Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

I voted this morning in Ypsilanti Township, Washtenaw County, Michigan.  The precinct in question used a Diebold voting machine (and we all know that Diebold isn’t just “in the tank” for Republicans; they actually built the damn tank).

When I approached the machine with my Obama/Biden ballot, the LCD readout indicated “TOT COUNT: 403″.  Four hundred three is a reasonable number of total ballots counted, since I voted around 10:15 AM in a small precinct.

I inserted my ballot, which the machine promptly accepted.  I watched the display, and “TOT COUNT” stayed at 403.  I waited ten seconds or so, and it still didn’t increment to 404.  I brought this to the attention of the elderly “inspector”, who dismissed my concern and assured me that my ballot had been counted.

I hope I’m wrong, and that “TOT COUNT” doesn’t mean what I think it means, and that my vote for the Democratic presidential ticket (and a slew of Libertarian candidates for other offices) wasn’t cheerfully delivered to the bit-bucket.

Customer (Kevin DeGraaf) 07/29/2008 10:10 AM

Do you have an API for ordering prints (or at least assembling a shopping cart that can be manually purchased)?

Response (Courteney A) 07/29/2008 07:01 PM

Dear Kevin,
Thank you for contacting Shutterfly.

Shutterfly do have a shopping cart. This allows you to return later to place an order that you had been working on. This also ensures that an order you were working on is not lost if you sign out of your account or close your browser window. For your convenience, Shutterfly will save the contents of your shopping cart for a limited time (10 days) after you sign out. For more information about the shopping cart, please refer to the link below:

Title: Shopping Cart Overview
URL: http://crmweb.shutterfly.com/cgi-bin/helpfly.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=111&p_created=1127316234

If you need further assistance, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you for using Shutterfly.

Sincerely,

Courteney A.
Shutterfly Customer Service

I just received my new phone, a Treo 680, and am testing how well its browser interoperates with Wordpress.

Update: it works pretty well. 

It was decided that our receptionists need to be able to monitor the idle/busy state of all of the phones in the company, and answer calls while walking around the office.

Solutions: one Linksys SPA962 phone, two Linksys SPA932 attendant consoles, and one Snom M3 cordless phone.  That Was Easy (TM).

With these additions, we have the following Asterisk-compatible telephony hardware:

I finally convinced the management to scrap our hideously awful brain-dead phone system and replace it with a modern Voice-over-IP system.

We purchased one Redfone foneBRIDGE2-EC device, one Rackform iServ R107 server, twenty-eight Linksys SPA942 phones, two Polycom IP4000 conference phones, five Grandstream HT286 analog adapters, and one Grandstream BT101 phone (to connect to a paging amplifier). We also consolidated our jumbled mismash of phone services (analog lines, a BRI, and a set of DIDs) into one T1 PRI connection.

Unfortunately, the management wouldn’t spring for new Ethernet wiring, so we had to piggy-back off our existing infrastructure, making it infeasible to use Power-over-Ethernet and thus requiring a fleet of local power adapters.

That aside, I have been very pleased with our new equipment. I was able to set up centralized provisioning of the Linksys and Polycom phones (using MySQL, Perl, FTP, and TFTP) without much difficulty. The Grandstream units support provisioning as well, but since they are so simple and we have so few of them, I didn’t bother.

On the software side, we’re using Asterisk (of course). That was the first decision we made, and all of the other components were evaluated based on their Asterisk interoperability. I plan to provide, in a future post, more technical details of how the system is set up. Stay tuned.

I would like to solicit feedback from my audience about two policy questions that came up during the planning and implementation of the system.

First: whether to use an automated attendant (AA) to answer the incoming calls. Under the old system, every call was supposed to be answered by a human. This policy inevitably led to dropped, missed, and/or rushed calls. It also annoyed those of us who don’t like to speak to humans unless it’s necessary; transferring calls based on a dialed extension does not and should not require using a human operator.

After strenuous internal negotiations, we convinced the management to let us set up an AA system to handle calls. Unlike the AA systems used by major corporations, ours is extremely simple: “Thank you for calling Blah. To reach the operator, dial zero. If you know your party’s extension, please dial it now. Otherwise, for blah, dial blah; for blah, dial blah, etc.”

Readers: what do you think? Should an AA be used to ensure that (1) every call is answered promptly, (2) extensions can be reached without involving a human, and (3) the human operator is far less busy and can devote more attention to each call for which the caller actually dials zero? Or, should the policy remain “every call is answered by a human”, even though that’s infeasible, inflexible, and old-fashioned?

Interestingly enough, in our discussions, the response was split neatly along gender lines. The guys voted for the AA, and the women lobbied unsuccessfully for the old system which, theoretically, involves “human contact”.

Second: what do you think of individual paging? When I started at this company, I was shocked to discover that the phone system was set up to allow any user to individually page any other user! Specifically: (1) you’d be sitting there working, (2) your phone would beep and immediately enter into an unsolicited full-duplex (two-way) speaker-phone mode, and (3) the caller would start yammering at you. I was astonished: a company actually thinks that barging in on people’s privacy like this is a good idea? What if you’re busy? What if you’re concentrating on something? What if you’re having a private/confidential conversation? In general: WTF?

Asterisk and the SPA942 phones provide for this behavior (you just set a certain SIP header prior to executing the Dial() application), but I strongly lobbied against it. Unlike with the AA debate, however, my technician and I were the only people opposed to this “feature”. Everyone else either argued in favor of it, or took a “meh, no big deal” position. One person even had the gall to suggest that our opposition stemmed from a lack of desire to assist others (like that has any bearing on ringing-vs.-barging). In general: WTF?

