Matthew Botos

So it seems the same White House that wants to read your email without just cause or due process doesn’t want anyone reading their own. Smells like… justice. Perhaps the Republicans and Democrats should start soliciting for cryptography software instead of cash?

Actually, it’s surprising these people expose themselves to email at all. Years ago, I read about a ceremonial email sent by Bush, and it was noted that neither he or Clinton used email personally. It wasn’t for any technical or time reasons, but rather because their lawyers had advised them that it would be subject to subpoena and thus a liability.

My blog doesn’t get anywhere near enough traffic to be worried about performance, but I was curious to see what caching would do to improve the sometimes sluggish dynamic pages of WordPress. WP-Cache turned out to have quite an impact: loading the home page went from 1.4 seconds normally to 0.5 seconds cached. That’s definitely enough to be noticable, so this plugin is worth the simple installation.

Today marks a year that I’ve been blogging here! 229 posts in 28 categories, 35 real comments, and 5,071 spam comments blocked by Akismet. It’s been an enjoyable experience, getting to exercise my writing skills on topics from my life and dating to the technical minutiae of running a blog. The latter has tended to become a bit disproportionate, but I couldn’t see satisfying my urge to tinker without running something like WordPress and the 25 plugins I’ve accumulated.

Blogging about my travels turned out to be unexpectedly exceptionally fun. I’ve often kept travel journals that have languished in dark drawers, but being able to post daily updates from Oregon, London, and Aspen was much more fun for myself and family and friends who usually just get a brief postcard.

For the future, I hope to balance the technical and more personal topics, and of course, to continue to have fun doing it!

I got my annual social security summary today, which is a bit of a cruel joke. It essentially says, “here’s all the money we’ve taken from you, which you’ll never see again because the system will either be collapse or have benefits drastically reduced. before you retire” I’d much rather have that money going into some tax-advantaged account that I can manage and know exactly what I have for retirement. Trusting three decades of Congress with that money just doesn’t seem like a wise investment.

In covering Vonage’s patent battle with Verizon, The Wall Street Journal sheds some interesting light on the changing face of VOIP:

Beginning in 2005, regulators began to erode some of the advantages Vonage and other upstarts initially enjoyed. Internet phone providers were required to upgrade their 911 emergency-dialing facilities, modify their equipment so it could handle law-enforcement wiretaps and pay subsidies into the nation’s universal-service fund, which finances phone service in rural and high-cost areas.

Vonage and others have had to pass on the fees and surcharges to customers. A Vonage bill in Worcester, Mass., that charges $25 for monthly service now tacks on an additional $5 in fees. At 8×8 Inc., another Internet-calling company, Chief Executive Bryan Martin says his customers’ bills have gone up to about $27 from $20.

This is one of the things that drove me away; paying 30% in fees on a bill that should be almost nothing since it runs largely on Internet service I already pay for. And if you’re paying those same fees again on a cell phone, you get hit twice.

There’s also this great chart showing how cable companies have come out of nowhere in the last two years to almost match Vonage’s customer base. Vonage has continued to grow, but nowhere near as fast as if they had only been competing with other VOIP startups. That reality is changing the direction for some:

Santa Clara, Calif.-based 8×8 shifted its strategy last year to focus on business users after seeing cable companies invade the consumer territory. Like Vonage, 8×8 has yet to turn a profit. “It’s taking the technology and the industry a lot longer to get to the tipping point than maybe we had hoped, or in the case of my investors, they expected,” says Mr. Martin.

The technology and industry are there, I think; the smaller startups are just having their lunch eaten by the big traditional telecom and cable companies.

I was watching the classic Airplane II, and can’t believe it got away with a PG rating. Things have changed a lot since 1982; these days having a handful of topless shots and a woman asking about faking orgasms in the opening sequence would probably get you an R from the puritans at the Motion Picture Association, or a PG-13 at the very least.

Not to mention the detailed list that now follows the rating, though sometimes that doesn’t tell you quite enough. Take Failure to Launch: they tell you there’s nudity, but not that it solely consists of Terry Bradshaw’s naked ass! IMDB, on the other hand, tags it a bit better with “naked man”.

