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The Looting of America

Employment,Books,Reviews,Opinion 2009/07/03

The Looting of America
Les Leopold
978-1-60358-205-6

This book attempts to explain our economic problems primarily by using the analogy of fantasy baseball. That's a very good analogy, I think, and does help us visualize how a relatively small amount of defaulted mortgages turned into a multi-trillion dollar mess.

Unfortunately, the author has a very liberal slant that will utterly annoy and anger conservative readers. For me, it's right on target, but my conservative friends will see a lot to dislike. That's too bad, because the explanations of how all these mysterious financial shenanigans actually work is very good. It's the laying of blame that will cause anger in the conservative ranks - I may agree completely with his analysis, but nobody who likes Fox News will.

I wish he had avoided the politics and stuck with simple realities. It is undeniably true that the middle and lower class have lost purchasing power as money has flowed to the very wealthy. I don't think many conservatives will argue about that; the problem is that they see that as a good thing - it's the "trickle down", "a rising tide floats all boats", "concentration of capital creates jobs", "greed is good" mentality.

Of course they are right, at least to some extent. We need concentration of capital - some things just can't get done without it. Greed is good, at least when not carried to excess. But that's the problem, isn't it? Greed has been carried to excess and the disparity between the rich and the rest of us is far too great. Unbridled greed is what made this mess, and I think the author does make that argument very convincingly.

I think it's fairly easy for both liberals and conservatives to agree that putting purchasing power in the hands of the middle and lower classes is good. Certainly that's the goal in the "rising tide" theory, isn't it? Having a healthy working class lowers welfare needs, makes for more stable families, increases purchases of real goods and increases the overall tax take of governments. All that seems pretty obvious - where we get into shouting matches is how we should go about getting there.

I like the wage cap idea this author (and others) suggests. That says that no executive can be paid more than X times the lowest wage paid in the company (wages, benefits, stock options, bonuses - full compensation). Set X wherever you want - 50 times, 100 times - wherever you set it, the cap will have the effect of raising the wages of workers.

I realize that's bitter poison to strict conservative ideology. I also recognize the argument that such a cap might drive some highly talented people right out of the country. It may be a too simplistic solution. Fine - let's hear some other ideas - it's obvious what we have been doing is not working.

This is the dialog I am trying to have with my conservative friends. We have a mess, and putting billions in the hands of Gates, Soros, Buffet and the rest plainly hasn't done us any good - it has swamped boats rather than raising them. If we can get by the liberal/conservative blame game, maybe we can agree on some path forward that will perhaps improve things.

I certainly hope so. Oh, and sure, buy the book. If you are a wooly-headed liberal like me, you'll love it. If you are grinding your teeth at the mere thought of interfering with billionaires life-styles, this will be hard for you to stomach, but you may still find the explanations helpful.

No matter where you sit, please, let's try to find some common ground. It's our only hope.

Tony Lawrence 2009-07-03 Rating: 4.0

Order (or just read more about) The Looting of America from Amazon.com

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

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Why aren't you doing that?

Blogging,Web-HTML,Employment 2009/07/02

I was off reading or something but happened to walk back into the living room as my wife was watching the tail end of a news segment about people making money in this economy. This one was about some woman who started a website dealing with "mommies" and apparently is making good money reviewing cribs, toys, car seats and all that. I had missed most of it and honestly wasn't that interested anyway, but then my wife asked The Question:

"Why aren't you doing that?"

Of course she didn't mean "why aren't you writing about pacifiers?". No, she meant "why aren't you making oodles of money from the Internet?"

I don't mean that she was being nasty or accusatory. You shouldn't be picturing some poor hen-pecked husband cowering as his wife demands to know why he is still a lowly clerk while their neighbor has been promoted to vice president. No, this was just a "curiosity" question, as in "Hey, look, this women is making money and it looks like you could do the same thing?"

You should also understand that my wife doesn't know much about this website. Oh, she knows it is here. She knows it is the source of a lot of the consulting work I get and she knows that Google and other places magically put money into our checking account every month. She's even looked at the site a few times, but it's all nerd gobbledy-gook to her. She really doesn't know that I actually do review things. Or, more accurately, she does know, but she doesn't fully connect that activity with the money that appears in our bank statements. If it were "oodles", maybe she would, but since it isn't, it's reasonable for her to wonder why this "Mommy Blogger" is piling up mountains of cash while we are only getting little mounds.

