Category Archives: General

Shout out to the web.

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This posting is for other victims of Oracle Calendaring (an enterprise calendaring system) who are trying to get it to work on the Mac and their Treo (or Palm) synchronization.

Mac:

  • I was unable to get it to play nice with iCal, so no more iCal.
  • So you have to use their 1987 quality calendaring application on the desk top.

Treo:

  • You need use Mark/Space’s Missing Sync because iSync won’t allow you to disable the calendar only; so switch to that before the following steps.
  • The task and address book synching are said to be lousy.
  • You need the Oracle conduits.
  • After they are installed remove the address book and task conduits and restore the Mark/Space conduits.
  • Don’t try to run both the Oracle calendar conduit and the Mark/Space event conduit; since they are both trying to sync the same data.
  • If you get this error: “Out of storage space during update of database CTimeSetupPrefsDB” in the log on the treo then you need to upgrade your Treo’s firmware.

There may, or may not, be a Mac release of the Treo firmware updater for the Mac. If there isn’t on then you need to a window’s box. Virtual PC will work, but you need to manually kill the Mac processes running in the background listing for the Hot Synch request that comes in from the Treo; you can find those using the application known as the Activity Monitor.

That said this thing is junk.

I am assured by other users that it does not consistently move appointments created on the palm onto your main calendar. Those users then give you the sardonic smile of a fellow traveler and report that they have been trained to enter appointments only into Oracle calendar.

There is no work around for that problem on the Mac. I gather on the PC you can force a “full” syncronization and their conduit will then, very slowly, get the right answer.

It is a documented bug with the Mac conduit. Repeating events move over only the first instance of the repeating events.

Sludge

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Exercise! Brush your teeth. Learn new technologies. Lead a balanced life. Turn down the heat every night. Clean your glasses and the gutters.

Oh, and keep all your receipts, particularly the oil change receipts. Be sure they are dated. Be sure they show the milage. Be sure they show the car’s VIN. Do this before the “stop engine” light come on. Before the day after you spent $500 on misc. maintenance tasks. Before you spend $300 on towing it back home again.

Let this be a lesson to you! Do not to follow my example.

Sludge!

killer named sludge may live in your engine and can choke the life from your car, regardless of maintenance or mileage. And the automakers whose engines are susceptible to sludge still aren’t always eager to help.

Sludge often forms when oil oxidizes and breaks down after prolonged exposure to high temperatures. The baked oil turns gelatinous and can block vital oil passages, which could lead to repairs exceeding $8,000 or even an engine replacement.

While sludge often results from poor upkeep, notably not changing oil at prescribed intervals, some engines from Audi, Chrysler, Saab, Toyota, and Volkswagen appear prone to it (see the chart below).

The Center for Auto Safety says it has received about 1,300 sludge complaints since 2004. …

Volkswagen’s policy requires that customers produce all oil-change records.

…
Those conditions would require attentive record-keeping for original owners, but it could cause headaches for used-vehicle owners.Even with the extended engine warranties, some consumers are denied repair compensation when they first approach the manufacturer.

When Sarah Bolek’s 2001 Volkswagen Passat hit 59,000 miles in 2004, the engine succumbed to sludge. The repair estimate was $9,000, says Bolek, who lives in Boyds, Md.

I doubt, we will be buying another Volkswagen.

Re-negotiate your cable contract once a year. Oh, and your long distance service. Rebalance your investments annually. Keep an eye on your mortgage rate and refinance at appropriate times, but not too often. Consider having a health savings account. Clip coupons. Keep track of those rebates. Join frequent flyer programs as appropriate. Be sure you have a will. Check that your love ones know your end of life desires. Eat more vegetables. Take regular breaks to avoid typing injuries. Get plenty of sleep.

Newton’s immovable installed base

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Here’s a fine example of the tensions between an irresistible force v.s. an immovable object.

At some point in my childhood my father, presumably in an attempt to keep me from wasting a summer in idle pleasures, got me an unpaid job working with a locksmith. I really enjoyed it, though I never did get the hang of picking locks. One thing I loved about the job was all the paraphernalia. One of the principle artifacts in every lock smiths tool kit is a box of pins. These pins are tiny bits of brass all of various lengths. They were color coded so you could put them back in the case.

These pins are packed into the lock so that when the right key is slide in they align just right and the lock will turn. Sweet little springs push the pins back into place when the key is removed. Each spring sits in a hole and the hole has two pins whose length sum up to fill its column just right. A lock with a master key will have three pins in one or more of the columns.

Locks of varing sophistication modify this design by having the columns oriented in various patterns. The typical lock just has the pin-columns in a straight line. If you look at your key ring you’ll probably find at least one key who’s bumpy bits are set up in some tricky way. Complex topology makes it harder to pick the lock; or at least that was the idea.

