I have what seems to be a relatively straightforward problem. I lock my blackberry, put it in my pocket and discover that a perfect series of motions result in the phone dialing 911. I find out the phone has dialed 911 when the emergency dispatcher calls me back to ask if I have an emergency. Should I be concerned when they accept my “no Sir/Maam, we do not”?
After scouring the Internet this weekend, and waiting on hold with AT&T my fears were confirmed. There is simply no way to remove the “Emergency Call” option when the phone is locked. However I did find another option which has been working just as good if not better. By holding down the mute key the phone will go into standby mode disabling all of the keys except the mute button. Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to map the side keys to the standby function, but it is a step in the right direction.
Don’t it’s not supported.
There was an Earthquake this morning in Los Angeles. If you are interested in the full details check out the USGS site here:
Magnitude 5.4 - GREATER LOS ANGELES AREA, CALIFORNIA
Reports are sizing the quake in the mid 5’s - which means if you are in LA you felt it. I must say it was in interesting experience looking out the window in my 28th floor office watching the world move.
As an unfortunate side effect the elevators serving the high rise (the upper floors) of the building are still out. This means each time I need to go to our main POP on the 7th floor I end up climbing 10 flights of stairs on the way down, and again on back on the way up.
So I just found out that a utility I wrote called mrtgsql (parses and records the values of the mrtg .log files into a SQL database is/was being used by a German hosting operation. Honestly I wouldn’t have imagined that anyone would be using the software - very cool that it came to use by someone. I’ve long since re-written the utility to read directly from .rrd files. Maybe I should release that work as well.
http://www.cthought.com/free_software/
From Data Center Knowledge:
Go Daddy said this week that it is now managing more than 30 million domains
I was actually thinking about the domain registration business the other day and what the actually costs associated are. GoDaddy is charging $6.85/year (plus the $0.20 ICANN fee) for a .com domain registration. If they are paying Verisign the list price of $6.42/year per .com name registered GoDaddy is making $0.43/year per domain (a 6.7% margin).
With 30 million registered domains that is 12.9 million/year in Gross after $192.6 million/year payment to Verisign. Who’s the real winner here?
To bad there are those pesky things called merchant fees. At a best case 1-2% of the sale price for Visa/Mastercard (higher for Amex) that margin goes away really fast. Ever wonder why the GoDaddy shopping cart is so cluttered with all those up sells?
Tonight during round 37 of spring cleaning I managed to superglue three of my fingers together. It was quite funny actually - I was fixing some refrigerator magnets and dripped a nice pea sized dribble on one. As I was wiping the dribble up with my finger the thought ran through my head that it probably wasn’t a good idea. After a quick run though our household chemicals I can say that nail polish remover works pretty good at melting the stuff of of skin.
This last week (as in four days) we watched the price of premium at the station near our house climb from $4.30/gallon to $4.61/gallon. Besides the disgust at the cost to fill up I’ve learned some interesting things in the process, for example: Gas pumps cut ATM/Debit cards off at $75 dollars, and the limit for Credit Cards is $100.
Last month I was expecting gas to hit $5 dollars by 2009, now it looks like July 4th.
Oil Prices continued their assent today - I’m not going to venture a guess except to say the price of oil is probably going to continue upwards. This is a graph of the price of Oil over the past year:
So we are approaching double the price from a year ago. I found this one tonight - can you believe that five years ago Oil was ~$40 a barrel?
Wow.
Okay, I tried to let this one go but I just couldn’t. I will expand on my specific reasons for not being interested in InterNAP’s Flow Control Platform (FCP) or by extension their route optimized bandwidth in another post. For now I give you the text from a recent exchange with a Salesperson which started with this message:
Hello,
I would like to speak with someone about connecting InterNAP to 7012. Also, to who is responsible for managing eBGP links among Savvis, Hurricane, etc. Please advise.
Ian P. * InterNAP
This week we converted a series of Windows servers to VMWare machines. The VMWare Converter worked perfectly (albeit very slowly). After starting the new VM and installing the VMWare Tools we came across an interesting issue - the IP address was already in use by another NIC in the system, one that we could not see to reconfigure/delete. My initial hack was to just to search the registry and remove the IP address entries from the devices. After some Internet research I found the real solution:
To get rid of that unwanted driver, device, or service:
- Open the “Start” menu and choose “Run”
- Type in “cmd” (without the quotes) and click “ok”.
- At the cmd prompt, type in “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1” (without the quotes) and press enter.
- On the next cmd prompt line, type in “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and press enter.
- In the Device Manager Console, from the “View” menu, select “Show Hidden Devices”.
- Uninstall the offending Devices.
I should probably give caution to make sure you know what you are removing before you do it.
