Most of us have received at least one of those urgent forwarded virus alert emails from friends and relatives.  I got one last night, announcing a “new and very dangerous” greeting card or postcard virus that will “Erase your C: drive.”  This does not concern me, since none of the computers I use to read email have a C: drive, for one.  Second, this is just another one of those viral email hoaxes, that provoke well-meaning folks to flood their friends’ mailboxes with empty warnings.  If you get one, check it out before you forward.  Most of them say the virus alert has been issued by McAfee or other anti-virus company and verified by Scopes, a site that tracks these things.  But, if you go to those sites yourself, you will find disclaimers exposing the hoax.  Trust your friends, but verify their information.

This does not mean there aren’t dangerous computer viruses: any executable attachment or link in an email can be the source of a Microsoft Windows virus. Note I did _NOT_ say “computer virus”. Viruses infect vulnerable software, not computer hardware.  By nature, single-user computer systems like Microsoft Windows are vulnerable.  The constant parade of security fixes attack symptoms, but do not change the fundamental design.

Please consider switching to a safe operating system. The obvious choice is one based on Unix, a multi-user system built on the premise that the system files must be protected from the users and the users’ files from each other.  Unix-like systems available to the home and small business user are Apple’s OS/X, GNU/Linux, Oracle’s Solaris, or one of the several BSD variants.  If your budget or preferences exclude Apple Computer from your choices, you can convert your unsafe Microsoft Windows system to GNU/Linux for free (or, at most, the cost of a blank CD or DVD disk and a long download). And, if needed, you can keep Windows on the hard drive to run programs you “must” have, using the Grub menu to select which system to boot.

Keeping your Windows applications might not be necessary, as GNU/Linux comes with every type of program imaginable, either on the install disk or downloadable over the Internet (from the distributor of the system you install). If you are comfortable with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice will be easy to switch to.   For those who need to make the switch gradually, many of the most popular Windows programs can be installed on Linux directly, running under Wine (or the easier-to-use commercial Wine wrapper, Crossover Office), and still enjoy the safety of the underlying system.

Firefox, with which many Windows users are already familiar, is the default Internet browser in Linux. A wide variety of games, chat clients, and other office productivity tools for managing and editing photos and documents are either built-in or available with a mouse click–at no additional cost. Updates and fixes for the software you have installed are automatic, but on your schedule–the system never reboots without your permission or interrupts your work.

How is this possible? Because of a 30-year movement started by Richard M. Stallman and maintained by the Free Software Foundation to promote freely-sharing the ideas embodied in computer software, embodied in the source code itself.  It is possible because the developers are paid to solve a problem, usually through leveraging other solutions through source code written by others and freely distributed. You only pay if you need personal services installing and using the software, through print books, telephone support, and consultant support.  Even though only the source code is freely available (as in free speech), companies package complete systems on CDs and DVDs and distribute them for free (as in free beer), or for the cost of packaging and shipping.  You only pay if you decide to keep using the product and need support.

Free (openly published) software enriches society, not corporations. And, it creates jobs, by reducing startup and operating costs for small business and permits rapid adoption by larger companies.  The vast majority of publicly-accessible web sites are served by computers running GNU/Linux–a secure, stable, and scalable system that you, too, can adopt for greater peace of mind and to unlock the full power of your computer.  After all, your computer is not sick, your software is.

Over the weekend, we attended a very good Linux conference, the annual LinuxFest Northwest, where one of the presenters’ topics centered around the need for a systematic approach to systems and network administration–putting in place a process and following it.  But, what if the process is flawed or incomplete?  The ensuing week has been a real lesson in the frustrations of failed processes: corporate policies and procedures that simply do not address the atypical problem, or that have glaring omissions of solutions to obvious issues.

As frequent readers may know, we’ve been ranting about degraded to unavailable ADSL service for a couple of months now, as our Internet access has effectively deteriorated to a few hours of useful access between midnight and 8:00am.  During this time, Qwest has progressed from “it must be your problem” to “try a static address–it’s only $25 plus $7 a month” to “we acknowledge there is a problem” to “the equipment will arrive in two weeks” to “yes, it’s here, but it will take a few weeks to install” to “not yet, but you are on the priority list.”

Well, we depend on getting connected and staying connected to make a living.   Other customers in “our fair city” may be miffed at not being able to watch streaming movies or play multi-user online games for a few weeks, but getting cut off in the middle of a software upgrade or unable to connect at all to a customers’ remote server 600 miles away is a real business killer.  We waited.  April 15 (the date I was quoted around the first of April) came and went, and the service got progressively worse.  May 1st came, and it got still worse.

I think I’ve been patient, in the hope that a corporation as large as Qwest has some sort of survival instinct and is capable of making decisions and taking action to correct service issues.  But, patience only goes so far.  Finally, on May 2, on the advice of other IT professionals and my daughter, who home-schools the grandchildren and also depends on reliable connectivity, we decided to abandon ADSL and ordered a switch to cable internet and phone service, which will take about a week to switch over.  Not surprisingly, two days later, we noted an uncharacteristic session reset early in the morning.  Hmm.  Sure enough, seven hours later, the internet speed is staying up near the 70-80% of max (7Mbps) we would like to see.  The signal-to-noise ratio, which had been hovering between zero and 8, averaging 2, is now some astronomical number, which I looked at closer, and realized is actually a negative 32-bit signed number, which is worse than I have seen it.

