees!

24 feet = 7.3152 meters
Sea level rise will really not be that bad. “Oh yeah, they were saying like 24 feet or something. Shooot. Now they’re telling us it’s only going to be 7 meaters. That’s nothin’”

So, in doing America’s part to take action against the causes of global warming, the current administration should work feverishly to bring metrification to the good people of America and solve Global Warming once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL!

/sarcasm
I’m ashamed of the policies and politics in America. We are one of the few countries to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol and one of the few contries left to not use the metric system. Is there a connection? Yes, it all comes back to our precious economy.

I’ve been doing some research into online backup services and I think I’ve found the one I’ll stick with for a while, mozy.com. The link I provide here is a referrer link. If you sign up through this link we BOTH will get an extra 256MB worth of quota. Good for those that are on a budget but 2GB is free and it’s only $4.95 for unlimited. Yeah, that’s right, unlimited. Although I don’t know how effective it would be to back up your entire music movie collection over your upload link, might take a while.

I tried out datadepositbox.com (DDB) and onlinebackupsolutions.com (OBS) but neither of them really did what I wanted. DDB was nice because it would scan for changes and upload them as they happened, but that would sometimes result in many more versions of a file than necessary and it just hit the hard drive too much. OBS would just fail if you didn’t have the PC on during the backup time and if you shutdown while it was going you were also out of luck. Mozy will run automatic backups every two hours when your computer is idle, like at lunch, and can be interrupted at any point and will pick right back up where it left off. DDB had a bandwidth throttling feature so it would not tie up your uplink while you were using the computer, however it didn’t really work worth anything. Mozy’s throttle feature works great much like a limiter on bittorrent software or some FTP programs.

Mozy is a quick download and simple install. It will suggest a bunch of stuff to back up and you can also specifically choose files or folders you want included. Quota is based on what you select to back up, not on what is stored. Some may say that is a rip because the store it compressed, however they also keep 30 days worth of revisions which don’t count toward quota. Also, if you unselect something, like music files, those files stay available for restore online for 30 days but don’t count toward your quota.

When I was going through the information on the website I really got a kick out of how they come across. Very laid back and in tune with what people are dealing with. In their suggested alternatives to Mozy they said, “Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line.” I laughed at that one because it is actually something I considered. The other alternatives are just as funny.

If you search the web for reviews on Mozy you might find some folks talking about the Terms saying you are opting into spam. This is no longer true and not in their terms. Also, in just about every blog I saw a post from someone touting idrive.com. They must be pushing their service to anyone interested in Mozy because their features are much the same but still in beta. Comments are off so I wont get their comment spam but I’ll go ahead and tell you that I’m not keen on their practices and would not recommend them.

I’d be happy if Mozy and Google hooked up and offered a service where my files would be backedup and synced to my PC as well as available through the Google services. Modifying them on Google and also have the latest copy on my PC would be nice. Plus having all the version control and peace of mind in backups.

Try them out and drop me a line to let me know your thoughts.

What You Get
* 2GB of free, secure storage (Or go Unlimited for $4.95/month!)
* Open/locked file support
* Block-level differential backup
* 128-bit SSL support (to secure your data during transport)
* 448-bit Blowfish encryption (to secure your data on our server)
* Continuous or scheduled backup options

I just tried out the Windows Vista Test Drive to see how it worked. It looks like they are running terminal server with a bunch of hosted Vista sessions. I picked the ‘lab’ for Previous Versions. This new feature supposedly will keep past versions of a file automatically so you go back if you delete a file or the file gets corrupted. This seemed like a cool feature a bit like what they offer when you use a W2K3 file server. I followed the steps as shown in the lab and this is what I experienced.

• The first time I clicked the Start button (the new flag in the corner), I immediately saw a blank screen with ‘No Connection’. I had to refresh the window and then I saw the desktop again.
• When I opened the file they directed me to, I was prompted to activate Office 2007. I would have thought they would have done this already or at least bypassed this. The activation failed over the internet so I canceled.
• I deleted all the text in the document then saved and closed it.
• I opened the ‘Restore Previous Versions’ dialog and it searched.
• “There are no previous versions”

Before this Test Drive I was really not impressed with Vista. I had no plans to upgrade to Vista when it was released or any point later. My feelings after the Test Drive really have not changed. It just proves to me that features are not going to work all the time as advertised. Oh, the term ‘it just works’ does not apply here. I know it might be some configuration problem somewhere that was not done correctly, but this is supposed to be a test drive to show off the features. Don’t think that I’m discrediting the entire OS based just on this experience. I’m discrediting the OS based on all my bad experiences with Vista. Your mileage may vary.

I ran into a situation where I had a large (12gb) vmdk file that only needed to be about 2gb.  There are no tools built into VMware Workstation for reducing vmdk size, although there is one for expanding (vmware-vdiskmanager).  Here are some simple steps I used to reduce the size of my vmdk using all open source tools.

