everyday

You may have noticed some new graphics on the site, specifically the following in the upper left corner:

Up until this point, I have remained fairly silent regarding my thoughts about who should be our next President. I was very interested in the campaign of Ron Paul, unfortunately he has not received the Republican Party’s nomination.

I won’t spend a great deal of time here talking about why I think Barack Obama is the best choice, but I will say that I do think he is the best choice.

UPDATE! Netflix has reversed their decision.

I received a notice from Netflix that, effective September 1st, they will no longer be allowing users to have more than one queue. LAME!

I currently have the “2 at a time” plan with 2 different queues. This allows my wife and I to each get one movie at a time from our respective queues. This is such a convenient feature that I am not sure I will want to continue using the service should they discontinue the multiple queues. I would like to know what bean counter came up with this brilliant way to increase profits. Perhaps I can provide some advice, reducing the costs to operate your service will be meaningless to your bottom line when your customers leave.

Here is a link to some very, very lame corporate marketing / used car salesman language Netflix is using to “sell” this feature removal as a “improvement” to their service. Ha!

Having just watched the Boston Celtics defeat the Los Angeles Lakers in the fourth game of the NBA Finals, I can confidently say that 34 is greater than 24. 34 being the jersey number of Paul Pierce of the Celtics and 24 being Kobe Bryant of the Lakers. While Kobe is most certainly one of the best, if not the best player to ever play the game of basketball, he was literally shut down by the very impressive defense of Paul Pierce.

The Celtics came back from a 24 point deficit to defeat the Lakers on their home court at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. This was a phenomenal come back spurred on by the Celtics coaches decision to have Paul Pierce guard Kobe Bryant, which allowed the Celtics to avoid having to double team and provide help to aid in the defense against Kobe’s amazing scoring ability. The combination of Paul Pierce gaurding Kobe and Kevin Garnett shutting down any open lanes to the basket really kept the Los Angeles Lakers off balance and allowed the Celtics to manage one of the biggest come backs in NBA Finals history.

In my work as a Network Administrator for a school district, I run into problems with email click-through marketing techniques rather frequently. The specific problem is with click-through tracking of email advertising campaigns. Since we are a school district that provides internet access to minors, we tend to filter our internet traffic rather heavily. This filtering wreaks havoc with most click-through advertising emails.

For instance, an email is received inside of our network with a link to:

<a href="http://www.rs6.net/?kna76dv978y34qtib33t897jk1bt4hq3fr897&site=www.theactuallink.com">www.theactuallink.com</a>

The user thinks that when they click on theactuallink.com that they will be taken to theactuallink.com, they are instead taken to rs6.net and then bounced through to theactuallink.com. This causes a great deal of frustration with our users. We constantly receive phone calls that our internet filter is blocking theactuallink.com, when it is in fact blocking rs6.net, and rightfully so.

I imagine that this problem will only increase as more and more companies increase the amount of internet filtering they do to comply with various laws and regulations. So, what is the solution?

I would highly recommend never, ever rely on a 3rd party to bounce your links through. If you need to track the effectiveness of an email advertising campaign, then invest the time and resources to roll your own tracking. That or use a tool like Google Analytics that will not break the link even if the tracking itself gets blocked. I know that a large number of the emails are generated by non-profit organizations or businesses with limited budgets that are running their email advertising campaigns through a 3rd party, but I think the time has come to abandon the 3rd party and either hire the talent or develop it from within to avoid losing your audience entirely. There are a large number of free, open source applications that will allow you to run email advertising campaigns so the cost for software would be negligible. Hardware costs and requirements are ever decreasing as well, so the excuses not to are few.

Photos can be found on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/celerity/sets/72157605209737298/

I know that the title probably makes no sense to any one of the 2 people who read my weblog on a semi-annual basis, but I have decided to try to post more stuff related to my work as a Network Engineer. That being said…

Today I ran into a problem with our Microsoft WSUS server. Recently I upgraded the WSUS from 3.0 to 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This is the second time our WSUS has been broken by an update. Usually Microsoft’s updates are pretty solid, but WSUS updates seem to be a tad iffy. The upgrade from WSUS 2.0 to WSUS 3.0 broke completely and I had to completely rebuild the server, luckily I run the WSUS on a virtual server using VMWare’s ESX server, so rebuilding it was very simple.

