When it comes to Apple and quality software, stuff like this is just par for the course:

The world is full of idiots.

Because so many of these people have wrecked their servers by accidentally installing malware, MS now feels they have to force hightened security on the rest of us.

So I have wasted 30 minutes trying to get an activeX control installed on a server.

IE won’t let me do it, even though I marked the site as Trusted, and even though I went through every ActiveX option in advanced tools and turned them all to Enabled.  Nope, still nothing.

I then decided to try changing the default security levels… oh wait, they won’t even LET me do that.  Are you kidding me??

I finally found a link to download an install.

Now IE tells me “Your security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded.”

Do I seriously need to go install firefox to just get this damned flie downloaded??

No, because thankfully I was able to open up the page source and go find where the activeX is getting pulled from, and realized it was coming from a different subdomain (which of course is not apparnet to any normal users).

Adding that subdomain manually to my trusted sites fixed the problem.

The whole thing is just stupid.

Flickr provides an application called Flickr Uploadr to help you upload your images, and it really sucks.

I have been trying to get it to upload my collection of images for the last 24 hours and it has failed at various stages of completion upwards of 10 times.  Each time it fails in the middle of a batch, it seems unclear as to if when I restart I am uploading the same images again or if it is smart enough to not upload images that have already been uploaded in the earlier batch. 

I think it probably isn’t smart enough.

The other thing that is really crappy is that it is really really slow.

Using the web based upload tool (which is really sweet btw) is about 4-8x faster than using the Uploadr tool.  This is very frustrating because it should be the other way around.  You can do a lot of things with a rich client that you can’t do in a web page, but apparently Flickr didn’t put the effort into the Uploadr app.

Jungle Disk is another product (only 20 bucks) that runs on top of the S3 service from Amazon.

http://www.jungledisk.com/

Unlike S3 Backup, it acts as a virtual drive (like a USB drive) that you can drag files to/from.

The interesting part for me, is that they supposedly employ some kind of caching algorithm so that most files (I assume given availabe drive space) are cached locally so you don’t have to go up to the server and download the whole thing when you want it.

Might be worth looking into.

Most internet providers for businesses offer some kind of SLA to show their commitment to continued uptime.

One of my customers who uses AT&T Business DSL recently had a multi day outage. 

So what does AT&T’s SLA provide?

Customer connectivity shall be restored in 24 hours or less from the time AT&T is notified of the outage. *Customer shall be entitled to one (1) day’s credit (based on 30 day calendar month) from the Customer’s recurring monthly service fees if AT&T fails to meet the 24 Hour Service Restoration SLA.

Yes you read that right.  Your business has no email or internet access for 3-4 days and what does AT&T do for you?  They might knock 10 bucks or so off your bill.  How nice… well at least they don’t make me waste any more time …. oh wait..

(*) Credits are not automatically applied. Customer must apply via the Business DSL SLA website located at http://www.att.com/businessdslsla, or by calling our Customer Care at 1-877-722-3755.

Wow. 

Jott is an interesting site that allows you to send emails from your phone.

You call a number, say the name of the person you want to send a message to, and it will do speech to text conversion and send the email.

As I understand it, they employ 2 different speech recognition engines, and if the 2 don’t agree on what you said, they offload it to a person to do the typing.  Pretty interesting!

You can also set reminders and it will email ou 15 minutes before the reminder time.

Not sure that I will ever really get into using it heavily, but I thought I would give it a shot.

They also have an API so I could write up some code for my site and “phone in” my blog posts and they would show up here.  Pretty interesting indeed!

Here is the API: http://jott.com/jott/developers.html

Amazons S3 service already had crazy cheap bandwidth and storage.

Today I got an email that they are LOWERING the price even more!

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB – data transfer in
$0.180 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB – data transfer in
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Excellent!

I am still not sure who to blame on this…

Is Comcast packet shaping Netflix, or is Netflix just not able to provide enough consisten bandwidth?

I’m leaning toward Comcast as being the problem behind this, but I haven’t been able to fully verify it.

I have bandwidth to spare:

But netflix doesn’t seem to like it:

Comcast has been caught “packet shaping” traffic for specific P2P applications like bittorrent.   While this isn’t exactly packet filtering, the desired effect is to limit bandwidth for a given application.

It is total BS.

The last 2 nights, I have been trying to use Netflix, and even though speed test have me around 15 mbps (10 T1s worth of bandwidth), I am getting bandwidth warnings, and buffering pauses while trying to watch an episode of Dexter.

This is the message that I get:

Comcast has an interested in making your Netflix experience as terrible as possible: they want you to use their on demand video service!

Would they really do something like this?  Of course they would!  The question is not would they, but are they.

The only other possability is that Netflix itself is having some issues, but I can’t seem to find anyone else seeing these major issues.

I am a season ticket holder for the Chicago Fire, and over the last few years, they have infuriated me numerous times with what appears to be total incompitance in running the business.  I won’t go into it all now, but to point out yet another way they have blown it.

Let’s say you ran the Fire, and you were trying to use your website to promote your home opener.  Don’t you think you would try to avoid confusing your fans as to what time the games starts?

If you print out the season sechedule, it says 7:00.   If you look at the ticket, it says 7:30!

This is just dumb.  Dumb.

There are threads going on among fans on the various soccer related websites trying to figure out what time the game starts??  What is this, Guadalajara??