Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

Of course, without the obligatory New Year’s posting, I just wouldn’t be a geek, right?

Well, here it is: I know now I’m getting older. How? My wife and I no longer go to New Year’s Eve parties. Instead, we’re sponsoring one for our older two sons.

After an evening of some dinner, a rousing replay of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, some cupcakes, the boys have mostly adjourned to play a few parallel games of Yugioh cards...and now we’re waiting for the ball to drop (literally) over Times Square.

Happy 2007!

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So an interesting article on procrastination as linked to from (of all places!) Slashdot talks about some research at MIT about how we tend to impose artificial deadlines on ourselves to combat our own known propensity to procrastinate. It discusses the idea of “hyperboilc time discounting”, where people over-weight the value of their own time now versus time later. (If you think about it, this can also be the source of the well-known self-destructiveness of teenagers: “who cares about tomorrow, I’m not going to be getting old”, or “I’ll be old for a lot less time than I’m going to be young”, etc.)

The interesting point the study made is that self-imposing deadlines is not an “optimal” method of assigning deadlines: students in the self-imposed deadlines section did not perform as well as those who had deadlines imposed for them.

I know that, for me, real deadlines always give me a burst of adrenaline and productivity; I’m seldom more productive than Friday afternoon about one hour before sundown...there the deadline is a religious one, and not really “self-imposed” in any meaningful sense.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In this day and age, when you want to register a domain name (say, www.jbaltz.com), there is actually a two step process that goes on:

1. You register a domain name with a registrar, like GoDaddy or 1and1 or Network Solutions (10 years ago NetSol was the only game in town, but that is another story.) and they verify that no one else has that domain name, and they reserve it for you.

2. At the same time, they notify the TLD name server for your TLD with a list of the authoritative name servers for your newly-formed domain.

What? Wait? Come again? What’s all that? Let’s define a few terms:

• A registrar is just the organization that registers your name and enforces global uniqueness—there can be no other “jbaltz.com” sites out there but this one. It may also hold “whois” information about the name of the responsible person or company are behind a domain, but nowadays many registrars will allow you to obscure your whois information to prevent onslaughts of UCE (spam).
• A TLD (Top Level Domain) is the last part of your domain name: typically “.com” or “.org” or such, or even a country-specific domain like “.uk” (British sites like www.amazon.co.uk) or “.il” (Israeli sites, like www.huji.ac.il, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem).
• An authoritative name server is a site that agrees to answer questions of the type: “Where do I find the IP (numerical) address of site www.example.com?” and “Who receives mail for www.whoever.com?” (It is at this point that discussions usually go into things like “SOA” and “glue records” and most peoples’ eyes glaze over, but this is actually an important contribution to the discussion.)
• The TLD name servers are a group of systems that hold all the names in a particular TLD, and a list of who the authoritative name servers are.

To wit, for jbaltz.com, the records that the .com TLD name servers hold is:

jbaltz.com. 172800 IN NS ns27.1and1.com. 
jbaltz.com. 172800 IN NS ns28.1and1.com. 

which means that the internet hosts “ns27.1and1.com” and “ns28.1and1.com” will be able to answer the “who” and “where” questions about jbaltz.com. (The other numbers and codes are somewhat irrelevant to this discussion, although they are important.)

(Digression: A long time ago, there was actually semantic difference between “.com”, “.org” and “.net”, but nowadays the difference appears to be entirely nominal: people just scoop up the “.org” name or the “.net” name if the “.com” name is taken. There are a few TLDs that do maintain an entry-barrier other than money: “.edu” requires that you actually prove to them that you’re an educational institution, and I believe “.museum” has a similar requirement. Also, I believe other country-wide TLDs require proof of residency or something to register a website with them, with notable exceptions being Tuvalu “.tv” and Western Samoa “.ws” )

If you’re a typical website hosting with your provider (like 1and1, which is the hosting provider for this site), your hosting provider may act as your registrar (holding your name in the global namespace of .com and telling the TLD nameservers who is the nameserver for your domain) and act as the authoritative name server for the domain, but they do not have to do so. jbaltz.com is registered through MelbourneIT (neé www.registerfree.com) but has its domain name service provided through 1and1. Many many other sites do that.

My client’s site was one of them.

He had registered his site through Network Solutions, but another site (his hosting provider) was the authoritative DNS for his domain. He was moving from one hosting provider to another, and in the interim it made sense to make Network Solutions his authoritative DNS, right? I mean, they already have his registration, and they have an easy web-based interface to set up the DNS entries that were needed. It seemed like the easiest way to have a smooth transition from one place to another.

