If you are like me, you have a “million dollar idea” every day. Leave it to Google to allow you to quickly and easily find out that all of those ideas have already been patented, and send you back to the drawing board. Once again you rain on my parade Google! I demand that you develop Google Psychatrist Beta to help me deal with the pain!

Note – While there are many entries about implanting RFID tags into food, I don’t see any plans that use sensors in the sewers allowing customers to track their poop via website. Time to start looking at domain names…..

RsyncX is a great tool for synchronizing data. It has a GUI as well as the rsync command line utility. Not only can it synchronize folders locally, but more importantly when used with a private ssh key, it can synchronize across a network without a password. This ideal for automated tasks (like cron) where having a clear-text version of a password stored in a file is not acceptable. It can come in extremely handy when working with everyone’s favorite operating system, OS X Server. You could use it to keep the content of a web server and a backup web server synchronized like Jen does, or you could back up your home directory to a server like I do. No matter how many times I set this up, I always forget some mundane detail. So while it is fresh in my head…..

For readability, the computer we want to synchronize from will be referred to as PITCHER and the computer we want to synchronize to will be referred to as CATCHER.

Install rsync on the PITCHER – Downloading and installing the RsyncX package is the easiest way to do this. Purists will want to build it themselves, and I’m sure there are DarwinPorts and Fink packages, but I’m too lazy to look.

Create a key on the PITCHER – I like to run these jobs as root using the command line. It adds the danger that if you screw something up you are totally hosed, but it also does away with any pesky permissions problems, so proceed at your own risk. First open up a Terminal window and get yourself some root access by typing sudo -s. Enter your root password and press return. If you haven’t enabled root access, here are some instructions. Type ssh-keygen -t rsa and press return to create your key.

Hit return to save to the default location, return again for no passphrase, and return once more to confirm. A hidden directory (.ssh) should appear in /var/root (or wherever you have root’s home directory). Navigate to that directory and list the directory contents. You should see two files: id_rsa and id_rsa.pub. Copy id_rsa.pub to an easy to access location like your desktop.

Add that key to the CATCHER – Now get root root access with sudo -s on the CATCHER. Type ssh-keygen -t rsa on this machine as well and give it the same amount of return key presses listed above. The .ssh directory should appear in /var/root (or wherever you have root’s home directory). Navigate to that directory and list the directory contents. You should see two files: id_rsa and id_rsa.pub*. Yeah, that was all the same stuff. Now comes the tricky part. You need to take the id_rsa.pub from the “easy to access” location on PITCHER, rename it to authorized_keys, and and save it in the .ssh directory of the CATCHER.

Now the root account on PITCHER can transmit to the root account on CATCHER without a password. Yay!

Customize your sync job – Read the man page for rsync for insight on your options, but here is the basic formula for rsyncing over the network.

rsync [source folder on PITCHER] root@[IP or hostname]:[destination folder on CATCHER]

Here is (something like) the command I use to backup my home directory:

rsync -az -e ssh /Users/doug/ root@123.123.123.123:/Volumes/raid/doug_backup –delete –exclude=”.Trash*” –exclude=”*/Cache*” –exclude=”*.cache”

-az – (a) archive preserves just about everything including directory structure, and (z) compresses the data for transfer to reduce network bandwidth
-e ssh – specifies the use of the secure shell for the network communication
–delete – delete any files that are on CATCHER but not PITCHER (files that may have been within my source at the last backup but are no longer)
–exclude=”[file(s)]“ – do not copy these files. This option comes in handy when you are trying to prevent the backup of garbage files like cache or trash.

Create a cron job – once you have your rsync statement working flawlessly, it is time to automate. I use the crontab for this purpose; It is pretty straightforward and part of a standard UNIX build. On PITCHER, make sure you still have root access and type crontab -u root -e in Terminal. Your text-editor will open with root’s section of the crontab. It is probably blank, but you may to append to entries that are in there for other cron jobs root is responsible for. Cron statements have 6 variables serparated by tabs. They look like this:

[minute] [hour] [day] [month] [day of the week] [command]

So if you want your command to run every night at 10pm (22:00) it would look like this:

That’s it. Each time that crontab runs, the data on PITCHER and CATCHER will be compared. Any changes on PITCHER will then be updated on CATCHER. Let me know if you have any questions or run into any snags.

* – if authorized_keys already exists on CATCHER, this means a key has already been copied to this machine for some other purpose. You can overwrite that file if you know that that functionality is unused, or you can add your new key by opening the id_rsa.pub on PITCHER with a text editor, copying all the contained data, and append it to the pre-existing authorized_keys on CATCHER.

I have been following a startup auto company called Tesla Motors for almost a year now. Most of you who come here likely know this already, because there was a period of a couple months where I would talk about this company to anyone who would listen. Anyway, I made a mental note to put something on my blog about Tesla when I had a minute. I have a minute.

How can you start up a competitive car company in the U.S. market? Many would say you can’t, but I think Tesla Motors has found just the right mix to pull it off. How they are doing it:

New Blood – Tesla was founded by Silicon Valley veterans Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. Sure many people are innovative, so what’s different here? No industry ties. Big auto and big oil have a great relationship. The automakers produce inefficient, oil-bound cars, and the oil industry keeps pumping out the black gold. These guys don’t have that 100 year friendship lurking over them. They can be truly innovative.

Style – They started out by manufacturing a roadster. I can’t think of a better way to get your picture in the paper and into the office watercooler conversations. The car is slick. Unlike many of it’s electric predecessors, It doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Technology – The Tesla roadster runs on an electric motor. This may turn off a lot of people, but for the new generation of car buyers, a car that is both at the forefront of technology and takes up a smaller environmental footprint brings it to the top of their list. And by the way, it goes 0-60 in about 4 seconds, fast enough to toast almost every gasoline engine auto. 130 mph top speed and 250 miles to the charge too.

Electricity – Tesla is making the ultimate “flex fuel” vehicle. It seems like everyday there is a new “fuel of the future” (biomass, ethanol, hydrogen, etc.). Look at the clamor that is created when someone mentions “peak oil”. Let’s face it; We are dependent on cheap, reliable energy. Why not electricity? The means to create and deploy it already exists. The infrastructure is already there. Take the billions of dollars it would cost to develop, produce, and and promulgate a new fuel like hydrogen and put it into the electrical grid. The best part? Electricity can be created from any fuel, and quite efficiently (comparatively) as well. Let’s say hydrogen becomes the best option in the future. Why replace the millions of cars on the road, when we can produce new generators at the power stations? Solar and wind energy can be used as well. I don’t know what energy sources we will be using in 50 years. Maybe fission reactors will become a reality. What I do know is that they will generate electricity. And if you can keep the rust off your Tesla roadster, you will still be driving it.

Batteries – There was a quote from one of the founders that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording but it went something like this: “Let Sony and Dell make better batteries. Then we’ll put them in our cars.” Battery life has been one of the biggest downfalls with the electric car. Electric cars are have a minuscule market (for now). This means R&D funding is minimal. Small electronics, cell phones and portable computers however have a huge market. These guys would kill for a better battery. Lots of R&D money. