Monthly Archives: July 2005

At Sprint, We Hang Up On You Automatically

Reviews

So my Sprint saga isn’t over…

July 5: Sprint’s website says our contract expired last October. Sprint’s e-mail customer service confirms that they have noted this in our account, even though Sprint phone people have several different answers.

Later that week, we switch to Cingular and the Sprint account gets canceled.

July 18: I call Sprint to make sure that we weren’t charged a fee. First attempt, got hung up on before I even spoke to a live person.

Called back, this person said that we weren’t charged the fee, and we paid off the remaining balance on the account. This should be the last we ever pay to Sprint.

Today, July 30: A bill for $166.33 arrives from Sprint.

10:30PM: I call Sprint. The computer claims the Sprint phone number I entered is invalid, but eventually lets me talk to a person in the customer support dept. That person eventually agrees that there’s a problem, and transferrs me to the “refunds department.” I get a recording saying that Sprint Financial Services closed at 9PM.

10:40PM: I call back, and manage to convince the automated system to let me talk to someone in the billing department. This person also agrees that I shouldn’t have been charged the fee, and adds a “high-priority note” to the account noting this, but is powerless to actually remove the charge from my bill. He — surprise — transferrs me to a different department.

But actually, he just transferred me to a new computerized menu. This one features a male voice, so we know it is Different somehow. It also completely refuses to accept my Sprint number, but it says that it will just have to let me talk to an operator. 5 seconds later, it hung up on me. No operator.

One would think that a telephone company would be able to correctly route more than 25% of calls to customer service.

I am so glad we switched away from this company.

Mako’s Habanero Lime Cheesecake That Can Kill White People

General

A little while back, I saw Mako’s Habanero Lime Cheesecake That Can Kill White People post on Planet Debian. I mentioned to Terah that we should try it sometime.

Well, apparently that sometime is today. She wrote about it in her blog. The results have been quite unusual. A grand adventure involving grocery store employees, difficulty breathing, lack of masks, and, yes… gloves. It sounds like these Habeneros could power small reactors.

And we haven’t even tasted it yet. I’ll make sure to post about it once we have, in a few hours.

If I survive, that is.

Recent Coding

Programming

I’ve been busy coding lately. Here’s what I’m up to:

  • A Haskell binding to OpenLDAP. I’ve got the groundwork laid (I can connect and bind to a LDAP server by now). Next up: searching. After that, the rest should be fairly easy. ETA about 1 week. Development sources: fetch with darcs get http://darcs.complete.org/ldap-haskell. See also the related haskell-cafe thread.
  • Packaged up and uploaded hsffig to Debian. hsffig will parse C .h files and automatically generate Haskell bindings and prototypes for them. It requires zero human assistance. Very, very, very cool. A little rough yet, but this is exciting stuff. Check out the source package with darcs get http://darcs.complete.org/debian/hsffig.
  • Packaged up and uploaded libcdk5, the latest version of the Curses Development Kit (CDK). CDK is a much more high-level tool than ncurses, and lets you say things like “show a dialog box” instead of “draw a border from 3,20 to 3,70 and make it gray”. Check out Debian source package with darcs get http://darcs.complete.org/debian/libcdk5.
  • Updated my MissingH Haskell library so it now builds and runs properly on Windows platforms. I now remember how much I detest them. (Urgh, drive letters complicate path manipulation in millions of annoying ways.)

Energy policy? What energy policy?

Uncategorized

So am I the only one that thinks that our (American) energy policy is absolutely, completely insane?

We all know we have some problems:

  • Environmental damange and global warming
  • Rising oil costs and dwindling oil supply
  • Dependence on foreign energy sources

So, what did our great stewards of democracy in Washington decide to do?

Well, first they approved massive subsidies for oil companies. Next, they decided to spend money researching underwater oil drilling. They put all their effort into getting a little bit of oil out of Alaska. And they sign some sort of treaty that really commits nobody to anything with India, China, Australia, and some other people.

