Beware the jabberwocky!

Well, at least beware the “Domain Registry of Canada”.  This official sounding name is a “registered business style” of Registration Services Inc.  They send what look like real invoices to domain name holders asking for payment.  If one is careful and reads the text, it becomes clear that they are trying to get you to change your domain host.  But looked at quickly:

• they look like an official invoice
• the name Domain Registry of Canada sounds like a government organization (I showed my adult son who’d never seen one, and he asked, “Why is the government sending you these?)
• they have the domain information on them (which is public) so it looks like they know about your account
• they state a reply-requested date 4 months in advance of renewal.  Most domain hosts give 3 months notice.  This deceives in two ways: implying a reply is urgent, and ensuring this notice is received before legitimate ones

So if you get one, unless you already have registered a domain with them, let your local consumer protection agency know.  If you have registered with them in the past, re-register with another host: you’ll save a bundle, the rates are outrageous!  $40 per year for a single registration!  I phoned Domain Registry of Canada last year and requested they stop sending me these, but they’ve ignored my request, so this time I’ve filed a complaint with the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Authority of British Columbia.  Ah, that feels better!

GPU (video card) considerations

Phil Taylor provides a detailed analysis of GPU specs and implications.

Virtual cockpit rain fix for FS9 addon aircraft

Backwards compatibility of FS9 addons in FSX has been an issue.  One problem that bugged many was that virtual cockpit windows in some FS9 addon aircraft may become opaque when it rains.  Two solutions are offered:

Solution 1: Microsoft outlines a procedure to utilize FS9 textures in FSX

Solution 2: Flight1 provides a free tool to implement their own replacement textures. 

How not to catch a thief

In Canada, if you buy a blank CD, it is presumed that you are going to steal music.  A levy of 21 cents is added to every blank CD purchased and 24 cents for every blank cassette more than 40 minutes in length.  These funds are distributed to the music industry.

Proposed legislation will compound this: the Canadian Private Copying Collective, a non-profit agency created by the music industry wants to collect up to $75 for each MP3 player sold, and 29 cents for every blank CD and Mini disc.  Futher all memory sticks would be tariffed, up to $10 per card.  Details here.  Looking at the financial report, the motivation may be the drop in revenue from CD tariffs since 2004, probably the result of the use of alternative media.   It’d be interesting to see how these revenue numbers might jump with the proposed tariffs.

Canadian music industry proponents would argue the funds will go towards fostering Canadian artists and music.  Futher artists don’t have the protection against file sharing that they do in the US: we have no equivalent to the Digital Millenium Act. 

Personally I purchase all music (and software) I download or copy.  So the presumption that I am stealing music and must be penalized is at best disappointing, at worst, theft.  I want my support of Canadian artists to be by choice, not legislation.  It makes a lot more sense to me to modify our copyright laws to protect against people who steal music, than to penalize all music lovers.  How this legislation will deter thieves is not clear.  You can contact your Member of Parliament if you agree.

SP2 install fix

Bob Arnson posts a fix to the “Microsoft Flight Simulator X Service Pack 2 requires the English version of Flight Simulator X.” error.

Interesting FSX benchmark

Check out Gary’s results on AVSIM.

Behind Vancouver+

Jarn has gathered some background from Holger and I on Vancouver+, and added some of his own great screenshots.

Getting angry about false positives

Sometimes I’m baffled that seemingly minor annoyances trigger a lot of anger and frustration.   Example: I’ve had four instances recently where over-zealous anti-spam systems have blocked legitimate communication.  My frustration has two sources: 1. That somebody thought it acceptable to have false positives in a spam-screening system, and 2. That, in most cases, attempts to feedback my concerns were met with a wall of irresponsibility.

In one example www.USA.NET customer support said that the fact they bounce messages from www.shaw.ca (with 2 million subscribers) was out of their control as it was the responsibility of www.mail-abuse.com.  No, USA.NET, you have chosen to use a service that is not reliable.  And you’ve stated your irresponsibility by blaming others for your own actions.  Customer support at shaw.ca was disinterested, and did not want the data they’d need to request their offending IP address be removed.  The fingers point in circles.

Another example is just as silly.  A company was doing it’s own screening using a variety of sources, and http://www.au.sorbs.net/ was blocking www.shaw.ca.  Fortunately a friend was an Executive with that company, and at my request they simply dropped using that site.  The explanation by SORBS of their service claims “a false positive rate so small that it usually does not register.”  Hmm, well this one registered.

The third example I’ll keep confidential but was caused by overenthusiastic list management.

