Ho John Lee’s Weblog

This morning the IBM service tech came to replace the failed fan assembly in my Thiinkpad T42p. The Thinkpad has been fairly indestructable, having gone around the world several times without any problems. So I was surprised when I started getting “Fan Error” messages just after the BIOS splash screen while setting up on Sunday evening. Fortunately, I also got the 24-hour onsite support contract back when I got the system. It ended up taking more like 36 hours to get someone out here, but I did call in the middle of the night.

That reddish assembly at the middle left is the heatsink and fan. The system board runs a test to make sure the fan will spin up before proceeding with the system boot process; the original fan will spin manually, but the motor seems to have failed. I’m glad to have the technician replace the fan instead of doing it myself. Getting the heatsink off the graphics chip required some significant prodding with a sharp knife to unbond the heat compound sticking them together.

I’ve never seen a search result page like this before. The meta text “Conservative think tank claiming to report about events and nations strategically important to the United States” doesn’t appear any where in the referenced page, which doesn’t contain any useful <META> content. Searching for that text, it looks like the text originated from the DMOZ directory listing.

Another entry from the same DMOZ list, the Kensington Review, also returns the DMOZ meta text, this time in place of the <META> text in the actual page. DMOZ says “An e-magazine of political and social commentary. When the left says the glass is half full and the right says it is half empty, Kensington suggests that it might be too big.” Kensington’s own META says “An electronic journal of political, financial and social commentary”.  DMOZ is a more interesting description, but again does not originate from the content itself. 

“No Premium User. Please solve the Riemann Hypothesis.”

It’s the time of spring when all the flowering trees bloom. There are a lot of cherry and wisteria trees in our neighborhood, it looks nice and as the petals start falling in a few weeks off later it will look like every home held a wedding recently. Good weather for being out and about. Speaking of which…

The Wachovia Bank (formerly World Savings) branch over at the Stanford Shopping Center was robbed last Thursday. This is already a little unusual, but what caught my attention was that they were robbed by an elderly man in an electric wheelchair. And he got away! He apparently stopped by The Sharper Image and asked for a shopping bag on his way over to the bank.

Spring seems to have brought on a new variant of the Nigerian “419″ spam fraud campaign, substituting Benin for Nigeria. Going through the e-mail that came in during spring break, weeks I’m seeing a lot of e-mail with titles like

“FINAL NOTIFICATION OF RECEIVING YOUR HERITANCE FUND IN ATM MASTER CARD”

“CONTACT YOUR ATM MASETR CARD”

“CONTACT EMS IMMEDIATLY ON +234 8022856155″

“CONTACT FedEX EXPRESS COURIER COMPANY LIMITED FOR YOUR CONSIGNMENT IMMEDIATLY”

“CONTACT REV DR.KENNETH OKOM DIRECTOR OF ATM CARD BANK”

“CONTACT MR FRED IKEM FOR YOUR $950,000.00″

The general theme in this sort of spam is “We’re waiting for you to confirm your bank information and send a small processing fee so we can send you a lot of money.” This campaign mostly mentions a program from the Republic of Benin to give away money through funded ATM/Mastercard accounts for various reasons ranging from inheritance to payment for previous services. Some of these have an interesting wrinkle though:

I just noticed that my Wordpress installation got hacked by a search engine spam injection attack sometime in the past few weeks. This particular one inserts invisible text with lots of keywords in footer.php. The changes to the file were made using the built-in theme editor, originating from ns.km20725.keymachine.de, which is currently at 84.19.188.144. The spam campaign automatically updates the spam payload every day or so. The links point to a variety of servers that have also been hacked to host the spam content. Here is a sample: http://www.nanosolar.com/feb3/talk.php?28/82138131762.html
I’ve sent an e-mail to Nanosolar, so they’ll probably have that content cleaned up before long. But the automated SEO spam campaign updates the keyword and link payload regularly, so any affected Wordpress sites will be updated to point at the new hosting victims.

