Banks and Scanners

If you've been following my blog you know that I love my scanner
(although with Snow Leopard its somewhat crippled). The banks are onto
this whole scanning thing.

Bank of America switched over to allowing you to feed the checks
directly into the ATM without a deposit slip or envelope. The scanning
works pretty good. One problem, I have to press about 4 buttons per
check. It takes me 10x as long to deposit a batch of checks as it used
to. Sure, you used new cool technology, but you just wasted more of my
time. Give me back the old machine or let me bulk feed my deposit
checks. Technology gone wrong.

USAA on the other hand has taken a different approach. I guess they're
forced to be creative having branches only in Texas. Anyway, you get
checks to deposit, scan them or snap pictures with your iphone. Upload
them to USAA and then shred them. Seems crazy but the system works
great. No need to leave my house, nothing to mail, cost efficient. The
first time or two it takes some fiddling to know what they need in
terms of an image but once you get it its a breeze. Its the future.

Banks Stink

Banks just stink these days. While we're now saving them money by
using ATMs, they charge you fees up to $3 per transaction if you use
someone elses ATM. Meanwhile you're saving them money for a teller etc.

I was moving out of Citizens bank recently due to their crazy fee
structure. I asked them how to close my account. They said take all
the money out (get it to zero) and they'd auto-close after 7 days. I
proceeded to get the balance to zero. A few days later my silly
insurance company took out an automatic payment for $10.35, so I went
negative by that amount. I saw it quickly and immediately transferred
$10.35 back in. I figured I was set. Meanwhile Citizens charged me $39
for going negative and sent me snail mail over labor day weekend). I
was away and when I got back I was swamped so I didnt look at anything
for essentially 2 weeks. Since I remained negative (by the $39) for
more than a few days they charged me another $35. Then since more days
passed, another $35. They never called, and they were assessing fees
on their fees. They refused to credit me back any of the $109 when I
finally addressed it. I paid the money and filed a complaint with the
Better Business Bureau. That bank should not be in business.

I have a real issue with banks that want you to keep your money with
them but then they slowly drain your accounts with their fees. What a
scam.

Google Voice Rocks

I got a free Grand Dialer account early on when it came out. I never made much use of it though. Then it was bought by Google and still it sat unused for a long time. This week, though, I had a thought. 

A while back I wrote about home phones and cell phones. To summarize, even if I could cancel my landline and move the number to google (you currently cant do this) I need to keep a home phone connection for:

a) Our home business uses that number and its been known for 10+ years and its in publications etc

b) We have an ADT system and it needs to dial out

c) 911 is better with a landline

The problem, though, is that with 10+ years at the same number and as a landline we get spammers calling constantly. The result is that we never answer the phone and our voice mailbox fills up. Sometimes its important stuff but because of the fear of the spammers (yes, i've put the number on all the do not call lists I can find) we delay in getting back to people and we can't really be reached through that number.

So what was my Google voice thought? Forward my home number to my google voice number. From there use google voice to manage the traffic. You can upload your address book (new after the google acquisition) including the groups. Then on a per-group basis set the desired behavior. 

So here's my setup:

1) Home phone always forwards to google voice

2) We have 3 cell phones, one for me, one for the wife, and one for the barn

3) Depending on the address book group a person falls in it will ring 1, 2 or 3 of those phone numbers. 

4) Also depending on the group the person falls in it may prompt them for their name first so we can decide if we want the call (they hear ringing until we accept)

5) If they're in no groups, no phones ring. They get to leave a voicemail if they want (spammers dont, but if they did google has some answers for that)

6) If someone like my dad calls, all 3 phones ring, if someone picks it up and its for the other person you can transfer to the other cell phone with a google voice command. 

7) Voice mails come in email with (weak) transcriptions. You can listen to them from your email (even on the iPhone!) and you can forward them to each other. You can also manage them in the order you want to -- no more wading through 17 useless voice mails to get to the one you want. (the transcriptions are amusing though)

I turned all this on a couple days ago and its magic. We've received NO unwanted calls and we're now easier for people to reach. Call one number (our home #) and you'll reach who we want you to reach.