Now, Network Solutions, oddly enough, does not make moving back to them for name service easy. You cannot set up all your various and sundry domain names (www.this.com, www2.this.com, mail directions) beforehand and then tell them “OK, we want NetSol to be the authoritative DNS for us, in addition to being our registrar.” Instead, you have to do it in two steps:

1. Move your DNS back to NetSol
2. Set up your DNS and all its addresses in high-speed.

Going on behind the scenes several things are going on: NetSol is setting up its own servers to be equipped to answer questions about the new domain, and NetSol is informing the TLD nameservers that it is going to be authoritative for the new domain. The former process is generally pretty quick, and the latter process can be time-consuming. (You are typically told that it takes 24-48 hours, although in reality 6 hours is about how fast it works for .com.)

What has happened now? We moved the DNS back and NetSol did the following: it notified the TLD nameservers that it was now authoritative, but it did not actually configure its own name servers to answer questions!

I think you can see where this is headed.

Now, after the move, it turns out the TLD nameservers were updated, mirabile dictu, almost immediately. NetSol’s own nameservers, however, were not updated. Which means the following things happened:

• A user out on The Vast Internet tried to find “www.jerrysclient.com”

• The user’s ISP’s nameserver asked the global nameserver who was responsible for www.jerrysclient.com. The global TLD nameserver replied: “NetSol is”

;; ANSWER SECTION:
jerrysclient.com.  3699    IN      NS      NS15.WORLDNIC.com.
jerrysclient.com.  3699    IN      NS      NS16.WORLDNIC.com.

• NetSol, of course, denied knowing anything about this domain, and said, in return, “go ask the root”.
• The root said “go ask NetSol”, and we get a nice little infinite loop.
• Eventually, the name query would time out, and no one could find my client’s site, and poof they have vanished off the internet!

Calling up Network Solutions technical support (“For a painful experience, press 1. To be on interminable wait, press 2”—I’m sure that Scott Adams had this in mind when coming up with Dogbert’s tech support.) was less than useful: they tried at great length to convince me that I simply had to wait for this information to propagate through the internet. I replied that it, indeed, had propagated, and the ball was now in Network Solutions’s court, and could I pretty please speak to someone in their DNS services group (I thought about posting something inquisitive to NANOG but decided later that it would be more efficacious to just wait.) and of course, I was told, I could not, but that he could enter a ticket for me, and the problem, being NetSol’s, should “clear up in 2-3 hours, tops”. The president of the client firm spent several fruitless hours, getting escalated up a never-ending chain of bureaucrats until he finally just got fed up. After about 20 hours, NetSol finally got their act together, and the site finally came “back to Earth”.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...with apologies to Bruce Schneier.

Occasionally I have to visit a client who works in the Empire State Building. Tenants walk in to the building, swipe a proximity card at a turnstile and walk directly to the elevator of their choice to go upstairs.

Visitors have to go through a metal detector and pass their bags through an X-ray machine. Presumably this is to catch the errant delivery-boy bringing up an order of coffee and C4. Now, I generally carry a Leatherman PST2 little multi-tool gizmo—I often need to use the needle-nose pliers for something or the screwdriver—and the device comes with a small, 2" blade.

Up until a few weeks ago, the security at the gates would have no problems with me passing this through the little bucket they give you for metal things that they then scrutinize by eye...they would just let it pass through and hand it back to me “here you go, sir.” They would, however, insist that I turn on my laptop, for what reason I do not know. (What if the battery was out? Would they forbid me from bringing it up? They claim no. So why bother making me open up my bag, bring it out and power it on? No answer but blank stares.)

Now, for the past two weeks, they've been hassling me about my Leatherman tool.
“What is this?”
“It’s a tool.”
“Do you need it?”
(um...how do you answer that? “No, I just wear it because it attracts women”?) “Yes, I use it every day.”

Once they even went on:
“It has a knife blade on it.”
“Yes, I have found that useful in opening boxes.”
At that point I just get a dirty look and am permitted through.

I am really not quite sure what they are hoping to gain by making a fuss over a 2 inch knife blade and a pair of pliers. Does that represent a significant security threat? Do they feel I’m going to go on a mass-murdering rampage with my file and blade? Perhaps I will attempt to disassemble an elevator? Why the sudden change in attitude towards what is an innocuous tool?

(By the way: there is no request for any kind of picture ID, and only once was I even asked to which floor I was headed. There isn’t even any accounting for picking up bags out of the X-ray machine! I could be picking up someone else’s bag, and no one would be the wiser.)

