bosconet.org: chocolately writings

Since I had a gift card and a want for a phone with a better web interface I bought a (ancient) unlocked Blackberry 7130. It cost me $2 out of pocket so I felt it was a justified impulsive purchase.

It arrive today, and tonight I set it up. I was frustrated for a long while because despite copying the exact network setting I had on my old phone (a Sony Ericsson K750i). Every time I would turn the wireless on the message “Data Connection Refused”. This was very frustrating, and I was beginning to think I might need to spend more and upgrade my T-Mobile service to one of the Blackberry options.

Thankfully I just ignored it and tried Opera Mini and it successfully loaded a web page.

Now I can go to bed happy. Tomorrow I need to figure out how to set up a personal email account which doesn’t seem to be an option at the moment.

For a while now I have been advising people to purchase their music through Amazon when ever it is available rather than the iTMS. Why? Because the Amazon tracks aren’t encumbered by any DRM.

Today that changed though. Apple announced that DRM is leaving the iTMS. I am thankful for that. Now the only reason to buy from Amazon over iTMS is price.

I gave up on my Eye-Fi card about a month ago when I pulled out my camera to a dead battery, yet again! Since then I had it on my desk at home. I tossed it in my bag for holiday travel just in case I wanted to use it as a last minute gift.

Here at my sister-in-law’s house I think it would make a great gift. Bother her and her husband have beter things to do with a new baby than deal with plugging the camera in to upload pictures to flickr. The Eye-Fi seems like a natural fit, it will automatically do it for them. EXCEPT for they idea you need to effectively disable the power saving auto shut off feature of the camera for it to reliably upload all your pictures. What this would mean, is that like in my case, their newborn would be doing something very photo worthy but the camera would be dead from the last time they took a picture of her.

So back in my bag it will go. And until the card is ’smarter’ about powering down a camera when it is done transfering pictures I can’t recommend this neat gadget to most people.

I’m currently away for the holidays. Both the ISPs my kind hosts use filter out port 25 traffic to mail servers other than their own. As someone who hates spam I can understand why they do this. This helps limit spammers from using the ISP to pump out their spam.

However I have noticed a couple things at my current location. One is related to incompetence on the part of ATT the other on my employer’s part. First ATT’s incompetence:

My in-laws have BellSouth DSL service back at their home in Florida. Their Outlook client is configured to use port 25 to send mail. This doesn’t work here in Chicago where the DSL provider is, ATT. Now just in case you don’t keep up with the acquisitions in the telecommunications field, ATT & BellSouth are the SAME company. So in effect they are filtering port 25 traffic to other ATT mail servers. I can certainly understand why this would have been the case for a period of time after the acquisition but it has now been 2 years. One should reasonably expect them to allow port 25 traffic to mail servers controlled by the same company. Sadly this isn’t the case so my in-laws are forced to use the less functional webmail client to send any emails.

Now my employer’s incompetence:

For remote access if you aren’t using Outlook (with its Exchange hooks) you set up your client to use IMAP to receive email and port 25 (with authentication) to send mail. Sadly as noted above many ISPs filter port 25 to combat spam. This means that you can’t effectively use non-Outlook client to send mail from outside the corp network. The incompetence here is that they haven’t opened up port 597 (mail submission) to accommodate these situations. Why is this the case? I don’t know for sure but it almost certainly is for 2 reasons: 1) Outlook with Exchange is the supported email client 2) the people in charge of running the mail servers aren’t competent enough to think of such situations and accommodate them.

We recently set up a TWiki install on a server that doesn’t have email nor is allowed to use port 25 to communicate out. This means that the normal way a user would reset a forgotten password won’t work.

Since the assumption by the Twiki community is that you will have email access no thought has been made to document how to do this in any other manner.

In my digging I found it to be fairly simple to do this.


cd $HTTPD_ROOT/twiki/data
htpasswd -b .htpasswd


tada all done. Oh you do need to either be root or have write access to the .htpasswd file.

Saturday I made the long (5 minute) drive down to the University of Baltimore’s Thumel Business Center Building for SocialDevCamp East. SocialDevCamp is a bar camp which means the sessions are self organized by the participants at the beginning of the day. For this camp it worked out very well.

The self organizing of sessions and with times and rooms worked out very well. The only improvement I could suggest for this process is to have the proposed sessions and schedule more visible to the entire room before finalization. A quicker update of the wiki might have solved this, or using the projector to make the schedule would have also accomplished the same thing.

None of the actual sessions I attended were quiet what I expected based on the title of the session but I enjoyed all of them.

Session 1: “Can you really find work using social media?”

This session started off with a presentation by Shashi Bellamkonda who blogs for Network Solutions. While his presentation was good it wasn’t long enough to fill the time slot. Steve Fisher was in attendance and decided to file the remaining time with an impromptu presentation on his 22 rules for entrepreneurs. Steve’s presentation was good and enjoyable.

Session 2: Evaluating & Hiring Developers and hosting providers

I don’t recall the leader of this presentation. The presenter was looking more for the insight of the audience to help her more effectively find developers for her needs. Again not exactly what I was expecting. But it turned into a good discussion about hiring people what to look for beyond the resume and even experiences with using overseas developers on projects. We also touched on hosting including some attendees experience with Amazon EC2 and S3 services. In the end I also enjoyed this session.

Session 3: Crowd source data quality

This ended up being a very small session (just 5 people total). We mostly just talked about the difficulties that can be associated with crowd sourced data but didn’t really come up with any good solutions. One the people in this session was Patti Chan one of the co-founders of 600 Block. Since her site accepts user submissions for content we (well I) used it as an example for crowd sourced data. The discussion also took a turn towards security when accepting data.

Session 4: Data portability

I was looking forward to this based on my assumption from the title about what it would be, Data Portablity over time. But it wasn’t that. The presenter was a gentleman who works for an insurance company and the thrust of the discussion was having data portability of health care information and how to help empower consumers in controlling the data. It was and interesting discussion and worth my time.

After session 4 I was going to head out to Brewer’s Art for a drink or two with Jason and Greg Cangialosi (of Blue Sky Factory. We got side tracked into a session “Entrepreneurial discussion” before we left though. Again I found teh discussion interesting. We ended up cutting out about half way through the session and enjoyed a drink at Brewer’s Art before heading up to the official after part at Metro Gallery.

Over all I enjoyed the time I spent there and expect to head back for the spring 2009 edition.

For one simple reason you have to effectively disable the power saving features on your camera to have it effectively work. If you don’t do this file transfers can get cut off in the middle when your camera decides to power down and save your battery.

Because I have no power saving features enable on my camera at the moment I have found on several occasions when I pull out my camera to take a picture it is dead.

Oh and I don’t find the wireless transfer of pictures so much better than using a SD to USB adapter that that will make me reconsider getting rid of it.