7 weeks ago I called Bell Mobility Data Support to report that my handset was having major issues with receiving text messages. This wasn’t the first time I called them about it. I had called them about it four years ago. I never heard back from them and I never followed up because I didn’t really need it to work.
This time around, the first person I talked to was unusually helpful and knowledgeable. A simple, “I’m not an idiot, I’ve tested what’s available to me to test, it doesn’t work, the (Java) handset crashes periodically, it’s almost certainly the handset” was enough to open an escalation to have it looked at by someone who can actually verify that’s the case.
A week goes by… no real news. Another week goes by, they re-confirm that pending text messages usually fail. Two more weeks and they blame the handset manufacturer (Kyocera) and claim that they’re working with them for a resolution. Another week and they’re still waiting for a resolution from Kyocera. I tell them to send me a new handset - after all, I’ve had the same one for 6 years. That’s six years without them subsidizing a handset (which they usually do for most their users every 18-26 months) for me. I figure that the least they could do is send me a new handset (after I could have got three subsidized handsets from them if I had wanted) to replace the faulty handset (text messages only worked right for the first 4 months I had it) they sold me in the first place.
A week later, now 6 full weeks after I contacted them, they tell me that they’ve confirmed that the handset isn’t functioning correctly… which sounded familiar given that I told them the exact same thing (and the guy I had talked to agreed) when I opened the escalation with them. I repeated the “the least you can do is completely or substantially subsidize a good new handset for me” theory again and was told that “It’s against Bell Mobility’s policy, we’re not going to do that. At best we’ll offer you the crappy subsidy if you sign another contract.”
WTH, would I want to sign a new contract with a company that is currently providing me with crappy service? Heck, even though I’ve been a customer of theirs for a long time, I’ve never had a contract with them. Why would I want one now? Better yet, even though I know that I won’t be switching providers any time soon (I like CDMA and I’m not giving up my number — #&^%@* number portability!) if I were to sign a new contract to get their subsidy, they don’t offer any phones I like. Nobody around here had a Bell Mobility handset in the candy bar form factor available with a subsidy. Bell World didn’t even have candy bar phones — only big and bulky flip phones that don’t fit in your pocket (which isn’t a good place for a phone given the radiation and all, but I don’t care, I’m sure I’ll do something stupid enough to get myself killed long before I die of cancer).
Radio Shack, or whatever the heck they’re called now, had a Nokia 2125i that suited my requirements (candy bar phone, some buttons, receives text messages in theory). Of course, no Bell Mobility subsidy (even though their phones on display all had subsidies available. So I ended up shelling out cash for a new handset. Thanks Bell, you suck. I guess the few hundred dollars I personally send you every month for services isn’t enough. Not much choice for me there, but there’s a few thousand dollars a month in services at work that I could easily move to other providers. The only thing stopping that from happening is there’d be little in cost savings, and I know how bad Bell is. I’m not too sure how bad the alternatives are.
So, Bell Mobility Data Support is sort of good… they eventually identified the cause of a simple problem. Bell (Mobility) on the other hand, is as always, not so good. The worst part of it all is that I really only need text messaging to function so that I can be notified when our various Bell provisioned network links go down.
November 16th, 2006
Someone must have known that I had a busy two weeks planned when some spammer decided to aim their zombie farm at my domain last Thursday and again Monday. At first I thought everyone was getting more spam (attempts… none made it through my filters) , then I realized that it was almost entirely aimed at dostech.ca addresses. Better yet, it was all aimed at addresses that don’t exist… specifically harvested message IDs. Really, who’s the dumbass out there that’s been spamming the hell out of message IDs, harvested from posts I’ve made to mailing lists, for about 9 months now. You’re wasting your time and resources and making it easier to catch the few spams you send to my legitimate addresses.
Anyway, Thursday’s mail volume was up over 4 times my average mail volume (which is high enough not to fluctuate too much) and Monday was well over 7 times the normal volume, right up until 6:55am EDT this morning when it all stopped. A little odd, even if it was an IRC server getting shutdown. It didn’t come to a quick slowdown, it literally just stopped. Weird.
October 10th, 2006
We released SpamAssassin 3.1.7 today. It includes all the good bug fixes from 3.1.6 that we released on schedule (for the fourth time in a row) last Thursday, except the lint change to sa-update that I broke sa-update, for anyone who defines their own scores, with.
I’ve also added my Nagios plugin (”check_spamd”) for monitoring spamd to the contrib/ directory of the tarball in versions 3.1.6+. It’ll work with versions 3.1.1+ of SpamAssassin, but it’ll work best with 3.1.6+ as those versions deal with some quirks in IO::Socket::INET that can cause weird ping results.
