The Search For ET (a.k.a: A Huge Waste of Money)

I grew up near Kennedy Space Center, and actually worked out at NASA during my last two years of High School with the US FIRST Robotics competition. Those NASA guys are doing some great and important stuff so I'm among the first to defend this country's space program. However, there is a side of space exploration that I truly feel is such a monumental waste of time, money and just pure brain power, and that is the search for aliens.

I'm not saying this because I believe that there aren't other life forms out there (for the record: I believe there aren't), I simply think that if there are they are either not worth all the effort we put into finding them, they don't want to be found or they are perfectly capable of finding us without our help.

Let's first explore the ulterior to these three options which is of course that there is something (dare I say someone) out there worth finding. The most common and appealing reasoning for seeking life on other planets is that this life may be far more technologically advanced than ourselves. If this is the case, they will have a lot easier time finding us than we would ever have finding them - so just let them!

If they are not technologically capable enough to finding us, why bother looking for them? If they are technologically advanced but don't want us to find them, we probably should not want to bother them either!

There's always the argument, "Well, what if they're not technologically advanced but can provide something else wonderful for us humans... Like their piss can cure cancer or something." That could always be the case, but perhaps there's an unknown organism at the bottom of the ocean whose piss can cure cancer, and we know far less about that environment than our immediate universe. Furthermore, wouldn't it make more sense to spend our time, money and brains actually looking for the cures to our problems than looking around for someone who might not even be worth finding if they even exist at all?

It's ridiculous some of the things we blow millions on trying to find these alien forms that we have no reason to think exist (other than the occasional hoax or nut-job that says they saw an alien.) Take for example SETI. Their whole thing is sending out a message into space. Since the electromagnetic spectrum is far too large to send out this message on every frequency someone out there might pick up, SETI just sends out the message at 1420 MHz - 1660 MHz (mostly just at 1420 MHz, really.) The EMS goes from 0Hz to infinity EHz! That's... (twelve times infinity... carry the one...) an indefinite spectrum that our alien friends could be monitoring. Silly.

Ok, I've wasted enough breath on this. It's going to be funny when this Stan Romanek video turns out being real. I for one would welcome our new alien overlords.

Digg is Worthless as a News Source

The stuff you read on Digg just seems to get dumber and dumber. I swear I'm about to take it out of my feed list. For example, this front-page article's description reads:

"Despite Microsoft's efforts, the
majority of developers still aren't writing with Windows Vista in mind,
a new study by Evans Data says. Only 8% are specifically coding with
Vista in mind, while Linux is actually higher at 13% -- evidence that
Microsoft's new OS isn't catching on."

The funny thing is, a programmer almost never writes a program for one specific version of Windows, just like one hardly ever writes a program for a specific flavor of Linux. In fact, I don't think I've ever written an application geared just towards one version of Windows. The fact that this crap makes the front page of Digg goes to show that all you have to do is say something anti-Microsoft and pro-Linux - No need to substantiate anything with actual facts. As reader estvir comments:

"...but hey, it's bashing 'M$' so quick, Digg it up! Who cares about full
of rbubsh [sic] it is! Why don't you guys just submit a daily story to Digg
that says "LOL M$ HAH WINDOZ" and be done with stories like this?"

I'm taking my Digg buttons off the blog. I don't want to support stupidity. As a matter of fact, I might even start doing a "stupid Digg frontpagers" collection of articles. At the very least it would give me the opportunity to make up another word like "frontpagers".

New Punisher Movie Swaps Lead Actors

Punisher is arguably my favorite comic book character. This dude's nothing but balls. No magical powers. No super-human capabilities. Just pure, unadulterated, VIOLENCE!

So as you can imagine I was totally stoked when I got a shout my boy iamronburgundy that there was a trailer out for the new Punisher movie and oh boy it looks sweet!

