Untangle!

The upcoming, soon-to-be-released, Version 8.1 of Untangle, which (as you may have guessed), inspired the naming of this blog, is finally going to be released... It's undergoing final testing, and the one aspect that I've seen in similar products (such as IPCOP, and similar), is finally being included.

Web Caching!

They just finished the plugin and everything... this is awesome.

What's the big deal? (you may ask) ... well, Web Caching, is something that your browser does automatically. It pulls a page down, and saves it, and if you're like me and keep reloading contect from the same pages over and over, over the course of a few hours, then the browser just reloads the content it already has, rather than download everything all over and over again.

You just said computers already do this, why is this a big deal at all?

... well curious reader, Untangle is a routing system, so it replaces the in-house router in your home (Kind of like a d-link or linksys system), however, because it's a full-fledged computer system it has a lot more options available. Web caching at the router means that if you're sitting at home, and you have guests in your house, and you see that picture that makes you "ZOMG SO AWESOME!!!111one", and you send it to everyone else in the house (presuming you're like me and all your friends bring laptops to your house), then it just reloads from the copy stored on the router.

ALSO, if you're like me, this is important because bandwidth is expensive. So rather than downloading the same content 5 or 6 times, it can be downloaded once from the internet, the router intercepts the requests and responds with the locally cached version. This saves you bandwidth, and probably more importantly, saves you time. As long as it's implemented right, the local web cache is much faster than most web server's response times, and it's much faster at transferring to you than it would be through the web.

Best example of the positive contribution to bandwidth is Windows Updates!! the dreaded evil things. They go out all the time and annoy you constantly saying they need to install, reboot, etc. Now, with web caching, those updates are stored locally on the router, so when your computer goes to download them (sometimes several hundred MB in size) it simply retrieves it from the router, which goes faster, so updating is less painful (but still painful), and it doesn't cost you in your monthly usage (eg update size times number of systems).

This is surely an exciting time, and I think I'll have to dust off one of my old P4 units and reinstall this new version of Untangle...

if you havn't heard of them or used them yet, check them out at http://www.untangle.com/

Your apps are spying on you.

big surprise.

Remember TextPlus4 that you installed? yep, now ad agencies have your phone's unique ID, location, and sometimes even your gender and age... who knows what else? your contact list?

This article comes as no surprise to me.

I have beef with Apple and Google wiping their hands of the responsibility by having applications require to disclose what permissions they're asking for, because honestly, if you want to use an application, the stuff it doesn't tell you it's doing, doesn't really matter, right?

wrong.

My beef with this is that they're putting the focus on the consumers giving permissions that the software is requesting. A lot of users don't even know what these permissions are, or what they include. "Location" ... okay, so if I turn on GPS, and open that app, are they going to know the address of the house I'm sitting in? Or if I've recently "closed" the application (and it's still running a service in the background), and get in my car and activate my GPS for navigation, are they going to know where I am then? and where I'm going?

The biggest complaint I have with the permissions isn't just that noone seems to understand them, it's that there's no options. You either grant all permissions, or don't. by declining, you're also opt-ing out of using the application.

How about this: The application requests permissions and you choose what permissions it should have access to. For example. If I go to install the game Slice It (which I believe is available on both iPhone and Android), and it requests (these are the actual permissions requested on Android) Your Location (both network and GPS), Network Communication (Full Inet access, Network state, Wifi state), Storage (SD Card access), Phone calls (read phone state and identity), System tools (retrieve running apps, change wifi state).

Why does it need all that?

Do I want Slice It to know where I am? not really. Do I get a choice? not if I want to use the application. Why does it need to know my identity and phone state? does the application want to know if I'm on a call while playing the game? Doubtful.

Do you think that if I asked the developer why they wanted all these permissions, that they would give me a straight answer? Probably not. Additionally, there's no way to revoke permissions other than to remove the application. This is my biggest gripe... Do you really believe that an application, such as Slice It would NOT WORK if there was no location data and no network access? I'm guessing it would, I can put my phone into airplane mode (all radios off) and start up the game, and it would likely run fine.

I get some of the permissions, they make sense, like SD card access to save games and stuff, and Network access to download levels without the need to update the whole application in the market, etc... but I should have the capability of granting or revoking those as I see fit.

