ANDREW PENG – Page 12 – He's dead, Jim

Palm Pre Out, Employee Referral Plans Left Hanging

June 6, 2009 No Comments

It’s not only the SERO users, but the Simply Everything Plus users as well. If you log into the Simply Everything Plus page on Sprint, you’re greeted with this message:

Because of unprecedented demand, the Palm Pre is not yet available to Everything Plus^SMReferral Program shoppers.

Which, actually is just a polite way of saying “Sorry, you can’t get them yet, because there are suckers willing to pay more for them right now and our bean counters say we make more money off of them”

Fine, I don’t have a problem with that, business is business. At least throw us a bone and let us pre-order or put down a deposit so we can get one when they do become available!

Speaking of suckers willing to pay more for them right now, if you check eBay, there are phone selling for nearlt $600, the full retail price of the phone without contract. I’m not aware of any outages right now, but it seems like the fat populus just doesn’t want to leave their nice comfy chair to get the phones.

Rapid Repair Guides have also posted their disassembly of the phone, and estimated that the cost in components only (in bulk of course) is around $170. Not too bad, good job to Palm for making the Pre attractively price for those under contract, unlike the $600 iPhone when it first came out.

Notes

SERO 500 + Palm Pre, part II

May 26, 2009 No Comments

In my previous post, I discussed somehow squirreling a Palm Pre onto my excellent SERO 500 plan.

As promised, I went to a local Sprint store and asked one of their sales agents if I could activate a non-contractual Palm Pre (purchased at the full retail price) on the SERO 500 plan. The agent was very understanding, and agreed that they were all instructed to NOT activate any Palm Pre’s unless the plan has the word “Everything” in it. He also said that while Sprint stores would be well stocked, Best Buy locations would be getting around a max of 5 per store. He then told me that if I did want to get a Palm Pre activated on SERO I should buy one at Best Buy at the non-contract price and attempt to activate it online.

Apparently he doesn’t know if there are any specific checks in their system to disallow activating the Palm Pre yourself, but it would most likely not work and ask you to call customer service. What he said next suprised me: apparently there are around 35000 customer service reps in call centers – he suggested that not all of them know the policy or care about the policy and I would have a very good chance of getting it activated that way.

To add some relief – he then told me that the Palm Pre should be available for employee-referral type plans after 60 days from launch, much like the Instinct was. Happy Pre-hunting!

what?

SERO 500 + Palm Pre

May 25, 2009 1 Comment

The Palm Pre – supossed real competition for the iPhone with true multitasking and oodles of other cool features – isn’t going to be available for SERO users. For those that don’t know, SERO is an older employee referral plan that has:

Unlimited data
Unlimited text messaging
Unlimited picture and MMS messaging
between 500-unlimited voice calling
Unlimited roaming
7PM Nights and Weekends
Unlimited nights and weekends

The most basic plan of $30 (around $35 after taxes) is for 500 minutes, which is plenty for me. Most of my calls are nights and weekends anyways, and I have never exceeded 100 minutes of peak usage.

The downside is that Sprint says with the upcoming Palm Pre, you must upgrade to a plan with “Everything” in it such as “Simply Everything” or “Everything Plus” – this is assuming that you want the $200 in rebates and the $150 in instant discount for extending your contract to get the Palm Pre at a decent price of $200 in contract. So…what if I don’t want to extend my contract? What if I pay full price for the phone and activate it, will it work?

So I started a chat session with an online Sprint CSR to see if I could purchase a Palm Pre out of contract at full price ($549) to activate on my (awesome) SERO 500 plan. After explaining that no, I wasn’t interested in extending my contract, I got this response back:

…no guarantee that this will allow you to work with this plan due to the plan being out of before the device came out.

At this point I gave up and decided I’ll go to a Sprint store and ask in person. Results soon!

Notes

Prevent spoofing sessions with public-key encryption

May 16, 2009 No Comments

More updates working on implementing a mod_rewrite\Apache implementation of mod_secdownload – just finished coding in a public key encryption verification for the script, basically the same method as implemented in mod_secdownload. Whew, I’m pooped, goin’ to sleep.