The fourth example is a good news story.  My ISP (www.server101.com) blocked a legit IP address.  I complained, they responded quickly, and were good enough to turn off all their filtering for my email addresses.  This is not a service they publicly advertised, but did this on request.  As a result I get many spam messages daily on a dozen email aliases.  And hitting “Delete” is indeed trivial.

With the reality of creative and fast-moving spammers, I understand it must be very frustrating to have users clamour for no spam.  Undoubtedly folks at anti-spam sites like mail-abuse and SORBS work very hard to clean up email for users.  And here’s my message to ISPs: it’s trivial for users to hit delete, it’s a PITA to have legit messages rejected.  The acceptable false-positive level is zero.  That’s 0.0.  Ask yourself:  are you addicted to a game of oneupmanship with the spammers, or attempting to serve users?  My message to you: DO NOT BLOCK LEGIT IPs!

The root cause is that foolish 5% of Internet users that buy products from spam messages.  Those users keep the spammers sending their junk.  But in this case the cure is worse than the disease.   So it makes sense that I’m angry that  my communication is impeded by overzealous individuals.  I’m no longer baffled.

Fix for Out of Memory errors on Vista

Many FSX users have been plagued with Out of Memory errors (OOM errors), despite having lots of RAM.  Phil Taylor posts info on a fix for this problem in Vista.  The MS knowledge base article is here.

DRM on it’s way out?

I’ve complained about iTunes stranglehold on online music distribution, and despite their willingness to offer some DRM-free music, the vast majority is still locked into Apple: only playable in Apple products like iTunes and iPods.  Following on Amazon.com’s May decision to offer a DRM-free music store, Boing Boing reports that Universal Music is apparently going to experiment for a limited period with DRM-free music.  So buy your music online without DRM crippling where and when you can, and that will hopefully move us towards a DRM-free future.  /soapbox [applause swells and fades]

How soon we forget

Despite my distrust in the value of anything branded Apple, we bought an iPod Shuffle for my step-daughters birthday.  At least at the low price, I felt we submitting to the marketing hype for the overpriced products was not too painful.

I cleaned out our Music library, as iTunes indexed 10,000 items, 8,000 of which were irrlevant video game sound bites, etc.  Unfortunately that also appears to have wiped out the three songs I did purchase long ago (I don’t remember what they are!).  I assume I can recover those from the store.  If I could access it.  Any attempt to search for music in the store (which is still the most pathetically slow interface) results in the cheery message:

“We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occured (-50). 

There was an error in the iTunes Store.  Please try again later.”

Now having wasted many hours on the phone with Apple in the past, only to discover that iTunes is a completely unsupported product, I’m not too keen on putting more effort in this.  But I will this time, and I’m sure I’ll get her up and running eventually.

However, I will continue to advise folks to steer clear of anything Apple, unless they are confident that they are buying a supported product, and are aware of the bloated cost of the products.  In certain focused application areas, I understand Apple is the way to go, but for the vast majority of the public, caveat emptor.

And yes Apple adds insult to injury by repeatedly spamming me, despite many attempts to request it to stop.

EDIT: so i recovered most of my purchased songs from my backup drive, and learned that in the iTunes store, if searched repeatedly, sometimes I didn’t get error -50.  The painfully slow search engine occasionally functioned, enough for me to purchase some songs.  Attempts to write to the device weren’t so successful.  First pass worked fine, with a test set of songs.  But after that all attempts to write a full slate of songs resulted in a “Cannot sync” error, after a long period of lock-up of the iTunes application.  The device then disappeared from the window.  Unplugging and plugging it back in resulted in a “Your iPod needs to be restored” message requiring reformatting.  I did this several times.

To add a sense of fun to this, the write speed to the device was incredibly slow, taking many seconds to write each song.  It would probably have taken 30 minutes to write 200 songs, if it actually ever got that for.  It usually choked after 70 or so.

So it’s back to the store for an exchange, and a committment to ensure I don’t buy Apple again.  I’m only exchanging it because of the monopoly iTunes has established for songs.  If another site had a such a comprehensive list, I’d jump there in a sec.  Let me know!

Another interesting learning bit: despite Apple’s offering of DRM-free capability (courageous and innoviate), very few artists are taking advantage of this.  Ten years from now we’ll be laughing at the restrictions that hamper honest people, while having no effect on the universal no-cost availability of ripped DRM-free music.

UPDATE: 29-Jul-2007: I took the device back to Future Shop and they replaced it, and were willing to change the colour from blue to pink (girls are unpredictable, I guess).  This one so far seems to work fine.

I also called AppleCare and they said the slow search speed and site access I experience is unusual.  We used msconfig to turn off most everything, turned off firewalls, etc., but the problem persisted.  No solution on that one.