But WTF happened to Tom Jane, the guy who played the Punisher in the previous Punisher movie? They've got this Ray Stephenson guy now (from HBO's Rome). I'll have to admit that he does have the Punisher voice down pretty well, but why must Marvel always swap out actors for it's sequels? When Edward Norton replaced Eric Bana for this years The Incredible Hulk I kept my cool since Ed is my homeboy (I have a Fight Club movie poster up next to my Punisher movie poster) but this Stephenson guy seems like a step down, not a step up.

Enough of my bitching. I'm sure we'll all enjoy the movie. Here's the trailer from IGN:

"The file you are trying to open, '[filename]', is in a different format" Excel Error

On a recent project, the client asked me to allow some reports to be exported to Excel (XLS.) I've had such a request 1000 times over the years and quickly went to work rendering the grid as HTML, sending its HTML as a response and setting the Response.Header to the Excel MIME type... Simple.

Or so I thought. Turns out that Office 2007 doesn't like that much. When you open such a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 you get an error like:

"The file you are trying to open, '[filename]', is in a different format than specified by the file extension. Verify that the file is not corrupted and is from a trusted source before opening the file. Do you want to open the file now?"
(Yes | No | Help)

After searching for hours, I finally ran into this document from MS that essentially says this is a "feature" of the new Excel and no matter how much everyone hates it, they won't fix it. Here's an excerpt from that document:

"The current design does not allow you to open HTML content from a web site in Excel... So ASP pages that return HTML and set the MIME type to something like XLS to try to force the HTML to open in Excel instead of the web browser (as expected) will always get the security alert... If you use an HTML MIME type, then the web browser will open the content instead of Excel. So there is no good workaround for this case because of the lack of a special MIME type for HTML/MHTML that is Excel specific. You can add your own MIME type if you control both the web server and the client desktops that need access to it, but otherwise the best option is to use a different file format or alert your users of the warning and tell them to select Yes to the dialog." [Emphasis added]

In other words, give up because there's no good solution. Here's some bad solutions you could try, though:

• Display a message that says something like, "If you are using Office 2007, please select "Yes" from the resulting dialog."
• Include a registry script that the user can optionally run to change their HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security\ExtensionHardening DWord to 0, disabling this useless prompt (more details.)
• Only export to CSV, not Excel. Sure, it's not as pretty but it'll work.
• Instead of using this much simpler spreadsheet generation method, instead open a template spreadsheet on the server as a data-source, write to it (using SQL), and save it with a unique file name for the user to download. Of course you'll then have to do stuff like ensuring your saved files have unique file names (perhaps using GUID) and deleting the old spreadsheets from the File System.
  

VSOfficeDeveloper: Known Problems, Bugs, and Fixes : Excel 2007 Extension Warning On Opening Excel Workbook from a Web Site

What's New in Windows XP Service Pack 3?

Apparently a whole lotta' nuthin'! I finally installed it after finding a fix for the Remote Desktop bug, and searched the Interweb to find out what new toys I had just installed. Turns out it is basically just a roll-up of the patches since SP2 (which you should have already anyway) and a few minor back-end changes.


Even Microsoft says so:

"Windows® XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) includes all previously released updates for the operating system. This update also includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system."

I guess I should have seen that coming with Vista being Microsoft's new (sick) baby.

Cigarettes Censorship Forced in Canadian Shops

"You can browse the latest porn magazines at Canadian shops, but tough new laws mean that cigarette packages are simply too suggestive.

Shop owners in Ontario, Quebec and a few other provinces must now hide tobacco products from their customers under rules that will cover most of Canada by year-end as the country tries to stamp out smoking by young people."

And to think people think this is logical. I guess if the "young people" can't see the ciggies behind the counter, they won't think they exist. Censorship solves everything.