Notes

Secure, fast, low-resource file delivery

May 16, 2009 1 Comment

Here’s the problem. I have a handful of files between 500MB-800MB that I need to host up on my website. I need to get these files to people that belong to a certain vBulletin community, and only people of that vBulletin community. Furthermore, the people of that community aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, so it has to be easy. I have limited resources, which include a shared LAMP webserver, and a 150/150 VPS.

The requirements? Just a few:

Must be able to track users to sessions to monitor and log abuse
Links generated should be anti-leech and secured with one-time use tokens
Links generated can only be accessible from this vBulletin community
Links must be easy to use

The limitations? It’s like being handcuffed to a telephone pole:

Hosting is done on shared hosting (no persistant readfile() sessions in PHP or other ugly CPU intensive scipting)
Hosting can also be done on 150/150 VPS. I’ve used lighttpd, but it chokes on sending files that are bigger than my RAM capacity

Things I’ve tried, and failed to work:

Doing the classic PHP readfile() and writing to the buffer
- Far too slow
- Persistant PHP session isn’t nice to shared hosting
- readfile() in lighttpd and Apache cause the process to consume massive amounts of memory for large files, doesn’t work in VPS
- More than 5 users or so and the load spikes to high heaven. Server /suicides
Using lighttpd and mod_secdownload
- Far faster than PHP readfile()
- Will only work on VPS as shared hosting is Apache only
- If you don’t have enough RAM (which I don’t on the VPS) – the process with explode and hang. I can’t kill it, and the server refuses connections until the watchdog resets the process or until I reboot the VPS. Server /suicides again.
Using mod_rewrite in conjunction with rewritemap and prg in Apache
- Sounds perfect – you can create tokens, and then revoke them with the rewritemap program, then use mod_rewrite to hide path source!
- …Until you realize that you need to modify your apache.conf to specify the rewritemap program (requires root or sudo, not happening on either VPS or shared)
- Your rewrite program is executed on server start, and is persistent – which is not allowed on shared hosting anyways. I /suicide
Apache with mod_xsendfile
- Can’t install custom modules on Apache in shared or VPS hosting
- Apache is still a fat hog of a server, and using Apache to send binary files is about as efficient as using Humvees for mass transit.
Dynamic mod_rewrite definitions in .htaccess files
- Use a manual lockfile with a SQL database to dynamically generate .htaccess mod_rewrite definitions
- Each rewrite entry for a unique URL a time limit
- Each successful request for token updates both the database and the .htaccess file
- This seems like the best solution – it will work with the most hosting environments too
- This behavior is basically emulating mod_secdownload for lighttpd in Apache with mod_rewrite

The last entry (emulating mod_secdownload in Apache with mod_rewrite) looks good, and is probably going to be what I’m going to use – I’ll be posting the results here as soon as I finish coding it. Weeeee!

Notes

Fears of swine flu worse than swine flu itself

May 7, 2009 No Comments

Why is everyone absolutely going nuts. Each day, 2700 people die of malaria, but it doesn’t make national news. To date, less than 30 people have died of swine flu, oh, sorry, H1N1, and out of that 30 or so, only one has died in the US, and it wasn’t a US citizen to begin with. It was an infant that came from Mexico.

News

Wee new dev box

May 6, 2009 No Comments

Recently ordered up a pair of Opteron 280‘s to stick in my GT24 – looking forward to having a dev box. Too bad it doesn’t support hardware virtualization – otherwise it’d be an ESX box.

Additionally, here’s a picture of the live network traffic on my box – it is generated with MRTG and cron and shows the rate of network traffic on my internet interface on my home router. You can see it on my “Network Usage Graph” on the right ->

Notes

Five Best File Recovery Tools

May 4, 2009 No Comments

http://lifehacker.com/5237503/five-best-free-data-recovery-tools

For once lifehacker has something useful posted. I’d like to add that I’ve also used PC Inspector File Recovery with success too.

Uncategorized

Feeding the sharks

April 23, 2009 No Comments

In hopes that a spam spider will grab these websites and spam them up (for a little interwebnets experiment), i’m going to post these links here. Pay no attention to them if you’re human.

http://forums.code86.com

http://www.uberboxen.com

Life

TV Shows, yay

April 22, 2009 No Comments

Pitchmen on tonight on Discovery, then Mythbusters. Maybe it’s the other way around, but it’s bad that i’m getting excited over a TV show.