Donner’s Daily Dose of Drama

I am soliciting feedback about this Smartphone application - a milage tracker that lets you record and document business and personal trips, as required by the IRS. It was developed using the .Net CF 3.5 and Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5. Prior to installing the application, you will need to install the .NET Compact Framework Redistributable package and SQL CE for Windows Mobile from Microsoft’s website.

Once the prerequisites are deployed, download my CAB file using this link, copy it to your Smartphone and install it using the file manager. Once installed, you can delete the CAB file to free up space.
The installer will add a new shortcut to your start menu called Trips’N'Miles. Use this shortcut to launch the app.

This free version does not support the processing of the milage log on a host computer. The SQL CE database is not secured in any way, so nothing prevents you from using other tools to do that. However, I am working on a Windows application that will use RAPI to read the milage log from the phone and write it to a CSV file. I am planning to make this utility available for a small fee.

For now, I am just curious to know if there are any issues with the device application on certain phones. Feel free to install it and let me know what works and what doesn’t. [The app deployed and runs fine on my T-Mobile Shadow]

When I grew up in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a noticable shift in public opinion away from support for traffic-enabling policies towards support for traffic-restricting policies. This manifested itself in numerous construction projects all over the continent with the objective not to build something, but to “unbuild” (Rückbau). Communities began to reclaim space in residential areas from traffic by narrowing streets, adding islands with trees and plants, raising cross walks, adding speed bumps, building bike paths, and introducing and rigorously enforcing lower speed limits.

The term used for this type of road redesign was traffic-calming - “Verkehrsberuhigung”.

Speed limits in areas that were redone in such a fashion were generally 20 mph (30 kph) or less.

Can it be saved? That is the question that should be asked instead.  Probably not, is the likely answer. Spending money on a bail-out of the US auto industry will be like pouring water in a bottomless bucket.

US auto makers have created a market for themselves that allowed them to comfortably deliver 1950’s technology while being resonably successful, up until a few years ago. If you have owned a Ford Explorer or Jeep Grand Cherokee in recent years, you will have noticed that, except for some superficial design changes, these cars today are largely built on the same platform that has been in use for decades.

The US auto industry has been selling cars and trucks using “tough”, “rugged”, and other similarly silly attributes for half a century. All the while, the world has moved on. European and Asian car makers have invested in markets that value refined engineering, efficiency, and fuel economy. Europan and Asian auto makers are 20 to 30 years ahead of their US competition.

In the United States, once a successful company has gone public, shareholders and executives will squeeze the hell out of it until nothing is left. This is why there is not enough investment in R&D and technological advancement at large. Advancement comes only in the form of new innovative companies, and once these companies have become successful, the cycle starts over again.

(Chart by Kenneth L. Hess)

The chances that any US car maker will be able to become competitive in a time of rapid change and innovation in the market place is small. Let’s not waste money on GM and Co. These companies will never be what they once were - the engines of the US economy. Pouring money into US auto makers today will prolong their certain demise and prolong the economic crisis. The money should be spent on companies that drive innovation. Only innovation will fuel economic growth. Suggesting that the US auto industry should be saved today is like suggesting that the US horse carriage industry needed to be saved in the early 1900’s.

Sometimes we need to reduce the granularity of date ranges by combining serveral contiguous rows into one. While this is a common classic SQL problem, I was unable to find an elegant solution that also performs well, and came up with my own. This article explains the problem and outlines the solution using a Common Table Expression (CTE) with recursion in SQL Server 2005.

I received this email today. I wonder if this will be part of their new ad campaign to help sign on new customers …

Dear Customer,

We appreciate your business with Lingo, and hope that you are availing and enjoying all its benefits!

We would like to inform you of updated terms and conditions of your Lingo service. Effective October 23, 2008, customers who cancel their Lingo service within 24 months of the activation date, will be subject to a $99.95 cancellation fee per account. To view Lingo’s Terms & Conditions, please visit Lingo.com and click on the Terms & Conditions link at the bottom of the page.

