‘Tis a mistake: Time flies not

He only hovers on the wing:

Once born, the moment dies not

‘Tis an immortal thing

James Montgomery, “Time: A Rhapsody” (1850)

So, the whirlwind trip is over – I’ve finished off my time in the UAE (again) and am settled back in Raleigh, NC, for the foreseeable future. House is up and running, jet lag isn’t so bad anymore, and the family is happy to have me home again. And it’s good to be back in the US – surrounded by the things I knew growing up and the comforts I grew accustomed to before I decided to go on my little adventure.

My computers are currently in transit from Dubai, and most of the pictures I took over the last three weeks didn’t get up into DropBox, so I’m working with my old boss to copy them off the temporary storage space he kindly allowed me to use until I get US based storage worked out. Hence, there are no new pictures on the photoblog side of this site, and it may be another couple of weeks before I get any semblance of order restored to posting.

At some point, I’m going to write up my frustrations with HSBC, the Sharjah Police Department, expiring passports and international data transfer, but at the moment, I’m focused on trying to be a pleasant human being, and it would be out of character to rant and rave like a lunatic about something that is settled and done with. Also, I’m composing all of this on my iPhone, which isn’t the easiest thing to write on.

I promise not to turn this blog into a ranting device. I don’t want to be that negative all the time, and there are people who are much funnier than I am, who can sound witty when complaining. I worry that I fall much more into the bitter or cynical side, and I’d like to avoid that. All of that said, however, I’m going to post my 2nd consecutive complaint about a technology issue that really doesn’t have to be as broken as it is. And that technology is blacklists.

For those who don’t know much about them, and the damage they cause, here’s a short summary – a bunch of systems administrators years ago decided that it was too difficult to write logic to block SPAM or other badness coming into their servers, and to just shut off the connection to people who were abusing the internet. A bunch of different people ran different lists, with varying levels of severity – sometimes the administrators were lazy and didn’t list a lot (which limited the effectiveness of the list) or were over zealous (which falsely blocked people who were conducting legitimate business). Many lists were an add-only affair, and once you were listed, it was nigh impossible to get off the list.

To be very clear, I have no problem whatsoever with people making and using these lists for their organizations. In my career I’ve had to block large numbers of addresses for short periods of time to find workarounds to things. What I can’t stand, though, is people who use external blacklists, and blindly follow them. The one that came up this week is the Composite Blocking List, a list that is fully automatic based on some criteria their script runs on. They are very proud to note that they don’t list mail servers unless:

the only exception is if the mail server machine itself is infected with a virus, trojan or open proxy of some sort.

Then why have I removed my mail server from the list twice in the last three days? I would love to contact them and find out what the beheivor of my server is that it running afoul of their policy, but alas, it’s really hard to find contact info on their website.

This post is many days coming. I’ve been fighting with Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) for some time now, and I wanted to make sure my frustrations are not simply ill tempered rants, but actual problems that other people face. Also, this post is a tacit apology to all my non-Mac using friends who complained when I sent them PDF files. I now know the pain they had to suffer every time I sent a PDF to them, and expected it to be as easy as using Preview.app on the Mac.

First things first. There’s only one reason I can think of that any sane Mac user would ever install Adobe Reader on his or her system willingly is to be able to fill out PDF’s that have the built in forms. And no, for the record, I don’t count having the Creative Suite puking files, programs and browser extensions all over Hell and Creation to be a “willing” install of Adobe Reader. The forms are things like the yearly IRS Tax forms we get as US Citizens, and are required to fill out and mail in. It’s so much easier to fill out the forms on the computer, print them out, sign them, and then mail them in. Not only does it save the IRS from the handwriting of people like me, it allows people to save the filled out versions on their hard drives for long term storage.

I am dealing with one such form with my new employer. My desktop at work is a Linux box. I’ve got no problems with Linux – even though I’m much more comfortable with Mac OS X – and in every way the system is setup for what I need to do. Other than, apparently, reading PDF files. KPDF is installed, and when I try to open the PDF, I get a message – from Adobe, embedded into the document – that I need to install Adobe Reader to be able to view this PDF. Dutifully, I go to Adobe’s site, download the RPM, fire up Adobe Reader, open the document, and fill it out.