It’s odd that we’ve gotten less permissive about nudity in the movies and while violence is still quite accepted. And now back to Airplane, with one of it’s better lines:

Steve McCroskey: Jacobs, I want to know absolutely everything that’s happened up till now.
Jacobs: Well, let’s see. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di’s clothes. I couldn’t believe it…

Dating always seems to make good movie fodder, though most stray far from reality. Here are a few favorites that were bouncing around my head this morning:

40 Year Old Virgin seems to have it all: bad advice, the bar scene, and a send up of Speed Dating. (Some of the best speed dating bits are actually in the extras.) Way too many good lines to quote, as IMDB’s list goes to show.

Nice Guys Sleep Alone is lesser known, but twists the romantic comedy to shows what happens when a too-nice Southern teacher stops being nice. The best quote from this one is easy:

Friend: You should totally hit that.
Carter: She’s my sister!
Friend: By marriage! In Kentucky they’ll arrest you for playing rap music before they arrest you for sleeping with your sister.

Other bonuses: unintentional sex ed for his class at the horse ranch, and a Netflix connection.

40 Days and 40 Nights starts off as a romantic comedy with Josh Hartnett being a guy whose life is being ruined by all the women that fall into bed with him, so he decides to completely abstain. From there it quickly turns into a cruder movie and more entertaining movie as his guy friends start a betting pool and all the women in his life try to regain the power they’ve lost. It sets the tone that the first line to come to mind is Horatio Sanz’s (of Saturday Night Live Fame) reply to his suddenly masturbation-crazed boss having done it three times before lunch: “Two more and you break my company record!”

Kevin Smith gets two honorable mentions for the following two lines:

• “Did you love every woman you slept with?” “No, some of them I downright despised.” - Chasing Amy
• “You know how when you spoon with someone and you can’t find a comfortable place to put that other arm? That was like a metaphor for our whole relationship.” - Mallrats

Here’s a good quote from the movie Boiler Room:

And there is no such thing as a no sale call. A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made, the only question is who is gonna close? You or him? Now be relentless, that’s it, I’m done.

There’s an even better scene where the main character forces a newspaper phone salesman to give him a real pitch before telling him he gets a rival paper. What made me think of it tonight was that I finally reached one-year on my VOIP contract and could cancel without a termination fee. Only I called the wrong number to cancel: 800-TRY-VOIP instead of 866-TRY-VOIP.

Naturally it’s another phone company. When the guy couldn’t look up my account, he asked what company I was calling and I finally realized my mistake. Even though I initially told him I was calling to cancel, he never tried to sell me on switching to his company!

The cynic in me would point out that this is what happens when you outsource to a call center in India where the name of the company on the script is just as interchangable as the management think the workers are.

Brian made a comment today that reminded me how dumb it is that people still communicate so much over totally open email. It’s the equivalent of writing your message on the back of a postcard, and handing off to your neighbor to hand off to a friend to hand to a coworker to hand to five other people before it finally gets to the recipient.

To get the digital equivalent of putting in a (padlocked) envelope, both people have to jump through the hoops of setting up encryption software. It’s a shame none of the big tech companies have seen fit to make this a more painless process; just think of the increased adoption if AOL, Yahoo, or Google offered easy, standard encryption.

Fortunately, it’s actually not to hard to setup Mac’s Mail.app to sign or encrypt messages with S/MIME. This very detailed tutorial on How to Set Up Encrypted Mail on Mac OS X makes it seem worse than it is. The twenty minute process is pretty much:

1. Get free personal certificate from Thawte
2. Backup (export) the certificate from your browser
3. Import the certificate into Mac’s Keychain
4. Start up Mac mail and sign/encrypt messages

The one pitfall I hit was the tutorial’s recommendation to put the certificate in a new keychain, which mail couldn’t see. Putting it all in the default “login” keychain worked fine, though.

If you’ve like to join me in the world of secure email, free from the prying eyes of systems administrators, hackers, FBI, NSA, and George W himself, email me your public key and we can start plotting to overthrow the world.

I’ve seen a dramatic increase in blog comment spam in the last few months. Though I don’t have exact numbers, I’d guess I’ve received as much in the last two months as I did in the previous ten. The disturbing part, though, is that they’re finally starting to get past the Akismet spam filter!

It appears to be primarily one adult website using a slew of URLs and IP addresses (a botnet of hijacked machines judging by their wide range). Fortunately, there’s still a distinct pattern in their otherwise random URLs that can be blocked with WordPress’s basic comment black list. Hopefully that will be enough to keep me from having to moderate all comments.