Vancouver+ for FSX status and test plan overview

Holger, Scot and I are currently testing/refining the configurator/installer.  Once we are satisfied with it, we will release the first beta to the test team in the next few days.  Testers have been chosen, the testing forum is set up, test plan written, and test allocations done.  Testers have signed up to check the product by geographic sector, and by functional area.  While the team is testing, I’ll finish off the CYNJ buildings and some other loose ends.

Our approach is to provide the beta team with a fairly well tested release.  We’ll fine out how it works on different platforms, including some older machines that we’ve included in the test group.  We will minimize the number of beta drops (test releases) by running a set of regression tests prior to each drop.

For those interested in a deeper view into our testing procedure, here’s our simple test plan.  Note that is directed to the beta team only, and is provided here should it be useful for other developers.

Vancouver + FSX - Test Plan and Sector Map

Because of the large scope of this project, both in terms of geographic area and features, we will be asking folks to sign up to do specific types of testing. This way we will help ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

There will be 7 geographic test regions, Alpha through Golf, and several non-geographic functional tests.

We also will be doing a simple form of regression testing: when we specify a new beta release is an RT beta, all tests must be run again. This minimizes the chances that fixes and enhancements do not cause collateral damage. We will of course work to minimize the number of complete test runs we do. For those who are interested, I have a document available entitled, “Regression Testing for Flight Simulator Addons”.

Of course, we still encourage mucking about, flying at will, and just having fun. That may find problems we haven’t thought of.

Here are the geographic test sectors (see below):

Some notes on reporting:

• please use screenshots with coordinates enabled (ctl-z), limited to 125kb, 6 per post (though multiple posts are possible), and (please!) max. width of 800 pixels. If you don’t want to hand-edit your screenshot use something like Grab-Clip-Save http://www.simviation.com/fsutilities_gen3.htm
• please report in the appropriate sectional threads (see below) and avoid starting new threads unless it’s a very general (or very specific) issue
• report time of day/season
• for AI traffic monitoring, for those of who have FSX Deluxe, use the Traffic Toolbox
• please ensure you have looked over existing bug reports carefully

Reference Material

• maps for British Columbia: http://toporama.cits.rncan.gc.ca/toporama_en.html or here http://webmap.em.gov.bc.ca/mapplace/minpot/general.cfm (the second link requires a free plug-in for the interactive map). http://maps.gov.bc.ca/ and click on “Land and Resource Data Warehouse Catalog”
• googleEarth http://earth.google.com/
• VanMap, for detailed downtown airphotos: http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/vanmap/o/orthophotos.htm
• Burnaby, for detailed Burnaby airphotos: http://webmap.city.burnaby.bc.ca/publicmap/viewer.htm
• Richmond GIS for detailed Richmond airphotos: http://map.city.richmond.bc.ca/website/gis/viewer.htm
• Photos: http://www.webshots.com/search?new=1&source=mdocsheader&words=
• Other photos: search at http://www.google.com/imghp
• Oblique air photos: http://www.globalairphotos.com/
• Buildings: http://www.skyscraperpage.com/ and http://www.emporis.com/en/

Known Issues – please don’t report unless noted below:
• List coming

Test Section Overview

Notes on Test sections:

• Please report issues in the thread provided
• Delta and Echo areas have many features, it is suggested that if you sign up for one of these, you don’t sign up for other areas
• you can report issues outside your chosen area, but please use the correct thread

Sign up by section:

• Section 1a – Geographic Area Alpha
• Section 1b – Geographic Area Bravo
• Section 1c – Geographic Area Charlie
• Section 1d – Geographic Area Delta
• Section 1e – Geographic Area Echo
• Section 1f – Geographic Area Foxtrot
• Section 1g – Geographic Area Golf
• Section 2 – AI
• Section 3a – Airports – land-based
• Section 3b – Airports – Seaplane bases
• Section 3c – Airports – Heliports
• Section 4 – Third party compatibility

Everybody will do:

• Section 5 – Performance
• Section 6 – Installer/Configurator

Test Section Descriptions and What to Look for

All Sections

Please report any crashes and shutdowns with as much detail as possible so that others can try to recreate the situation.

Please check for and report major frame rate drops and increased loading times.

Suspension of disbelief: Holger’s own measure of success is to fly around and not come across places where the environment looks or feels “wrong”. For example, are specific textures (rocks, forests, water) strange or of the wrong color? Do the shorelines look off? Are the settlements placed well? Anything that makes you go “hmmm…” or “ouch!”

Section 1 - Geographic Tests – by regions (Alpha – Golf)
Sign up by geographic area - See test regions above.

