Once again I found a valuable on-line tool that I have bookmarked forever.  I wanted to create a banner for a building that I own in Heber City.  I’m putting the downstairs offices up for rent, and wanted to post information about the rental in the front window … in large letters as a banner.    BlockPosters is an amazing, yet simple, application that allows you to take any image that you have, enlarge it, and split it up into “printer-sized” pages.

My friend James pointed me to this when I asked him about cheap software that would allow me to create some banners on my laser printer.  He remembered seeing the application, and it is simple and works.  It will work with any type of image … text, photos, etc.  You visit the website, upload your image file (up to 1MB in size) and then get to choose the parameters of your output – portrait or landscape, how many pages horizontally, the overall resulting size – and then after accepting the preview it produces a .PDF file that contains the pages that make up your picture.  You can take that, and print it on any printer that you choose, trim the pages, and tile them together.

It is applications like this one that convince me of the value of hosted services.  This is such a simple and clean solution.  And it’s free!  I’ve now got my banner for my office, and I’m thinking of trying this with some photos next … just to see how well it will work on my color inkjet printer.

I’m always into new experiences.  Participating or witnessing something new.  On August 18th, 2007 – here in Salt Lake City – we are going to have quite an event.  The old Key Bank Building in downtown is going to be imploded.  Now I have seen all sorts of videos of various buildings being dropped, but I have never seen one in person.  This time I will!

The schedule is for early Saturday morning …  ~6:00am-6:30am … to avoid the people and crowds.  From what I understand, they are going to close off 9 square blocks of the city – from North Temple to 200 South, and from 200 West to State Street.  They will clear everyone from the area, and not allow anyone to get any closer than those limits.  I’ve been thinking about the best place to watch the drop … I’ve got friends with access to numerous buildings in the surrounding area.  I’ve been thinking about exactly which windows or rooftops would give the best view of the event.  I’m wanting to get as close as possible, and will probably video tape the event.  It’s not like you get to see a building imploded every day … this ought to be a fun event to attend.

If anyone is going to plan a Implosion Party, comment here … I’d love to find out where people will be hanging out!

Spam is a pain in the Inbox. I seem to see it in waves … as I continue to evolve my anti-spam weapons. I really don’t want to change my e-mail address, so I have to keep looking for ways to block spam from the source.

Years ago, I migrated my mail server to qmail and have been very happy with the results. One of the features of the qmail installer script that I used, was that it automatically set-up a number of nice features, including the support for DNSBL. Domain Name Service Block List (DNSBL) is a system that has evolved over the years to be a very robust way for mail servers to check if mail is being sent by a host on the Internet that either should not be sending e-mail, or that is a known source of spam. Your mail server is simply configured to “ping” a DNSBL provider every time a system connects to deliver mail. The “ping” uses the DNS protocol to look-up the IP address of the connecting host, and it will get a response that indicates if the system is “black listed”. If the system is black listed, your mail server will hang the connection for up to 60 seconds (just to hold up the spammer for a bit) and then drop the connection. There are now several entities that will provide this service for pay and for free … and many have come and gone over the years.
Over the last several years I have moved from provider to provide between the various “free” providers. Recently, one of the providers I had relied on – SORBS – had started to really degrade in their ability to block spam. I figured it was time to see what was going on, and I came across this great article about the accuracy of SORBS by Al Iverson. Al has some incredible anti-spam statistics about the various DNSBL providers … and I was stunned at the statistics about Spamhaus. I very quickly updated my mail server configuration, and at ~1:45am last Tuesday morning I flipped to using Spamhaus. The chart above shows what the results were … fabulous!

Of course, with each success there seems to be a curve ball. Yesterday, not even a week after my change, my mail server began to experience problems. Of course I immediately began to suspect my Spamhaus changes … and I was worried that I was about to give up all of the wins of the last several days! But what I found was a relief. Another one of the providers that I have been using – ordb.org – had announced they were going under last December … and I forgot to remove their servers from my configuration. Looking at the chart above, you can see the impact … for almost 24 hours my spam when down to zero! Well … that’s because ALL received mail went to ZERO! I was able to remove them from my configuration and get things back in order … and the backlog of e-mails began to roll in.