Enough for now…

I recently turned down an employment offer. I would have been in a Linux architect role, far away from my current position that includes heading a department (okay, it’s just me and a junior sysadmin) that supports Windows users. The reasons for turning down this job are varied and complicated, but a point was added to the “bail out” column today upon receipt of a particularly whiny email from a sales droid.

“Whaa, whaa, boo hoo, I want administrative access to my laptop! Boo hoo! Whaa!” Okay, moron. The last time we bent the corporate I.T. policy and gave you access, you installed all manner of crapware onto a company-owned laptop (games, widgets, toolbars, P2P filesharing apps, trojan horses, etc.) and physically beat the same laptop almost to death, requiring us to replace four major parts.  I believe I speak for pissed-off I.T. guys everywhere when I say: screw you.

This same droid also complained that a laptop recently assigned to his sales droid colleague, a Dell system, was “unbearably slow”. Mind you, this is a brand-new Dell laptop with an Athlon 64 X2 processor, a gigabyte of RAM, and a clean Windows XP installation. It’s not a dream machine, but it’s no bargain-basement clunker either. Many people, including a number of our own employees, do just freaking dandy on a lot less.

Why must people be stupid?  It burns!

Let’s see here… I need a new Debian server:

xen-create-image –hostname supernova –ip x.x.x.x –tar /stuff/images/tar/staging-etch-production.tar

Okay, I’m going to need, hmm (think think think) a cool terabyte of space on it:

lvcreate -n netshares -L 1T /dev/volgrp0

Total elapsed time: about two minutes (three if you count tweaking a Xen config file on the dom0 and the fstab file in the new domU).

Heck yeah, Linux!

The designers and programmers who unleashed Microsoft Exchange upon the world should be shot.

That is all.

This blog has been deluged with spam comments over the last few days. I was on vacation with limited Internet access, but now that I’ve returned, I have cleaned up all the spam and enabled two anti-spam measures: captchas and comment moderation.

Although your comments will be held until I have a chance to approve them, my comment policy still stands. I will delete them only in cases of spam, illegal content, or other obvious cases of abuse. Comments that disagree with my positions are fine; in fact, they are encouraged — I love good, healthy debate!

For what it’s worth, I’m issuing a plea to email users everywhere: if you receive a message and feel the urge to forward it along, please engage your critical thinking skills instead of blasting it out to everyone in your address book. If an email makes too-good-to-be-true promises, warns of dire consequences for failing to take some action, or spreads vicious rumors about well-known people, there’s a good chance that it’s complete nonsense. Don’t assume that something is true simply because it came to you through the series of tubes in the interwebs.

Note: In this particular blog post, I’m not really arguing against the forwarding of jokes, optical illusions, brain-teasers, tests, religious stories and the like. While such forwards are irritating to most technically-savvy users of email, what I’m really complaining about are those email chain letters that make specific, absurd, and easily debunked claims about the nature of reality.

Example #1:

REMINDER 11 days from today, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls. You will be charged for these calls! Even if you do not answer, the telemarketer will end up in your voice mail and you will be charged for all of the minutes the incoming (usually recorded) message takes to complete. You will then also be charged when you call your voice mail to retrieve your messages. To prevent this, call 888-382-1222 from your cell phone. This is the national DO NOT CALL list; it takes only a minute to register your cell phone number and it blocks most telemarketers calls for five years.

Example #2:

My name is Bill Palmer, founder of Applebees. In an attempt to get our name out to more people in the rural communities where we are not currently located, we are offering a $50 gift certificate to anyone who forwards this email to 9 of their friends. Just send this email to them and you will receive an email back with a confirmation number to claim your gift certificate.

Example #3:

Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a Black man named Alex Rackley needed to die. [...] Rackley was first tied to a chair. Safely immobilized his “friends” tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him. When they got tired of torturing Rackley Black Panther member Warren Kimbro took Mr. Rackley’s outside and put a bullet in his head. [...] How in the world do you think that these killers got off so easy? Well, maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial. [...] O.K., so who was the other Panther defender? [...] The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at that time. She is now known as The Smartest Woman in the World. She is none other than the unofficial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from the State of New York - our lovely First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton. [...] And now, as Paul Harvey said; You know the rest of the story. Pass this on! This deserves the widest possible press. Also remember it when she runs for President.

All three of these letters either made it to my inbox directly, or were submitted to me for analysis. All three are, to put it gently, crap. The offer mentioned in Example #2 is ludicrous on its face. Example #1 is a well-intentioned, plausible-sounding warning, but it, too, is false. Example #3 is not only fabricated, but a disgusting personal attack.

A little bit of Googling will reveal the truth about these deceptive emails. In particular, I’d like to mention the excellent Urban Legends Reference Pages (a.k.a “Snopes”) website. This site contains an enormous repository of refuted hoaxes, including the three I mentioned: cell phones, Applebee’s, and Hillary. If you receive a suspicious email, verify its claims against Google and Snopes. It will almost certainly turn out to be garbage, and you should delete the email and/or set the sender straight.

The latter myth deserves further commentary. I am aware that several of my readers are die-hard Republicans who passionately loathe Hillary Clinton. Although I am not a Republican, I am not a Democrat either (as explained elsewhere, I am a Libertarian) and I’m not a fan of Hillary’s policies. However, when presented with blatantly-false trash-talk about someone, I feel compelled to stand up for the truth and protest the spread of bald-faced lies.

It’s one thing to vote Republican because you have given serious thought to a wide range of issues (not just abortion and gay marriage) and have come to honest conclusions, but it’s quite another to deepen an existing hatred of a Democratic candidate based on a completely fabricated story. It’s even worse to spread such misinformation, uncritically, due to a strong confirmation bias.