I'm not sure this is the use case Google Voice envisioned, a family google voice line, but as I did with my email, i'm using Google as an advanced spam filter and they're great at it.

I think about people with multiple houses that they travel between and think how this can solve their problems too. Forward those land lines to google and then use it to route to where you want when you want. With remote management through google you have total control.

Next steps? Perhaps change my cell # and route everyone to my google voice number or my home number. I'm getting a lot of spammers on the cell phone now. Problem with handing out the google voice number is that you start being really tied to google voice versus the solution it provides. Handing out the home number though could get messy if google voice ever went away. I'll ponder that a while before I change my cell #. 

My guess is that i'll just change it and hand out a google voice #, I like living on the edge :)

iTunes 9

I was checking out some of the cool stuff in iTunes 9. There are still
some silly things they're doing which I think are basic that need to
be addressed:

1) Finally they let you have the concept of home shared libraries with
a common iTunes account. The problem though is that if my wife and I
want to sync the same songs to our iPods we have to have them in the
local library. In other words we're being forced to copy music around.
Why?

2) The iTunes Store got a major overhaul which is cool. But they still
have a very broken behavior in that they give you NO indication that
you already own a song. Go to "iTunes Essentials" and you'll see
recommended songs and pricing but you may already have/own the songs.
Why cant they search and indicate this?

Anyway its a good app and getting better.

ESX and virtual machines losing time and hanging

I ran into a nasty bug between VMware ESX and VMWare Fusion. The
VMWare guys had no idea about it and after 3 hours on the phone with
them with little progress I started experimenting on my own and found
the solution.

Remember that I migrated my VMWare Fusion hosted VMs to ESX using the
VMWare converter tool. Prior to conversion I removed all snapshots
created by VMWare fusion.

The symptoms were that the machines under ESX were losing time and
network connectivity intermittently with no log entries on ESX and no
errors on the machines other than the massive time jumps. You could
see the machines "disappear" for 2+ minutes at a shot.

Turns out the issue was VMWare Fusion's autoprotect feature. I didn't
disable that on the VMs prior to migration and while ESX doesnt
support that feature it appears to break it. ESX was creating some
kind of snapshots frequently and there was no way at ESX to disable
this functionality.

My solution was to use VMware converter to go back from ESX, load the
machine into VMware fusion, turn off the Autoprotect feature, then re-
convert the machine back to ESX. Since then everything has been perfect.

The VMWare support people were friendly but not helpful and despite
the obvious client hangs and lots of snapshots getting created by ESX
were unwilling to admit it was an ESX issue. Obviously if my fix above
fixed the issue then it was a VMWare issue. I made no changes to the
guest operating systems.

Quicken delayed -- again

Time to fire the team working on this one. Quicken is now slipped to February 2010. This is the ONLY non-Intel app I have. Since snow leopard will beat their release their app wont even run on the latest version of Apples OSX. They say they haven't given up on the Mac market but their actions say otherwise. 

How many engineering teams can slip that much and survive?

Someone, please make a decent finance app for OSX and put these jokers out of the mac market permanently!

VMWare Fusion -> ESX

Finally made the leap at work and got an ESX setup. Then had to work
through converting 5 VMs from an OSX VMware fusion environment to ESX
server. A few observations along the way:

1) VMware needs a TON of help on marketing. Their product names,
portfolio etc are confusing as all get out.

2) Get the "VMWare vCenter converter standalone" app (Windows/Linux
only) to do the conversions

3) Since you can only run on Windows or Linux you'll have to move your
VMs to somewhere that the app can access them for import

4) The VMs must be shut down. Also the snapshots don't seem to import
so remove them first (saves space)

5) As you go through the wizard for the converter, make sure you
choose to make your disks "thin" versus "flat" in the last step. The
default is flat which will eat your ESX disk space.