All in all, I have to say that I am really pleased with Spamhaus … it is an amazing organization that deserves a lot of attention … and donations! They are out there doing everything they can to provide a great anti-spam solution. I know for sure … I’m down to ~15 spam a day now … I was getting ~200 a day before making this change!

This last month flew by. It went just too fast. I started the month busy on projects and work, and looking forward to my long planned vacation to visit my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I left on July 10th for Pittsburgh with my son Sam, and my girlfriend Andrea, and it was too much fun. It was great to see the old stomping grounds, visit my old home, and hang with friends.

We ended up taking a rafting trip on the Middle Youghiogheny out of Ohiopyle, visited Laurel Caverns, driving around Brownsville, PA where my father grew up, ran around downtown Pittsburgh, rode the inclines (part of the mass transit system since the 1870’s!!), visited Westminster Presbyterian Church (where I went to church and was also a custodian), went hiking in Boyce-Mayview Park in some nice forests, went out catching fire-flies (lightning bugs), got some incredible Italian hoagies and pizza at Ardolino’s, ate at Primanti’s, and went to a Pittsburgh Pirate’s game. The week we were there was just not long enough … I’ll have to go back … maybe in the fall.

Of course while out of town, all sorts of crap started to fall apart back home in Utah! On the Friday night before returning (we were heading back on Tuesday the 17th!) two of my servers went down.  One … an old NetWare server … the other was a Linux box.  I had a friend go to my building in Heber City to see if he could recover the boxes … but both were out of commission.  Ouch!  The Linux box was a systems management box, and so it wasn’t too critical, but the NetWare server still had 20+ web sites hosted on it.  And the calls began to come in.  It sucked … there was nothing that I could do.

Upon returning to Utah on that Tuesday night, I hit the building and grabbed the two machines … recover attempts began that night.  The NetWare server?  Dead motherboard or RAM, so I chucked the hard disks into an old chassis I had laying around … moved the LAN cards over … booted and up it came!  I ran some tests, allowed the hard disks to re-mirror (I was using RAID 1) and then it was ready to go.  My Linux box?  Ugh … dead as could be.  The hard disk failed … it would spin up, but the controller card was dead.  The mirror drive?  Mis configured and useless. Time to start from scratch.  I used the opportunity to upgrade the motherboard, memory, hard disks, and version of Linux … it took an extra day or so, but I have a much better machine now.

Of course I head into work on Wednesday, and while there … more failures.  What the heck!?!?!  I then spent that night at my building rebuilding another Linux box that had a failing SCSI drive.  It was educational to say the least as I learned about how to juggle drive partitions to consolidate three SCSI disks worth of partitions onto my two remaining good drives.  I actually did pull it off, and was able to get the server back up and running.

That next weekend, I took the time to do a *LOT* of preventative maintenance.  I completely rearranged my server room, brought in the spare rack that I had, recabled, installed the new KVM switch that I bought 6+ months ago, and put in several new UPS units.  In total … I spent another two full days over the weekend working on things over there.

And today?  Well it’s now August 1st … and with all of that work and effort the rest of the month of July slipped right by me.  I have a short list of things to do, but hopefully this month I can get back to coding and projects … I’ve got a lot of ideas that I want to turn into code this month!

Broadband rocks.  Period.  A month or so ago I bought my Broadband service from Cingular / AT&T.  I’ve been using it weekly, if not daily, since then and I am very satisfied with it.  Now I’m a die-hard WiFi fan … but it is the unusual circumstances that I can now take advantage of that makes all of the difference.

I’m actually posting this blog post from a Delta jet, sitting on the tarmac at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta.  I am on my way from Salt Lake City to Pittsburgh via Atlanta, and we were held on take-off from Atlanta.  The pilot immediately came on and apologized, and indicated that we have at least a 30 minute wait.  All the sudden I remembered … I have Broadband!

