Watch out for Amway/Quixtar

I was recently approached in a parking lot by a fresh off the boat Indian guy looking for the campus bookstore. I pointed him in the right direction and began walking away. As I did, I heard the question "Are you from India?". I get this a lot, and I politely answered that no, I am not, but my parents are from Bangladesh, the country next door. He starts asking me where I'm from, what I do, etc., and he exchanges the same information with me. He tells me that he works in IT, but that he also has his own business on the side in which he has a concept similar to amazon.com, in which he is partnered with people like Dell and IBM to help increase their market share. I think "cool, this guy might have connections, it never hurts to keep contacts." I'm thinking that because he is a kind of start up, he might need a coder to manage this new amazon.com type of website. How wrong I was.

He asked for my phone number, and since I thought he'd be a good connection since he had a start-up internet business, we exchanged numbers. I get call Friday night saying how he really felt good about me, and that his company was kind of hiring. He wanted to meet to discuss the opportunity.

The meeting started with a condescending overview of how franchising works, and how McDonalds makes their money, and how I have to multiply my time by getting others to work for me if I want to become wealthy. Instead of offering me a job opportunity in any real start-up, he goes on about how I can open an online store through this system he uses, and how I can get bonuses for signing up other people into the system. It became apparent that this guy was just trying to get me to sign up so that he gets more of a cut.

Basically this guy has an "online store" where all of his product is provided by this company called Quixtar, which is just the online arm of the notorious Amway. I suspect the online store website itself isn't anything at all but just the Quixtar page itself, and I'd have to put in some sort of ID number indicating that I'm buying from him. The fact that he had given me a business card with no URL for this supposed e-business website should have tipped me off.

He showed me some DVD on his laptop of a conference he attended, a Quixtar conference where 20k people with 40 millionaires among them attended. Of course this is a part of the scam, you have to drink the cool-aid and attend conferences and meetings to be successful...and guess what, you have to pay big money to attend, money that goes directly into the hands of higher up members who host the conference to teach you how to be successful. There is some bigwig up at the top of this scheme who started a company that sells informational materials and conference tickets on how to be successful in this program.

The point is that there is really not money in moving the retail products themselves, only money in selling promotional materials and signing up other poor saps. I think I've learned my lesson. This guy was dishonest with me, misrepresenting himself as a businessman looking to hire, when really he is just a peon in this pyramid setup. Note I don't say pyramid scheme, because that is a very specific thing regulated by the FTC, but Quixtar straddles the boundary between multi-level marketing and pyramid scheme. So if you ever encounter someone claiming to be a business person wanting to discuss an opportunity, makes sure you ask them upfront if they are with Quixtar...and if they are, wish them good luck and walk away.

Gutsy Counter

Its just a few days now until Gutsy goes official. If you've been on the fence about Linux, give this one a try when it officially comes out.

Editing hosts file for convenience and ad blocking

DNS Servers
When you type in www.google.com into your browser, we all know that there is a DNS server somewhere that gets queried to resolve that name into an IP address that can actually be used to start connections. But did you know that you can override these lookups locally? The TCP/IP stack looks in a file called "hosts" that resides somewhere on your system to FIRST resolve names to IP addresses before querying the DNS. This file is just a plain text document with a list of IP addresses and hostnames. On most *nix machines (MAYBE not on all BSDs though), the file lives in /etc. On Windows, it's usually in windows\system32\drivers\etc. Play around with it.

Make Digg Load Faster
I've had a bug with the digg ad servers that causes each digg page to take upwards of a minute to load, with my status bar saying "Transferring data from y.digg.com", so I added the following line:

127.0.0.1 y.digg.com

This redirects all requests to y.digg.com to the IP address 127.0.0.1 which always corresponds to your own machine, the localhost. Since your machine isn't hosting any evil ad server, your browser can't establish a connection and gives up immediately trying to contact y.digg.com, making digg load faster. There are other fun things you can do, like add aliases to your hosts file for commonly accessed hostnames:

192.168.1.110 rajserv

This could let you do things like ssh rajserv on a local network instead of having to type in the whole IP address.