We had a noticeable earthquake a few minutes ago this evening. Nothing too severe, but the hanging lamps were swinging back and forth a few inches, and the house was shaking for 15-20 seconds. Apparently it was magnitude 5.6, somewhere near Alum Rock.

BarCamp returns to Palo Alto next weekend, this time as BarCampBlock.

Almost two years ago, a group of 6 San Francisco geeks in 7 days, using blogs, wikis and IRC slapped together a weekend conference with wifi, food and amazing presentations in Palo Alto, California. This was a different kind of conference, though. There were no superstar keynote speakers. There were no pre-programmed agendas. There was a brilliant agenda filled with content by and for the attendees. Everyone, including the sponsors, the organizers, the speakers and the audience were involved in making the event happen equally and were often one and the same. Over the weekend, more than 200 people showed up and people watched remotely from all over the world. This event was BarCamp.

A few days ago, the first time I saw the television ad for the new Volvo S80’s heartbeat sensor alarm, I thought it was a parody. It shows a woman walking up to her car in a dark parking lot, then turning away after the heartbeat detector shows that someone is hiding in her car. I’m sure they test marketed this before including the feature, but I totally don’t get it.

Here’s what the Volvo site says about the feature:

The Personal Car Communicator (PCC) is your car key’s smart connection with your Volvo S80 applying the latest in two-way radio technology. When in range, you’ll always know the status of your car. Locked or unlocked. Alarm activated or not. If the alarm has been activated, the heart beat sensor will also tell you if there is someone inside the car. The PCC also includes keyless entry and keyless drive.

Hello, dear readers. I had lunch with some friends the other day and they mentioned that I hadn’t posted in a while. Sorry I haven’t been paying much attention to this site lately, other than knocking back comment and link spam. I recently saw that Google Reader is starting to report subscription statistics, which prompted me to take a look. It’s been a while since I looked over the server logs, and I was surprised at the number of RSS subscriptions that have accumulated (i.e. it’s more than I can account for by friends, family, and random acquaintances). I didn’t know you were out there, but now that you’re decloaked and I can see you, I wanted to say hello.

A team at Honam University in Korea has developed a low cost wide angle lens that provides the wide field of view associated with fisheye lenses, but with much lower distortion. The image above is from a wide angle camera mounted on the ceiling of a university book store. Notice the relatively straight lines of the book shelves, in contrast to the curving distortion associated with a fisheye lens.

There are already various software solutions for remapping lens distortion from captured images, but this is a much more elegant approach performing the mapping in analog space before the image is sampled. There is still a blind spot at the center of the image, where the camera blocks the conical miror.

It’s been a while since I’ve come across something I haven’t seen before online. Ms. Dewey fits the bill. It is a Flash-based application combining video clips of actress Janina Gavankar with Windows Live search.

As a search application, it’s fat, slow, and the query results aren’t great. However, as John Batelle observes, “clearly, search ain’t the point.” This is search with an flirty attitude, where the speed and quality of the results aren’t at the top of the priority list.

As short-attention-span theater goes, it’s quite entertaining.

If you can’t think of anything to search for, Ms. Dewey will fidget for a while and eventually reach out and tap on the screen. “Helloooo…type something here…”

This week there was a guy from Comcast going door-to-door in our neighborhood, offering promotional rates on their triple play bundle (video, data, voice), and internet service in particular. In general, I’m enthusiastic about the future prospects for combined services from either the cable companies or the telcos, and the Comcast internet service is attractively priced at $19.99 for 6mbits down/384k up, so in theory we are a good prospect for this service.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on the verge of cancelling our Comcast service for months because of sporadic outages. I’m not totally thrilled with my relatively slow PacBell/SBC DSL service (1.5mbits down/384k up), but other than widespread outages due to flooding or power interruptions, it has been quite stable. In contrast, our cable TV service went out for a week last year, and I have observed outages lasting anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more every month or so since then. I can live without CNBC or Disney Channel, but things can rapidly grind to a halt here without internet service.

