Posts filed under 'tech'
A few days ago I was having my old AC unit removed and my AC technician noticed that I had a PEPCO Kilowatchers box on my AC Unit. “You won’t be needing that on the new unit” he said. Sure enough they killed the program 3 years ago. These boxes allowed PEPCO to turn off AC units during peak hours to prevent brown outs and help them reduce expenses. In return, people who volunteered to add this box to their AC Unit would get paid each time they were turned off. I think the max was 1 hour per day. So much for trying to get by with fewer power plants.
When I moved into my house in 1998 the power meter was setup for Time of Use (TOU) billing. The off peak rate was about 1/2 the normal rate and the peak rate was a few cents higher than the normal rate. Since my wife and I worked during the day, this saved us money. I kept the AC off during the day and turned it on again when the rates dropped. A few years ago PEPCO changed the off peak rate to be almost the same as the normal rate so I dropped the program. There was no longer incentive to participate.
Just this week I heard that utilites pay 10x more for energy during peak hours. Giving me 50% off my off peak rates seems like a huge win for them and me. I don’t understand why they removed the incentive.
My guess is that since they no longer own any power plants, they are no longer concerned with having to build new plants to keep up with demand. Any increase in peak power can just be passed onto consumers and they profit regardless.
Time of Use programs have the power to reduce the need for more plants and they allow us make better use of our existing infrastructure. Perhaps the government should push for reasonable TOU programs so we can reduce our peak energy usage.
December 16th, 2007
I was going to write about how much I hate December but instead I’ll attack www. 
Now I love the World Wide Web but I hate typing www for web sites. I’m specifying http:// and I’m hitting port 80, i expect a web page. So why do so many sites still expect you to type www. then the domain name? My site works fine with http://tonycode.com/ or http://www.tonycode.com/ but there are still plenty of sites that just plain break if you don’t add the www. A friend of mine worked at a startup and he mentioned the company name so I entered http://companyname.com/ and I got some guys personal web page. As it turns out one of the employees was using the base domain as his personal web site. No one at the company noticed because they always typed www first. I wonder how many people like me landed on this guys page instead of the company page. Needless to say this was corrected after I brought this issue to the attention of my friend.
That was a few years ago but there are still plenty of examples today. Here is the most recent one I stumbled on
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ works correctly but http://berkshirehathaway.com/ returns a directory listing error. Come on Warren, surely you can get Bill Gates to fix this for you. Any competent IT professional could fix this issue in a few minutes. Of course the site is running on Microsoft IIS so maybe this takes days. I live in an Apache world were everything is easy and free.
Ok, enough picking on Warren and Bill, I own stock in both of their companies so they have the last laugh anyway. But please fix the www. I never type www. unless a site won’t work otherwise.
Did I mention that I hate December?
December 11th, 2007
It all started when my uncle’s web site was redesigned with flash. EVERYTHING was done in flash. The address, the phone number, directions, etc. Basically the site was invisible to search engines. I tried explaining to my uncle that search engines would not find anything to index and people googling him would no longer get any results. I told him that he should have the people who design his site put the basic information (address, phone, business name) in plain HTML so search engines could find it.
My uncle is not a techie and didn’t fully understand what I was saying but he did contact the site designers. Apparently they didn’t understand what I was asking either. Instead of pulling out crucial information they added a new index page to his site that lets people choose between a broadband (flash) or dial up (jsp) version. What the?? The JSP version of the site was no lighter than the flash version. Obviously the designers didn’t have a clue either. At least search engines can crawl the JSP site but now there is twice as much to maintain.
Rather than try to convey technical requirements to teams unqualified to build web pages, I decided to build a site that would help other businesses like my uncles. If typing your business name and city does not give you the top result on Google, with a map to your business, your web site is not doing its job. I have a solution. I call it BizLocale.com.
Goto bizlocale.com and enter your business name, address and phone number and website address and see if your search results don’t improve in the coming weeks. The bizlocale.com domain is new and google hasn’t started crawling it actively but I hope that will change in the coming weeks. The site is still pretty rough and I have no proof that entries on this site will show with maps in google but I suspect they will.
BizLocale is also great if your name is not part of a business and people try to search for you. For example. John Doe works in a doctor’s practice called Smith and Associates. On BizLocale he can create an entry for Smith and Associates with his name as a contact. This works great for all sorts of businesses and I see it as a useful tool for people who run businesses out of their house.
The bizlocale.com entry can be your only presence on the web and it should help. In addition to entering contact information there is a text area where you can describe your business and enter keywords. This could be all web presence you need. BizLocale is about empowering local search so having a fancy web site is not a requirement.
November 25th, 2007
I occasionally find myself setting the wrong date on my camera and ending up with 100s of pictures that need the dates edited on them. In the past I made these changes with programs that made me edit the dates one picture at a time. I want to set the year ahead or the hour back on 100s of pictures all at once.
JHead to the rescue! Just today I discovered that I needed to set the date back on 100 pictures that I had taken since daylight savings time. With jhead I just stuck the pictures with bad dates in a folder and ran
jhead -ta-1 *jpg
then I changed the actual timestamps on the files to match the EXIF data with
jhead -ft *.jpg
Now that my pictures had the correct hour I was hoping to see my pictures and my daughters in order in picasa. For example. The picture of Maia taking a picture of a boat should be followed by the picture of the boat.