Cigarettes whisked out of sight

Daily Link Roundup of E-Inks and Moons

Japanese Vending Machines Now Require A Tobacco Passport To Buy Cigarettes Emergency Exit USB hub Bike Mount For iPhone, iPod & Other Portable Devices Cost of hops crops hits tops: Won't someone please think of the beer? Eye-Fi Announces New SD Cards, Services Laptop thieves nabbed with help from Mac software New E-Ink cells offer curved pixels, any-shape displays Giant working NES controller/coffee table Netflix Watch Now: Missing too much popular content Duck Hunt lamp - Boing Boing Gadgets The Original Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products Send your name to the Moon!

Comcast Does Not Want Us to Watch Lost

We have lived in our apartment for almost 2 years now. In that time our cable has been disconnected 4 times, once right after we moved and 3 times in the last month. How does this happen you ask? When our upstairs neighbors moved out Comcast came to disconnect their cable. The cable guy decides, "Hey 95A doesn't need cable either". Ironically, the upstairs neighbor didn't even have Comcast, but satellite. This is on a Thursday, so no Lost for us that night.

The next day the Comcast guy fixes our connection and explains to us what happened. He says he re-labeled our connection so this should not happen again. Good! We even have a better signal because he replaced some connections. A week or so later we get new upstairs neighbors. The Comcast guy cuts our cable so he can hook up theirs. I don't mean "cut" in the figurative sense. The dude physically cut our line. Guess what day it was: Thursday. No Lost for us again.

Again the tech comes on Friday and fixes our cable. At the time we speculated that when that tech fixed our cable he must have disconnected our upstairs neighbor's cable. We make this speculation because the next Thursday we lost our service and our neighbor had a slip from Comcast on their door (as if the Comcast guy paid them a visit but they weren't home.) We check the cable box outside and low and behold our line is cut again.

The Comcast guy comes out to fix it the next day. At least they're fairly prompt. If you haven't figured it out, we missed Lost again. So what did Comcast do for our troubles? They gave us a 3 week credit on our next bill. Not even a whole friggin' month's credit! If this happens again we're canceling our service.

I don't know if you follow Lost or not, but it's been on a "break" since Episode 8 aired on March 20th. It seems our Comcast outages have also gone on a break - perhaps until Lost comes back on next week. Oh, and it turns out our upstairs neighbors don't even have cable. Who know Comcast hated Lost so much.

Tech History Made on April 14, 2000

On this day in 2000 Lars Ulrich ruined music sharing for everybody. Ulrich, the drummer from Metallica, filed suit against Napster. Thus began the messy, unfair punishment of music sharers across the country. Thanks Lars.

Daily Link Roundup

[NAIAS 2008] Camaro Bumblebee - As seen in Transformers P2P movie site Jaman signs deal with TIVO AT&T's Retarded Plan to Filter the Internet Yahoo Implements OpenID; Massive Win For The Project CES: Demo: WowWee Wrex The Dawg Triggit: Weird but handy blogging tool Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS Watch Flickr to host Library of Congress photos [NAIAS 2008] Saturn Flextreme Plug-in Concept - With built-in Segway storage. Top 10 Telephone Tricks Jobs: Kindle Will Fail. Why? People Don't Read! How Do You Deal with Gadget Lust? How to Boost Your Productivity with Jott Disposable Microscope Cards Siemens Touch Sensitive Stovetops Better Gmail 2 Firefox Extension for New Gmail - New release of "Better Gmail" FF Extention. Sun acquires MySQL; Adds to its software stack - Holy poo that's some big news. Exploration Of Lake Hidden Beneath Antarctica's Ice Sheet Begins - Getting into the lake is a huge technological challenge. Ancient "Lost City" Discovered in Peru, Official Claims Gmail Adds New Shortcut, Archive from Inbox Every Time

Daily Link Roundup

CES is here, and we'll be bringing you highlights from the conference whether you like it or not. Why? Because that's all anyone is blogging about, so take it and like it! Seriously though, we have some great articles for you from CES and even mixed things up a bit from a few that (dare I say) are not from CES!