Then, I try to print. It tells me that an “unspecified error” has occurred. Doing some searching online, it seems that the permissions within the PDF prevent me from printing – because it wasn’t explicitly granted. I then download the current Adobe Reader and install it on my borrowed MacBook Pro. When I first open it, the Adobe Updater program runs – wanting to update itself, and then wanting to download and update Adobe Reader. Wait a minute – I just downloaded the software! What Adobe has told me at this point is that they can’t be bothered to put the current version of Reader on their website. Anyway, I fire up the PDF in Reader. And I’m told when I’m trying to print that “There were no selected pages to print”. Looking at Adobe’s support forums, the suggestion on Mac OS X was to uninstall Reader, apply the combo updater for OS X, and then reinstall Reader. Of course, you can’t do this if you have a current version of the OS installed. And really, what kind of PDF display technology requires major system updates to be performed in specific ways?

Unfazed, I trudge on. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, both of which I find out are useless. The first is the old standby, “Save As…”. I planned to save it as a simple PDF (one that doesn’t allow edits). This fails, due to the protections on the PDF. The other is the “Print To PDF” feature in OSX – which is present system wide in the print dialogue box. This has gotten me out of a number of jams in the past. This time? Reader tells me “You cannot use this feature – please use ‘Save As…’ instead.” Well, I already tried that. I wound up sending the PDF to a coworker who was running Windows and had them print it out.

Yes, I had to have a Windows user print out the document. Which printed just fine. I have since uninstalled Adobe Reader from my systems, and won’t ever put it back on.

There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose.

The rest of the article is worth reading as well, but for those of you who don’t code I’m not sure it will make as much sense as the monkeys.

How to make real, New York style pizza. 750°+, 2 or 3 minutes. Sounds like heaven.

http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

Well, I was going to write this on one of the many free wireless spots in the US – one of the things I had been missing living outside of the United States the past years. Sadly, that can’t happen. I’ve been driving around Raleigh this morning and haven’t located a free WiFi hookup yet. Admittedly, I’ve been perusing shopping malls and chain coffee shops, but still. When I left here, WiFi was free. Now, not so much. So, I sit here in a Barnes and Noble, not paying the $3.95 for 2 hours of WiFi. My iPhone tells me that there’s two free WiFi locations in Chapel Hill – both at Cup A Joe’s – and one of them is less than 5 miles from where I started my drive this morning.

That brings me to another gripe. I have an iPhone, and it’s wonderful and all, but… but, I can’t use it to tether my laptop to the internet. In Apple and AT&T’s infinite wisdom, that will be a paid service, later. With bandwidth caps. And it will cost an extra $20 or $30 per month. That’s on top of the $30 per month my wife and I pay for unlimited text messages, and the $30 a month I pay for 3G internet for my iPhone. Now, where I’m moving from – the “backwards” land of the Middle East (which many people here seem to think is camels and tents, not skycrapers) – SMS messages are 15 fils each. That’s less than .04 USD. So, I’d have to send 750 messages to spend the same on text there as I spend to have the ability to not worry about it here. AND. AND. There’s always an AND. AND – the person I send messages to pays for them as well here. Which is possibly the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard of. Anyone can send you a message. And you have to pay for it. I’m covered (with my monthly $30 of filthy lucre), but I’m hesitant to send messages to friends here – unless I know they have an iPhone. Otherwise, I’m costing them money to read my mindless “want to get coffee” messages. It’s actually cheaper here to just call them. Grrr.

Sorry, got a little distracted there. And I’m burning up my battery, as there’s no where to plug my laptop in. I guess my point is that while I love being in the US and all, and yes, it’s better for us to be here, with child coming and all – the US really has a lot of things backwards. No wonder the international community finds us so strange.