So, I want to go up there and ask them:

You are doing all of this WHY???

The world is going to be moving away from oil, and the sooner we join it, the better.

Otherwise, instead of depending on Saudi oil, we will depend on Japanese hybrids and Chinese solar panels, because nobody here cared to spend money to research non-oil products.

Temporary: Need to register to comment

The ChangeLog

The comment spam problem has become so bad that I’ve had to temporarily require you to register before you can post. To comment, just hit the “register to post comment” link. You just have to pick a username and your e-mail address, and you will be e-mailed a password. It’s simple, painless, and stops spammers dead.

I have been deleting hundreds of spams a day, but the Drupal spam module folks are looking into the problem. I’ll remove this requirement ASAP.

Incidentally, if you do log in and hit “history” at the top of the screen, you can see which stories have new comments. Also, you can sign up to get an e-mail when new comments or stories are posted.

If you have an account with another Drupal blog, you can log in with that as well.

The good news: Trackbacks are being caught by Drupal now.

Looking For Text-Mode Widget Library

Programming

I’m looking for a text-mode widget library. Something that has dialog-boxes, etc. for text-mode (curses/console/xterm) programs.

I’ve looked at these so far:

  • tvision/tv/turbovision: Questionable license situation, unsuitable for Debian
  • CDK: Fine on *nix, but unusable on Windows
  • CTK: Not maintained for several years, looks dead, not as good as CDK anyway

I want something with a C library, that supports *nix and Windows, and has support for things like menus, dialog boxes, etc. Any suggestions?

Drupal Doesn’t Stop Spam

Software

I run Drupal for this site, as well as some others hosted here. My complaint about it is that the spam solutions in Drupal are ineffective and poorly-designed. The situation seems to have actually gotten a bit worse in the most recent versions of Drupal. Here are my complaints:

  • No working support for captchas. (I had lots of problems with captcha.module)
  • Spam filter is not very effective, despite being properly trained on huge volumes of spam. I get dozens, if not hundreds, of uncaught spam comments per day.
  • The “mark as spam” button has no effect on some very large spams.
  • There is no feedback to users whose comments have been marked as spam, indicating to them that the comment will be manually approved.
  • There is no auto-expiry of spam comments; they sit in the database forever unless manual action is taken.
  • Deleting spam comments — which seems to be the way that people are encouraged to use the spam module — requires: checking one checkbox per message, then selecting “delete”, and repeating this for each page of the spam comment listings (it only puts a few dozen per page; I get about 15 pages worth in a slow day.) Even with some Mozilla toolbar help, this is a slow and cumbersome process.
  • No “auto-delete” feature for spams referencing certain URLs.
  • Poor recognition of &-sequences in HTML
  • Nobody really maintains the spam filter
  • Does nothing at all to stop trackback spam

So, my question is: what blogging software has good anti-spam capabilities?

Back when I used WordPress, I used the Captcha module for it, which worked well. (Its normal anti-spam capabilities didn’t.) Drupal doesn’t have a working Captcha module, and everything else is hugely labor-intensive.

Is there something better out there for Drupal anywhere?

I often get the impression that the authors of the spam module in Drupal get less than a dozen spams per day on their blogs. It simply doesn’t scale to places that get hundreds of spams per day.

(Update: Drupal also isn’t very responsive at addressing bugs…)

Linux, Bluetooth and Mobile Phones

Hardware, Linux

I got my first Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone this week, a Motorola v551. I’ve been playing with the Linux utilities for working with mobile phones and have assembled some links. Most of the pages out there seem focused on SMS features of a mobile, or using a mobile phone for Internet access for a Linux box. I’m interested in neither, and care more about phone book syncing and transferring files back and forth between the phone itself and a PC.

There seems to be quite a community built around hacking Motorola phones as well. The Hofo Guide is the authoritative resource.

HowardForums.Com is also a great site.