Category: Computers

This here is one reason I’ve been reluctant to use Google for anything more than email. I’ve also advised the Wife to steer clear of iCloud for the time being as well. So far, she has.

As for all our digital data, it all exists here on our home network, including a complete copy of the blog. Storage is cheap so there’s really no reason not to do it.

I remember getting the following advice, “No one will care more about your money than you.” I think the same thing holds true for digital data. Apple, Google, Amazon and anyone else isn’t worried about your data. At least, not in the same way you or I are. Ceding all the control and security of it to them seems foolhardy.

So, for awhile now, the Wife’s computer has been, seemingly, randomly shutting down. She’d use it to check email or other duties, then she’d walk away from it, come back some time later and it would be off. She’d note the behavior to me and all I could do was shrug.

It’s an Windows 7 machine, so guess whom I blamed?

It finally hit a fever pitch last week when she was trying to upload some pictures onto her iPad using iTunes. It varied, but she’d successfully move anywhere from 5 to 20 images, then POOF it shutdown. She walked away from it in disgust.

So I finally sat down to see if I could figure it out, since we finally had a seemingly foolproof method to get it to happen. After investigating several software possibilities, to no avail, I finally started thinking along the lines of it being a hardware failure. Fortunately, Win7 has a memory test that reboots the computer into a dedicated little program that exercises the memory. So I went that route. And the computer once again shutdown.

Which was troubling for a couple of reasons. One, it hadn’t detected any errors prior to the shutdown. Two, having the failure occur when Windows wasn’t running meant that Windows wasn’t the problem.

So I booted into the BIOS to see if there was any potentially useful information to be gleaned from there. By pure happenstance, there was. There’s a screen that reports the CPU temp. The readings indicated the CPU core was hovering in the 90C range.

Insert whistle here.

Fortunately, it’s also possible to setup an alarm that goes off when the temp exceeds a certain trigger point. After enabling the alarm, it became clear that the problem was the CPU overheating and going into thermal shutdown. It actually became kind of comical, listening to the computer “scream” just prior to going silent.

So I ordered a Coolermaster Hyper 412 Plus. I’ve had good luck with Coolermaster in the past, so I saw no reason not to go with them now. It turned out to be a pain to install because I had to take the mobo out to install a support bracket on the underside. But it’s a monster of a heatsink. Luckily, the tower the computer is in is large enough to handle it. All told, it took about an hour for me to install the new heatsink, including the time to take the old setup out and so forth.

Since this afternoon, the CPU hasn’t gotten above 41C and it hasn’t shutdown. So I guess MS and Win7 is off the hook.

For the moment.

Assuming you’ve seen the Apple commercial with Samuel L. Jackson talking about date night, this may be of interest. One of the phrases I’ve wondered about since I first saw the ad was when Jackson talks about putting “the gazpacho on ice.” Siri then asks if he’d like a reminder, and Jackson replies with a quip like Siri is a real person. Charming.

Anyway, what I’ve wondered is if Siri really is that good at rendering speech to text? (There’s a brief shot of Jackson’s iPhone 4s with a screen asking to confirm making the reminder about the gazpacho.) Well, via John Gruber, the answer is no.

Not that I expect anything to come of this, but what constitutes false advertising? That seems like walking right up to the line, at the least.

Remember Netzero? The free dial-up company from, like, 10 years ago? Well, I hesitate to say “They’re back”, because it’s more likely they never left. They just, kinda, slid to the background while wireless, cable and DSL took over as the pipelines to the internet.

Well, they’re rolling out a new “4G” offering. Engadget has the details. It looks like they rely on existing infrastructure to pull it off. If I were to guess, I’d say it won’t turn out well for them. But still, flyers like this is what it will take to break the current cell-carrier stranglehold on cell-based wireless data. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads.

From Ann Althouse, we learn this about Steve Jobs:

From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that even the aspects that remain hidden are done beautifully.

One of the most extreme- and telling- implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. ‘That part’s really pretty,’ he said. ‘But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.

I’ll be up front- I find it hard to believe Jobs would do this. It’s just plain stupid. Design means different things in different disciplines. When designing a product like a piece of furniture, aesthetics obviously matter- no one is going to buy something ugly. There are other arenas where aesthetics can actively work against good design because the design objective is robustness and functionality. Printed circuit boards are one of those.

If Jobs did, in fact, do this then I can only imagine the engineer rolling his eyes at the buffoonery of the suggestion. The board is going to be hidden in an enclosure, unseen by anyone except a technician. It’s sole purpose would be to provide for the user experience. Mucking with a printed circuit design because it isn’t “pretty” is nonsense on stilts. Making it pretty could very easily render the board useless. There’s nothing to be gained whatsoever from making a PCB pretty.