That's a hard question to answer. I pointed out that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, other "Mommy bloggers" who aren't making enough money to pay for coffee and a donut. There are equal numbers of people with sites very similar to this site who are making very little money. I do far, far better than most, so we really have nothing to complain about.

But.. there are people like the woman featured in that segment who apparently have done very well. There are also tech bloggers who make a lot of money doing something very much like what I do here. So my wife's question does deserve an answer.

Not that I have one.

Well, I don't have a good answer. I can state the obvious: some people are just more talented: better writers, better at marketing. Maybe they work harder, maybe they work smarter. Maybe they have more personality, more raw talent, more friends to spread the word. Or maybe they just got lucky. Maybe they had all the talent, worked hard AND got lucky.

I could remind her of American Idol, one of her favorite shows. How many times has there been a guest singer, some wildly successful person who sells millions upon millions of records but our first thought is "He never would have even got by an audition on this show"? There are a lot of talented singers in this world, but only a few of them "make it big" and often you can't really put your finger on why. Why them and not that other kid who never went anywhere? Who knows - it happens.

I could also say that many of the very big sites aren't individuals - they are team efforts. There are exceptions, of course, but having more than one person certainly lets you do more.

I could also note that some of the very successful are very focused on just that: being successful. I know that sounds funny, but that never has been my intent here. I write to share knowledge, not to make money. Oh, I'm happy to take the money, of course, but that's not my focus. My focus is sharing.

But none of that is an answer, is it? None of it tells you why someone just like me makes a couple of dollars a month and I make a few hundred and someone else makes many thousands.

Maybe somebody does know. Maybe somebody really can isolate all the elements that make for wild success on the web and put it out in a cookie-cutter recipe for you to follow. I seriously doubt it. We can suggest things that you should and shouldn't do, but nothing guarantees success. That's just the way it is.

So why aren't I doing that? I AM doing that. I'm just not making as much money at it, and honestly, that's OK with me. Not that I wouldn't like a little more, but it's OK. I'm having fun, doing what I like doing. We have enough. We're happy. Life is good. And that's enough.

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

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The Helios Project

Blogging,Web-HTML,Linux 2009/07/01

I'd like to direct your attention to The Blog of Helios and specifically the post referenced by that link.

This is a guy in Austin Texas who has been building Linux computers for disadvantaged children. The Helios Project takes old computers, rebuilds them as necessary, pops Linux on them, and delivers them to needy kids.

All for free. All done by hard working volunteers.

I'm helping to point him out for two reasons. One, if you can help them financially or with equipment donations, that's great. But even more importantly, if you can help spread the word that projects like this exist, that is even better. Of course if you have the will and the means to start such a project yourself, that would be wonderful.

Yeah, I know. Tough times. If we're having it tough, imagine how some of these kids are feeling.

Maybe your company is dumping some equipment a guy like that could use? If so, please do make the effort to read their current needs page and perhaps make the bigger effort to convince your company that paying to ship that stuff would be a generous and wonderful thing to do.

Or maybe you have some "junk" that isn't junk kicking around your garage or basement. Wouldn't you like to do something good with it?

That's all I want to say today. You know what to do, right?

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

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17,000 Net Illiterates Can't be Wrong!

Blogging,Web-HTML,Microsoft 2009/06/30

Amazing as it may seem, over 17,000 visitors arrived here last month by way of Internet Explorer 6 or worse. I'm not amazed that there are 17,000 people still using crappy old browsers, but it is astonishing that any of them looked at more than one page here.

You see, this website doesn't give a damn about old browsers. It's "broken" from their point of view. Pages can be jumbled, text can be obscured... actually nothing is broken here, it's their old junk Microsoft browsers that are (and always have been) defective. But the users probably don't know that, right?

Actually, I stopped caring about any browser glitches. We had something weird with the first Safari 4 betas and - surprise, surprise - I don't care. I am NOT going to write special Javascript code to work around the limitations of browsers that don't work to standards.

So anyway, a few weeks back someone asked me a question and I sent him to an article here. He immediately wrote back complaining that he couldn't read it. Yep, IE 6. I told him that he needed to upgrade, not just so that he can read the web pages of stubborn jerks like me, but also for his own safety and for his own browsing pleasure and convenience. Note that I said "upgrade", meaning IE7 or IE8 - I knew better than to suggest Firefox!