For the last 20+ minutes I’ve been on IM, picking and replying to e-mail and writing this blog post.  Oh yeah … I did check … no WiFi anywhere that I can pick up.  But I have a nice strong 3G signal, good bandwidth, and I’m getting work done.

For the last four weeks I’ve been monitoring my usage, and this is the fourth or fifth time that I have been able to get work done where there was no WiFi.  (Wow … we’re moving on the runway, but they indicated that we don’t yet have to turn off our electronic devices!) In watching my usage, I’ve been averaging ~100MB / day of downstream data … with ~40MB upstream.  I only occasionally detect lag …

Uh oh … time to shut down …

We’re getting closer … it’s just a matter of time.  It appears that European researchers have now gotten closer to reconstructing a complete genome of ancient Neanderthals.  So if we follow the story line of Jurassic Park, we’ll be able to recreate some actual Neanderthals, and maybe create a park for them to live someplace.

This might sound far fetched, however I could see some company – or country – seeing the lucrative market for this and actually begin to exploit this genetic research to do exactly that.  As we continue to make these breakthroughs in genetics, it’s only a matter of time before we start to see some pretty wild uses of the research for commercial reasons.  I’m afraid that besides the medical and knowledge purposes, there are going to be some massive commercial business models that emerge.

From the article:

Researchers studying Neanderthal DNA say it should be possible to construct a complete genome of the ancient hominid despite the degradation of the DNA over time.

There is also hope for reconstructing the genome of the mammoth and cave bear, according to a research team led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

So also expect the sale of recreated mammoths to zoos world wide … imagine what zoo would not want to be able to show off a “real” mammoth to attract attention.  We are entering interesting times!

Source: Researchers: Neanderthal DNA Sequence Can Be Rebuilt
FOXNews.com Jun 27 2007 10:56AM GMT

A couple of years back, I started to play with Marc Andreessen‘s Ning.com. At that time it provided a very interesting hosted service for creating a wide range of mash-up sites. Ning provided developers with a set of templated PHP web sites that could be customized for different markets and users. I did a little development, but didn’t have time to really do much more than experiment.

At the end of February Ning transformed itself, and began to focus on becoming a hosted “turn-key” social network provider. They are still allowing developers to get into the code and create custom modifications and additions, but now even the average user can create an account at Ning, and very quickly create their own custom social network.

I was reminded of all of this last week, when a friend of mine showed me the site he put together in no time … WakeUtah … a site for Utah Wakeboarders. When I saw that, I decided to spend an hour or two this weekend and get back up to date with Ning. I have to admit that although it’s a little thin in places, they have done an incredible job. I still had my old Ning account – which still worked – and I logged in and within an hour had learned what I needed and created UtahNetwork … the Utah Entrepreneur Network.

I have found a few things that I think are weak with the default features of Ning … but I’m sure that they are going to continue to evolve and enhance the platform. Some of the immediate features that I found lacking are:

• Events – there is no event calendar that I could find
• Blog Aggregator – I couldn’t find a component that would pull from numerous RSS feeds
• Google Maps – they used to have some great tools for doing Google Maps mash-ups … this seems to have faded

Overall, I am very impressed … you are welcome to go and check out my site. I hope that you do check it out for multiple reasons. First, I’d like some feedback on thoughts about the Ning platform. Secondly, I’d like to see if there is some value that we could create in forming a Utah Entrepreneur Network where we can communicate and exchange information about entrepreneurial activities going on in the state. Take a look, create an account, and try it out!

I have to admit that I have long been a fan of Microsoft’s Local.Live.Com for mapping.  There are just some features that I like a lot more than Google Maps.  One of the major features (of Local.Live) is the ability to easily add my own pins to the maps – just by right clicking and adding text – and then being able to send the marked up map to a friend using the URL.