CES: Logitech MX 5500 Revolution - If I were a keyboard, I'd have sex with this keyboard. CES: WowWee's Tribot Spins, Sasses, and Kicks RoboSapien in the Crotch osliving.com - "Welcome to Open Source Living, an archive of the Web's best Open Source software, applications and references for a zero-cost / top quality digital experience." CES: Alienware's Curved LCD Monitor Prototype - You gotta see this thing (with video). CES: Pepcom: PocketFinder GPS Locator - Wherever this pocket-sized device goes, you can locate it's position to within 5 feet. Starry Night Bed Lacking Only a Toilet Sony BMG Sort of Drops DRM CES: Pepcom: Fujitsu Concepts - A few out-of-this-world concepts from Fujitsu. It’s People! Soylent Heat Is People! - A new office building being constructed near Stockholm’s Central Station plans to tap the rush of daily commuters as an economical source of heat. Flunked: 14 Signs of a Deficient Intellect (TheMishMash.com) New Year’s Tech Resolutions - These are resolutions that tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook should adopt, in Erick Shonfeld's opinion. Flickr to Authenticate Using OpenID Foliage Covered Botanical Building by Mass Studies - If you’re a fan of botanical architecture, this might just be the coolest building ever.

Cellphone Drivers: You're Slowing Us Down!

We all have read that cellphone use while driving causes accidents, but recent studies also suggest that it causes traffic congestion in several different ways.

The most recent of these studies found that students in a driving simulator were less likely to switch lanes when the lane they were in was moving slower than the others if they were on their cellphones. This adds to a buildup of vehicles in a lane, effectively slowing both that lane and connecting lanes.	Another study shows that drivers on their cells in many ways drive like drunks: Following at greater distances and having slow response times when hitting the breaks and recovering from breaking.	Mathematicians at the University of Exeter recently determined that late breaking can cause "mystery" traffic jams that previously appeared to have no cause whatsoever. Late breaking cellphone users can cause a wave of slower and slower traffic, turning the interstate into a parking lot.

New Cards

Each day when I walk down to my (snail) mailbox and open it I wonder what surprises await me. Will it be a bill? Did my latest Popular Science come in? Did that client finally send in their check?

Regrettably, one thing that will always await me is an "OPEN IMMEDIATELY! YOUR RESPONSE IS URGENTLY NEEDED!!!!!1" [sic] credit card offer. I can always count on at least one of these nuisances a day - be it for myself, my wife or my business.

The ironic thing is, I don't think I have ever returned a response for one of these "deals". If I ever do get a new card, I do it the same way as everything else I do: Using the internet! There's tons of information out there that will help a person pick out the best card for him, so why just get a card because it was thrown in your face? You could visit the card-supplier's sites directly (MC/Visa/AmEx/Discover), or even better yet go to one of the many "Apply for a business credit card" sites that allow you to compare multiple card options side-by-side.

(Note: If anyone out there in the audience works for a credit card junk mail shipping facility, please take me off your mailing list... Seriously.)

Top 5 Articles of 2007

2007 has been a great year for the Grinn Blog. We've had some great feedback from all of you, and launched two new series articles, This Weekends Tech Deals, and Historic Tech from Today. But the articles that keep you guys coming back are exactly the ones we wanted this blog to be all about: The articles that help you be more productive with your tech, and keep the tech from keeping you down! With that I bring you a review of the top 5 most popular articles of 2005:

1. Incorporate Google Calendar Into Outlook
Published way back in April of 2006, this still remains our most popular article. It is a detailed how-to for syncing your Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook using a program called Remote Calendars.

2. Add to Google Calendar by Talking Into Your Cell
You guys sure like your Google Calendars. This article introduces our Jott2GCal application that allows you to add (and now retrieve) Google Calendar events using the popular Jott service. Since then Jott has released their own Google Calendar implementation, but you guys seem to like ours, so we'll keep developing it!

3. Your Connection to the Server Has Been Lost
We had a problem and had a heck of a time finding the solution. So, when we did resolve the issue, we posted about it to share that solution with you. This article serves to correct the infamous "Your connection to the server has been lost" issue with Battlefield 2142, and apparently it serves it's purpose well because it claims the #3 spot on our list.