The permissions shouldn't be "these are the permissions it wants, is that ok?" it should be that the permissions requested by the application are granted individually, rather than as a group.

But hell, what the hell do I know? I'm just a paranoid consumer right?

RIP 8700M GT

Everything I buy, I buy on purpose and for a good reason. ... at least I try to.

I suppose I don't do nearly as much research for a toaster as I would for a laptop, but I digress.

The other day, my Alienware Area-51, m15x's graphics card melted. The corner of the board overheated and the board melted, nearly destroying the components on the surface. (in that corner, mainly resistors)

The tragic part is, if I had purchased the 8800M GTX which was available when I bought my system, I would've been stuck in the middle of a bad-batch of video cards... namely, the ones that nVidia recalled. So I'm thankful it lasted this long.

Tragically, this means the card is dead, and has since been removed from my system.

On a more positive note, for those who don't know, the Area-51 M15X was one of the first laptops to offer hybrid graphics. It was the first generation of hybrid graphics. It's a really interesting topic if you look it up on Wikipedia or something... Anyways, here's a run-down. The system had two graphics cards; the 'discreet' 8700M GT (in my case, there were others available), and an integrated x3100 from Intel (GMA945 Chipset). When gaming, crank it up to high with Stealth mode (down-clocking for power saving) off, and the nVidia card races along at full speed... For even better power-savings, switch to "binary GFX" (requires reboot), and enable stealth mode for optimum power savings.

The difference was astounding. Wifi + nVidia + no stealth on batteries was an hour or two, switch to the Intel card, and pop on stealth, even with wifi, it easily doubled play-time with the system. Add in the second battery, you'd be set for a full work-day of activity.

Anyways, I removed my nVidia card from the system (MXM-HE slot) and the system now powers on and runs without an issue. The most notable changes are A) decreased graphics performance (obviously) and B) no HDMI. That's right, the video-out on my system only works with discrete graphics.

Now I'm on a mission to get a price on a new (hopefully 9800M GT) graphics card for my system, that will work with the HDMI output... Last time I got a quote for it, it was a cool $650-ish (with cooler), but since Dell has now fully absorbed Alienware, I'm not certain I can even get a quote anymore. I'll try again on Monday.

Let's install McAfee

I file this one under "woes of an IT Professional serving the public"...

it's more PEBKAC than anything else.

So, as some of you may know, I work on the phones, doing remote support for an ISP in the eastern united states. Yesterday, I got a call from a customer who was having some issues getting, and staying, connected.

It was a strange issue, since the customer had no issues getting to most webpages, but couldn't load either of the two he needed to connect his computer to me, even in safe mode (with networking).... I decided, after about 45 minutes, to ask him to uninstall his Antivirus (McAfee). I also inquired about having something installed prior, and he mentioned he had McAfee before, but 'removed' it for the new version. Well, uninstalling worked, long story short, his 'removal' of his previous version wasn't complete, it failed or crashed or didn't complete for some reason, and he still had some of the firewalls from the old version.

I EXPLAINED THIS TO HIM.

We have a tool... the filename is MCPR.exe and it's the McAfee removal tool (there's a similar one for AVG and another for Norton). This tool removes any and all McAfee software from your computer. I was going to use it to uninstall the broken version, but first, wanted to download the installer to get the current version re-added to the system when I'm done. I asked the customer to log into the website where we download it, and he did, and when clicking on the download link, it came up with "error 31", which is something we see sometimes. "We" have a support department that can specifically handle error 31 with a significant amount of ease, and presuming the customer can get in touch with them in a timely fashion, we can have the error resolve in a matter of minutes.

So I send him off, and finish up some of the other work I had to do on his system, and take another call, and I'm working on other peoples computers... by the time I get back to his screen, HES INSTALLING MCAFEE AGAIN.

Yes, let's reinstall a problematic software, so we can run the removal for another piece of software that will just so happen to completely wipe out exactly what you're doing.

and he was all happy about it too, he typed into our support chat "only 7 minutes left!"
I was like.... no, we can't do this, I havn't run the removal. I asked you to resolve the error 31, not reinstall the application.

