*scottstuff*

Huh. I just noticed that the font that Safari uses for scottstuff uses lower-case numerals. That is to say, a 1 is the same height as a lower-case letter, not a capital letter, and some digits (4, 5, 7, at least) have decenders, just like the lower-case letters j, p, and q.

Kinda cool. I haven’t noticed a lot of mainstream fonts with lower-case numbers before.

Looks like they finally lit off the engines on SpaceShipOne. It was only a 15-second burn, but it took them over 68,000 feet up at a peak speed of 930 MPH. They’re claiming that they’re far and away the smallest company to have produced a supersonic passenger vehicle.

It looks like they damaged SS1 slightly on landing, when they had a gear failure, but they’re downplaying it, saying that it’s a minor repair.

It looks like they’re in a good place for their X-Prize attempt.

Just noticed that Cisco has announced a new higher-end GSR, the 12800. For those not familiar with Cisco, this is their high-end superrouter, with a price tag to match. According to Network World, Cisco wants $178k for the router itself (it’s unclear if this is just the chassis, or if it includes the processor card), $405k for the new 2x OC-192 card, and $468k for the 8x OC-48 card.

Zing! Choice: one supercar, or one Cisco line card.

It’s been a while since I’ve been involved with GSRs, but we were always running into weird limitations with them at Internap–things that worked perfectly fine on 7500s and Catalyst 6500s, but ate the CPU on the GSR. I don’t know if they’ve fixed things in the newer models or not, but at the time, the Catalyst 6500 series of switches (now also the 7600 router series) was usually substantially faster for 1/3 the money. That’s kind of how Cisco has worked, historically–they acquire companies and never really merge them, and they keep competing with each other internally, which leaves Cisco with a bizarre product lineup. At least they (mostly) run the same software these days.

For a fun exercise some time, take a look at Cisco’s product lineup and see how many card form-factors they have to support–there’s at least VIC/WIC cards for the [123]6xx models, NM cards or [23]6xx models, PA cards for 7[1245]xx models, CX cards for 75xx models (mostly gone), something weird for the 7300 (which looks like it’ll end up as a PA line eventually), then cards for the Catalyst 4xxx switch family (which now runs IOS and routes), cards for the Catalyst 6xxx/7600 family, cards for the 12xxx/GSR family, plus whatever the 10000 and 11000 lines use. That doesn’t even count things like PIXes, storage routers, ATM switches, and non-IOS hardware.

Their IOS software is, if anything, slightly worse. It’s been in dire need of a complete re-write for most of a decade. It’s very similar to the pre-OS X Apple story–they’ve tried and failed repeatedly. Right now, IOS is a router platform, a switch platform, a firewall platform, a SNA gateway platform, a telephony platform, a server platform, and they all interact in weird ways, and they all run on an outdated OS with a pile of technical shortcomings. It must cost them a huge amount of money just to keep the current IOS development process from collapsing.

We went out to Canlis with some friends on Friday. For those who aren’t familiar with Canlis, it’s one of the few dressy restaurants in Seattle. They’re more of a Special Occasion place then a Good Food place, but that’s not to say that the food is bad. It’s just that other places have better food for less money. They don’t have Canlis’s view or atmosphere, though.

I don’t really know what happened this time, but everything was just a bit off. They felt really crowded, their valets were behind picking up and dropping off cars, and the waiter wasn’t quite right. My wife ordered the chicken, which arrived half-raw (the center half inch was still translucent pink), and my Wasyugyu steak had 2-3 chunks of gristle. They tried to compensate for the chicken by bringing my wife a complementary desert, which would have worked, except she’d already ordered the apple pie. So, they brought her the pumpkin custard (which was decent), but not the pie that she’d ordered and wanted to try.

Wow, three local-paper quotes in the same day. According to the P-I (via AP), DirecTiVo boxes are in short supply all of a sudden due to unexpected demand. DirecTV lowered their prices to $99 from $200, and suddenly they can’t keep up. Apparently they sold 150,000 boxes last quarter.

I love my TiVos; I basically refuse to watch normal TV anymore. It’s a cliche, but TiVo really changes the way you approach TV watching. It’s also the best consumer electronics interface that I’ve ever seen. I’ll probably buy the Pioneer TiVo DVD burner once the price drops, half because the TiVo UI is so much better then any DVD player I’ve ever used.

I guess I’m a TiVo snob :-).

The Seattle P-I has their Return of the King review up; this is the first one that I’ve seen. They gave it 3 out of 4 stars; they didn’t like the way he handled the ending(s) of the movie.

Interesting–the Seattle Times is reporting a series of fake ads by “Plasma World” in newspapers across the country, selling plasma TVs (and down comforters and pillows?). The ads were paid for with counterfeit checks. The store address provided was a fake, and the phones were handled by a call center paid for by a stolen credit card. Customers who tried to buy things via the call center have had their credit cards milked for all that they’re worth.

You expect this sort of thing on the net, I guess, but for some reason it’s suprising to see it happening in the real world.

The power was out at home from 2:30 PM yesterday until 3:30 AM this morning. No mail, no web server, no heat, and no lights. Apparently we weren’t alone; 190,000 homes were dark yesterday, thanks to the big windstorm.

Another .com millionaire is getting into the rocket business:

PayPal founder Elon Musk unveils his Falcon orbital space vessel, a reusable rocket powered by oxygen and kerosene that promises to make satellite launches much cheaper. Erik Baard reports from Washington. [Wired News]

From a business standpoint, it’s probably just a waste of money (to a very close approximation, there’s 0 market for satellite launches), but one can always hope. On the other hand, If we’re ever going to do anything with space, we need to get NASA out of the way, and startups like this, even if they fail, still excite the public’s interest and demonstrate that the big, expensive defense-contractor version of spaceflight isn’t the only way to do things.