4. How to Fix the Azureus Disk Read Error
Yet another case of us sharing in an issue. We found a compatibility issue between the popular P2P application Azureus and Google Desktop. Here, we tell you the simple measures you can take to resolve this issue.







5. 10 REALLY Weird Instructables
If you have yet to visit "The world's biggest show-and-tell", instructables.com, you should start with our list of the wierdest. Does anyone else find a list making the list of our 5 most popular articles a little ironic?

Blogger Goes Apeshit

Since sometime yesterday I've had a heck of a time publishing to my blog using Blogger and apparently I'm not the only one. In fact, I'd be surprised if anyone will be able to read this entry since I'm essentially unable to publish!

Blogger allows you to publish your blog to your own server via FTP. In your settings you specify your FTP server, user name, and password and when you hit Publish on their web interface their servers upload the HTML files that make up your blog to your server.

However, since yesterday, FTP upload has been finicky at best. When you attempt to publish, Blogger just sits there displaying the "Publishing..." message you see above. Sometimes it will eventually display a message saying "Your publish is taking longer than expected" but offers no real explanation.

It seems the folks over at Blogger have yet to realize the issue, but the morning is just still young. Perhaps they're over at the Android wing of the building hanging balloons for the SDK release party. This is the part where I normally say, "I'll keep you posted" but I probably will be unable to!

Comcast vs BitTorrent: Issue Resolved

Comcast is killing BitTorrent. For weeks people have been reporting experiencing issues downloading using various BitTorrent clients. From what I've seen it seems they're killing off BitTorrent one city at a time. Are you next?

I'll explain (using my superior art skillz) how this all goes down.

Under normal circumstances, your data packets (sugar packets) pass freely between you (Best) , Comcast, and your fellow peers (Friends).



However, Comcast's Sandvine servers (cock) block any BitTorrent packets (Sweet N' Low) that try to pass through it by sending back RST packets.



One way past this is to have your packets (Sweet N' Low) encrypted (sunglasses) using SSH and passed through a shell account (wheel thingie) such as silenceisdefeat.org, as described in this article. This way, Comcast can't see what's behind the mask. This does add a bit of overhead though.

If you're as sick of Comcast as I am (and these people are) perhaps you should consider doing what I'm going to do:




Ditch Comcast and get an ISP that actually wants your business!

How to Fix the Azureus Disk Read Error

Do you get one or all of these errors when using Azureus?

Error: Disk read error - [filename] (The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process), open fails

File close fails: [filename] (The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process), open fails, flush fails

Are you also running Google Desktop?

If you answered yes to both of these questions, you're probably really glad you found this article! And you should be, because I can fix your problem.

These errors are saying that another program has one of the files you're downloading open, so it can't access it to continue downloading. If you're like me, it's that Google Desktop has that file open to index it. All you have to do is follow these simple steps to tell Google Desktop to not index the folder(s) you download your torrents to:

1. Right-click on the Google Desktop icon in your task bar (the rainbow-colored circle near your system clock.)
2. Select Preferences...
3. In the Web page that opens, under "Don't Search These Items", click the "Add file or folder to exclude" link.
4. From the resulting dialog, browse to the folder where you normally save the files you download with Azureus and click Ok.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each folder you normally save files in, if applicable.
6. Click Save Preferences at the bottom of the Web page.
   
7. Send me money. (I'm guessing since you use Azureus you probably will skip this step.)

This should also correct the issue where the DivX Settings Manager icon comes up in your system tray all the time while you're downloading avi's - if you have it. If it doesn't, then try this fix (using Azureus.exe as the value.) You may have to run "divxsm /unregister" then "divxsm /register" in a command prompt to reset the thing and get it to stop.

It's likely that this will fix similar issues experienced on other P2P file sharing clients such as Kazaa or Shareaza.

