Archive for the ‘General nonsense’ Category

Unrelated news: HFCS isn’t so great

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

I read a study about high-fructose corn syrup today, after being amazed by another article I read about how they make the stuff. (The Wikipedia entry has a lot to say too.)

Here’s the kicker: at least some HFCS has a higher mercury concentration (0.56 ppm) than most* fish you eat. So, if you’re someone who shouldn’t be ingesting much mercury, HFCS is probably a bad idea too. Don’t take my word for it, though, read the study.

There are two processes for producing HFCS, and one of them generally leads to undetectable levels of mercury, but unfortunately, you can’t find out what you’re getting just by reading the ingredients list. And while 0.56ppm is the worst sample they found, again, you can’t tell you’re not getting that level too.

Contrast that to fish: most people watching their mercury intake know which kinds of fish to avoid and which are safe. There are recommendations on how often you should eat which kinds of fish. With HFCS-containing products (which, by the way, is soooooo many things), it’s simply a blind guess. 

It wasn’t immediately obvious that the FDA regulates mercury levels in HFCS, although it looks to me like they didn’t even know about it until this study.

So, the bottom line is that if you’re on a mercury-restricted diet, you should at least think about this issue. 

[*Details: the study detected a concentration of 28µg mercury per 50g HFCS (or, 0.56 ppm) in the worst sample. Compare to the FDA's list of mercury levels in fish.]

BlueHat

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

If getting a new product ready for market is time-consuming, it’s 10x worse to try to do a major revision of that product while supporting users! I’ve been down this road many times in the past, but it never fails to impress me as to how much harder it is to make forward progress when you simultaneously have to support users. I wonder how long it would have taken the NT team to deliver 3.1 if they had had users out there, since it took 4 years as it was!

Anyway, I’ve managed to find two days to escape to BlueHat in Redmond, which I’m really looking forward to. I’m a little concerned, though, since I’m here with my Mac, on Wi-Fi, and David Maynor is here…

Opera, anyone?

Monday, August 20th, 2007

In a totally off-topic post, I wanted to send congrats to my brother Scott Dispensa, who has been selected to join the New York Metropolitan Opera chorus.

In his honor, I’m currently playing La bohème louder than anyone around me would like.

Whoops…

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Whoops! It turns out that I forgot to change my DNS hosting after my move of my domain to my new registrar. It turns out that the new guys don’t actually do DNS hosting (at least, not in an obvious way), which is astounding for a company in the domain name business. Anyway, thanks to the free DNS hosting provided by zoneedit.com, we’re back up and running.

You’d think I’d have remembered to fix this, since I used to run a company that sold DNS hosting. Sigh…

Network Solutions tells lies (or they’re incompetent)

Monday, July 30th, 2007

The folks at Network Solutions either do underhanded and annoying things when talking to customers from customer service, or the representatives are just not very good at their jobs.

I called NetSol today to try to complete the transfer of a domain name to another registrar. I’m tired of paying $30+ per year for something that should be nearly free, and regardless, is 1/5 the cost elsewhere. I asked the polite individual on the other end of the line for my authorization code. She asked me why I wanted to transfer, and (like an idiot) I said it was due to cost.

She proceeded to tell me that she couldn’t complete the transfer without her customer service department calling me back tomorrow between 9:15 and 5:00 Eastern. I am booked in meetings almost all day tomorrow, so I was annoyed but I accepted it. I did ask her, though, why she bothered to ask me why I wanted to transfer if she knew full well that she couldn’t help me at all. She said something like "They tell me I have to ask these questions."

I decided to try again. This time when the rep asked my why I was transferring, I said "because I want to." She obviously didn’t have this on the script, so she essentially asked if it was because of price. I said that it was not, and that it had more to do with wanting to try other services. She had my auth code sent over 30 seconds later.

Folks, this is what kills reputations. Customer service should be there for, you know, service, not roadblocks. I paid NetSol something like $45 all-in for this domain last year. Part of that payment includes paying for customer service. Instead, I got the run-around.

