The No Starch Press Blog

Let’s see. We returned our Comcast owned VoIP router at the beginning of November. Comcast had already credited me back for November’s service, but today I get yet another bill. Now I’m on hold with Comcast while yet another CSR attempts to figure out whether my account has been canceled, although we we canceled in October and have been using Astound since the beginning of November.

Now I’m trying to have them take my payment information out of their system but the CSR says that he can’t do that. I’m waiting for his supervisor.

The moral of this story? Need to hack your cable modem, make sure you’re using Comcast.

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading postings from both sides of the Presidential campaign; both primary news and comments on those postings as well. As a former Political Science major, I find the dialog very enlightening (if a bit disturbing at times).

I’ve just read one brilliant exchange and I have to share it. In many ways, this sums things up very nicely, as “maggots” basically dismisses what have essentially become irrelevant allegations. (You can read the original story here.) Enough with the labels and slander; it’s the economy, stupid.

still, nobody has proved to me that Obama isnt a socialist…somebody give me some feedback

Posted by: nave1379 | October 29, 2008 7:57 PM | Report abuse

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No one has proven to me that Palin isn’t a Martian.

Posted by: maggots | October 29, 2008 9:00 PM | Report abuse

Posted by: maggots | October 29, 2008 8:56 PM | Report abuse

What is with these companies.

I’ve had a Canon MP530 for a couple of years now. For the most part, it’s been a good printer, except when it acts up.

The current problem, and probably the one that will be the death of this printer, is that one of the black ink tanks has stopped printing completely. It seems that this is a known problem with this printer but not one that Canon will fix.

I tried multiple cleaning cycles, replaced it with Canon branded cartridges twice, and not a drop of ink comes out.

After searching forums online I tried soaking the bottom of the print head in a thin film of water. A lot of black ink came out but none came through. I put a few drops of alcohol on the pad; no luck. Tried deep cleaning again and no luck. All of the other cartridges print just fine.

I just called Canon support. What an unpleasant experience. After a brief conversation with one rep whose response was “No, we do not recommend that,” with this nasty tone, I asked to be speak to a Supervisor, Waymon. Waymon was no better and completely unhelpful, as I’ve found most Canon support people to be.

Great cameras, nice printers, but stinky customer support. Never mind the lousy chips that Canon adds to their ink cartridges to prevent people from using third party cartridges. It’s my printer; why can’t I use any ink cartridge that fits?

Next step: Buy a Brother MFC printer. It looks like they don’t restrict the use of cartridges to only Brother cartridges.

UPDATED: Read the latest here.

We’ve recently released the second edition of our best-selling Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. This is a major revision and it’s off to a great start.

Well, this weekend I was playing with Adwords a bit. I’ve got a couple of campaigns running. Or at least I thought I had a couple running.

Our campaign for Forbidden L3GO seems to be working just fine. There was an issue with using the L*GO trademark but it looks like that’s sorted out.

There’s a bit of a disconnect here. Now, I understand that Google can’t review each ad individually and that the word “hacking” is probably stuck in a database somewhere with the flag “evil.” But Google should know better and this certainly smacks of some sort of censorship.

I don’t know and I don’t really care if McCain had an affair, as suggested in this article in The New York Times. What I do care about is his close relationship with telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman who was clearly hanging out with him to affect public policy in order to help out her clients.

I’m registered as an Independent though I definitely lean toward voting Democratic. That said, I’ve voted Green in prior elections, and I would vote for a Republican if the Democratic candidate sucked in comparison. I don’t think that’s the case this time around and, if Obama’s the Democratic candidate, I’ll be voting for Obama. If it’s Hillary, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I think there’s a good bit of muck-raking in this story from the Times. I read and enjoy the Times and will continue to, but like every newspaper they want to sell copies. Stories like this one move papers. But would McCain have been as close to Iseman if she were some big, ugly guy in one of those cookie-cutter gray suits? Probably not. Iseman played him.

I remember that I used to like McCain. He seemed like a reasonable, down-to-earth gent who eschewed old school politics. But I’ll never forget the time after the last election (same one with the Swift Boat mud slingers) when he gave George W. Bush a big, public hug, even though Bush had treated him like dirt throughout the campaign. War hero, POW, or not, I think McCain is your typical, old-school, spineless, politician, toad. Take a look at the photo below, hosted by The New York Times.