Should you have any questions about the new term, please contact us at 1-888-LINGO-99.

Sincerely,
Lingo.com

In an earlier post I presented the network throughput results of my tests with the Synology RS-407 NAS and IPerf in various configurations. I had a Windows XP x64 client in the mix with a bad network driver that messed up my test results. During these earlier tests I contacted Synology support about the odd results that I was getting, and the technician suggested that I repeat my tests with a cross-over cable, thus eliminating the influence of a switch.

Since then I got rid of the 64-bit XP installation and reverted back to the 32 bit OS. I was hesitant for a long time about making or purchasing a cross-over cable, because it is so unlikely that I will ever use it again. I got one anyway. I repeated the iPerf tests with various client and server configurations, both with the cross-over cable and my HP switch.

I did not create lab conditions, which means that the tests were done with normal network traffic. For instance, the Synology Surveillance Server running on the NAS was recording a video stream while I ran iPerf. The results should therefore be regarded as somewhat lower than under ideal conditions. The Thinkpad laptop ran on battery during the tests, which may explain the meager results

This time, iPerf produced more meaningful and repeatable results. The take-aways for me are that

• I do get transfer rates of over 500 MBit/sec, but only when jumbo frames are turned on. In fact, throughput with MTU=9000 is generally twice the rate of when jumbo frames are turned off (MTU=1500). Jumbo frames are now turned on for good on all stations that support it.
• My HP switch performs well and it is not a bottleneck. Obviously, when I tested with the cross-over cable there was no traffic other than the Windows remote desktop or an SSH terminal session. With the switch, my network was running with standard traffic. It is possible that when accounted for the video stream from the security camera, the results would have been 5-10% higher, meaning that throughput with the switch would be at least as fast as with the cross-over cable, if not faster.

The results are below. Detailed results are here.

As the mortgage mess unravels and takes down more and more of the players, bits and pieces of information become available about who played central roles, and who benefited the most from unscrupulous lending schemes. One suprising conclusion that I drew is that much of this was in the making during the Clinton years, and that Bush, while he did nothing to prevent the system from collapsing, cannot be blamed for having caused it. Some of the players that I found mentioned over and over again in the news coverage are in the sphere of influence of the democratic party.

Allen Greenspan

Role	Chairman of the Federal Reserve 1987 to 2006
Political Affiliation	Republican
Responsibilities	Failed to realize that the asset bubble was at least in part caused by his “easy money” low-interest rate policy. Many experts believe that he was directly responsible for the housing bubble and many earlier bubbles during his tenure (e.g. MSN Money columnist William A. Fleckenstein).
Quote	“The housing boom will inevitably simmer down.”

Daniel H. Mudd

Franklin D. Raines and J. Timothy Howard

Angelo R. Mozilo

Chris Dodd

Barney Frank

James B. Lockhart

Martin Sullivan

Phil Gramm

Also entering the stage at the last minute: Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke

To sum it up in one sentence (two, actually)

What we see is a pattern of greedy executives who were enabled and helped by self-serving lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum, and a failure of government oversight due to poorly qualified, unwilling, unskilled, and unmotivated regulators. Let this go on for 20 years, and the mess is perfect.

The issue with BETWEEN is that it does not behave consistenly. Sometimes it is inclusive of the 2nd DateTime value, sometimes it is not.
Consider the following:

Crude oil futures swung wildly again today, first rising to a record and then tumbling as investors wrestled with the latest developments.

With little in the way of news to explain oil’s turnabout, analysts pointed to Saudi Arabia’s weekend decision to boost production and to Tuesday’s expiration of crude options, which are agreements to buy or sell futures at higher or lower prices. A sense that the Saudis may be getting serious about boosting output could be growing among some investors. Also, a weaker dollar makes oil less expensive to investors dealing in other currencies. Investors were also mulling the effects of an overnight fire at a StatoilHydro ASA drilling rig in the North Sea, which could affect as much as 150,000 barrels of daily oil production.