1. Shut down the VM
2. Add a new Disk with the appropriate size and settings (flat or sparse).
3. Get the GParted LiveCD from here.
4. Set the VM CDROM to boot using this LiveCD.
5. In GParted, select the new drive and create a disk label. (Initializes disk)
6. Highlight the partition on the old drive and reduce the partition size to something smaller than the space available on the new drive.
7. Highlight the partition on the old drive and select Copy.
8. Highlight the new drive and select Paste.
9. Choose to expand the partition to the full available space of the new drive (if desired).
10. Ensure that you set the drive options on the new drive to Boot.
11. Shutdown the VM.
12. Remove the old drive from the VM configuration.
13. Remove the LiveCD mapping from the CDROM
14. Boot up the VM and test.

If all goes well you should have your OS running on the new smaller vmdk.  If everything looks good, you can delete the old vmdk file or leave it there in case you want to roll back.

I recommend using preallocated vmdk files that are allocated in 2GB files.  Being preallocated ensure optimal performance for the VM.  2GB files are easier to manage and defrag.  Once the vmdk files are created go ahead and run a defrag to make sure all your vmdk’s are contiguous.

I’m on a little kick right now to surgically remove myself from Windows dependency. I’m running a Ubuntu Linux virtual machine and trying to do everything I possibly can without Windows. Amazingly it is working out quite well. No special reason why I chose Ubuntu over the other distros, it just what I started with on this kick. My dependency on Windows is tied to Quicken for my finances. I (briefly) tried to get Quicken installed on Wine but found that there are many hoops I’ll have to jump through to get it working. CrossOver from CodeWeavers shows more promise but I’m not sure that I won’t end up bagging Quicken all together. The idea that I have to install IE because Quicken is so reliant on it for page rendering in the application, seems a bit of a backwards move in trying to get off my dependence on Windows. I’m willing to give up features just for simple functionality in something like GnuCash. We’ll see where all this goes. My plan is to resist the need for Vista and be Windows free by the time WinXP reaches end of life in a couple of years.

Yesterday I discovered pandora.com. I had been told about it before but never tuned in but now I’m hooked. Pandora is an Internet Radio provider that learns what kind of music you like as you listen. You flag songs you like and reject ones you don’t and over time it dials into an awesome personal DJ. You can set up multiple (100) ’stations’ so you can listen to different types of music at different times. Makes those ’streaming’ online radio stations a bit ancient because you can’t tailor the songs to your liking. Right now I’m listening to my ‘Female Vocal Harmony’ station. Sweet!

I recently investigated the use of Ubuntu and worked through the process of installing VMware Tools and developed this guide. All comments and feedback welcome as this is my first experience with Ubuntu.

Host OS: Windows XP SP2
VMware Workstation: 5.5.2 build-29772
Guest OS: Ubuntu-6.10.1-desktop-i386

NOTE: If you are performing an upgrade to 6.10 it would be best to uninstall VMware Tools prior to performing the upgrade due to the vm* binaries being built for the older kernel. After the upgrade is complete, VMware Tools can be reinstalled.

Installing VMware Tools:

The VMware Tools installer (for 5.5.2) does not install drivers for Xorg 7.1, only up to 7.0 is supported. The method outlined below updates the installer to install the 7.0 vmmouse driver and leaves the vmware video driver that exists on a default 6.10 install in place. The existing 6.10 vmware_drv.so is 39332 bytes, 2006-09-11 19:55.

1. Start up a terminal window and do the following to ensure that you have the required packages for building VMware Tools for the 6.10 kernel (2.6.17-10-generic).

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

NOTE: linux-headers-`uname -r` is not required on a default build as these headers already exist. They are listed here in case you have made kernel modifications.

2. From the VMware WS menu, choose VM->Install VMware Tools. You should see a mounted CD image show up on the desktop.

In the File Browser that pops up, right-click the VMwareTools*.tar.gz file and click Extract To…
The Desktop is the default, click Extract.
Close the File Browser.

Back in the terminal window:

cd ~/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

CAUTION: During vmware-install.pl, I chose the default answers to everything but at the end did not choose to launch vmware-config-tools.pl. This file is going to be patched in the next step.

3. Put the contents of the vmware-config-tools-5.5.2-patch-diff.txt file in your home directory. (Look over the changes for your peace of mind)

wget http://mtnbike.org/vmware/vmware-config-tools-5.5.2-patch-diff.txt
sudo chmod u+w /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl
sudo patch /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl vmware-config-tools-5.5.2-patch-diff.txt
sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl

4. In order for the synchronized clipboard to function as well as the host shared folders feature, you must have vmware-toolbox running.

From the menu choose, System->Preferences->Sessions->Startup Programs
Click Add, enter vmware-toolbox, Ok, Close.

5. Restart the system. (Shouldn’t there be a better way to get things working without a reboot?)

All done!

UPDATE 1 (2006-10-27):
In order to get the scroll wheel to work again after the above install, you will need to make a minor change to the xorg.conf file.

In the “Configured Mouse” section, change the following line as indicated:

Options “Protocol” “imps/2″

If you have more than five buttons (scroll wheel counts as three), then you might need the following line:

Options “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″

A day to look back and see where you have come from. A day to look ahead to see where you are going. A day to look up a know that your life is just a mist.

You know the day. Everyone has one once a year.