Lobbyists are tricksters and Iseman played McCain. Whether they were romantic or not is irrelevant. The guy has no backbone and he’s not to be trusted. Same as the old Boss.

Blech.

Check this out. I ordered a nice, new machine from Dell about two weeks ago. The machine arrived promptly but with Windows Vista installed.

Since we use Framemaker for much of our layout, we run Windows on our production machines. Problem is, Framemaker 7.2 won’t run reliably on Vista.

Dell customer service agreed to replace the machine I received with one running XP. Since the OS is presumably pre-installed, they replace the entire machine. Inefficient and wasteful, yes, but that’s the way it goes.

I received the first replacement machine from Dell but with a slower processor. My sense after corresponding with the CSR at Dell is that he has no idea what a processor is, how speeds differ, or even what RAM is. Check out this latest message:

I would like to inform you that I called you office and spoke to xxxxx, and have confirmed if the package was sent back (the supposed first replacement). I informed xxxx that I will be closing case# xxxxx, as this is related to the first replacement. This case#xxxxxxxx is related to the new replacement order#xxxxx, of which I will be calling back xxxx to confirm receipt of this package. I would like to inform you that I will still be keeping you posted on the 2^nd replacement order, and will only close this case once I’ve confirmed receipt. If you need further assistance, please feel free to get in touch w/ me via emial or phone call. Thank you.

The messages go on and on. There should be another machine waiting for me in the office but who knows what’s in the box. Last time he told me he only had units with 2MB not 1MB, so he picked one of those. I think he was referring to 2GB of RAM that is. I think 1MB would be a bit slow.

This is a rant.

As you know if you’ve been following my posts to this blog, I’ve been in Florida with my family. I’m back, and flying, as always these days, is no fun.

When checking our bags at Ft. Lauderdale airport we had a really unpleasant encounter with a ticket agent, a Tony Jones. We checked in online and had our boarding passes in hand; we just needed to drop off bags. We waited in the self-serve line which was quite short. When our turn came, an agent waved us over and began the baggage check process. He took our boarding passes (I realize now that he never did check our IDs!), and did his typing thing. I put a couple of our bags on the scale.

That’s when Tony Jones, who was not checking us in, decided that he didn’t like our bags on that scale. He told me to take them off; that we needed to wait to be called. (Remember, hardly anyone in line and the agent had called us over.) I told him that I wasn’t working with him and that the agent that I was working with was already processing our bags.

Jones wouldn’t relent. He kept insisting that I remove the bags from the scale. I asked him why, when I was working with another agent. He said because it was a shared scale and he had to check someone in. I moved our bags to the side so that he could share the scale. He wasn’t happy with that and kept insisting that we remove our bags—wasting everyone’s time in the process. The entire back and forth was ridiculous. What made it even more ridiculous was the frowny-faced woman standing between Jones and my agent who just kept staring at me and frowning, ready to get those evil bags off the scale. Finally, she asked my agent if he had our bag tags and he did, so she backed off. Miraculously, our bags made it onto the scale! Phew.

Of course, during this entire customer service fiasco, a supervisor was standing about three feet away, doing absolutely nothing to intervene.

I told Jones that he needed some customer service training and that he should fix his tie, which was turned backwards. Take that, Jones.

And the final rub? Upon arrival in SFO we learned that one of our bags had been diverted to Reno! I can only assume that that is Jones’s doing. I haven’t had a bag lost in years. That or he rattled our agent so badly that he chose the wrong Pollock for the baggage tag.

I’ve been flying United recently. Even though their customer service is pretty useless, and routes through India, they seem a bit more professional than American Airlines. Really, though, most airlines today totally suck. Never mind the pleasures of the TSA where, according the TSA agent I bantered with today, service comes second when you’ve got the highest security job in America.

I try to avoid using Windows because it tends to drive me nuts. My OS of choice is Ubuntu 7.10. It has its problems but I can usually enter an error message into Google and find an answer to my problem in about two minutes. Try that with Windows. If you have a few hours to spend you might be so lucky.

I’ve been at Shmoocon the last couple of days, playing vendor. (More on that in a moment.) When in DC I like to stay with my friends David and Sally and their kids Molly and Ella. They have a nice old Steinway upright though I played it (badly) for only about 10 minutes. But I digress.

David is a huge music fan. He’s got about a million CDs, who knows how many songs on iTunes, and a Sonos. First time I’ve seen a Sonos and I wouldn’t buy one, but that’s just me.

