Category Archives: Technology

Confidential Information

I saw a very interesting mail reject message today on one of my mailing lists …

You are receiving this message because you have attempted to send an e-mail containing confidential information. Examples of confidential information include, but are not limited to social security numbers, birth dates, account numbers, policy numbers, medical history, financial history, personal phone numbers and user IDs. Another example of sending confidential information would be combining any two or more of the following: name, address, identification numbers (employee number, phone number), organizational affiliation (place of employment). This information may be contained in the body of the message or any attachments.

I looked at the body of the message it was rejecting (which was included in it’s entirety), and noticed that the message referenced dummy social security numbers (the message discusses SQL techniques).

Of course, based on the warning message, it would probably reject ANY numeric text that was included in a message at all.

I suspect that the company, who’s server rejected the message, does not have a problem with email volume … since the majority of email sent to them is probably rejected.

I really wonder about companies that have such incredibly draconian content rules.  How do they stay in business?

Snow Days

Garage ViewAs you might have noticed (or heard), the Chicago area has had a bit of snow recently.

Lots of people are off work because the the streets are impassible.

Ginny’s home, there’s just no way she could have gotten to her office.

Due to this contraption they call “The Internet”, and an invention called “VPN“, I have no excuse to not work.

In fact, I’m pretty sure there isn’t anyone in our office right now.

VOIPo

I recently signed up with a new VOIP service for my home phone.

I’m using VOIPo … so far I’m really impressed.

The call quality is great, it’s got a lot of nice features, and the rates can’t be beat.   For a 2 year contract, the price is only $7.50 / month with free hardware & setup.

I’m going to give it a few more days before I start the process of porting my 2nd phone number from Vonage to VOIPo.

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Adding Help to Dialogs

I’m in the process of updating the help text for my RCP and have found that some of the dialogs that I’m invoking don’t have the ability to directly add help context id’s.

After a bit of digging, I found it’s not that difficult to add help to an object that extends Dialog.

For this example, I’m going to add a help id to the InputDialog class.

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Verizon iPhone

Lots of people are clamoring about the fact that Verizon is going to offer the iPhone.

There are a lot of good reasons to get an iPhone from Verizon … better network, better packages, tethering, etc.

One significant reason NOT to get the Verizon iPhone is: It doesn’t work in the UK and Europe.

The UK and Europe use the GSM system for cell phones … and the Verizon iPhone doesn’t support that.   It uses CDMA.

I know from personal experience that the AT&T iPhone does work fine in the UK (although it’s pricey).

I’ve also seen comments mentioning that the CDMA can’t handle data connections at the same time as voice connections.

So if you travel to the UK or Europe much, think twice about getting the Verizon iPhone.

I did see a rumor that Apple is going to offer a “World phone” that will, theoretically, have CDMA and GSM capabilities.

We still have a number of months left on our AT&T contract … so I’m going to hold off on jumping over to Verizon.   Ginny & I travel a fair amount and really like the UK & Europe.

Dell PowerEdge T310

(Read this entire post, as there is a very weird problem described later)

It’s been quite a while since I upgraded the hardware that runs this (and others) web site.

The warranty on the systems either will be expiring soon or has already expired.

So I bit the bullet and ordered a new Dell PowerEdge T310 server. The pertinent specs are:

  • Quad core Xeon 2.66ghz processor
  • 12gb RAM
  • RAID controller
  • 4 x 500gb hot swap drives (configured as 2 x 500gb RAID 1 sets)

The system arrived last week and I got it set up immediately.

I actually ordered the system with only one 250gb hard drive and 4gb of RAM … and upgraded it myself.

A few things annoyed me out of the gate …
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Spam Retaliation

I’ve got a slightly new policy when it comes to spam.

If given the option, I’m going to change my email address in the spammers database to spam@uce.gov.

So the next time the spammer tries to send ME junk, they will be reporting themselves to the Federal Trade Commission.

Yeah, I know, it won’t do a LOT of good … but it makes me laugh.

Inheritance

One my gripes about the Eclipse framework is the general lack of standardized interfaces & inheritance.

For instance: a TreeColumn & TableColumn both have a lot of attributes in common … width, alignment, movability, sortability, resizeability, etc.

But since they don’t share an interface or a common ancestor, you can’t handle them with common code.

Similarly widgets like the ComboBox and a Text field share a lot of attributes … they can hold text, they can be changed, etc, but you can’t access those attributes with a common interface.

Sadly most Eclipse widgets explicitly forbid subclassing … so I can’t subclass the various types and add my own interfaces. The following is a direct quote from the TableColumn javadocs …

IMPORTANT: This class is not intended to be subclassed.

And, unfortunately, they enforce this in code.

Buckminster Interference?

Weird … I just tried to build my RCP application and the ant script blew up.

It seems like there’s some kind of interference caused by the addition to Buckminster to my Eclipse install.

My build should not be referencing any buckminster functionality at all.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time to dig into the problem.