List of the April Fools Jokes for 2006

Wikipedia has a list of all of the big pranks that have happened. The list is growing fast, enjoy the hilarity.

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Print from your laptop to your wall using a can of spraypaint and string

This is the coolest thing ever! Two electronics engineering students in Zurich made this simple but intriguing way of printing from their tiny laptop to a wall of just about any size using a can of spray paint, some string, and two tiny motors. It's hypnotic to watch!

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So we received our Treo 700W's today. It felt like Christmas as we all scrambled to rip open the boxes and start checking the phone out. The verdict is still out as to whether or not I like the 700W. The screen resolution, color depth, and clarity puts the Treo 600 to shame. It's about the same as the 650. The built-in camera will let you take 1280 x 1024 resolution pictures...which means you can actually use this as a camera if you wanted to. The camera on the 600 was a joke. The really fun stuff began when I pointed the IE browser to my.orb.com and logged into my HTPC box at home. I selected a Seinfeld episode and hit play...and I didn't expect really much to happen. To my astonishment, it started buffering for about 5 seconds and then...it streamed Seinfeld to my phone using Windows Media Player. The quality was actually quite good for being a phone. I have to break open the piggy bank soon and get a 2 GB SD card so that I can take my shows to go. When you put the display in full-screen mode, it's totally watchable. The sound is great too. Neither video nor sound had any jitters. My manager in Boise hit my Orb service and said that he was able to view the video, but it was pretty jittery. Boise won't have EVDO service until around November 2006, so they're going to have to wait before they get to experience streaming onto a cell phone up there.

All in all, I was quite impressed. It still takes a couple seconds for my brain to grok the Windows Mobile interface each time I want to do something. The phone quality itself is average, although the real test will happen tomorrow when I take it down to the datacenter and try making calls inside the cage. Usually what happens is that I lose my voice because I'm yelling so loudly, my battery quickly drains because the reception is so bad, and the receiving end gets frustrated and annoyed since all they hear is 8 million fans drowning out my cries. I don't think this phone will be much better, but here's hoping.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this News.com article which talked about being able to use Slingbox on your cell phone. Now, I definitely think this is a very cool idea. I'm not a huge TV fanatic, however I do see the convenience in being able to watch TV while on the go.

I already spent way too much on my HTPC project, so the idea of paying another $250 for the Slingbox is not one I'm likely to entertain. Now, as coincidence would have it, my work is issuing out Treo 700W's to all the system / network admins this week. I think the combination of my HTPC + Orb + TCPMP will equal a pretty good project for me to write up about. If my friend does end up getting the Slingbox, I'll try to get him to write up a review on that as well. I don't think Orb's video is going to match up with the Slingbox...but on a 240 x 240 cell phone screen, will I notice the difference?

So today I got my hands on our Cisco Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) server. I don't know all the features yet, but from the outside it's literally just Linux on a Dell Poweredge server. When you login to the box you don't get a shell, it drops you into this Cisco environment where you can issue a bunch of commands like

packet display fa0/0

Which just runs tethereal and displays packets in realtime. This isn't impressive since you can just run tcpdump or tethereal on the command line and get the exact same effect. This isn't the IPS's main feature however, it's just one tool an admin can use to see what's going on.

Once you've fully configured the IPS server the real fun begins. It will analyze *all* traffic on your network and can automatically make ACL updates on your PIX, switch or router. You can setup event action filters, and use built-in and custom signatures in conjunction with risk ratings that the IPS will calculate in order to automatically deny packets that have a strong probability of being malicious. Once you set everything up, you can monitor the different packets that the IPS server sees as possible attacks, but not do anything with them yet besides logging. This will give you a better idea as to what the IPS sees, since false positives are inevitable. Once tuned though, I see this device being very helpful in keeping a 24/7 watchdog on what's entering our network.

The east coast office move was a success. I wrote the PIX commands that they would need to run once they powered on the PIX and consoled in. I made one minor goof that held things up for about 10 minutes while I figured out what was missing. I removed the inbound access-list lines and added them back in using the new external address. That seemed easy enough when I planned it ahead of time. The one thing that I forgot about was that as soon as you remove the last access-list entry, when you rebuild the access-list you also need to reapply them to the (external in this case) interface using the access-group command. One lousy line that was overlooked caused a bit of confusion...but at least I should remember this in the future. Hopefully this help anyone else out there that aren't Cisco experts already.

