Double Blind

I was going to write something, but unfortunately the bulk of my disposable time this evening was spent patching up my mail server. Apparently some spammer found a hole to send email through my server. They were sending Ebay phishing spams and my server managed to send 19,800 spams before I closed the thing down and patched up the security leak. It managed to start on February 25, while I was on vacation (nice timing on their part, maybe they read this weblog).

What a pain in the ass. Running your own mail server seems to be something suicidal these days. The only fortunate thing is that the address in the email is from some German address pretending to be from Ebay.

I apologise to all of those that were affected by my administrative ineptitude.

While looking through the server logs, however, I also noticed that somebody was brute-forcing their way into some mail accounts using very generic username and password combinations. This was to the magnitude of about 10,000 attempts per minute and I can easily see it’s time for me to pack my mail server up pretty soon – I don’t have the patience to deal with this and would prefer to outsource my mail to Bluehost. I know how to deal with problems like these – put up a firewall that will block more than 100 opened TCP connections in a minute but I don’t have such software with me.

Won’t be back until Monday at the earliest.

I’ve got a full plate ahead of me so things will be a bit slow in the next few days.

I found the news that the infamous (and anonymous) Vancouver Housing Blogger has shut down his doors. The forum that he links to has all sorts of conspiracy theories – was he bought off by the Vancouver real estate association? Was he threatened to be exposed, lifting his veil of anonymity? Did he go through a divorce? Did he buy a place?

Alas he denies it all, and cites that he just burnt out.

I think this is the case. Keeping up the pace that he did would have involved many, many hours of time and dealing with many emails is draining. I remember taking an extended hiatus after the 2005 provincial election since I just burnt out posting about politics. But I didn’t have the problem of having a high number of readers – VHB does and with a high readership comes the problems of scaling and making sure that commenters don’t turn your weblog into the next version of Jerry Springer.

So I can easily see how he just got tired.

A seemingly random event might be another Vancouver real estate blogger closing his doors because he bought a place, about three months after he opened his weblog saying that he believes that prices are headed down.

It’s difficult to make any sweeping conclusions out of these two data points, but my contrarian instinct kind of suggests that the closure of these two weblogs seems to mark a psychological peak in the marketplace – the bull market ends when the last bit of demand finally bites the bullet and reaches out to purchase the supply. After this, prices go down. We’ll see if this turns out to be true.

On Tuesday, the BC Budget will be tabled. It will be interesting to see what measures are enacted for this year. I am predicting two major measures – a heavily “green” budget, to correspond with what was mentioned in the throne speech, and a “Pacific Gateway” theme consisting of some heavy capital expenditure outlays. I am also not expecting much in the way of general tax measures (both positive or negative) as this would be consistent with the government’s increasing focus toward the left.

As natural gas prices have not completely collapsed (nor gone through the roof), I would expect tax revenues and royalty revenues to contribute toward a surplus ranging around $2 billion, so the debate will be whether to (in order from the most politically sexy to the least politically sexy) spend it, reduce taxes or apply it to the debt. Tax collections have increased significantly over the past year and I don’t think this trend will be decreasing anytime soon.

I am also anticipating heavy capital expenditures, well beyond the rate of amortization of capital assets. It’ll correspond to the “Building Canada’s Pacific Gateway” theme, so it will likely involve more allocation of funds to the convention centre downtown, and the gateway project.

I doubt this budget will ruffle too many feathers out there, although you can be guaranteed that the NDP will cry about a lack of funding for healthcare and childcare after the budget is tabled.

When it comes to doing my income taxes, I’m part of the old school – avoid using software unless absolutely necessary. It’s much easier to learn how taxes work when you do things by hand. The tedious thing, such as capital gains, can be done in excel, but otherwise it’s all done by hand.

I just recently completed filing in the T2 for Divestor and unfortunately it doesn’t get any easier each year I do it. There are software packages available that will assist you which cost $100 for a single return, but I just wonder why the Canada Revenue Agency doesn’t offer its own software for free? People can then make a choice between a private market offering and the CRA’s offering. This is a very rare instance I can find myself saying that the government should be getting involved in industry.

My argument would be that since the government creates the messed up legislation that force people to hand in these pieces of paper every year, why don’t they be part of the solution and release some free software that will help us abide by it? If they find that developing such software is too complicated, maybe they will finally get the hint that the legislation, as constructed, is costing people many hours for nothing.

Here is yet another article on why you should never deal with anything of substance on EBay. Whenever selling anything related to electronics, there’s almost no point in dealing on the internet anymore.