6) For the ones that wont convert with a "the object or item referred
to could not be found" error, downgrade the image in VMWare fusion and
then repeat the process.

7) If you're moving around Linux machines this way you may need to fix
the networking config. For us this was:
rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules*

8) Their web access for ESX just gives a "503 Service Unavailable". It
seems out of the box this doesnt work and ssh into the console doesnt
work.

In the end everything moved and we're up and running on a real
environment. The tired desktop with flaky fusion is now retired.

Yet another OSX Server'ism

Today our Open Directory service lost its mind. At least thats what it
seemed like. Turns out what started it was a configuration change we
made a couple days ago. We enabled SSL for LDAP via the Server Admin
tool. Turns out SSL auth is broken in OSX server without some fixes.
It also turns out that once you click this button, it appears that
local client apps like Workgroup Manager start using SSL to
communicate and when you turn this back off they don't stop using SSL.
In other words, once you go SSL you can't go back just by shutting it
back off, so you're forced to fix the SSL issue.

Anyway, here's what you need to do if you're having SSL issues with
Open Directory on OSX server (10.5):

Add:
olcDisallows: bind_anon
to:
/etc/openldap/slapd.d/cn\=config.ldif

then: sudo killall slapd

Also see: http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20071203011158936

To test on a client:
ldapsearch -v -x -W -D
"uid=<auser>,cn=users,dc=<host>,dc=<domain>,dc=<com>" -H ldaps://
<host>.<domain>.<com> -b "dc=<host>,dc=<domain>,dc=<com>"

Replacing the things in <>'s with your appropriate information. You
can test this with and without the user ID section to see if anonymous
access is allowed.

If you're using a self-signed cert you may need to do this on the
client:

Edit:
/etc/openldap/ldap.conf

Change:
TLS_REQCERT demand
To:
TLS_REQCERT allow

From there you should be able to ping your LDAP server (make sure you
allow access through firewalls etc).

Unlimited iPhone Ringtones for free on OSX

This has been covered in pieces elsewhere on the net, but I just got it going myself and figured i'd share.

It always bugged me that iTunes wouldn't let me make ANY song a ringtone and they wanted to charge me extra for the few ones that I could. Turns out there's a way to make any MP3 (and perhaps other formats, but all my music is MP3) file a ringtone. 

Here's the process:

1) Pick a song, make a duplicate of it and give it an easy to recognize name like "a song - for ringtone"

2) Get info on the copy of the song and pick the start/end time on the song in the options tab. Make sure the duration is no more than 40 seconds. Fiddle with that until you're happy. Use iTunes repeat play to help you fiddle

3) Run garageband and open a new project, I chose a voice project (perhaps others would work too)

4) Delete one of the two voices (you get a male and female by default) (delete track or command-delete) (this seems to be optional)

5) Click on the bottom right icon in the garageband window (media). Find your song and drag it to the remaining track (you can adjust length etc again here if you want)

6) From the garageband menu choose share->send ringtone to iTunes

7) Sync your ringtones and assign them to whoever. My wife got "Firecracker" by Josh Turner. She thinks he wrote the song for her. Go figure.

There appear to be other ways of doing this too but no way to natively do it within iTunes. This avoids any command prompt hackery and uses Apple products I already had.

I think Apple is split on this front. I think the Carriers (AT&T) dont want them giving away ringtones, but at the same time they haven't completely blocked it. 

There are better interfaces for doing this (iToner from Ambrosia) but they're not free. The process above isn't hard and its free and legal so why part with the $15?

Another OSX Server-ism

I was making a minor change on OSX server today, just adding another
machine to DNS. I found out the hard way that if you insert a comment
with parenthesis "()" in it in the description fields OSX server DNS
crashes in interesting ways. The GUI crashes and eventually all of DNS
comes down, specifically the line that crashed this piece of OSX server:

machinename IN HINFO "Virtual Machine running on anothermachine
(description)" "more text"

The same line without parenthesis works just fine.