The whole domain business is questionable to me, and I’m sure they all pull this crap. Still, I’m willing to shop around to see if anyone else even pretends to be helpful. No more NetSol for me.

Fun with power backup

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

One more tangent while we’re reminiscing about the Good Old Days. There’s a major power outage going on in San Francisco right about now, which may be the result of human error, to put it nicely :-)

It’s funny how this stuff still happens despite oaths to the contrary by data center providers. But it does!

A few years ago, my company had a lot of equipment co-located at a Switch & Data facility. They are (were?) a nationally recognized, relatively well respected data center company, and the location we were at had all of the modern trimmings: nice cages, dual utility power, a monstrous diesel generator, tons of A/C, controlled access, yada yada…

One day, predictably enough, both utility power circuits went down. The batteries kicked in and the diesel started to spin up. It got halfway up to operating RPM, but there it stayed. The local Switch team converged on the site and tried to get into diesel room. Only – it was locked!

But it wasn’t locked! You see, when the gigantor humungous diesel fired up, it started sucking tons of air. The wasn’t sufficiently ventilated, as it turned out, although nobody ever would have known, because they always tested with the door open (since they were in there watching anyway).

So there they were, with the diesel running way under operating RPM because it couldn’t get enough air, and they couldn’t get in to the room to diagnose it, because the door opened out and it was therefore vacuumed shut!

They wound up having to break the door down (not easy with a heavy commercial door and jamb), and hours later, the site came back online.

Data centers are a pain. Try to have at least three.

What was your first computer?

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

Brad Feld asks, "What was your first computer?"

Mine was a Commodore 64, complete with a Commodore 1541 5 1/4" Floppy Drive and a 300 bps modem. The whole thing was bought used in about 1985 for a couple hundred dollars.

I went from there to a comparatively gigantic Commodore 128D before I made the jump to PC land. Once I got there, I couldn’t believe that there was essentially no graphics support, no sound support, and you had to run some goofy program just to get BASIC working! (Commodores booted up into a BASIC interpreter.)

Those Commodores were great computers, though. I learned BASIC and 6502 assembly on them, and learned how to use a debugger with the add-on Warp Speed cartridge. I still remember the rush from signing onto my first BBS at 300 baud.

Anybody else?

“I’ll pay you for your checking account number”

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

What if someone said “I’ll pay you for your checking account number.” Would you give that person your information? Probably not.

But a similar question just came up in a conversation with a friend: should you be careful about accepting checks from just anybody? Everyone who writes you a check gets your checking account number and routing number printed on the back of their canceled check. I have a nice PDF from my bank with all of my canceled check images in it.

I think the best course of action is to only give checks to people or organizations that you trust to 1) not abuse your account, and 2) not let your account numbers be discovered by anyone else. That second one is a pretty high bar.

As for myself, I’m switching to credit card for everything I can. Checks suck.

Incidentally, this is exactly the kind of thing that PhoneFactor would be great for.

IE7 Crashing?

Friday, June 15th, 2007

I have noticed in the past few days that IE7 has been crashing a lot on msdn2.microsoft.com. Is anyone else seeing this or did I somehow screw up my system? Vista, latest updates, blah blah…

What I’ve been up to lately

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

I’ve been heads-down for the past six months focusing virtually all of my attention on two very special projects.

Tomorrow, Positive Networks will be announcing its newest service to the world: a two-factor authentication service for everyone. Readers of my blog will recognize by now that I’ve never been a fan of usernames and passwords, and I have long believed that the breaking point is near, when single-factor authentication simply won’t be practical any more.

I don’t want to jump the gun here, but I’m really excited about it – there are a couple of aspects of this service that are quite a bit different from what Positive has done in the past. Anyway, check back tomorrow for all of the details!

As for the second project, she’s been helping me code the first project for the last few weeks. If she keeps this up, I’ll have to add her to the credits. ;-)