In the meantime, I told him to use the "Printer Friendy" link. That's plain Jane enough to work with anything. Some people (my wife is one of these) want to print everything anyway - that drives me crazy because it wastes so much paper, but these people just don't like to read on-screen. I can partially understand that; I can read a piece of paper faster than a web page, but on the other hand you have to wait for the printing. Makes no sense to me overall, but that link does let you read a page as simple, bare-bones text.

Stubborn as I am, every now and then I still do get the itch to do something about the "old browser" problem. Because I have mostly separated content from presentation, I can re-write 99% of this website to a new format in an hour or less. All I need is to figure out what I want it to look like. Unfortunately, that's the hard part, and summoning the will for that effort isn't easy for a few thousand net-illiterates.

Well, maybe someday. Certainly not today.

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Firefox 3.5 out soon

MacOSX,Linux,Reviews 2009/06/29

Firefox 3.5 is nearing release. According to the release notes, it has "Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine". Well, maybe: I found that Firefox 3.5 on Mac OS X crashes less frequently, but it does still crash and when it crashes it still has startup problems.

Fortunately, they've added a feature that helps with that. When Firefox can't start, it puts up a "Well, this is embarrassing" window - and yes, it is embarrassing - when will Firefox really be stable? That window lets you choose what tabs to reopen or to give up and start a new session. By the way, I've found Gmail to usually be the problem; deselecting that will usually (not always) let Firefox start up correctly.

The idiotic un-awesome bar is slower and more annoying than ever. It regularly locks me up when I fat-finger an address. I seriously cannot understand why so many reviewers gush about this. Nor can I understand why the developers continue to think they've created something good with this. It's horrid.

I'm not the only one that thinks the Awesome bar is clunky and slow - here's someone offering an Awesome Bar Accelerator (no, I didn't try it).

Like Chrome and IE, Firefox now has a "private browsing" mode. Unlike Chrome, which lets you open a specific "incognito" window or tab, Firefox private browsing affects everything once it is turned on. I don't have much need for private browsing, but I would think that the best way to do this would be to offer both specific windows and every window/tab. Choices are good, but Firefox developers often seem to think that their way is the only way.

If it were not for extensions, I wouldn't use Firefox. I try to remember to use Safari for Gmail; that eliminates a lot of trouble. If I forget and do load Gmail in Firefox, it often hangs. With the new JavaScript, it doesn't crash the rest of Firefox, but you do have to wait (and wait... and wait) until Gmail either loads or Firefox gives up. Safari never has such problems.

Oh well: can't live with it, can't live without it. Crappy as it is in some ways, Firefox has enough "must have" features that most of us choose to put up with its problems. That's why I have to give it a 4.0 out of 5.0 - the good outweighs the bad (yet the bad does continue to infuriate me!).

Tony Lawrence 2009/06/29 Rating: 4.0

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

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OS X Console Log Monitoring

MacOSX 2009/06/29

I hadn't looked at my Mac log files for quite some time. That's probably not an unusual habit for most users - heck, I bet most Windows users NEVER look at log files. It is more unusual for me; Unixy people tend to look at logs more often and that habit should have come with me to OS X. But it hadn't.

When I finally did start Console and take a peek , I was annoyed to see hundreds of errors from Launchd trying to start daemons for programs that I had removed from my system. Aaargh - that was dumb. Anything that runs in background is most likely going to trigger by Launchd and just throwing the app in the trash is NOT going to remove the plist files that cause Launchd to try to run those daemons.

Don't forget to choose "All Messages" in Console. While you are in there, you can also look for old logs that are no longer in use because you have removed the application that generated them. You can right click to send those to Trash.

For example, I had once put Mozy on this machine. I had also tried Google Desktop. Later, I removed both of those by dragging them from Applications to the trash. Console repeatedly showed lines like this:

6/28/09 8:50:18 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.mozy.backup[23968])
posix_spawnp("/Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/MozyBackup",
...): No such file or directory
6/28/09 8:50:18 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.mozy.backup[23968])
Exited with exit code: 1
6/28/09 8:50:18 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.mozy.backup)
Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
6/28/09 8:23:38 AM com.apple.launchd[274] (com.google.Desktop.Agent[23184])
posix_spawn("/Library/Google/Google
Desktop/GoogleDesktopAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/GoogleDesktopAgent",
...): No such file or directory
6/28/09 8:23:38 AM com.apple.launchd[274] (com.google.Desktop.Agent[23184])
Exited with exit code: 1
6/28/09 8:23:38 AM com.apple.launchd[274] (com.google.Desktop.Agent)
Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

What a waste of CPU. Well, not a big waste - you wouldn't notice this slowing you down, but just the same it does waste resources and it does clutter your logs with unnecessary junk.