Makes me wonder if anyone is using OSX Server for real prime time
operations.

Cisco ASA and ASDM

Cisco has a nice client side java app, ASDM, for managing their
firewalls. Unfortunately if you go to the web page for the firewall (https://
<ip address of firewall>) and click "Run ASDM" then you just end up
with a downloaded file "asdm.jnlp". If you have the less-secure
setting of open files after download it will likely open up an XML
document in Xcode or something like that. So how do you run the ASDM
on the Mac?

Do this at the command line:

javaws asdm.jnlp

From there it will ask you where to save the .app bundle and then
next time you can just run that application.

iPhone 3GS Update

It seems that AT&T is reading my blog :)

Anyway, they changed their stance and are now offering special upgrade pricing to early iPhone adopters.

I just checked my status and I got this back:

"A full discount on a standard handset or iPhone upgrade is not available at this time, but you may qualify on 12/12/2009.  We can offer you an iPhone upgrade at a higher price with a 2-yr commitment and an $18 upgrade fee. Please visit a participating iPhone sales location for pricing on this offer."

Since this program is targeting the early adopters:

"All of that said, we've been listening to our customers. And since many of our iPhone 3G customers are early adopters and literally weeks shy of being upgrade eligible due to iPhone 3G S launching 11 months after iPhone 3G, we're extending the window of upgrade eligibility for a limited time."

And I got the iPhone 3G the day it came out I don't understand why I'm blocked until 12/12/09.

Either their systems reports on upgrade ability don't match their press releases or they're flat out lying on the whole early adopter program. AT&T appears to just make things up and see how people react then tune/correct as they go. Not a lot of thought/planning going into what they're doing.

Anyway, even if I was eligible for the early upgrade there's little in the HW that i'd care about:

• Compass - More targeting people walking around in cities. Fortunately I dont do much of that.
• More memory - I fit just fine in the current footprint (16GB)
• Bluetooth audio - i'm not very interested in this and i'd have to buy new a new headset too
• Voice commands - i'm not much of a talker
• Better performance - This is the only one thats really appealing. Some apps are dogs and some of the delays on the phone are annoying. But thank goodness its not a Newton!

What I would like is an upgrade that would stop the phone from dropping calls 3x on a 45 minute ride on the Mass Turnpike. Unfortunately that upgrade is one that requires a new carrier. AT&T remains the weakest part of the iPhone which we all expected from the day Apple announced the first one. Its just a shame considering how much business they've received thanks to the iPhone.

Find my iPhone

A cool feature that came out with iPhone OS 3.0 today. Not sure it will help you find it while its in your house but it will at least track down what store/gas station you left your phone at.

For the house problem it has the ability to vibrate/ring (despite ring settings) for up to 2 mintes:

"Write a message that will appear on your iPhone's screen. You can also play a sound on your iPhone, even if it is in silent mode."

If you choose the sound option when its at somewhere like a gas station they'll get annoyed. Assuming you have security on your phone (a pin, which you should have or your whole life is exposed) then it will beep and vibrate continuously for 2 minutes and they can't stop it without the pin. They could power it off (I confirmed they could do this) if they know how to do that on an iPhone. I fear what they'd do otherwise...

iPhone 3Gs

Ok, I have to post on it. I'm more excited about the new iPhone 3.0
software. But in this generation of the iPhone AT&T and Apple have
made what I think is a mistake. For the first two versions I got the
phones the day the phone came out. The very first because it was new
and exciting etc. The second one before it had some significant
improvements (3G) AND they let me get it for the same price as a new
customer -- i.e. they allowed me to upgrade before my 2 years were up.
Without that I wouldnt have an iPhone 3G. This time around they've
taken an ugly approach of requiring you to pay full price ($500-$700)
AND re-up for 2 years. Thats worse than most on an early renewal. I
could live with re-upping for 2 years IF they gave me a discounted
price. But I can't live with both.