The current issue of EETimes gives us a good look at the innards of the new iPod Nano. Earlier posts on the new iPod have noted the “Apple”-branded chips, which are identified in this teardown. PortalPlayer had supplied the media processor for the original Nano, and has been replaced in the 2nd generation design:

An Apple-labeled ASIC, the S5L8701- B05, comes from Samsung and is responsible for all audio and still-image decoding. Other than the Apple proprietary markings on the Nano’s CPU, labeling tells of an ARM core within the Samsung chip, under 6 x 6 mm in die size, and packaged in an underfilled ball grid array package similar to the Nano’s PortalPlayer-based predecessor. Unlike the first-generation design, which had a separate NAND controller component from SST, the Samsung CPU appears to have integrated the NAND interface directly, reducing cost and complexity.

The recent problems with spontaneously combusting lithium-ion batteries in Dell and Apple computers appears to have turned up in IBM Thinkpads now.

Engadget reports

the ThinkPad (which was quoted to be an IBM, not a Lenovo) apparently had a number of death throes as the fire went through various phases, until eventually a United employee busted out the fire extinguisher and laid the laptop to rest. Apparently the machine’s owner already checked its battery against the recalls and it was not listed — and why would it be? IBM and Lenovo aren’t flagged for bad batteries — yet.

I cleaned up the photo a bit to get a better look. Based on the battery placement and connectors it looks quite a lot like my T42P. It will be interesting to see whether that battery was an original IBM-supplied battery or from a 3rd party. My notebook has a Sanyo battery. The recent battery fires have all been in Sony-manufactured units. There are also a lot of low quality generic batteries available in Asia, but the Thinkpad is mostly purchased by corporate and consulting users, who are likely to stick with original equipment.

I seemed to have missed this feature when the most recent line of Photosmart cameras came out a few months ago:

They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!

Just the thing for making your own Katie Couric-style portraits…

Today SpiralFrog announced a free subscription-based music service. Subscribers will be able to download music to their music playing devices, but will need to listen to advertising presented on the SpiralFrog site periodically, to keep the music authorized. It sounds like the downloaded music would be WMA files, using Microsoft Windows Media DRM.

A couple of days ago, Engadget pointed at FairUse4WM, a Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 removal utility with a user friendly interface.

This FT article says that iPod+iTunes has the largest market share for legally authorized music at 80%. At the same time, it notes the growing number of non-iPod MP3 and other music players coming to market. I suspect it won’t be long before there’s a one-click utility to remove the Windows Media DRM, transcode the WMA file to MP3, and import them into iTunes so subscribers can listen on their iPod or whatever device. It probably won’t be from SpiralFrog, though.

Today is the first day of school in Palo Alto. It feels like we just started summer vacation, but it’s fun seeing everyone after the break. I’m always surprised by how much the kids grow in just a few weeks.

Amidst the speculation about the Amazon Unbox video download service, Amazon has quietly launched aStores, a service providing custom online storefronts for Amazon affiliates. (You may not be able to view the link unless you’re an Amazon affiliate.)

aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.

Here’s a link to their demo store.

You get to pick up to nine “featured items” to put on the home page of the store, choose product categories, and add reviews and editorial content. The shopping cart and fulfillment are handled by Amazon, with standard referral fees going back to the affiliate. There’s a browser based interface for building a store on the Amazon Affiliates site. The resulting store can be hosted by Amazon or on your own site.

Dell is recalling several models of notebook batteries, due to several incidents of spontaneous combustion. The batteries in question were manufactured by Sony, which also supplies batteries to other notebook vendors. Lithium-ion batteries are widely used today, so I’m expecting to see additional recalls from other notebook vendors, or at least a raft of press releases verifying that they do not have a problem. Dell has already set up their own web site for battery recall information.

I haven’t heard of any episodes other than various spontaneously combusting Dell notebooks and exploding Powerbooks in recent weeks, but I’m keeping an eye out for news about my Thinkpad’s battery.

The battery issue is compounded by the recent changes to airline security screening. It would be unfortunate if this got all lithium-ion batteries banned from the cabin. On the other hand I don’t see any way to create a completely accident-/terrorist-proof high density energy storage device, which is going to make some people unhappy now that they’ve noticed the issue.