Objects (Buildings, dams, marinas, bridges, other structures) - look for flickering, incomplete or inaccurate textures, blend with context, misplacement

Photoscenery - look for blend with context, edges

Lake elevations and river placement and elevations - look for plateaus, pits, breaks
mistakes in vector line designations - look for roads as streams and vice versa
Roads and railroads - look for misplacement, breaks, river/lake crossings
Shorelines - look for missing, incursions: river meets or leaves lake
Utility Cuts - look for how lovely they look
Landclass - look for mistakes in landclass (eg desert instead of forest)
Autogen building encroachment - look for buildings on steep mountainsides or other inappropriate places

Testing:
- for your chosen region(s) fly a pattern and check the above in detail
- fly a coarse pattern over the region in each season (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) and each time of day (Dawn, Day, Dusk, Night)
- report by lat/long with screenshot with coordinate display turned on (ctrl-z)
- you may be asked more than once to repeat the full test before final release

Section 2 - AI
Seaplanes - look for smooth departure from dock or ramp, and smooth docking or parking. Smooth traffic flow at runways and taxiways.
Small boats – look for collisions in paths, crossing land, etc.
Cruise ships – look for collisions in paths, crossing land, etc.
Helicopters – look for collisions with buildings, land
Testing: use Traffic Explorer to monitor takeoffs, landings and progress.

Section 3 - Airports
Testing: Check ATC, runway designations, parking,

Section 4 - Third party compatibility
Test with any third party addons you have and report anomalies

Section 5 - Performance
We will provide some test flight scenarios and required settings to create some benchmarks.

Section 6 - Installer/Configurator
Install and uninstall, reinstall, repair.

Appendix – Test Regions (see map above)

Test Region (TR) Boundary
Alpha (Howe Sound) 50° 37.50’N 123° 45’W x 49° 30’N 122° 58’W
Bravo (Garibaldi) 50° 37.50’N 122° 58’W x 49° 30’N 121° 55’W
Charlie (Fraser Canyon) 50° 37.50’N 121° 55’W x 49° 30’N 120° 56.25’W
Delta (Vancouver) 49° 30’N 123° 45’W x 49° 11’N 122 °58’W
Echo (Golden Ears) 49° 30’N 122° 58’W x 49° 11’N 121 °55’W
Foxtrot (Hope) 49° 30’N 121° 55’W x 48° 52.03’N 120 °56.25’W
(includes part of US, test that too)
Golf (Fraser Valley) 49° 11’N 123° 14’W x 48° 52.03’N 121 °55’W
(includes part of US, test that too)

Train sim and more new blogs

Microsoft ACES studio (which develops Flight Simulator) has revealed that they are resurrecting the Train Simulator, completely rewritten from the previous version which didn’t meet expectations.

And Tim Gregson lets us know about a couple of new blogs: Rick Selby (on the train sim team) and Pat Cook (Design Director for ACES).

YouTube is cool, but…

I’ve seen lots of great videos recently on YouTube.  But I’ve always been suspicious of sites that have sleazy banner ads.  I noted to day that YouTube is going one step further: when using the search function, 5/6 times rather than getting what I sought, I was presented with a cheesy flashing banner, “You’re the 1,000,000th visitor! You’ve won a Free* laptop!  Claim within 080 [insert countdown counter here] seconds!”

For fun I clicked the link, and indeed if you sign up for spam, plus 6 trial offers of various products, and get 2 households that you refer to also sign up for all that junk, they claim they’ll send you a laptop.

Now I’m ignorant of the law, but isn’t telling lies in advertising illegal?  (Yes, I was the 1,000,000th visitor many times today!)

I’m not impressed YouTube.

Simulate this!

Here’s a cool view of North American planes in flight.  Quicktime needed.  The colour-coded aircraft is my favourite.

Playing with Dell chat

A non-techy friend asked me to check into computer prices, so I built a system on dell.ca, then thought I’d get an answer to a simple question by trying the Dell chat feature.  After no wait, here’s the dialog that ensued.  Insert 10 seconds to 1 minute or more for each Dell response.

Jon>Does the E521 have a network connection for a high speed modem?

Dell>Welcome to Dell Canada Sales Chat. My name is Joe. I’ll be your personal sales advisor today. I’m reviewing your question and typically respond in 20 secs or less so please don’t go away.

Dell>network card is already available

Jon>included in the system price then?