Tonight, I read this great blog post from Google LatLong and I have to admit that I am impressed.  There is now the ability to create “drag and drop” routes on Google Maps … and to easily send them as URLs to other people.  For example, it took me only a few minutes to create this map of my motorcycle ride in the Utah mountains last weekend.

There are still some real limitations in my opinion … but it’s getting better.  Here are a few UI features that still bug me:

• I placed the start and end near each other, and then began to “drag” the route as described … but the map did not scroll as I got near the edges.  So I had to keep stopping – and Google would add an interim destination pin – and then manually scroll the map.  I later had to go back and delete all of the extra interim destination pins.
• I still can not find a way to add my own text to the various pins … so I can’t figure out how to label the start, interim, and ending pins.  I actually saw on the right pane the ability to ‘edit’ the interim pin label … when I did that it blew away my whole route!  Ugh!

It is a cool new set of features for Google Maps.  I did a little experimenting and created this other route of another motorcycle ride off the Mirror Lake road in the High Uintahs that I really like to ride.  Not only was this simple to create, it also allowed me to discover and look at alternative routes like this one that I have never been on!

It is amazing where these technologies are going … now if only Google would add the ability to label the pins … then I would be happier with their product!

My friend Todd, who works for Apple, sent me this link tonight while we were IMing about the iPhone.  The post is titled “Apple Now Third Biggest U.S. Music Retailer“, and it is really stunning to think about.  A company that has no stores full of music CDs, nothing but a bunch of servers in a data center, has now become the third largest retailer of music.

This, to me, is absolutely amazing.  They have none of the overhead of stores, shelves, cashiers, or any of the other fixed assets required by Walmart or Best Buy.  Instead, they have a bunch of servers, lots of storage, some system admins, and a bunch of programmers.  In a matter of a few years, they have provided a way to buy your music on-line at a reasonable cost from wherever you have an Internet connection.
I have to admit that I am slowly transitioning to buying on iTunes.  I have always been buying the actual CDs, and then lately using iTunes to rip them and load them into my iPod.  A month or so ago I spent some time with my father using iTunes to track down a long list of “oldies” that he wanted to listen to in his car.  We found all of them but two on iTunes, downloaded and burned the CD for him … all without leaving the house.

We are quickly evolving from an economy of bits, to one of atoms.  Where it makes sense, more and more information will make this migration.  I believe that the next big statistic will be when videos begin their migration to the net.  Who will be the big provider of downloadable video … legally … for rent or to buy?  With bandwidth ever increasing it’s #inevitable that we’ll be pulling more and more rich media down … so who is going to be the big on-line retailer that dominates in that space?

I also begin to think … what is next?  Once music and video are primarily bought and downloaded over the Internet … what is next?  What will be the next big migration?

Today was a really nice afternoon … I had some time and took my motorcycle out for a ride.  I’ve got a 1988 BMW R100GS … I’m going to post some pictures of it … and I love the bike.  Not only is it a nice ride on the road, but it is fully capable of taking me off-road on the many amazing fire-roads and 4WD roads in the mountains of Utah.

I’ve been getting out on my bike again after taking a break for quite a while … almost 8 years since I’ve ridden it off-road.  Today was the first off-road trip that I’ve taken this year, and it was a blast.  Even for a 1000cc bike, it’s amazingly agile for cruising the dirt roads.  Today, I took a long round-trip ride from Heber City, up to Strawberry Reservoir, and then on East Main Canyon Road – a dirt road that degraded into some really rough and rutted less-than-one-lane parts – to Wallsburg.  From Wallsburg I headed back into Midway, cruised around the Heber Valley for a bit, and then headed home.  You can see my Heber-Strawberry-East Main Canyon-Wallsburg-Heber ride here … on Local.Live.com.

I’m looking forward to a few more rides this summer.  I’ll be heading up into the Uintah mountains, and maybe take a trip up towards Yellowstone.  We’ll see.  If you are into riding here in Utah and want to explore some nice rides, comment on this post … we’ll see if we can get a good group together to take some rides!