It wasn’t! Turns out her camera was 5 minutes ahead of mine. With jhead this is not an issue.
jhead -ta-0:05 HP*jpg
jhead -ft HP*jpg
This moved the time on all her HP pictures back 5 minutes.
Now the pictures are in order and I’m happy. ya. I’m just a little anal.
Here is my picture
Here is what Maia got
More jhead notes are on my wiki
http://tonycode.com/wiki/index.php?title=Photo_Notes
November 18th, 2007
Back in high school (1985) my auto shop teacher told us that over time car batteries die because debris that flaked off the plates eventually got high enough to short out the battery. Today it seems that the more common failure is caused by build up of sulfate on the plates from excessive use. My little GTI didn’t use much power so both batteries lasted over 5 years and I’m pretty certain that debris buildup was the cause of the failure.
The original battery died right after AOL installed about 100 rumple strips in front of its building. The vibration surely knocked off some lose crud on the plates and viola, I had to roll start the car after work.
The 2nd battery died shortly after visiting a new shopping center outside of Baltimore where they had a brick-like entrance driveway. The drive vibrated the car pretty badly and sure enough, that afternoon the battery was dead.
I suspect a service to vacuum out the crud in the bottom of the battery would have allowed me to use the battery for another year or more. Although such a service would probably cost as much as a new battery.
September 8th, 2007
I was left a comment asking if I thought we would be getting a refund from SunRocket. My reply got long so I’m creating a new post.
I don’t think we’ll get anything back from SunRocket. They ran out of money so I don’t expect we’ll get anything. I interviewed for a job with SunRocket about 2.5 years ago. I’m now glad that I didn’t get the job. Back then they were small and thrifty. Once ex-AOL management came in they were spending too much to attract anymore VC funding.
VCs want big returns. $200/year VOIP is not a big return business but it certainly can be cash flow positive. I think independent VOIP providers can succeed. I suspect ViaTalk will survive because they are a private company and Packet 8 (EGHT) will survive because they are an established company that doesn’t have to rely on VC. Lingo is part of Primus (PRTL) and they have been reinventing the company over the past few years. Time will tell if they can turn the company around.
August 18th, 2007
I’m looking forward to BarCamp this Saturday but I’m feeling like a total slacker. I haven’t suggested or volunteered to run any sessions. Hopefully, inspiration will find me on Saturday.
I’m hoping that this is just a start of more tech conferences in the DC area. Most of the conferences here are geared towards government agencies so real techies end up leaving town for the “cool” conferences. RefreshDC does some great things but I (maybe incorrectly) think of that as more of a designers group. I’m sure Mr. Garber will set me straight. I guess I should attend the next meeting and find out because I’m all about getting real technology talk and conferences in DC.
August 9th, 2007
This is a blinding flash of the obvious. I feel really stupid for not doing this sooner.
My Local Number port from SunRocket to ViaTalk is supposed to go through on 7/31. 14 days after they received my request. I was hoping a VOIP to VOIP transfer would be faster.
With Packet8 claiming 5 days to tranfer number I was tempted to switch because I really need my old number back.
While I contemplated canceling my ViaTalk order and Switching to Packet8 I decided to sign into sunrocket and see if call forwarding would work. AND IT DID!
I hope the SunRocket forwarding continues to work until the end of the month. At least I won’t miss anymore calls while I’m waiting for the number port.
July 19th, 2007
Hoping this helps someone out there. I’ll update as I get more information.
Since Sunrocket canceled our accounts with no notice and no refund I figured they would not mind if we continued to use their gizmos as we moved onto new VOIP providers.
There are various sites that tell you how to get into the gizmo as admin so I’m not putting that information here.
Since it tool me a lot trial and error to get ViaTalk working with the AC-211-SR I figured I would document my settings on my wiki.
Here is the link
http://tonycode.com/wiki/index.php?title=AC-211-SR_configuration_for_ViaTalk
July 17th, 2007
I’ve been a happy Sunrocket customer for over 2 years. So when I started seeing blog posts that said they were going under I didn’t worry too much. I figured the worst case would be a skeleton crew and poor support while they tried to sell us to Vonage or another provider. Acquiring new customers is expensive so other providers would be crazy not to jump in and do a deal.
We’ll I’m not sure who was doing the dealing but instead of selling us they just shut the service off tonight. Can you imagine? 200,000 VOIP customers cut off. Calling (um surfing) around for new service.
I’m sure Vonage and ViaTalk have their phones ringing off the hook. I’m sorry I didn’t find a new service last week when all the rumors were flying.
Now. I’m stuck with no phone for at least another 24 hours and I may never get my phone number back (which I have had for 9 years now).
On the bright side I still have the Sunrocket gizmo that I plan on using with my new service.
I am just blown away by how poorly managed this bankruptcy was. I can’t think of a worse outcome for the employees, customers and the venture capitalist. They threw away millions by not selling the customers to a competitor.
July 16th, 2007
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