Another likely contributor to the current market uncertainty is Dan Hobson, a Llama Farmer on New Zealand’s South Island, according to Addison Legweak, director of market research at Energy Tradition in Paris, Texas. Dan is an avid bean enthusiast and has been suffering from flatulence for the last few days. Winds caused by a strong jet stream brought some of the gases to the off-shore rigs on the US Pacific coast, where work has been negatively affected. Wall Street’s reaction was immediate and profound.

Frank Ramirez, manager at an Exxon facility near Anchorage, Alaska, reported that a herd of moose blocked the access road to his plant for 20 minutes this morning. His personal assistant Sylvia S. was unable to report to work on time, and he had to make his own coffee. The national average price of a gallon of gas rose 0.3 cent between 9am and 11am as a direct consequence of this earth-shattering event.

Later in the day, Mr. Ramirez had lunch with his mistress and spent a happy hour at the local motel. The markets calmed somewhat and August Brent crude futures fell 40 cents in London to settle at $134.71 on the ICE Futures exchange.

For the 2nd time in about a year I ran into what appears to be a fraudulent seller on Ebay. The last time it was someone who messed up by purchasing a large lot of bad memory chips himself, but who still went ahead and sold it off on Ebay (see my earlier post about this incident). I was not successful in getting my money back from Paypal back then because of a technicality.

3 weeks ago I purchased a (luckily) very small and inexpensive item, 2 RCA extension couplers for about $5 including shipping. I never received anything, never got a response to my emails to the seller, and was unable to get in touch with him otherwise. The seller, James H Linker who does business out of Las Vegas, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. His feedback on Ebay is private, so I cannot see what the other people’s damage is, but his negative feeback count is going up every day (see this archived page with serenitydigital’s feedback, which I am sure will not be accessible online much longer). What is striking, though, is that for the better part of 2 years he seems to have been receiving exclusively positive feedback. All the negative feedback is from the past month.

Why would someone risk his reputation as a seller for $5? What happened? Did this person have an accident, become ill, get deported from this country? Maybe I will never find out.

What prompted me to start another blog entry about this incident is my increasing frustration with Ebay and Paypal, though. These companies have been able to establish a quasi-monopoly and they are becoming very sophisticated in disenfranchising their users by making it so difficult to claim a loss.

Ebay no longer handles claims themselves, but referred me to the Paypal dispute process. I just started a dispute there. This will take many weeks. I am just waiting for Paypal to send me back to Ebay, and this process continuing back and forth until I become too tired to continue.

As I read through various policy documents online, I come across some interesting stuff. For instance, Ebay requires buyers to pay for an appraisal if one of their sellers sells you Chinese junk instead of that Louis Vuitton handbag that you always wanted … There is a growing number of little nuissances that one has to put up with as an Ebay shopper. Unfortunately, the options are limited when dealing with a monopoly. I will look for alternative sources in the future, maybe pay a little more for having peace of mind. Ebay’s business model is built on circumventing basic consumer rights that it took a century to establish in this country. If they prevail with this model, other stores will start cutting back on consumer protection as well. I don’t want this to happen. Let’s avoid Ebay!

later on 5/28: I just found this thread on the Ebay forums (6/11/2008: this link is no longer good since Ebay removed the discussion from the forum). Nobody knows anything and everybody is speculating. What is interesting, though, is that some of the comments pointed me to the seller’s page on Ebay. Here the feedback is visible, and wow, there is a lot of negative feedback.

Update 6/8: PayPal refunded the $5.something today. This is nice, but since PayPal’s communication makes it sound like they did me a favor, the positive outcome does little to improve my level of comfort as a buyer. I feel that I am at the mercy of Ebay/PayPal with no leverage if a deal blows up. In my experience this happens with one out of every 30 transactions.