So i'll wait out my contract. Hopefully verizon will get to offer one
around the time my contract expires and i'll be rid of AT&T and get to
a new phone at the same time.

BTW, the side effect of them allowing me to upgrade at the cheaper
price would have been for me to give my 3G to my wife, caused her to
switch from Verizon and then they'd have another AT&T subscriber. AT&T
didn't think this one through especially with oncoming competition on
several fronts.

OSX Server - What works and what Doesnt

So after 2 months of using OSX server, here's the update:

What we're using it for:

1) Central file server - I often have to fix permissions on the shares as someone will copy things into a share and the file will be read only to others in the same group. Since the UI is messed in Leopard (see previous post) you have to fix this through a VNC connection on the server which means you need to be an admin. Apple really needs to fix that.

2) DHCP - this is working, although some of the engineers have complained that the OSX DHCP server seems slow.

3) DNS - no real complaints here

4) Mail - The UI around the mail setup was weak and broken. Has anyone tested that? Some things we had to do:

    /etc/postfix/master.cf -> uncomment submission inet n       -       n       -       -       smtpd
        enables port 587

    /etc/postfix/main.cf -> add tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom (gets rid of some error messages)
        "no entropy source specified with parameter tls_random_source" 

    /etc/imapd.conf -> add tls_ca_file: /etc/certificates/wasabi.nasuni.net.crt (gets rid of more error messages)
        "TLS server engine: No CA file specified. Client side certs may not work"
  
        http://www.corpmac.co.uk/2008/09/30/tls-no-ca-file-specified-reason-and-solution/

They also don't let you add aliases other than Groups so you need to:

sudo vi /etc/aliases
sudo newaliases

Also note that when you stop the mail server and restart it through their UI (i.e. after you changed some settings) you often lose the first email that gets sent after restart. Nice.

Generally i'd recommend using someone else's mail server. The experience was not an "apple" one.

5) Open Directory - Apple uses this for all the user/group management and I havent had to touch it.

6) Radius - We use this for Cisco VPN authentication. Note that OSX server didn't really support this in the UI, so you need to follow some instructions.

7) Software update - saves multiple macs downloading to the same spot. Note that the first time you turn this on its really painful as it brings in a lot of updates.

8) Backups - the server time machine's itself and presents itself as a time machine target for any clients to use.

What we're NOT using it for:

1) Wiki - I used the Apple Wiki quite a bit. Its VERY limited. The WYSIWYG is nice, but you don't always get what you see and it can do some odd formatting stuff. If you want to do more advanced stuff you get thrown into HTML and the HTML is cluttered and hard to manage. You can't do a lot of basic stuff and eventually I punted and went with the tried-and-true MediaWiki which i'm very happy with. Its running as its own VM.

2) Web Hosting - I didn't really even try this. I wanted a server that wasn't hosting all the stuff above to be our external web host. So I created a standard Linux VM and am hosting the site via Apache.

3) Firewall - We have a decent Cisco firewall so I didn't try the OSX server firewall.

4) Our source code control/bug tracking etc is off on Linux VMs.

OSX Server bonding issues

We had some crazy issues with our OSX server setup. When we had clients join the server we had odd permission problems, synchronization issues with passwords etc. After much mucking around it turns out it was mostly our fault. Our OSX server is also a target for SSH from the outside (not on the normal port 22 and requiring certificates). To support logging in I had created some local user accounts on the OSX server machine, and for convenience I had given them the same names as the server accounts.

DONT DO THAT

OSX server gets very confused if you have local accounts with the same names as the server accounts. And you don't need the local accounts anyway as you can enable the server accounts to login/get a shell through the admin tools. Deleting all the local user accounts and enabling the ones we needed to login helped a lot of the issues.

The Leopard client still does odd things when you're looking at group/user permissions (and ACLs) on network shares. Seems that Apple messed this up in the UI in Leopard so that if you look at them you see things that just don't make sense as the users/groups are not getting copied over from the server and displayed correctly. Under the covers of the UI the right things seem to be happening but it can be confusing for the users.