The design patterns for key-and-pin locks form a the plaform for a huge installed base of locks and keys. So it’s a great standards story and like all standards used for security things get messy when a security flaw is revealed. The usual exemplar of that is Microsoft Windows, which was never really designed to be secure and now sustains the vast cyber-crime industry (said to be larger than the drug trade).

You can’t ‘just fix’ a system like this because the installed base is very slow to move. As Bill Gates is rumored to have said back in the 1990s, “My biggest competitors is old versions of Windows operating system.” Users don’t upgrade quickly.

Over the last year or two knowledge of a huge security flaw in the key-and-pin lock design pattern has been revealed. There is a fun video (with subtitles) from a Dutch TV show you can watch (WMV) and a paper about it (pdf).

It’s easy to understand though. The common name for the technique is bump key. You make a key that bumps the pins. Well, actually, it taps the pins sharply. The sharp tap is then transmitted thru the stack of pins until it reaches the top most pin. That pin then floats up and way from the rest of the stack. At the moment the gap appears you turn the lock. All you need is a good bump key, a sharp tap, and to time the turn to the right moment.

You have seen this dynamics in one of those executive desk top toys (these are known as Newton’s cradle) where a group of balls hang in a line and you drop one ball one end and ball on the other end floats up.

Designing around this problem is, I presume not too hard. For example, since only the top most pin will float up when tapped you need to assure it’s movement won’t open the lock. That’s not too hard since you can arrange to have the top pin above point where the lock turns. In some cases you might even be able to repin an existing lock to prevent the problem. In other cases you probably have to redesign the locks.

There are techniques for moving a large installed base. Firms, like Microsoft, that depend on upgrade revenue are very practiced at these. Moving an installed base can be very profitable. Rekeying the entire planet, changing every lock in every door, replacing the keys on everybody’s key ring – wow! The lock industry ought to be very excited about this. I bet there is quite a backlog of key-and-pin patents piling up at the patent office right now.

Of course, the profits to be made from migrating the installed base are not the first thing most people think of when they hear this story. But then, most people don’t tend to think of Microsoft’s security problems as an upgrade driver either.

All

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David Hornik speaks the truth about the long tail.

… It is certainly the case that in the aggregate, Long Tail content is extraordinarily valuable. The question for VCs and entrepreneurs is “for whom?” … The value will all inure to the benefit of the aggregators and filterers ….

All. Not some. All.

There are three players in these transactions. The buyer and seller are obvious, with the distribution channel the third. The aggregators and filterers is just another name for middleman, distribution channel, market, or hub.

The three players all benefit when the transaction happens. Some money to the channel, some to the maker, some “consumer surplus” left for the buyer. Pretty much, only one of these three has pricing power.

The emerging hubs; they are the new Telecom, Media, and Platform companies. In the long run it, certainly looks to me like, they will be bigger and fewer.

The Epicurean Life (part II)

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It is possible to spend less than $5.99/gallon for your wine. You just inherit it. Yes, my wife brought me some fine wines from the cellars of her parents house. Recently some vintners have begun to adopt the screw top for their wines and my in-laws managed to catch one of the first. Pictured is the label from a 1.5 liter bottle of “soft semi-dry red table wine” the label assures us that it is naturally pure, naturally fermented, and should be served chilled. It’s “Grandi Vini” and was imported by the Renfield Corp. of Union NJ from Nonantola Italy. I suspect this bottle entered the collection in 1978. While I did not swallow any of this bilge it took two strong India Pale Ales to remove the taste.

The Epicurean Life

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In general you can’t buy liquor in grocery stores in Massachusetts. But today I wandered into one of the few that have managed to figure out how to get the licenses setup just right. I was amused to discover that all the wines at this place had unit pricing, so a $6 bottle of wine is a $30 a gallon. Using that information I now know that the ‘two buck chuck’ at Trader Joe’s is $15 a gallon. Wandering around the store I discovered this wine in a box for $5.99 a gallon. So I bought some.

This stuff! Grape juice with a head ache. Wow.

Out of the Park

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Paul Kedrosky’s blog is just amazing; the quality and quantity just mind boggling.

In one of today’s many entries he find and passes along this marvelous 1932 rant about bloggers:

His learning is but a “parade,” the “product of omnivorous folio-bolting and quarto-gulping, urged on and sustained by inordinate vanity”; his method naught but a “pseudo-method,” a mere “affectation of method and order.” It is merely something with “slanging power … a hurly-burly of invective.”

Written of a book pen’d in 1895. Appropriately enough about Melancholy; which as scientists have shown can be caused by keeping a diary.

But then. There is this.