Read: Genesoc (probably down)
Read: P2P Forum Italia (in Italian)

Your connection to the server has been lost

If you come by Grinn Productions around 2:00 pm, you're likely to find our software developers spending their lunch break playing Battlefield 2142. Although "Hot Pockets and Battlefield" is now the routine, it used to be "Hot Pockets and figure out what the hell is wrong with Battlefield." For some reason, my machine would randomly get dropped from whatever server I was on. Sometimes it was right when I connected, sometimes fifteen minutes into the game. After extensive Googling we were eventually able to get the thing stable. My problem had something to do with a little thing called "CPU Affinity", but it seems people reporting the same issue found their solution elsewhere.

Below we've compiled a list of all the various solutions to this problem that seem to have worked for someone out there in internet-land, starting with the solution that worked for us. Trying each of these one at a time will help you deduce which solution (or solutions) is the fix for your problem.

• If you're running multiple CPU's or a dual-core CPU such as the Intel's Core 2 Duo, or our AMD Athlon 62 X2, you might be experiencing the same issue as us! To correct this problem:
1. Start Battlefield 2142
   
2. Hit Alt+Tab on your keyboard to get back to your desktop while BF2142 is running.
3. Pull up your Task Manager by right-clicking on the task bar and selecting Task Manager, or hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard.
   
4. Under your Processes tab, find your BF2.exe. Right–click on it and select “Set Affinity...”.
   
5. In the resulting dialog you will see CPU0, CPU1, and perhaps several other CPU checkboxes. Each enabled checkbox represents an individual CPU core. Uncheck every checkbox other than CPU0.
6. Hit OK and close your Task Manger.
7. Go back into the game. You'll have to do this every time you start BF2142, but you'll be able to play!
• Manually update PunkBuster by clicking on the Software Updates link on this page.
• Disable any firewalls you are running. Apparently you should try disabling the Windows Firewall as well, however having it enabled doesn't seem to cause me any issues. Direct from EA, here are some instructions for disabling the Windows Firewall:
1. Double click "My Network Places" on your Desktop or in your Start Menu
2. Click "View Network Connections"
3. Right click on "Local Area Connection" and Select "Properties"
4. Click the "Advanced" tab
5. Make sure to uncheck the box under "Internet Connection Firewall"
• If you're behind a hardware firewall or router, try circumventing it altogether by connecting your PC directly to your cable modem. Although this may seem impractical, if you don't have issues while directly connected, you've probably found the source of your problem.
• Be sure to open the following ports on your firewall and/or router:
  UDP 27900 Client Server
  UDP 29900 Client Server Standard Server 29910
  TCP 80 Client Server Standard port for Gamespy
  TCP 29900 Client Sever
  TCP 29901 Not in use yet
  TCP 29900 Standard port 29920
  UDP 27901
  UDP 27900
  TCP 28910
  TCP 4711 4711
  UDP 55123
  UDP 55124
  UDP 55125
  UDP 1500-4999
  UDP 16567
  You may be able to find instructions for configuring your specific model of router here.
  
• EA also suggests attempting a reset of your Network connection:
1. Click on Start and then Run.
2. In the Open box, type in: winipcfg
3. Click "Ok"
4. When the Windows IP Configuration box comes up, Click "Release".
5. Then Click "Renew"
6. Then close the Windows IP Configuration box
• Disable VoIP in BF2142.
  
• Turn the settings for Textures or other video details down a notch.
• Disable any anti-spyware apps while you're playing online.
• Call your broadband internet provider and have them test your connection.

I almost forgot: If you're on the market for a copy of Battlefield (or any game for that matter,) I'd suggest checking out alphaleap.com. They're able sell brand new games in the box for a fraction of the price of retailers because they sell them through a distributor in Bangkok. The shipping takes a while, but if you ask they'll email you the key before they ship. That way you can download the game via newsgroups or torrent, using your valid key to register the game, and be playing that same day.

I hope all of this helps someone out there. See you in the game!