October 10th, 2006
I went to the pre-season opener against Buffalo last night at the ACC. The Leafs pretty much sucked. I’m not a fan of Paul Maurice, or a fan of changing up a huge percentage of your players over one summer. If you’re going to make huge changes like that, you’d better do it right. Once again, it’s already starting to look like it’s not working out as well as Ferguson proclaimed it would. I know, it’s the first pre-season game, but the Leafs were really really bad. With very few shots on Buffalo’s goal during the second period, I even started to get bored. Getting shut out 4-0 isn’t good. Of course, I’d be crazy if I had thought that the Sabres weren’t going to kick the Leafs asses.
Anyway, if it continues like this, it’ll further enhance my disappointment in my two favourite Leafs organization members; Pat Quinn and Tie Domi. Quinn, in constant conflict with Ferguson, is an awesome coach when given the latitude to get things done. Tie Domi, is the most down to earth, kindest hockey player who has ever set foot in Toronto in my lifetime. If Quinn was still coach, Domi would have never been forced to either be traded or retire. Today he announced his retirement and his joining of some TSN program. Maybe it’s for the best of the Leafs, but in my opinion, if they’re going to lose, they might as well be entertaining, and entertaining Pat and Tie are. Heck, I’d rather they be entertaining than as boring as many of the American teams have become.
In any case, there’s no one more responsible for the current, and recent, success (or lack thereof) of the Leafs than John Ferguson. I can only hope that he’s the next to go.
BTW… I sat in section 314 right in front of the “Ice Box”. Probably the best seats you can get for $80 (or less).
September 19th, 2006
OK, maybe not for spammers, but I’m no more likely to believe that they’re taking efforts to prevent email abuse than that they are not.
Canada.com: Toronto Hydro rolls out wireless in continental first
Toronto Hydro Telecom launched its downtown WiFi project yesterday, offering full wireless Internet access throughout the financial district, with plans to have all of Toronto covered in three years.
Yesterday Toronto Hydro launched their wireless service, which they are providing for free until March 6, 2007. Hopefully they’re taking measures to prevent email (and other) abuse by doing things like port 25 blocking or throttling/limiting, otherwise this makes about as much sense as Google providing free WiFi to Nigerians. Heck in years of dealing with the public I’ve learnt that free anything is always going to be abused.
At least this is currently only in the financial district, so it shouldn’t be open to too much abuse from spammers sitting at home. Then again, some spammers make so much money that they can probably easily afford to live in the financial district, so watch out.
If anyone knows what address space this network is using or knows what is or isn’t being blocked, please let me know.
September 8th, 2006
Tonight NASA announced that despite not resolving the fuel cell coolant pump issue that they scrubbed the Wednesday launch over, they’re going to try and launch Atlantis at 11:41 eastern Friday. Fuel cell motor problem? Can anyone say “Apollo 13″?
Canada.com: Shuttle launch to go ahead despite wonky motor
NASA spent 48 hours trying to diagnose a little electric motor similar to a car starter after a glitch was found in one of the three fuel cells that provides the shuttle with electricity. The motor runs the cell’s coolant pump, which was giving erratic readings.
The problem has grounded the $2-billion shuttle and stalled construction of the $100-billion International Space Station. The little motor was manufactured in 1976 by a company that has changed hands five times since then. And lives depend on it.
In four hours of “intense” closed-door discussions, NASA decided the wonky motor isn’t a safety hazard. It does still work; it just doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.
“We had another fun and very interesting meeting,” said Wayne Hale, boss of the shuttle program. “If you ever want to see the difference between the old NASA and the new NASA, you should have gone over there today. There was a chance for everyone to participate. All the data was laid out on the table for everyone to examine, from the top of the agency to the most junior engineer.
“It was very nearly unanimous, with just a few folks voicing concern,” he said. A further meeting was set for 1 a.m. today.
The shuttle is scheduled to launch a 11:41 ET today. Saturday is a backup launch date.
If Friday’s launch doesn’t pan out, they’ll try again on Saturday, which is a day later than their original deadline — which is silly too. If they previously decided that it’d be too dark to launch after Friday, why, other than desperation, are they now pushing back their deadline?
At least their decision not to launch outside of optimal lighting conditions is just so that they can film the launch and review the film for debris that may have caused damage doesn’t increase the safety of the launch, it just makes it more likely that they’ll be aware of potential problems upon return.
I’m all for space exploration. I just hope that they don’t write off all the shuttles before I get a chance to go see a launch.