I immediately cancelled the install, shut it down and started the removal tool.
After that, reboot, got him to re-login to the download page, and re-downloaded and re-re-installed the application.

The system now works as intended... however, there seems to be an issue somewhere on Layer 8.

FM Radio and Android

There's been some discussion in the past few days whether FM Radio should be supported by google on devices that have capable circuitry, such as the Nexus One.

While there's been a constant and steady outcry for the feature from the community, as I understand it, the feature can be activated by using a non-stock ROM for your Nexus One, something Google has very much, opened the door for by creating the Android OS and making it open source.

If you don't have a custom ROM, you'll at least need a custom application and root access. Neither of which is terribly hard to achieve.

As the story goes, everyone has to have an opinion.

My standpoint is, why not?

I don't think google should have to take the time to push out an FM Tuner application, the community can do that easily, heck, as far as I understand, they already have, but why require users to have root access? My question is, why doesn't google allow the software to work WITHOUT root? The changes would be minor, probably just a matter of adding a module into the kernel to permit the functions and initialize the device, not difficult. Then, when the feature is enabled, if people want it, they can download the 3rd party applications from the community to make FM Work. If it's successful enough, and the media player design team is sufficiently bored, why not have them add the feature to the built-in media player on the google experience?

Makes sense to me. It would ensure the minimum amount of effort by google to make the system work, while maintaining a happy client base by allowing them to use the feature without requiring root, and also, keep their streamlined look and feel of the phone.

Maybe in Honeycomb.

how-to document

So, one of the companies I work with (contracted), emailed me the other week saying they needed help with some specific aspect of their software. I manage their server, not the software on it, so I got a message to them saying that I don't know the software they're talking about and to contact the support personnel for that software, since it's very specific.

They did and word got back to me that the Tech support from that company wanted access to the server to debug the issue. Okay, not a problem. but that was two weeks ago.

Just today, I was told WHAT access the agent needed. Though the information was ambiguous at best, I made my best estimate on what permissions he needed and setup his accounts.

Now the hard part.

Part of the issue they're experiencing (from what I understand) is that they can't seem to install the client software on a few computers and get it to work... This has been a major problem in the past and we've had to overcome many obstacles with this software because it's so specific.

Some of these obstacles include:

Region settings. - if the Operating system that's running the software is set to any region other than "united states" then, when the client verifies the version with the server, the server will reject it as a version mismatch, since the release date of the software is included with the version number stamp sent to the server.

The error emanates from the fact that the US puts the Day Month and Year in a specific order that no one else seems to use... this is a problem because the company that I work for is Canadian, so some of the systems they use are set to Region "Canada (English)", which formats the date wrong (resulting in a mismatch).

UAC - User Account Control doesn't function correctly when giving permissions to the update installer. So updates always fail when run in user-mode. You have to start the application as an Administrator and log in to receive the updates...

Address - For some reason the software always sets the default server address to "localhost" which is obviously false, and it gives an error every time it's launched. This needs to be changed to the IP address of the server.

ADDITIONALLY, when the client connects, it then needs to access the database, which can be an independent address. So when that attempts to connect, and fails, throws another error that the database server is not "localhost" (which then needs to be changed to the correct IP)

ALSO! The Addressing settings are independent by user, so running the software as an administrator, the software will 'forget' the addressing settings when re-run in user-mode, or when run as a different user on the same machine.

We determined all of these flaws the first few times we installed the software, and by "we" I mean, myself and the couple of other guys who WERE employed by the company (now not), and were working on the project... They new the workarounds but now they're no longer working on the project, so everyone turns to the contracted worker.

It doesn't work and I set it up... therefore I must have done something wrong because it's not straight forward to expand the system... Nope. You did something wrong by firing the only workers that knew anything about the system, then you blame everyone else for not having the knowledge.

So! I wrote a very long email, and included pictures (everyone loves pictures!) to send off to the relevant parties that are now on the project... these, must less technical people than the last bunch, are not very skilled and simply don't have the necessary knowledge of the computer systems they use to really do much debugging, and/or trials. if it doesn't work in an obvious way, they're probably not going to get it to work... at least, when it comes to software.

Oh well, now I have to go do some billing...