The particulars of the problem are that the client machines would not download updates! Normally I don’t check on the update status of machines very often, but I was creating a new image for a laptop and the thing just would not download updates. I check the WSUS log on the client machine and noticed that there was a 0×80190194 error. A quick search on Google pointed me to a number of forum posts that state this is an HTTP 404 (Page not found) error. Unfortunately, none of these posts had any information about a solution. A bit more searching led me to a post on Microsoft’s TechNet Discussion Groups that had the solution, Re: WSUS 3 sp1 do not distribute patches to clients in Windows Server Update Services (URL is rather deep and may be broken, no warranty). The noteworthy part of the post:

1. Create a new virtual directory called ’selfupdate’
2. Set the pathname to
   %programfiles%\Update Services\selfupdate

Hopefully Microsoft will put some more resources into testing the updates for WSUS, it is a really nice product, but the updates always seem to break it!

via: Inhabit

There is a really interesting article on Inhabit about Frasers Broadway. It is a highly sustainable development planned to be built in the middle of Sydney. Hopefully other major cities will follow suite, especially in the south-western US where urban sprawl has obliterated the natural environment.

via: Simple Bits

Some exciting news from the developers of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8! Basically they have reversed course on their previous decision to hamstring standards based web design by forcing IE8 to render all web pages in an identical fashion as IE7, unless explicitly told to do otherwise. Microsoft was planning on forcing web developers tell IE8 to render a web page according to web standards or else IE8 would render the page identically to IE7 (which has some shortcomings when it comes to standards).

This is definitely good news and I for one am glad to see Microsoft making a decision that makes sense for the web community at large.

Having recently moved I have been dealing with the unfortunate reality of an extended commute on a number of California’s highways. My commute is 39 miles, one way, the majority of which is spent on one highway or another. As a result of this commute I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with large trucks, spefically the lanes in which they choose to occupy.

On any given day, on any given highway I run across numerous trucks that, through their choice to violate certain sections of the California Vehicle Code (CVC), consume far more than their fair share of the road. Through an entirely non-scientific and casual observation of traffic, I have found that trucks make up around 15% of the road going traffic while using well over 50% of the road. I did a little research today and found the following:

21655. (a) … (b) Any … vehicle subject to the provisions of Section 22406 shall be driven in the lane or lanes designated … whenever signs have been erected… . …, when a specific lane or lanes have not been so designated, … those vehicles shall be driven in the right-hand lane for traffic or as close as practicable to the right edge or curb. If, however, a specific lane or lanes have not been designated on a divided highway having four or more clearly marked lanes for traffic in one direction, … those vehicles may also be driven in the lane to the immediate left of that right-hand lane, … When overtaking and passing another vehicle proceeding in the same direction, the driver shall use either the designated lane, the lane to the immediate left of the right-hand lane, or the right-hand lane for traffic … This subdivision does not apply to a driver who is preparing for a left- or right-hand turn or who is entering into or exiting from a highway or to a driver who must … drive in a lane other than the right-hand lane to continue on his or her intended route.

This tells me that trucks should stay in the right lane (unless there are four or more available lanes). I continually run across trucks in the right 2 lanes on a 3 lane highway. I have even run across trucks in all 3 lanes on 3 a lane highway. But wait, it gets worse… I have been on a five lane highway with trucks in all but the leftmost lane! One thing that I have never seen is a truck being stopped by the California Highway Patrol for any of these violations.

So what can be done? Well, how about pressing the CHP to cite violators for starters? I for one would love to see a law enacted mandating that trucks stay in the right most lane irregardless of the number of lanes. I would also like to see a significant penalty for lane violations, including both a stiff fine and a number of “points” on the driver’s record.

http://acsa2000.net/cain2004.org/Dine-Navajo-PressRelease.htm

I hope that this article is incorrect, I can’t imagine that a whole tribe of Native Americans was forced to relocate in 2005 so that major mining interests could strip mine coal that laid under the Dineh land. This can’t be true, we can’t have done this (again) in the latter half of the 20th century. Oh yeah, the Senator primarily responsible for getting this travesty of justice pushed through the system and enacted into law was none other than current GOP front runner Sen. John McCain! Please keep that in mind this November.

UN information regarding the forced resettlement.