The wireless router they’ve been using for years, a Netgear, had been dropping connections. Having had the same problems with a Netgear router that I was using, I thought we’d try installing a new router, but a Linksys this time. I’ve had pretty good luck with Linksys routers, though that may be just luck.

Regardless, Sally picked up a new WRT54GS which offers better security — WPA2 with AES encryption. We set everything up and finally got everything to work. I configured it for WPA2 with AES. (The Linksys CD wouldn’t run but the web management is just fine.) Mac OS X 10.5 handled WPA2 just fine, Windows XP SP2? You guessed it. Good luck.

Having just gone through the same headache with a router I set up at my mother’s, I knew that XP required a download in order to offer WPA2 support. I went to the download page, ran through their genuinecheck software (phew! we’re genuine!), then installed the patch. Rebooted and what do you know. Nothing’s changed. I tried it again and the same thing. Something is broken and who knows how to fix it. Maybe if I had a couple of extra hours I could.

Actually, now that I’ve had some time to think about this, I’m guessing the problem isn’t the patch but the wireless card itself. It probably needs a firmware upgrade in order for it to support WPA2, so I’ll check with my friends about that. But regardless, my question is this: Why isn’t the WPA2 patch included in Windows XP automatic updates? It’s not like XP can’t be made to support WPA2. Clearly it can. So why should I have to think to look for it? Isn’t Microsoft taking care of me?

Apparently not, and the only reason I can figure is that they want people to dump their perfectly good machines (this one is a Pentium 4 but it’s fine for ordinary use — just needs some more RAM), and go out and get a Vista machine. I bet Vista supports WPA2 and, if it doesn’t, I bet the patch is included in an automatic update. Time to go to the dump to retrieve those perfectly good, dumped machines!

In closing, let me just say that I don’t dislike Microsoft quite as much these days. Not because of this headache but because they’ve got their head so far up their you know what that I just have to feel a little compassion.

As for Apple, they make pretty machines, but if they had Microsoft’s money they’d probably be 10 times worse.

After a nice workout session and on my way to the sauna at the fancy dancy spa that’s part of this Floridian resort, I happened upon one octogenarian and his friend in the locker room. They were watching some election coverage on CNN. And yes, I do mean octogenarian. During the course of our ensuing discussion he told me several times that he was 81. Qualifies as octo in my book.

Anyway, I wasn’t wearing my eyeglasses so I was kind of walking around in a bit of a daze. Yes, more than usual. It’s funny, but when you’re used to wearing glasses and then you take them off, it can be like walking in a kind of dream state. Maybe you know where I’m coming from if you, dear reader, wear glasses. Maybe you think I’m in that dream state now.

Well, let’s just say that the forthcoming presidential election is shaping up to exacerbate certain generational gaps, especially among die-hard Republicans. And I almost forgot that Jeb B. is the former governor. There’s also a rich/poor/distribution of wealth issue at work.

That said, for some reason I thought these guys were Obama fans. I don’t know why I was so convinced. I think I figured octogenarians (at least one), savvy, thoughtful, introspective, and freshly showered or something. I don’t know that these guys work out. I think they just hang out and sauna.

So I said “I think George Bush is the worst thing that’s happened to this country in years. I’m really hoping that we’ll see Obama in office,” or something like that. Stunned silence, which had nothing to do with an overdose of that nice lemon-flavored water in the dispenser that I kept spilling onto the counter because I wasn’t wearing my eyeglasses.

Turns out, they prefer McCain. They *really* prefer McCain. The patriot. He’ll keep oil prices low and oh, won’t I hate it when gas is $6/gallon. (I said I’d like that because then people will drive less and buy more fuel efficient cars.) “It’s the money,” the one guy kept saying. “It’s the money.”

I like money. I like to invest. I like it when our business makes money. But, it’s the money? There was a fundamental disconnect. Not only didn’t I know what he was talking about, he wasn’t listening to a word that I was saying. The experience was like talking to a wall while in my eyeglass-free dream state.

This banter continued back and forth and tempers were getting a bit high. I think to them I represented everything that they hate in Democrats and, I suppose, liberals, or activist judges, or whatever, even though I’m an Independent and my politics is issue-based, not platform-based. But they clearly did not like what I was saying.

“Deficits don’t matter,” Octo said. Wow. I couldn’t believe that one. Every financial columnist that I read with any ability to call changes in the stock market is concerned about deficits. (You should subscribe to John Mauldin’s free newsletter if you don’t already. He called the sub-prime mess about two years ago, as well as the rise in gold prices. See? I do like money.)