Some apps come with an uninstaller. You might find that in the package or .dmg you used to install the app originally, or it might even be buried down in the Application directory itself (right click and "Show Package Contents" to explore). Unfortunately, a lot of apps don't bother with this, so for those you have to hunt down the files and remove them manually.

I've seen web pages that tell you to use Launchtl to unload the plist. That's fine, but why would you want to leave the file? The application has been removed; why should you leave the Launchd plist hanging around? Get rid of it and you'll never see this again.

So where are these files? Things that run for users in /Library/LaunchAgents or your personal LaunchAgents directory. Something designed to run whether or not people are logged in will be in /Library/LaunchDaemons. It should NOT be in /System/Library (that's supposed to be for system stuff only).

A program generating log errors might also have started from /etc/rc.local, /etc/rc.common, /Library/StartupItems or /System/Library/StartupItems. However, today's apps will usually use Launchd.

So what's left in the logs now that these errors are gone and I have a chance to notice the less frequent enties? Mostly unimportant stuff - or stuff I can't find out much about. What's "ImageKit Error: freeUselessAdditionalCache"? That pops in every few minutes and I don't know why. I know that "Note: Frequent transitions for interface en0" comes up whenever the machine wakes from sleep. The logs tell me that VMware adjusts its network bridges at the same time, even it it isn't running.

I also see " mDNSResponder[18]: NOTE: Wide-Area Service Discovery disabled to avoid crashing defective DNS relay". That's Bonjour looking to send multicasts out on the WAN. That's not something my router is going to do (and I wouldn't want it to anyway), so there's really nothing "defective". Anything that says mDNSResponder is Bonjour, so I can also ignore "mDNSResponder[18]: Note: Frequent transitions for interface en0 (192.168.1.2); network traffic reduction measures in effect" messages.

I noticed " Xmarks for Safari[272]: sessionDriver willPullAndReturnError called appliedRemoteChangesCallback" - that's yet another program I do not use but had forgotten about. That was harder to remove. Uninstalling the Firefox extension is done through Firefox, of course, but theere is also an Xmarks process running that has to be killed before you can drag the application to the trash.

I also see messages from Jumpcut about "CPSPBGetProcessInfo(): This call is deprecated and should not be called anymore". Jumpcut itself is at the most current version and works fine (I couldn't live without it), so I'll just have to ignore that.

So now I'm getting down to very minor stuff - initialization messages from starting programs and those few oddities that don't turn up in Google. I do see quite a few messages like this:

6/28/09 8:54:16 AM quicklookd[372] [QL ERROR] 'Creating
thumbnail' timed out for '<QLThumbnailRequest
/Users/apl/Downloads/L_200933126.pdf>'
6/28/09 8:54:26 AM com.apple.quicklook[378] xref table size
mismatch: calculated 1476; /Size = 1477.

I haven't been able to track down anything on those yet, but just about everything else left in Console logs is explainable or at least seems innocuous.

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

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Help - I'm on a blacklist

Security,Mail,Kerio 2009/06/26

You are getting bounced mail that says your email can't be delivered because you are on a blacklist. Almost always there will be instructions or a link in the bounce message that tells you what you need to do next. It's usually pretty simple (here's Spamcop's FAQ page, for example). You follow the directions and get yourself removed, but a month or so later it happens again. You are unhappy, and if you are one of my Kerio Mailserver customers, you might have sent me an email saying just how unhappy you are.

Ok - take a deep breath. It's unlikely to be the mailserver that is at fault here. More likely you have an internal machine that is responsible. The problem COULD be on whatever server the mail server runs on, but it still is unlikely to use the mailserver program. It's much more likely that they'll send it directly themselves.

Why? To avoid logging. If your mailserver is used to send spam, it's going to log every piece of mail sent. It wouldn't be hard for you to notice unusual activity in your logs - you'd spot them quickly.

To stop these sneaks, your WAN firewall should be set to block outgoing port 25 and 465 from all machines EXCEPT the mailserver. Ideally, it should log any such attempts. It should also separately log port 25/465 coming from the mailserver itself in case that machine itself has been hacked.

You say your firewall can't block outgoing traffic or won't log it? You have a toy firewall - get something better (Kerio sells a nice firewall too, by the way).