My own rule with Ebay is that it is a totally useless medium for performing transactions over a hundred dollars. There’s not enough of a mechanism to prevent wholesale fraud. When people make transactions, they want 99.9% reliability that they get what they paid for and Ebay can’t deliver this at all – it’s closer to 95% for items in the $500 range. 95% might still sound good, but 1 in 20 is a horrible reliability rate since it means that if you’ve performed 20 transactions, you’ve probably been scammed at least once. It’s like losing 5% of the auction price per transaction to self-insure yourself against fraudsters.

It’s no surprise to me that a lot of people get turned off of Ebay.

I was just blown away by this one. I punched it into the graphical program and verified it is indeed the same shade. I still can’t believe it.

Looking at the musical patterns that I tend to enjoy, there are plenty of sites out there that offer recommendations. One CD that was highly recommended by Amazon was The Dawnseeker by a new group called Sleepthief. Sleepthief was conceived by a couple people that likely were trying to follow the Balligomingo model – constructing some music and getting female vocalists to sing toward it.

Despite the rave reviews that the CD got on Amazon, it didn’t work for me at all. I think I will just cut and paste the review that closely mirrors my own opinion of the CD (this reviewer gave it two stars):

[...] this sounded so over produced it utterly lacked the creativity that these musicians and vocalist have brought to all their earlier work. It is OK but seems very mainstream targeted. I found myself bored with each track before it even got halfway through. I will try listening again, I really wanted to be knocked out by this but was underwhelmed. If you liked this, and are curious to hear something similar but more experimental try some of the other work such as Mind Fruit or Delirium’s earlier stuff, and you may see what I mean.

I have been observing that this seems to be a common trend these days – the pattern is that musicians come up with some sort of niche following. They realize they have a growing fan base, but when they release some more product, they discover it doesn’t increase their exposure too much. Then they start trying to produce more “mainstream” music in order to get to the critical mass necessary to make it to the “next level”. This never happens since what they end up producing would normally be attractive to those listeners that wouldn’t have listened to the musician’s earlier works and so the musician fades into obscurity again.

The Dawnseeker appears to have skipped the first step and seems to have tried to gone “mainstream” before even developing their own niche audience. Most mainstream music I have found to be very difficult to listen to. The Dawnseeker is slightly less mainstream than mainstream but not by a lot. Given a choice between this CD and Nuages Du Monde, the choice is easy: Get Nuages.

Due to the recent hoopla of the release of Windows Vista, I’ve been looking around for a new laptop. A lot of retailers have been significantly marking down their inventory of old stock (i.e. machines pre-loaded with Windows XP). Since it is nearly impossible to get a laptop without a pre-loaded installation, I might as well get an XP license which of course is included in the purchase price.

I’ve also been doing a bit of research about Windows Vista, and I can’t find anything about it that I would need to upgrade the operating system for. Due to the system architecture, I’ve generally come to the conclusion that Windows Vista is strictly about streaming protected content (read: content that you have to pay for a decryption key) to the user and making sure that they can’t rip the corresponding audio/video stream. I’m also convinced that if this can’t be hacked then Windows XP will likely be the last incarnation of Windows I will be running for a long, long time.

So I managed to find at Staples a Toshiba A100-TA2 notebook. The cost was $769 (plus GST/PST) after I applied a $30 coupon that I managed to find online by doing some basic google searching. The rest of the specs on the thing are fairly standard for a low-end notebook, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, Intel integrated video, etc. (Update, February 15, 2007: They actually marked this up to $897 a few days after I bought the thing, I wonder if they made an inventory pricing error.)

The big compromise was the Core Solo processor (at 1.86GHz) opposed to the Core Duo (would have cost $200 more for a 1.73GHz Duo and an extra 40GB HDD capacity). The only difference between these two processors is that the Core Duo has a functioning second CPU on the same die cast, while the solo only has one functioning CPU. In other words, if I do multiprocessing (running two CPU-intensive tasks at the same time) I’ll be a bit stuck, but I have plenty of experience with dual processor systems and the benefits are relatively imperceptible.

What’s rather funny is that a faster clocked Core Solo system can outperform a Core Duo running at a slower clock frequency. The reason why Intel makes Core Solo chips is due to the manufacturing process – if the second CPU core fails testing on the same die, they sever the connection and can still sell the chip instead of throwing it away. This way they get better a manufacturing yield.

All of these CPU performance comparisons are completely useless, since the big constraint in most systems for the past 10 years has been hard drive access times, both the seek times and data transfer speeds. If you don’t run high performance computer games then it’s all a moot point – having a faster CPU doesn’t make you type faster in MS-Word.

I am anticipating that this hardware will last for the next 5 years. Considering that my typical run rate for laptops has historically been two years, this is a rather bold prediction.