Daley Ponderings

We have been getting more and more sales calls lately.  I try to take the time to report them to the do not call lists, both for our state and for the country.  We are supposed to get $100 for each violation (where the caller pays $1000).  But, I haven't ever gotten any money.

My new theory is that the do not call lists don't really have anything behind them, and companies now know that, so don't bother checking the list. (More)

I forgot to post yesterday that I am now officially working from home full-time.  Woohoo!  Now I just need to catch up on all of the work that I have been postponing until now.

So - where can I buy one of these?

A bunch of people made a neat video of a lot of kids using augmentative communication devices.  My guess is that most of the devices are made by DynaVox, the company where I currently (for a little while longer) work.  It is neat to see our technology making a difference in people's lives.

I got a couple spams through my Lime Daley contact form the last couple days, so I took another look at the script that I was using.  I wrote it a year or two ago, and was my first attempt at writing an anti-spam tool that was designed to have a 0% false negative rate (ie. humans can't possibly fail - as opposed to the image recognizer thing, which I fail about 20% of the time, so I imagine less technical people people must fail and/or give up more often than that).

The one on the Lime Daley page isn't as good as the one I wrote for this blog, but I took a look at the statistics this morning, and it blocked 544 spams last month, only allowing three through. (More)

I got a security notice that I should upgrade from version 5.32 of Winamp to 5.35, so I downloaded the upgrade (and noticed that it supports my Creative Labs portable MP3 player - I'll have to check that out at some point), and once the install was mostly finished, got this message: 

I'd say the "I'm smart" status message is proving that the programmer wasn't all that smart, since I am seeing his debug messages... 

Peter was nice enough to loan me a Kill-A-Watt for a couple weeks to investigate power usage around our home.  I have thought about buying one before, but borrowing one is certainly better, though it is quite a bit of fun to test out devices to see how much power they use.

I first tried it on our dental water pik, and it is 30 watts when it is being used, and 0 when it is not.  In Pittsburgh (at 11.3 cents per kWh), a 50 watt device running for a minute costs just under a penny.  Our chest freezer runs at 83 watts when it is cooling, and 0 watts when it is not (pretty good, I think).  I let it run for a day and the grand total is 9.4 cents ($3/month). (More)

I am sorry to report that I am below average, when compared to college and high school seniors in the United States with regard to knowledge of history.

Here is a quiz to see how you do. 

Here is a brief review of Organizing for your Brain Type by Lanna Nakone.  This is a neat book that gives some explanation about why some people have trouble keeping things organized and why some have trouble understanding those others. (More)

I was recently asked to speak at IVCF at CMU on the topic of Christian view of success and vocation.  I am supposed to talk for 15 minutes, which will probably go very fast, so I need to be more concise than I usually would be. (More)

I hadn't checked my log file in a while for my Lime Daley contact page, but happened to check it today.  There have been 438 spams sent in the last two months, and 2 legitimate emails.  The spam filter (I wrote it - which is probably why it works - that my site isn't big enough for the spammers to work on getting around it, it is rather trivial, the spam filter for this blog site is better than that one, and somewhat more difficult to get around automatically) did its job 100% of the time.  The two emails went through without delay, and the 438 emails were saved in a log. (More)

Found some pictures today that are mostly amusing.  I don't understand all of the references, and am probably happier that way. "Generous Orthodoxy"?

Everyone always says how user-friendly Windows is, and as I sit here waiting for my Windows computer to endlessly update itself, I am struck by how much harder it is to update my Windows laptop than all of my Linux (Debian) servers put together. (More)

I have been having lots of fun (that's the bad kind of fun, not the good kind) configuring Asterisk for my new IT job.  It has been a pretty big pain getting it to work correctly with a couple different VOIP providers as well as the landlines.

I had a good day today, figuring both how to get Teliax to forward the calls to our landline (since I can't seem to register the connection with Teliax, via SIP or IAX), as well as I figured out the problem with outbound calls using the verizon line.  It turns out my theory was correct, that Asterisk was dialing too fast and not waiting for the dialtone, so Verizon wasn't getting the first digit (sometimes).  But, adding a half second wait before dialing did the trick. (More)

I was recently asked by a Microsoft engineer why I am still asking questions about Windows XP when I should be using Vista, since it is better for various reasons.

My response is below, which he called, "stunningly clear", and said that he had already forwarded it onto his executive management.  I don't know that it will have all that much of an impact, but it is nice to hear that he thought it was a good explanation. (More)