Meanwhile, the gaping security hole I should mention (in an obligatory fashion) is that I can pass my Starbucks coffee cup through without inspection every single time. I simply pass it around the metal detector and pick it up on the far side. Evidently, a 2” knife blade is scary, but a 8” tall cup that could be filled with anything (they do not open the lid to ensure that there is coffee in there...they don’t even move the cup to see that it is warm) gets an automatic pass. The cup could be filled with any kind of inflammable liquid (the kind the airlines are afraid of) and ignited and cause great damage. (No, I don’t do this. The Starbucks coffee is hot enough to burn my mouth, that’s all.)

Talk about non-security through mild inconvenience...this takes honorable mention, at least.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven’t done a google search for this yet, so I don’t know if this is a popular characterization or not, but I cannot believe that I am the first one to come up with this...

Yesterday I took my two older boys (and some of their friends) to a showing of the new Eragon movie, which they all found enjoyable. And, of course, the ride home was a prolonged discussion on the divergences between the movie and the book. The movie had good special effects, and the acting wasn’t too bad, although I thought it was a waste of John Malkovich's acting talents—he could have been much more evil.

But that isn’t what interests me.

What interests me is the idea that Paolini has written Star Wars into LOTR. We have elves, and dwarves, each with their own pseudo-proto-English tongue, and instead of orcs we have “urgals” (I suppose so we aren’t so blatant.) The elves, as they always seem to be,are a

fount of magic, the dwarves are cast the consummate metalworkers, and the urgals/orcs as low-life brutes.

(I have to admit not being quite sure how to fit Roran into all of this—his sudden appearance at the final battle scene in Inheritance is only somewhat reminiscent of Han Solo’s appearance at the end of Episode 4 of SW.)

Likewise, in the end of the second book the sudden appearance of an unknown sibling, but with a seminal difference: Murtagh (in Inheritance), turns into a foe, whereas Leia turns into a friend. Moreover, although there’s plenty of room given for the ultimate redemption and reunion of the two brothers.

Our hero is an orphan child raised by an uncle (the aunt is presumed missing)—Luke Skywalker and Eragon are the same in this regard—and who is brought into the fold by a mysterious “stranger ’round these parts” (Obi Wan Kenobi vs. Brom) who, it just turns out, used to be one of The Good Guys, and who presents Our Hero with the sword of his father.

In both cases, it turns out, Brom/Kenobi is the one who “kills” the protagonist’s father, although in the latter case it is, as we learn, only figurative, and it isn’t clear whether or not Brom knew of the connection between Murzan and Eragon/Murtagh.

The “Riders” are equivalent to the Jedi Knights of Star Wars fame, complete with their “magic” powers, their betrayal by one of their own (Galbatorix is either Darth Vader or Darth Sidious at various times), eradication, and reappearance of a savior, who learns a little, goes off to battle, then goes off to study with an over-the-hill master (Yoda versus Oromis).

Sigh. Have I written too much about what is, essentially, children’s literature?

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So last night (earlier this morning) I need to write an envelope. My handwriting is atrocious at 1 p.m., and it’s 12 hours worse at 1 a.m., so I turn to my word processor to do it for me.

On my current, new, laptop, I don’t have MS Office installed, but I do have OpenOffice 2, so I fire that up to see what it can do.

I find my way down to the envelopes composer, type in the addresses, and then try as I might, I cannot find the exact envelope orientation I need for my printer. I find one that, by all rights, should work, put an envelope in the feeder, and click print.

What happens next is that the envelope feeds through, then a plain piece of paper gets the envelope text—evidently, the envelopes are printed only after the main text (of which there is none). Two or three iterations of trying to get the right order (remember, it is 1 a.m.!) and I throw up my hands in despair. Why can’t it just take the envelope first?

I go to the other computer in the office, with MS Word 2007 installed, and go to the Envelopes wizard. It looks like the one I’ve used countless times since I started using it in Office 2000, enter my addresses, select the correct envelope orientation, insert the envelope in, and go. Time start to finish is about 2 minutes, including changing the default fonts for the envelopes. (I’m no fan of Arial to be honest.)

It isn’t that OpenOffice does it so wrong, or can’t be convinced to do it right, it’s that Microsoft made it easy and straightforward to do it right—if I want the envelope to be attached to the document, I can have that, or I can just print it out by itself. (There’s a big “print” button there on the envelope wizard.)

Some things, believe it or not, Microsoft does right.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)