Sprint Picture Mail site lets anyone log in

Engadget's Evan Blass reports about some discussion on forums that there's a bit of a bug in Sprint's Picture Mail online that lets anyone log in to any Sprint phone's account, without a password.

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So we are getting ready to roll out our new fileserver at work. It's actually an old fileserver with new disks, but that's a helluva lot better than our current situation (our Exchange server functions as a fileserver, print server, and primary Active Directory server). Now that our office is growing, it's time to start distributing the load a bit and add in some redundancy.

We only have about 30 users in the office. Since some users are more technical than others, I've decided to stage the migration and do the engineers first, then sales, and finally the marketing and executives. I figure the engineers won't freak out if they suddenly have a new mapped drive.

Since I'm doing the move in stages, I needed a way to "rsync" their files from the current fileserver to the new one. I was considering using the Cygwin tools to accomplish this, but I was worried about NTFS permissions. There are programs out there that will "fix" permissions, but why resort to that when you don't need to? There were a number of solutions to pick from. My colleague decided Robocopy would do the trick. Robocopy is a tool based on Microsoft's XCOPY and is available on the Windows 2000/3 Resource Kit.

Not only will Robocopy handle file and directory permissions with ease, but it also has a number of other features that is going to make this migration really easy.

• Can auto-restart a copy in the event of a failure
  
• Will retry a user-defined number of times before giving up (for instance, if the file is locked)
  
• Use wildcard characters in file and directory names
  
• Delete destination file and directories that no longer exist in the source
  
• Schedulable to run automatically
  
• Monitor a directory for changes, then automatically start a copy
  
• Can copy files based on attributes such as last access dates
  
• Bandwidth usage can be controlled
  
• Has very verbose and legible logging
  
• Can use UNIX style switch flags (-foo instead of /foo) and path delimiters (/ instead of \)
  
• Can control how deep you want to recursively copy directories
  

So I'll post more news about the fileserver migration when it happens.

So this week your friendly neighborhood sys admin gets to don his network hat on and do some work on a PIX 525. We have an office on the east coast that is moving on Thursday. We have a lan-to-lan vpn tunnel connecting our office in Idaho with the east coast office, so once it moves and the external address changes the tunnel will break - that's where I come in. The PIX changes are minor, and the VPN concentrator changes are even more minor...but the fact that I get to do the work makes my geek salivary glands pumpin. I've always liked doing network work (even firing up tcpdump to aid in application troubleshooting is fun). Our main network admin is on vacation, so I get to live out my fantasies. OK, being a network admin for a week is a pretty sad fantasy...at least I'm being honest.

So after about 3 months of using Media Portal, I decided to give another application a shot. I've steered away from Beyond TV in the past because I was looking for a non-commercial solution. That was closed-minded of me. I decided I would give it a try since I could always go back to using Media Portal if I didn't like BTV.

I downloaded the trial version, and after 1 week of use I'm happy to say it has exceeded my expectations. BTV only does PVR duties, but SnapStream has other products (Beyond Media is the next one I'm going to try out) that extends the functionality by (for instance) allowing you to play / save DVD's, play downloaded videos, stream music, view pictures and stream to clients like a laptop or another computer. The amazing part for me was how fast it took from downloading the installer to being fully operational (two tuners; one for the DirectTV receiver and one for terrestrial HDTV). Media Portal took me several days to get everything working...BTV took me about 15 minutes. The interface is snappy too, compared to MP. MP kept the choices open for pretty much everything, including the TV listings. This is great for some people, but BTV let's you use their own SnapStream.net TV listings service which is as good or better than the service I used for MP. Being able to login anywhere and schedule remote recordings was a big plus as well.

I'm not done trying out the different HTPC / PVR software out there. Next on my list is GB-PVR, which is another freeware application that runs on Windows. I won't forget about MythTV either, although I won't be able to use my ATI HDTV Wonder card so I'll have to buy another Digital capture card before venturing in that territory.