General Adblocking
The more general thing to do with this technique is to find hosts files on the net that have a list of all the bad adservers on the web. One such file can be found here, or you can just google for "hosts file". Some care must be taken editing these, just make sure to keep back up copies of the file when you are editing. On *nix, you will have to be root, so make sure to do the proper su or sudo before editing.
Having one of these adblocking hosts files pretty much blocks every ad/banner/cookie you can imagine, making the web experience a lot faster for many sites. Enjoy!

Learning Typesetting in TeX and LaTeX

If you are in academia, or ever have been, chances are you've seen the output of a system called LaTeX (pronounced la-tek or lay-tek). This typesetting system lets you create professional document with figures, mathematical equations, etc. Many professor's notes are written in this format and then distributed via PDF or HTML. Many professors then take sets of notes like this and publish textbooks. Pretty much every peer reviewed journal out there requires submissions to be formatted in LaTeX. In short, if you want to be in academia, its important to know how to work with it.

I just wanted to share this good tutorial I found:
http://frodo.elon.edu/tutorial/tutorial.pdf

This is a good reference if you are wondering "how do I insert a _________?", this document will most likely tell you how to get the symbol you desire. Another good place to get this type of information is from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula
It turns out that the equations and math typesetting in Wikipedia use a subset of TeX, of which LaTeX is a variation/implementation. So most of these are valid and useful, although you may find that some of the tags/commands on this page don't work as expected.

I hope this was useful to SOMEONE...

Gutsy goes beta officially tomorrow!

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been using Linux at work for about 9 months now, and switched to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise a few months ago in hopes of having GUI configuration of multiple monitors. The version of Ubuntu that is the newest officially supported one (Feisty Fawn) has no such tool, but the release that is coming out next month (Gutsy Gibbon) does:
And this goes officially beta tomorrow! I'm excited. Of course it's been available in alpha form for a few months now, but the development process is moving along towards the release date next month.

Motorola STB 5C bug?

DVB can be encrypted, making it useless once captured via Firewire. If you're using the Apple Firewire SDK, these channels come up as "Copy Once" in the Copy Protection field. I found a workaround...just play with the Pause and Play buttons during playback and recording. I hope this works for you, and sorry for the intentional vagueness. The DMCA is a scary thing.

1080p Macbook Update

This is an update to my original post, which is a full tutorial on getting 1080p to come out of your new Macbook.

I've been getting comments about how the workaround given here doesn't work for some particular TV models. Several people have issues with 10.4.9. I would suggest firstly to update to the LATEST (10.4.10 I believe), which is what I've been conducting my tests with.

There is another caveat I failed to mention, and that there is an issue with signal strength that could be at fault. I've read reports on other forums that TVs expect higher signal voltage levels than what the Macbook outputs, resulting in the TV being unable to lock onto the appropriate parts of the signal. This could be the problem for people getting a picture for a moment, and then a garbled nonsense screen. This device could be the answer, although it is pricey. Googling for HDMI ampilfier might help, or if you're and adventuresome electronics tinkerer, you might be able to DIY, that is make a three channel high bandwidth amplifier.

Others have suggested using switchresx:

Take the 1080i settings and just disable interlaced button and set the 30Hz refresh rate to 60Hz. I now get the problem that the picture is totally blurry/blocky. (Thanks David)

This is unfortunate, because when this works correctly, you get a glorious full resolution image that looks breathtaking.

My last bit of additional advice is to bootcamp install Windows if all else fails. XP home is sufficient, and hopefully you have an old copy lying around. I retired an old Pentium II machine I had with XP Home on it, and transferred the license/key to my Macbook. Or you can hope Leopard has fixed this issue entirely, but that is a more expensive solution, and one that we have to wait for until next month.