Dell>what is the base price of the system you have chosen to configure

Jon>$668

Dell>would you using dial up for Internet or high speed

Jon>high speed likely.  I note the option for 56k modem is clear

Dell>We would encourage you to use my SALES REP EXT <number> on the SHIPPING ADDRESS page while placing an order ONLINE so that we could get you the order confirmation and the Tracking number right away and expedite the order

Dell>how do you want to pay for this purchase

Jon>not ready to order at this time, thank you.  Just wanted to confirm that the system could connect to a high speed modem.

Jon>If so, that’s all the info I need today.  Thanks for your help.

Dell>you can save my sales rep number if you are ordering in future you can mention so that i will be your authorized dell representative

Jon>alrighty, I cut and pasted it for future refernce, thanks

Dell>Welcome to Dell Canada Sales Chat. My name is Joe. I’ll be your personal sales advisor today. I’m reviewing your question and typically respond in 20 secs or less so please don’t go away

Dell>Sorry that was not for you

Jon>oh, Joe, what will be the shipping cost for that system?

… and I waited a minute or two without a response before deciding to click on the FAQ button in the browser window that spawned the seperate chat window.  The response: This will terminate your chat.  Click OK.  No option but to terminate.

What’s even more fun is that the chat dialog shows the time of each response, but using a special warping function that made it look like I was getting a fast response (dell responses were clocked at 5 seconds or so, when the reality was 10 seconds to a minute or more), while attributing the long time for the Dell response to me!  Most interesting.

I haven’t included the reps name or ID in the above dialog, because this isn’t about one rep, it’s likely about a system that overloads the reps and drives them to close the sale with a frantic zeal that ignores all else.

So the next step?  Find another vendor that pays attention, or give Dell a call.  I won’t be needing that sales reps number though ….

Caution with using IE7 as a newsreader

The good news is that IE7, just released, can now read RSS newsfeeds.  The bad news is that it does not use the original format, stripping out the look and feel, but more importantly not providing all the info available in a more functional newsreader.  So, the links you see at the right-hand side of this page do not appear in IE7. 

So, I suggest you continue to use (or start to use) a fully-functional feedreader, such as RssReader, which I use.

Kudos to Webshots

A while ago we were having trouble with Webshots.com: some images downloaded correctly, many stalled.  Customer service was prompt, and we interacted a bit, including lots of technical questions and information they asked us.  In the end they determined it was a bug in how the app interacted with IE. Worked fine with FireFox which gave us a workaround.

So although they didn’t resolve the issue, they convinced me that they were serious about diagnosis and solving the issue in the future. 

The Tail Wags the Dog: Spammers outwit Spamcop

The ManKind Project uses a list server to broadcast emails to members throughout the world, and has something like 750 lists, 120 list administrators, and thousands of subscribers.  Spamcop is a service that helps out Internet Service Providers (and individuals) to weed out spam by blacklisting IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that source spam.  Unfortunately, Spamcop’s system is not smart enough to differentiate between real spammers and legitimate list servers.  In this case, somehow Spamcop’s spam trap email addresses are getting email from our servers.  This may be because someone has spoofed the MKP address well enough to fool Spamcop, or it may be that someone has compromised our list administration system. 

It’s creating difficulties across the world for our international organization.

In this round (and I know there are many), it seems that the spammers have outwitted Spamcop and the ISPs who use this service.  More damage is being caused by using Spamcop than would be caused by additional spam.  The tail is wagging the dog.

My ISP (who uses Spamcop) offered to whitelist the MKP servers, and further was able to effectively stop filtering emails to my addresses

In my opinion, this situation represents a failure to adequately serve some subscribers: it seems the focus on fighting spam is taking precedence over meeting my subscriber needs.

The source of the issue is the spammers, who persist I suspect because of those folks who respond to spam, who actually click on links or reply to emails.  I have published some info on dealing with Internet issues here.  Meantime, please don’t respond to spammers!  And be aware of how your ISP tries to block spammers: they may be blocking legitimate email.

Jaggies part 2

It’s getting more interesting! My dealer kindly lent me a video card while mine was sent off for repair … and it had the same problem! So it’s not the video card, hold that RMA, please.

He thinks it’s a RAM or power supply problem, but before taking the machine into the shop, I wanted to ensure I’d tested every variability I could think of (and some others have had good ideas too). So I’ve tried:

- two different model video cards (Nvidia 7900GT and 6200)
- three different monitors with three different video cables (2xSamsung 920N and one Samsung 710N)
- two different video adapter drivers (84.21 and 91.31), uninstalling, running drivercleaner, re-booting into safe mode to reinstall
- re-installing DirectX9
- two different monitor drivers (920N and 710N)
- dxdiag reports no problems

And after all this, the problem looks slightly worse.

I’m quite intrigued as to what the problem could be ….