I’ve been reading a few things that suggest that the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network–the traditional phone system) is dying, soon to be devastated by VOIP. Since companies like Vonage are starting to switch consumers and small businesses, and larger companies have been moving internal phone service to VOIP for a while, within a few years most profitable customers will have have left traditional telcos for nice, cheap facility-less VOIP. That’ll leave expensive customers (rural consumers, for example) as the primary users of the old phone system, and that’ll destroy the business model of all of the telcos.

We’ll see. Maybe it’ll go that way, maybe it won’t, but I wouldn’t buy telco stock right now :-).

The story goes like this: once we have a good, semi-open way to map traditional phone numbers onto VoIP providers, we’ll start seeing pure-VoIP calls between (say) Vonage and 8x8 customers. Companies can jump in and do direct VoIP calls to other companies and consumers using the same database, either the ENUM thing that never seems to go anywhere, something DNS driven, or something new. Doesn’t really matter which way it happens, because one of them is going to happen very soon, probably within 6 months, and it’s probably going to be at least partially driven by the Vonages of the world in an attempt to cut their costs when talking to customers of the other VoIP providers.

Once we have open-ish IP telephony, unless regulation rears its ugly head, phone service will end up looking a lot like email. Consumers and very small businesses will pay a provider, and larger companies (and geeks) will handle it themselves, directly. In either case, you’ll end up paying someone to connect your calls to (and from) the legacy PSTN, so Aunt Mildred in Kansas can call you, but 95% of the traffic will be SIP end-to-end. Once this is in place, we can start exploring what you can really do with SIP above and beyond traditional telephone service (your phone number follows your laptop on vacation, for instance).

But, here’s the problem: SIP spam. What’s going to keep the spamming scum of the earth (and I’m being charitable here) from blasting your phone with automated crap 24x7? Regulation probably won’t do it–they’ll just connect directly (via IP) from outside of the US, just like some SMTP spammers do today. The economics are basically the same as they are for SMTP spam, it’s astoundingly cheap to send, and you only need a few returns per million to break even. It’s not completely clear that today’s spam filtering techniques really apply to SIP spam, besides blacklisting and whitelisting.

I’ve been enjoying the near-complete lack of phone spam at home since the FTC do-not-call list took effect. I wonder how long the quiet is going to last, though.

I’ve now been using SpamProbe for over a month to filter my spam at home, and it’s been working perfectly. It’s blocking an average of 210 messages per day, although it’s climbing; November 18-28 only had 2 days below 210, and averaged closer to 250. The last weekend was quite a bit lower, mostly due to server problems, but I’m currently at 433 spam messages today and counting.

Of those 210 messages each day, I’m probably seeing 1-2 false negatives. I haven’t seen any real false positives, although I’ve pulled a couple bounce messages out of my spam folder, just to keep from poisoning the spam database.

Interestingly enough, spamprobe is also eating all of the current Windows email virus messages. So, not only is it a spam filter, it does viruses too :-).

All in all, I’m a very happy camper. My personal spam count has been rolled back to 1998 levels. In essence, spam is now a complete non-issue for me.

Cool. It looks like Elitegroup (ECS) has announced a 8” tablet PC with more or less the hardware specs that I’ve been looking for (although a 1.8” hard drive might be better then the 2.5”, it’s hard to say). Looks like a cool toy, and it’s not too outrageously priced (a bit under $900, from what I can tell).

Now, if only it ran something other then XP… I’m not really a Windows fan this year (or any other recent year). I’d love to see what Apple’d do in this form factor, but they keep swearing that they’re not going to do it.

The Seattle Times says that there’s a new artisanal cheese store/factory opening up in the Pike Place Market. I’ve been missing good cheese as of late; pity I don’t have time to drop by this afternoon and pick some up for tomorrow.

The Puget Sound Business Journal has more details–it’s in the old Molbak’s space.

Also, there’s some discussion that suggests that they’re going to do butter and ice cream in a couple weeks.

Update: Okay, I’m weak. I stopped by after work and bought cheese for tomorrow. Mmm. Cheese. Anyway, it’s an interesting little store. It’s obvious that the owner has experience with upscale food stores (he more or less owns Pasta & Co., according to the paper), and this really feels like it’s a test store so they can get their three-ring-binder in shape before rolling out copies. That’s not a bad thing; the store seems decent, and I’d love to see more good cheese in the world. They still need to work on a few things, though. Service was pretty slow, and they could barely keep up with the small-ish crowd that had developed. But, they’re only a week old; they’ll get better.

I finally installed more RAM into my PowerBook this morning, going from 512MB to 768MB. I can’t say that it’s made a huge difference, but I haven’t had the computer grind to a stop yet today, either. Since it’s been slowing down every afternoon for weeks, and I’ve been killing off Mail and NetNewsWire just to keep the computer usable with 512MB, this seems like progress to me.

I ordered it from TransIntl; they had the best price. It arrived last week while I was out sick, so I can’t really comment on speed-of-delivery, but it was well-packaged, cheap, and works right.

I have a new CGI book event page up. I’ve had it sitting around for a while, but I never actually told anyone. I just finally added the redirect, so my CGI book event page is now the default at http://scottstuff.net/books, instead of PHP iCalendar. The iCalendar version was easy to put up, but it’s painfully hard to read; the new one should be quite a bit better.

Also, I noticed that Jimmy Carter, Tom Douglas, and Terry Brooks are signing books next month.

If you’re still using the PHP iCalendar-generated RSS feed, you should really flip to the new one. It has better detail, and it’s not such a huge hit on my poor server. I’m probably going to kill off the PHP one eventually.