Usually you can get the blacklist company to give you some information about what was sent and when. In combination with your firewall logs, that can sometimes help narrow down your search so that you can identify the specific machine.

Of course it is possible that someone outside is using your mailserver to relay spam. That's often very easy to do if your users won't use strong passwords. The all too typical "sam" with password "sam1" can be easily guessed and then used to send anything. Again, these will be in your logs. If you see that Sam sends email 24 hours a day or sends hundreds or thousands of messages per hour, you may have found your problem.

If you do not see anything unusual in the logs and you are blocking outgoing mail ports for user machines, you can be pretty certain that you have NOT been sending spam. In that case, you may have been falsely reported. If that keeps happening, most blacklists have a procedure for dealing with false or malicious accusations.

Another possibility is that the mail didn't come from you at all. Usually this type of lie won't get you on a blacklist, but it might cause a friend or other email contact to accuse you of spamming them or sending them a virus. One of the odd things about sending email is that the sender can easily lie about who they are. I (or anyone else) can very easily "forge" mail so that it appears to come from someone else. Therefore, the nasty virus-laden email that appeared to come from you may not have at all - but it probably DID come from someone who knows you. Here's why: those nasty programs that take over programs often read the mail address book to find other folks email addresses, and will use those addresses in the forged email. So if Pete has you and Sam in his address book, and his computer gets infected by a virus, Sam might get forged email that looks like it came from you.

If you've left your email on newsgroups, message boards or websites, spammers could have found it there too. They look for email addresses both to send junk to and to use as the forged source. See How Mail works for more on that.

Also see: I'm receiving spam reports, but my mail server logs don't reflect it. Why?
But my server is secured against relay...
Spam-sending malware

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

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Fear of fsck

Linux,MacOSX,Basics,Filesystems 2009/06/26

"... they were afraid to run fsck for several months". That little sentence fragment was part of a support email I received this week. The email went on to say "After we ran it the system will no longer boot. (perhaps their fears were justified)."

I've heard similar things in the past. The fear is that fsck will "make things worse". The system is running now, it's working (or at least mostly working), so why tempt fate? The mental analogy here seems to be one of going in for surgery and dying from the anesthesia.

That's the wrong idea. Anything that fsck sees as needing fixing has the strong potential to make things worse, often much worse, if left unfixed. Yes, there may be unusual circumstances where I would want to not run fsck in order to examine or copy something before letting it do its repair. There might be times where I'd want to first run it with a "-n" (meaning report what needs fixing but do nothing). But in none of these cases would I then turn the system over to users.

There are things that fsck will fix that might be fine to leave untreated. For example, fsck looks for files that don't have an entry in any directory. It makes entries for those in the "lost+found" directory of the filesystem. If you have no need for those "lost" files, they really don't matter. They can sit out there in never-never land and never cause a problem. Fsck is not going to have any problem fixing these, either, so there's no reason not to let it do what it wants to do.

However, other filesystem screw-ups are more dangerous. If a disk block that belongs to one file also ends up among the blocks that are supposed to belong to another file, or is on the "free list" (meaning available for the next file that needs more blocks), that can really mess you up. That block will contain data from whichever file was last written to at whatever position the block lies. You have no way of knowing whether your application is writing accounts receivable data into the midst of your kernel or any other system file. File permissions don't matter; data will get written. You can lose application data or lose system files.

All fsck can do in that case is allocate a new block and copy whatever it has to there and then fix up the inode so there are no cross-linked blocks (dups). That doesn't really change anything - if you've already messed up important data, fsck won't make anything worse!

If the block is on the free list and you never need any more space or never need enough to get to where that block is allocated, sure, no problem. Again, it could sit on the free list forever and never cause a problem, but the moment it is allocated, the original file is at risk.

This is why you are just tossing the dice if you ignore the systems desire to run fsck after a crash. You might have no problems, but if the issue really was that innocuous, fsck will have no problems fixing it quickly. Unless... well, unless you have hardware issues that will cause fsck itself to do something unpleasant. Bad ram or a malfunctioning disk controller could cause fsck to inadvertently make things worse. However, under such conditions, running anything, including your application, is also likely to mess things up - perhaps not as spectacularly or as immediately noticeable as what might happen with fsck, but damaged files will almost certainly result.

Don't be afraid to run fsck. If it has problems, you already have things to be worried about.

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

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