Deficits don’t matter. Who came up with that one? The fact that the U.S. debt is over $9 trillion doesn’t matter? Sounds like a lot of money to me. I hope that we never run such an outsized debt at No Starch Press. Add to that the $200 billion or so that we’re spending blowing up people and munitions in Iraq, the reduced revenue from reduced taxes, failing banks and insurance companies, and you’ve got a problem. That does not sound like a well-run business to me, but what do I know.

These guys were vets. They carried guns. They decided that I knew nothing because I wasn’t a patriot. I don’t blindly support what our pithed President does and I’m not patriotic. Wild.

In fact, at the close of our discussion one asked me this: “what kind of gun did you carry.” That was his simple test to determine whether I was a true patriot. I asked him if it mattered whether there was a war on when I was growing up, or whether I should have just gone out, bought a gun, and shot someone. He seemed to like the latter idea, so that was the close of our conversation.

So what do we learn? That some people just have very closed minds. Nothing that I said or would have said was going to matter because they weren’t listening. This was truly an “America: Love it Or Leave It” conversation. In fact, one of them told me to go to Iraq if I loved it so much! (I would actually like to go to Iraq, or Iran, or Afghanistan. I love the food!) Deja vu all over again.

So we’ll see what happens in the election. I hope we end up with someone in office who can actually bring people together instead of fracturing this great nation.

I’m really making an effort here to do a bit of blogging, but I’m on vacation. It’s Florida again. The oysters are still good but I won’t have a chance to dine on that fantastic Hot Boyz BBQ because I’ll be at Shmoocon in DC where it’s cold.

Anyway, here’s a driving story. When in Florida we stay with my mother in her condo. It’s a nice, private, enclave, where everyone’s rich and fat and happy. Well, at least rich and happy.

My mother rented a Toyota Prius. Well, let’s say she didn’t ask to rent a Prius; that’s just what she got. And I’m glad that she’s got a Prius because now I can really test drive one. If I’ve learned one thing about a Prius it’s that you’re not supposed to press the On button until after you’ve put your foot on the brake. Especially when you’ve been waiting to move while backed up at an auto accident and all of the unhappy drivers are in line behind you.

You guessed it. We were returning from Tarks in Dania (don’t you love that name?); a local seafood joint in Dania Beach, when we saw lots of flashing lights. (Tarks is a great place. Most of the seating is at the bar. The conch is really fresh; the steamed clams were fresh but a bit sandy; the conch fritters are nice and light; and the oysters looked excellent. Oh, and the key lime pie. Cheap and worth the trip.)

Anyway, there’s a pile up. Since we’re driving a Prius we don’t really care because it’s not going to eat much gas when idling, but all of the people in gas guzzlers around us must care. And they were getting steamed. Like the clams. The ambulances, fire trucks, and the police cars kept coming, and most of the drivers weren’t going to let them through! As I tried to move out of the way, people would honk at me, and fill the gap that I left. Finally, all traffic stopped dead. And we waited.

I won’t generalize here so I’ll simply say that the drivers around here don’t like to wait. People were yelling out of their cars “let’s move!,” and walking around, talking to the police officers. Tempers were rising. Finally, the herd started to move, like a herd, through some narrow opening. Unfortunately, we weren’t moving because I couldn’t figure out how to start the Prius. Remember, foot on the brake first? I read that when we got home.

So there I am pressing the Power button on and off. My wife was a bit nervous because everyone was honking and yelling. Then some guy actually has the nerve to come up to my car window to say “what the hell is going on here now!”, although I had my flashers on. Was I sitting there for fun? Do hazard lights mean . . .hazard? Problem? Can’t move?

Needless to say I let out the requisite string of expletives and it’s a good thing that I couldn’t find out how to open the door handle because there were a lot of cops around. I guess I let out a sufficient string though so he backed off. I guess he figured he’d be better off driving than whatever else.

And we got the car started. I know how now; then it was just a random thing.

Okay, we got moving and detoured through the shopping mall, which was pure chaos. Finally, we came to a stoplight. I noticed a fire truck on the way and I waited as drivers in front of me went IN FRONT OF THE FIRE TRUCK. I was so glad that I was at the head of the line because I stopped as did the cars next to me while everyone behind me honked and cursed.

I win.

Okay, next on to politics.