Thanks, Qwest.  You finally came through.  But, too late, and not enough–by mid-afternoon, speed dropped and sessions started resetting, probably due to the low SNR. You have lost a customer.  Your customer service process and network provisioning policies have failed.  You failed by not addressing the concerns of technically-knowledgeable customers,  by not following through and responding appropriately to trouble calls, and by failing to plan capacity properly for network demand.  It is infuriating to watch bandwidth on a “standard” line drop to zero while trying to bring up the customer support screen on the corporate web through all of the advertisements for much higher bandwidth service–which we know you can’t deliver anytime soon. We also suspect that you aren’t really concerned with fixing the current service: the “new equipment” that you are provisioning is really planned to support the higher-bandwidth service, which will be quickly consumed when customers opt-in for the higher rates, and the cycle will start over.

But, Qwest, you are not alone.  The entire communications industry customer-service process is in a failed state.  When attempting to switch over to cable service, the phone number to call for installation wasn’t the “right” one.  The next call went to a call center half-way across the country, which, after getting disconnected in a transfer and calling back and giving all our information, turned out to not be the right one, either.  Yet a third number (not listed anywhere) started the process from the beginning, cancelling our original service order, which had been set up through a retail agent.  Going to the store added no value to the on-line order process except for the fact that their Internet connection actually worked to complete the transaction, which was of no importance, which leads us to believe that either the retail store is going to be stiffed on their order commission or they get paid a flat rate for writing orders whether or not the customer actually gets service or not.  Another process failure point.  But, finally, we have a tentative installation date and a plan, but a sinking feeling that we may be trading one failed support and provisioning process for another.

The third thing that happened this week to trigger the title subject of this post was instigated by text message that popped up on our Montana cell phone, which we keep active for the benefit of our many customers in our previous location.  The message stated that our cell provider was merging with another carrier and we should visit the new carrier’s store in person to effect migrating service to their network.  So, we did as requested.  Unfortunately, carrier number one did not have any stores locally, so carrier number two’s local stores, with no local customer base to draw from, have no process for doing this.  We stood at the counter in the store for an hour and a half, for the purpose of transferring $75 worth of prepaid cell time to a new $10 phone, which we will probably not renew.  The store agent was very resourceful, dedicated, and diligent, calling one customer service number after another–some of them twice–and getting forwarded in circles, to no avail.  Calls to supervisors yielded helpful but ultimately not useful suggestions.  Meanwhile, other customers came and went, spending hundreds of dollars on complicated new smart phones and expensive service plans, having to wait for other agents while ours patiently endured dead-end after dead-end trying to bridge the disconnect in the transfer process.  Cell provider number one said we should have received a new phone  “in the mail,” but, with a pre-paid account, we never get a paper statement, so they had no idea where we lived, having moved so long ago that the forwarding has expired.  It appears the process in this transfer encompasses, but does not provide for prepaid accounts that have no paper trail.  Process fail.  In this case, after tying up three people–ourselves plus the store agent–and the time of a countless parade of customer support technicians and supervisors for 90 minutes, we were told to come back in several days, after they had resolved the process issue.  Well and good, but the nearest service store is 20 miles away.  Recovery of $75 worth of cell phone minutes that will expire in six months (or in one week, if we aren’t successful) somehow doesn’t seem worth $16 worth of gasoline, four or five hours of our time, and the cost of a new phone to replace one we were planning to throw away in six months anyway.

So, Chaos Central is in full duplex mode this week, creating and absorbing the chaos that results from poorly planned and badly executed processes, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and blindly stumbling one way and then another, through–as the classic computer adventure game says–“…a maze of twisty little passages, all alike,” from which there is no exit.

Having vented spleen in our last post about waiting for the phone company to install their next-generation equipment so we can get even the slower speed access we pay for (until our neighbors upgrade to the faster service, which all shares the same base bandwidth), we have to do something with ourselves when the DSL starts crashing.

As readers may know, the Unix Curmudgeon’s partner in life, the Nice Person, is an accomplished fiber artist–spinner, weaver, and quilter.  As you may  or may not know, there are strong connections between weaving and computer technologies.  The invention of the Jacquard system of controlling multi-shaft looms 210 years ago, in 1801, became a foundation idea for data processing.  Using punched tablets to control the weave patterns was adapted by Hollerith to electrically operate counters to tabulate the results of the 1880 U.S. Census.  Punched cards were used for electronic data tabulation for the next century, and, in the early 1950s, extended to include not only the data, but the programs in von Neumann architecture computers.  With the development of computer terminals and portable magnetic storage, punched cards became relics.  Even Jacquard looms became controlled by computers.

