What's wrong with TD Bank
TD Bank, "the most convenient" bank, permits downloads of transactions for only the current and previous month. So if you download your banking transactions, checks and deposits etc, into Quicken, QuickBooks or another package, and you forget or can't get to it immediately, you will have to enter each transaction manually.
Why only transactions for a month and a half? Are we still in the dark ages?
This is a show stopper for me and I'll have to find another bank. Luckily, we have more banks then we know what to do with.
It truly is, all in the details.
PHP :: Scope Resolution
Do you wonder what the :: means in PHP? It took forever to chase this one down since Google or Bing don't allow you to search on "::". They just ignore them.
www.whypad.com/posts/php-using-the-double-colon/500/
is the answer. Here's another post
http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/en/language.oop5.paamayim-nekudotayim.php
China's "Green Dam" filtering software
China has issued a directive that all computers sold as of July 1, 2009 must have their "Green Dam" filtering software installed giving the Chinese Government control over what internet sites the public can access.
All sorts of people have raised their voices in protest against government intrusion and control of the people's lives. I don't need to duplicate their outcries.
What I want to point out is the threat to the rest of the world. China is creating is a whole country network of personal computers the government and army can control. Alhough the current version 1 of the software is said to be crude and bug ridden, clearly that won't remain so. China has extensive software development talent. In the future China will be able to use the massive power of a billion or so computers to act in concert - possibly for cyber attacks or for tasks we can not imagine. Once the government controls software on every computer, it can download and run whatever it wants on as many computers it seems fit. Imagine a denial of service attack from a billion computers. They could cripple the world internet at will.
I hope our goverment, computer and tele-comm industries are taking the necessary steps to enable us to isolate the US internet network from the rest of the world or individual countries if and when it becomes necessary.
We need the ability to create a cyber ocean around the US in the event of a world cyber catastrophe.
Imagine if we were in something like WWII. Horrible to imagine but not impossible to happen. Will we just have to shut down our internet or will we be able to circle the wagons, so to speak, and continue with a purely national network?
Success with Magic Jack
I'm not in the habit of endorsing any product. Being a curmudgeon, I prefer criticizing. Nevertheless I have to report that the Magic Jack is working out perfectly. This is the story.
In the process of downsizing, I switched from cable to FIOS, which in itself is worthwhile as my internet speed went from 10 megabits to between 20 and 24 depending on the time of day, and I eliminated a phone line. I enrolled in Skype's unlimited US plan for 3 months to test its suitability to my lifestyle. You don't get a phone number and you make calls using a headphone, which is a plus and minus. It's hands free but I don't like using a headset all the time. Skype is only useful for outgoing call though. You can buy SkypeIn for incoming calls but it only comes to your computer. If your computer is off or you are in a different room you may not hear it. You can't attach it to telephones or to your phone system throughout your house or office.
I like the idea of a phone so I thought I'd try Magic Jack, which almost sounds too good to be true. I picked it up from Best Buy and plugged it into a USB port on my laptop. It booted up and popped up a window asking for registration data, ie what userid and password I wanted, my name and address so that I could be traced if I called 911, and what area code and prefix I wanted. It assigned the last 4 digits. I plugged in a phone into the other end of the Magic Jack and made a call. Simple. I was surprised with the clarity. I called it from another phone and the phone ran. It works.
I had some experience with the Magic Jack before, since a friend owns one and he called me numerous times, so I could gauge the quality of the call and I thought it was only pretty good with occasional lapses of sound and occasional breakups. I decided I could live with lesser quality on a second line that I would use only when necessary. To my surprise however, the clarity within my installation is great and there are no sound breakups or echos. That may be because I have a fast broadband connection and my friend is running DSL with a maximum speed of 2.9 megabits, only about 12% of my speed.
My next test sold me on the Magic Jack. I have a multi-line phone system. The incoming phone lines are plugged into the pbx and get distributed to all the phones. I ran a phone line from the Magic Jack into the PBX and, voila, all the phones now have the Magic Jack number! When I call, all the phones ring. I was shocked. I tried calling out and calling in and everything works just the way any phone should.
Now, of course, the line would go dead if I shutdown my laptop, or took the laptop with me when I left. So I decided to connect the Magic Jack to an old slow server I have running all the time. I wasn't sure if it could keep up with the Magic Jack, being a 2.0 ghz pentium 4,with only 512MB RAM running XP. It's being used as a print server and a web server to test web sites I'm developing. It's running Apache, mySQL, and SQL Server, but to my surprise the phone quality is still great.
So the moral of the story is:
Have a fast broadband connection
A slow computer is fine
Keep your computer on and connected
It's best to use a computer that you're not on all the time. A window pops up every time there's a call (in or out), and I can see how that would be annoying.
So that's my Magic Jack story.