September 8th, 2006
Holy crap! On Wednesday we released Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.5 on schedule for the third, maybe fourth, time in a row. As Theo put it, “what’s the world coming to?!?” I’m not quite sure why we’ve been getting regular releases out but I expect it has some to do with wanting to get sa-update out and in use (some minor fixes to sa-update have been in the last couple releases) and that we’re not tied up with getting a big release out (3.2.0) yet. As it stands, I don’t expect to see a 3.2.0 release until at least late winter or early spring. There’s a lot of stuff in the 3.2 queue and we’ve been backporting most things that a user would notice to the 3.1 maintenance branch.
Anyway… for those who don’t believe software can be released on time:
On 7/25/2006 6:54 PM, Daryl C. W. O’Shea wrote:
> BTW, I’d like to release 3.1.5 on Friday. Maybe we’ll hit the end of
> August. 
On 8/30/2006 11:21 AM, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.5 is now available! This is a maintainance
> release of the 3.1.x branch.
>
> Downloads are available from:
> http://spamassassin.apache.org/downloads.cgi?update=200608300000
September 1st, 2006
The SpamAssassin Rules Emporium (SARE) has a bunch of rules for SpamAssassin. Many of them are good rules. Some of them get updated regularly. To update these rules Chris Thielen wrote, and continues to update, a bash script called rules_du_jour that automatically downloads and when necessary updates a server’s SARE rules.
The rules_du_jour script works fine and has been in use by thousands of people for quite some time. One problem, though, is that it only runs on *nix systems. It also needs to be updated when new rulesets are released. Not a significant task by any stretch, but it does add to a mail system’s administrative load.
Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.1 and beyond includes sa-update, a cross-platform Perl program that manages updating rulesets available via “channels” in a light weight fashion using the DNS to track ruleset versions and HTTP to download updated rulesets when necessary. SHA1 sums and GPG are also used to verify downloaded rulesets.
So far the only sa-update channel available is the default channel published by the Apache SpamAssassin Project (updates.spamassassin.org). In early July I created my own channels containing up to date SARE rulesets to gain experience with sa-update and to automate rule updates on my own systems. For some reason I have never used rules_du_jour myself. I think it’s size and need for updating when new rulesets released turned me off of it.
After much discussion about “rules_du_jour vs. sa-update” in early August on the SpamAssassin users’ list in this and this thread, I decided to make my SARE sa-update channels public. The discussion was largely a debate between long time users of rules_du_jour who were discounting the utility of sa-update and the SpamAssassin development team, along with a number of Windows users who can’t use rules_du_jour. I figured making the channels public would attract enough users to either quash fears about sa-update or identify any problems with sa-update. I’ll be happy with either result.
So far there hasn’t been any problems reported. There’s only been a couple people that have reported their satisfaction though. Numbers often tell a better story. In the last week there have been a few hundred diverse IPs that have download files from one or more channels (each SARE ruleset is in its own channel). Browsing the server logs it appears that a number of noteworthy engineering and computer networking organizations have been using the channels on their mail clusters too. Since no one has complained yet, I’m assuming all is well. I know, myself, I haven’t had any problems in the last month or so.
For those interested in using these sa-update channels, a brief how-to is available here. I was planning on writing some more detailed documentation, but it really is as simple (on *nix systems at least) as stated in the how-to. If anyone wants to contribute documentation for use on Windows or other systems that the how-to doesn’t seem to cover it would be welcomed.
August 19th, 2006
I’ve always known that if you want to identify the most self-centred assholes in society all you have to do is ask people to wait in line. Even knowing that, this week I was surprised at just how little some people care about others.
Friday night, back at the drive-in theatre again, I found the theatre owner, who was in the box office selling tickets at the time, having a stroke. Even though about 50 cars had gone through, nobody had bothered to mention this to the staff or call for help. When I arrived one did have time to immediately complain that the line was moving to slow and that they were going to miss the movie. I, of course, ignored them and opted to call an ambulance instead.
So in anticipation of the ambulance actually wanting to get within a block of the scene, I start asking people to move their cars out of the way of the entrance. There were cars all over blocking the road because, of course, it’d be just to easy to line up orderly (this is a problem that has been getting worse over the last few years — see this post) so that you’re not blocking traffic. So I’m going car to car explaining that we’re making room to get an ambulance through and what do no less than five people tell me (all people who thought lining up their car in the middle of the road was the best plan of action)? “I’m not moving, I might loose my spot in line and miss the start of the movie.” Two people even told me that if we hurried up and sold tickets faster that they’d be soon out of the way. Both of these people could see the guy lying on the ground waiting for his ride in the ambulance. So, as many many years of dealing with the public has taught me, if you really need them to do something and being really nice about it hasn’t worked, swear at them. Cursing ensued and I’m now positive my Irish ancestors would be proud.