So, it is natural for computer-oriented folk to migrate back to the beginnings, with hand-weaving techniques.  A couple of months ago, the Unix Curmudgeon tuned up an old 4-shaft table loom and took a weaving class, producing an acceptable pair of placemats and matching hotpad.  The final exam, so to speak, is to make a scarf, using our own selection of materials.  For this, I chose to use one of our floor looms, a 4-shaft Gilmore, and to weave a doublecloth piece in Tencel (a silk-like man-made cellulose fiber) and wool.  As with computer programs, the design takes a bit of time and calculations (I used the draft from a magazine project as a template, but the fiber mix and project size adapted to my idea); the coding and debugging (dressing the loom) takes a long time, and the testing (actual weaving) not so long.

Of course, a complex threading pattern, like a complex computer program, is inevitably fraught with errors.  Some are caught in a “bench check” — visual inspection, and some only during testing, which often takes one back to the drawing board.  In my case, the tie-on revealed a few sleying errors (threading errors in the reed, or beater), which also revealed what I thought was a minor threading error in the heddles–a thread on the wrong shaft.  For this, I tied a new heddle and rethreaded a couple of warp threads.  But, an inch or so into the weaving, when the weave structure became visible in the cloth, it became apparent that the “fix” did not fix the problem: all of the warp to the left of the misthreading were offset.  At this point, the only solution is to unweave, reversing the treadling sequence and passing the shuttles in reverse order, until the warp, and rethread about 100 warp threads.  Hey, this is just like writing a program, when you don’t have a clear grasp of the structure or simply make an error.

So it goes.  Like quilting, weaving is a lot like computer programming. Design, built, debug, test, redesign, build, etc.

This, hopefully, will end up as a wool/silk (Tencel is a less-expensive substitute) aviator scarf.

Chaos Central (our Pacific Northwest home and office) seems aptly named these days.  We have a number of projects and crises going simultaneously, all to keep us active into our golden years.  Of course, the golden years are turning out to be peeling gilt rather than solid gold, but we are surviving the recession and housing bust.

Item:  after 20 months on the market, we have gradually lowered the price on our Big Sky cottage to what we refinanced it for in 2003 to repair the roof and replace the heating system.  The market is picking up, but prices still falling, with new houses in the development on the east side essentially going at cost.  Meanwhile, we are still working, and will for some time, as our home equity, once a valid retirement investment, has evaporated: retirement has become an artifact of the 20th century.

Item: our DSL connection, on which we depend for our livelihood, has always been a bit variable, but has been essentially unusable between 9:00am and midnight for the last five or six weeks.  We have a nominal 7Mbps line, which, early in the morning runs at a respectable 5.5Mbps, but drops to 500Mbps by mid-morning.  By the time high school is out in early afternoon, it specs out to about the 19.2kbaud speed of fast dial-up connections available 20 years ago.  The PPPoE connection, which used to stay up for weeks at a time, starts resetting as often as every two minutes, which stops file downloads dead, drops remote login sessions, and times out name service lookups.  We are basically off-line.

Qwest, our internet service provider, finally admitted it was a bandwidth problem, caused by congestion on the circuits.  The last time this happened, only a few short months ago, they suggested it was a “bad modem.”  But, curiously, the service seemed to improve before I could get the replacement installed, and the session drops continued, though at a slower rate.  At that time, I had written a Perl script to check the WAN IP address on the PPPoE session once an hour and post the address to a file on our external web site, so I could connect with our network services while out of the office.  But, with the session dropping every few minutes, this obviously won’t work anymore, so I rented a static address ($25 setup plus $6/month forever), which doesn’t improve service one whit, but does make it easier to reconnect.

Supposedly, the equipment needed to fix the problem is sitting on the loading dock at the phone company, but will be installed and configured “in due time.”  Meanwhile,  our only recourse is to shift office hours earlier and earlier.  If service does not improve, the other solution is to switch to cable, which, for all we know, potentially has similar problems.

Interestingly enough, at the same time the providers are struggling with oversold network capacity, they are advertising even faster speeds.  I’m convinced this is simply a program of competitive sales pitches between DSL and cable, and provides no actual improved service on the part of either provider.  Now, one can still purchase T-1 (DS1) service, at a guaranteed 1.5Mbps (versus 5.5 to zero, probably average less than T-1), for about 10 times what ADSL service costs, with appropriately larger equipment and installation costs.  That’s appropriate for a 10-12 person office, but a bit of overkill for a two-person shop.  But, if it means the difference between doing business and not, it is something to look into.  ADSL (Another D*n Slow Link), like ISDN (It Still Does Nothing), is yet another telephone technology that doesn’t live up to the promise.

The problem with the phone and cable companies is they can’t build infrastructure fast enough to keep up with demand.  Ever since the explosive growth of the Internet started 20 years ago, capacity has lagged behind demand by orders of magnitude.  Some of the demand is fueled by the aforementioned competitive claims of every faster speeds offered by the two major broadband providers, the phone company and the cable company.  Don’t be fooled by fantastic speed claims: it only lasts until your neighbor subscribes, too, and there is no minimum speed guaranteed. Caveat emptor.