That’s why I suspect the story is bogus- made up as some kind of silly anecdote in the book to “prove” Jobs’ extreme fastidiousness or some such. I’m not a Jobs fanboy, but even I would give him the benefit of the doubt here.

It was only a matter of time and I finally decided to take the plunge. I didn’t get a smartphone for the today, but I did get a phone that allows me to check email. As phones go, well, it’s pretty basic as it’s just an LG Octane. To be honest, I can barely type on the damn thing because the keyboard keys are so small and my fingers aren’t. But the next step up is a smartphone and Verizon requires one of their expensive data plans with those.

Enough of that. The point of this post is that I had to modify my home mail server in order to get the crappy limited little email client that Verizon offers to retrieve and send mail with it. Following are the mods I made.

First, my home server has a dovecot server configured for IMAP and exim4 configured as my sendmail program via a debian setup. Also, my home server is protected by a Netgear firewall/router.

The easiest thing to configure is dovecot, which as long as it’s configured for IMAP, should pretty much be good to go. The default configuration listens on port 993 for SSL connections, which is important for security reasons. There are plenty of other guides out there for getting dovecot working.

Exim, it turns out, is a little more difficult to configure. There are 2 things it must be setup to handle: ssmtp over port 465 and relaying from the Verizon servers.

Setting up ssmtp is not difficult, but it’s also non-trivial. First, a signed certificate is required. A while back, I setup my own certificate authority for just such a situation. I followed these instructions to setup the CA (that was awhile ago) and I followed the portion about requests and signing tonight to setup my new certificates for exim and SMTP over SSL. Alternatively, exim has files to generate the certificate and key file.

The two files should be named exim.crt and exim.key and placed in the /etc/exim4/ directory. Change the permissions as follows:

$ chown root:Debian-exim exim.crt exim.key
$ chmod 640 exim.crt exim.key

That will lock them down so only exim and root can access the files.

Next, I added the following settings to my exim4.conf.template file (I put them near the beginning of the file):

tls_on_connect_ports = 465
MAIN_TLS_ENABLE = true

Save that and exit. The first line will make exim listen on port 465 for SSL connections. The second line enables other configuration settings needed by exim to make SSL work. The nice thing here is, if exim was configured to listen on the local network on port 25, operation there will be unaffected. So there’s no need to go running around reconfiguring other clients.

Next up, the update-exim4.conf.conf file must be modified. The Verizon client requires a working SMTP server. In order for the server to be considered “working” it has to act as a relay for the email host Verizon uses. The only way I could figure out the host name was to attempt to setup the account and then check the exim logs to see what host tried to connect. In my case, the hostname was sjc002-egress-a.seven.com. This hostname (it may end up being different on other setups) must be added as a relay net. Open up the update-exim4.conf.conf and add it as a semi-colon separated entry (if there are other entries) to the dc_relay_nets parameter.

To finish the exim modifications, modify the SMTPLISTENEROPTIONS entry in /etc/default/exim4 as follows:

SMTPLISTENEROPTIONS='-oX 465:25 -oP /var/run/exim4/exim.pid'

Finally, enter the following commands as root:

$ update-exim4.conf
$ /etc/init.d/exim4 restart

Actually, only use those commands if you’ve got a debian setup. Basically, the first command regenerates the live configuration file located in /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated. The second one restarts the exim daemons. Perform whatever the equivalent is for your system accordingly.

Last, setup port forwarding on the router. This consists of telling the router to listen for connections on certain ports and then forward those requests to a specific IP address for processing. This has to be done for port 993 for IMAPS and port 465 for SSMTP. Chances are you’ll be using web utility on your router. If you’re more security conscious, I suppose you could configure special ports on the router side that forward to the appropriate ports on the LAN side to make it less obvious to interlopers what’s going on.

Once all that’s done, the server should be good to go. Once I had everything setup properly, my phone was able to “activate” my account without any special settings on the phone.

For those wondering what all the hub-bub is about regarding SOPA and PIPA, Wired has a pretty good rundown on what’s at stake. They’ve “blacked” themselves out along with several other websites to protest the bills. Here’s their rundown on what the legislation is all about.

The bottom line is powerful interests don’t like the freedom the Internet provides and rather than addressing the problem themselves, they’re trying to muscle lawmakers into enacting a series of laws that can be abused endlessly.

Lastly, here’s a link where you can tell your Congressman your opinion.