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I’ve been out of work sick for the last couple of days with a cold, flu or whatever. It actually started on Saturday so I got to be sick over the weekend too.

Today I started on what’s called the Hacker’s Diet. It’s an engineering approach to dieting written by the guy who started AutoDesk. It’s a little old (1991 or so) but the book is free. Basically eat less than what you need to maintain your weight. I’m using a program on my iPhone called Lose It that helps you track how many calories you’ve eaten and how many calories you’ve budgeted per day. One of the major points that the Hacker’s diet makes is that you should pay attention to a moving average of your weight instead of what you weigh day-to-day. This makes a lot of sense to me.

The other thing I’m doing is making sure that I have an accurate calorie count for everything that I eat. Since a two or three hundred calorie difference per day can seriously add up, if I don’t know how many calories are in something, I find something else to eat.

Hopefully this will work better than the other diets I’ve tried.

If there are frequent updates on this blog about the diet that will mean I’m doing well. If you never hear about it again, that means it didn’t work. We’ll see.

I used to post my email like this: X AT y.com instead of x@y.com. Nowadays I get so much spam that I don’t think it matters anymore. As a consequence, I no longer bother with this email obfuscation. It’s a sad sad state of affairs. Fucking spammers.

I installed OS 3.0 on my iPhone last night. So far so good.

I had one minor issue after the installation. The second page of Apps only had one App, the rest of the Apps were on the third page. So at first I thought that my Apps hadn’t been restored. When I tried to reinstall an App, the install button for the App was grayed out and said ‘installed’. It took me 10 minutes or so to realize that there was a third page. I guess I should pay closer attention to those circles at the bottom of the screen.

The cut/copy/paste works very well. Much better than the various third party fixes that I looked into previously. This makes complete sense since Apple can do this from the OS and not have to kludge something together.

I was disappointed to see that I still can’t send or received MMS photos. From what I’ve read, AT&T will not start supporting this in the iPhone until later in the summer. AT&T may charge for it, which although ridiculous, doesn’t surprise me. Cell phone companies generally have a policy of charging their customers as much as possible even when it doesn’t cost them any more resources to support a feature. If I’m paying for an ‘unlimited’ data plan where I can send photos attached to emails, why would it cost me more to send photos using the same data path with a different protocol?

The landscape keyboard is very nice. Although I have almost gotten used to typing with end of my fingernails, I welcome being able to type normally with my pudgy digits. I’ve used it with the email and MMS programs so far. The only (small) drawback, is that you end with a tiny amount of real estate at the top of the screen to see what you are typing. I’ll take this minor problem over trying to type with the edge of my fingernails any day.

I have yet to try the other advertised features. I expect I’ll post something about those in the coming days. There are a few additions that weren’t well advertised that I like as much as the more well known new features.

In the iPod app when you are playing a podcast there is now an email icon and a 30 second ‘replay’ icon. I haven’t figured out what the email icon does but the 30 second replay option is very nice. The old iPhone app made it very difficult to go back in small increments of time during a podcast. This feature is very nice. Another feature along the same lines is the ability to scan back/forward in song/podcast with finer precision. Once you’ve ‘grabbed’ the little circle icon that lets you scan forward or back, you can slide your finger down the screen of the iPhone to change the granularity of the scanning. It’s called the ‘scrubbing rate’ and goes from high speed scrubbing to fine speed scrubbing. This is another very nice feature especially when used for audio books, podcasts or longer audio files.

At worked today I needed to setup a secure ftp site. My normal job is to writing software but our company is small so I end up doing IT type work from time to time.

I have an server that the three or four engineers at my job use for subversion, email testing and other engineering tasks. It was decided (not by me) that we needed to have an sftp server running on this machine to handle some customer requirements.

I have a weakness that I need to really to improve on. I always look for free software before I look for commercial software. In most cases this ends up costing me more time that it’s worth but I haven’t been able to break the habit. I think the problem is that there is some fantastic free software out there. I have always been a fan of Apache and MySQL, not to mention the software that this blog is running on. (WordPress).

On the otherhand there’s software out there that works really well but, unless I’m going to work with it all the time, just isn’t worth my time. Sendmail is an example. As long as you don’t need to configure or change anything it’s fine. Otherwise I’d rather spend $200 on a mail package like Merak that cuts out all the required Unix geekery. The biggest problem I had with Sendmail is that if I had to add a user 6 months after I installed Sendmail, I always spent too much time reading Sendmail documentation. (maybe it’s better these days, I haven’t used sendmail in about 7 years).

To get back to today’s issue, I spent about 4 hours trying to get OpenSSH setup to use as an sftp server. An hour of the time was spent with me trying to get the firewalls set up. (I had forgotten that in addition to a hardware firewall our Windows 2003 server has a software firewall running). In about 45 minutes or so I had OpenSSH working with 2 users set to use 2 different directories. I thought I had the problem solved.

Then I performed a few tests. I ran into two problems. One was that OpenSSH is shell program. I didn’t want people to be able to shell into the machine, I only wanted secure ftp. It took me about 30 or 40 minutes to figure out how to get around this problem.  I found a small bash shell script that I ran instead of the normal shell program when someone logged in.

The second problem was that when someone logged in they could navigate to any drive or directory on the machine. I probably spent 2 hours trying to get around this. If I had been on a Unix server I could have done something called  a ‘jail chroot’, This basically makes the root directory equal to the user’s directory when they log in. It keeps them from navigating to directories outside their own.

I could not figure out a way around this problem, but after spending way too much time researching on the internet, I know that this is a common problem that, it seems, no one has a good answer for.

So after spending 4 hours or so trying to get the free stuff to work, I spent 30 minutes searching for something commercial. I found CoreFTP. It was $50 and took me all of 15 minutes to setup. No need to write any scripts or mess with windows users or edit any config files.

The lessons that I think I should take from this are:

1. Spend more time thinking about and defining the requirements up front. The requirement given to me was ‘set up a sftp server’. I didn’t realize until an hour into this journey that I needed to restrict directories. I should have also realized that openSSH is shell. (duh).

2. Look for both commercial and free at the same time and pick the one that fits the requirements best and, for me, requires minimal installation effort.

This should be obvious. I wasted the better part of a day on this. One day I might learn my lesson because, y’know, I’d much rather write software than spend my day configuring and installing someone else’s.

I bought a Kindle last year. (a couple of months before the Kindle 2 came out. doh!). I really like the Kindle. One of the reasons that I bought it was that I was getting tired of having so many books laying around. I have a room in my basement that’s full of books. I know I could trade them in or donate them but I’m way too lazy to actually do that.

A side effect of having the Kindle is that I now have a history of what I’ve read this year:

Now this history isn’t entirely accurate. It doesn’t show any books that I’ve read that I didn’t buy from amazon.com and I haven’t read three of the books listed there yet. I’ve read three other novels that were free ebooks and one novella that came in the Hugo voters packet, so it’s pretty close.

It looks like I’m averaging about 2.5 books per month. This is 15 books this year that aren’t going to be in a pile on the floor in that room in my basement.