So the ambulance arrives and the attendants start doing their thing. In order to keep the owner from trying to get up off the ground to go back to selling tickets I start selling tickets, which is something I do really fast. Nonetheless, as each person pulls up (right beside the ambulance no less) nearly 25% of the women proceed to bitch me out about wanting them to pay for the full ticket price ($7). After all, they’ve missed at most an additional 8 minutes of the first movie of the double bill that they’ve already shown up late for. All of this in ear-shot of the guy on the ground, who the complainers can plainly see less than 10 feet from their car. Some of these people are lucky it’s too hard to climb through the box office window to kick their ass. Others vow never to come back to the drive-in again. I thank them all, the drive-in will be a better place without them.
Intermission comes, no more complaints, except for a few waiting for popcorn (line-up!). Interestingly, and this has happened a few times in the past to me, a number of the husbands of wives who previously bitched me out find me to apologize. Weird. Not one guy complained to me the entire night. Maybe they all thought “that could be me”?
Two nights later, back in the box office again (I’m now working every night until the owner’s family can take over), people start stopping their cars in the middle of the road in the line-up instead of lining up down one side of the road like any sane person would do (and have done for 25+ years). No more than 3 minutes after me going out to the road to tell people not to stop in the middle of the road like an idiot, and being told “what do you know”, one of these cars gets hit by another car going by. What do I know? That you’ll probably get hit by another car if you park in the middle of the road. Especially a back road where people normally do twice the speed limit, including the Southern Georgian Bay OPP.
Another two nights later, Tuesday now, people start lining up on the wrong side of the road (the correct side is obvious from the 50 cars lined up there) again. Once again, I go out to the road to tell them to stop being idiots and to proceed to the back of the line like everyone else. I even tell them that blocking the road isn’t a good idea since getting an emergency vehicle in would be, as I found out earlier in the week, next to impossible, and that you’ve got a good chance of getting hit by another car when stopped illegally in the middle of the road, which I’ve seen many times. Some responses, “That won’t happen” and “I’m not worried about that”. When I respond that, regardless, it’s not very nice of them to cut ahead of 50 other cars in line I get responses of “I know what car was at the end of the line when I got here, I’ll pull in then” and “I don’t care, they should have shown up earlier”. WTF! If you knew where the end of the line is why didn’t you go there. Cutting in at what you’ve determined to be the appropriate time isn’t going to go over well with the good people who got in line. This isn’t grade school anymore, no more of my buddy showed up early to save me a spot crap. And to the person who declared they just don’t care. Why don’t you go see your movies somewhere else. I know that you’ll be the one giving the staff a hard time about stupid things later and they just don’t need it. If you do decide to come back why don’t you show up on time.
People are good. The public is not. Line-ups separate the public from people.
August 17th, 2006
For almost a year and a half I’ve had one server, a Dell PowerEdge 800, randomly reboot itself with no warning in its syslog. The problem component is a CERC 6 channel SATA RAID card (from Dell) that is extremely sensitive to power supply fluctuations.
Even though it was connected to an APC UPS re-configured from its default to its most sensitive settings the server would end up rebooting, usually right after transferring on or off the UPS battery. This happened a lot due to the insane, and widely varying, load levels the rest of the (manufacturing) machinery in the building consumes.
Simply put, a server rebooting itself, especially without any notice, is unacceptable. I could not trust the machine. Just after this started happening, I put a scope on the machines input power and could see just how bad the power was. I also noted that I often only got email for the UPS battery kicking in, but never out since the machine would reboot before the monitoring software registered the status change and submitted the mail. So, knowing that there was nothing I could realistically do about the bad power situation, I said we should buy an online (double conversion) UPS. About 14 months later I finally got one. It kicks ass.
I installed the unit on Tuesday just before a mild thunderstorm that night and a really big one late Wednesday afternoon and evening. After an unknown amount of brownouts (the UPS will actually use input voltages between 65 and 138V to constantly charge its battery) and 9 complete blackouts (18 transfers, well really just losses of input power since output power is *always* off of the battery) the server was still going. This was a first, this server had never made it through a single thunderstorm without rebooting. Fantastic. If it keeps it up for three months or so, maybe I’ll start to trust it.
Of course, I probably should have thrown the server back at Dell in the first place since NONE of our other servers, workstations, or digital electronics on various machines have any problems as bad as this one server. If it wouldn’t be such a pain to transfer the load to another machine I probably would have. Oh well, at least that server and everything else I plugged into the online backup (a couple of switches, a Cisco router and Nortel Voicemail) should last a lot longer having nice clean power to live on.
Anyway, the online backup I got was a Tripp Lite SU1500RTXL2Ua. $799 US on their website. You should be able to get it for less than $900 in Canada… wholesale cost before shipping (it’s heavy) is about $750 CDN.
July 30th, 2006
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