OSX Environment and IE

In our vision for an All-Mac office we sort of expected to be able to pull that off without any bumps. I mentioned previously that I ran into early bumps of some office environment management apps that required windows. Later I found out that our bank (Silicon Valley Bank) and our payroll group (ADP) both have web sites that are not friendly to non-Windows/Internet Explorer environments. I proceeded to setup a new VM with Vista Home ($199 for the full install) for our office admin to run just for IE for these sites but otherwise to use the Mac side of things. When you run into mainstream companies that lack support for non-Windows platforms with their websites you really get a sense of the size of the Linux/OSX market on the business side of things.

Another thing i'm amazed at is that Vista Business sells for $300, but I can buy a full Netbook with Vista Home for $300, or a Dell Inspirion 531 with Vista Home for $249. Vista Home sells for $199 for a fresh install which is required for VM use. So the hardware is worth $49. You can setup a VM for $199 or you can have dedicated hardware for $249. While I went the VM approach mostly because I dont want more hardware to deal with (power, cooling, all that) the economics just don't make sense. 

EveryTrail

Just got back from a bike ride with the kid. Got to use my new iPhone attachment for the bike and EveryTrail iPhone app. Thats a nice combination and lets you keep track of rides.

Ride with Lydia

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

Netflix, Flexplay, and RedBox

I'm currently a Netflix subscriber (cheap plan, 1 out at a month unlimited with Blu-Ray = $10.99/month). I average about 3 movies a month. This means each movie costs me about $3.65 to watch. Whenever possible I watch them in BluRay format. 

The other day I noticed how many RedBox outlets there are around where I travel. Gas stations, grocery stores etc. With RedBox you pay $1/night and you can reserve movies. They have pretty current movies, but no BluRay options. There's no subscription fees and you only pay for what you use. This could possibly drop my monthly cost, but i'd have to know in advance that i'd be able to watch a movie in a given night or i'd end up paying for an extra night (and feel the pressure to watch soon). The fact that the price can stack up if you don't watch it once you take it out puts me off. The lack of BluRay is disappointing too. 

Shortly after running into RedBox I noticed a 48-hour self destructing DVD option at Staples called FlexPlay. It chemically self destructs its playability (in a way that doesn't break your DVD player) 48 hours after you open it. Staples generally sells the disks for $1. The outlets aren't as convenient (in this case tied to Staples store hours) and the movies aren't usually as new as Netflix and RedBox (or updated as frequently). On the positive side your expense is capped at $1/movie and you can "queue" them up by buying several and having them handy and watch whatever suits your mood. If you rent via their web site they "rent" the movies at $4.99, they're not going to win the war with that kind of pricing. At $1 and with more outlets I can see how they could be competitive with RedBox. With the limited availability, older movies, and poor pricing direct they're out.

Ok, you're probably wondering why I dont just do video-on-demand and pay just for what I watch. A couple reasons, my bankruptcy-declaring cable company charges $5.99 per rental (HD). Thats more than my average cost via NetFlix. In addition, their movie selection is worse than Netflix and RedBox. And finally about 50% of the time there are issues with the video on demand playback.

Currently NetFlix appears to be the best option as it gives me the most flexibility when I play the movies and the quality/availability of what I want. Its largest downside is the fact that I have to wait 3-4 days after watching one to watch another. I could pay more to have more flexibility but given how few I watch it doesnt seem worth it. If someone could deliver HD video on demand at an equivalent cost to NetFlix then i'd switch but given where I live and the monopoly of the local TV provider, i'm stuck for a while.

iTunes Music Video Playing Problems

If you happen to be having problems playing music videos in iTunes I
found an odd behavior: If you use multiple speakers normally for
playing music, then Videos won't play when you have multiple speakers
selected. You have to choose just the speakers of your mac and then
the videos will play. Seems like a bug to me -- there should at least
be a warning.