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The other day I was at a T-Mobile hotspot. I used to have an account, but couldn’t remember it. I have various standard usernames and did a password recovery on one. I was prompted for my city of birth, which I entered and I was allowed in. It turns out that the person who owned the account had two things in common with me, Username and city of birth.

I quickly noticed that I had logged into the wrong account when T-Mobile logged me in and said “Welcome SomebodyElsesName”. I looked at the contact info, logged into Gmail and wrote an e-mail to the owner of the account to let him know his new password and that the whole thing was an accident. He was very understanding and thanked me for behaving this way.

Just thought I’d bring some attention to this problem. As more of us go on-line, this is something that is going to happen more often as time goes by unless companies wise up and require some form of verification before allowing password recovery. If T-Mobile logged me in for 30 minutes and made me confirm by entering a code sent to my e-mail account, this wouldn’t be such a serious problem.

I recently ordered a Kurobox. This thing is a low powered computer that can run Linux. So far I’ve not done much with it, aside from installing Debian. So far so good.

I hope to test out some neat features with it, such as using it as my dedicated file and print server for the home. My regular desktop has a 500 watt power supply and the electricity costs for a 24×7 file and print server at home isn’t that bad, but a penny saved is a penny earned.

I stopped by the Circuit City in Glendale and noticed that they advertise the HDTV’s in two fashions (720p & 1080p). Every model I cross referenced online that were labeled 720p were also capable of 1080i. I think it’s fairly obvious that this is a marketing scheme to make the 1080p screens look 360p better in peoples minds. Forget the fact that there are no native 1080p broadcasts. . .

Word to the wise, do your own research before spending a ton of money on an HDTV. Do not rely on commission based sales people.

Since Amazon gave every user a $15 credit for Unbox + TiVo, I thought I’d give it a shot. My final verdict is a solid not bad. The quality of the downloaded video is just sub-DVD quality. All of the videos I tested were in 4:3 native aspect ratio w/ black bars on top and bottom for a total 16:9 aspect ratio. I just used the “Aspect” button on my Series 3 to resize this fill my entire screen.

As I have a Series 3 TiVo w/ CableCARDs, I have no PPV available to me. The Amazon+Unbox appears to fill that niche okay. With a 5 Mbps connection from Charter, it takes just a little over to download the full movie.

Tonight I helped one of my buddies build an auto-attendant on Cisco CME + Unity. I was told that the auto-attendants were all controlled by tcl scripts, and figured I knew the language fairly well as I had experience writing tcl scripts for irc bots in the late 90’s. It wasn’t, I had to write the script using a silly Cisco GUI editor. To set a variable you have to drag an “equals” sign (=) labeled ’set’ from the left side onto the part of the script where the variable is used. As I moved the “equals” sign to the right side to put it in place, everything was expanded and I lost track of where I was supposed to put it. Once I finally put it in the correct place I had to right-click and properties it to set the variable. Regardless, we got the job done fairly quick, and his customer is happy.

Now I’m not anti GUI or anything, but the interface really slowed things down. It was both clumsy and cumbersome. As a person who writes scripts on a regular basis, I felt like I was tripping over the GUI over and over. I can’t imagine having to use this on a regular basis. Now I’m not an elitist or anything like that, there are many GUI’s which I use on a daily. I even use QmailAdmin GUI more often than the command line interface when dealing with my mail servers. All I am really saying is that I believe Cisco’s CUE Editor needs some serious usability work done. It is a horrid interface for creating scripts.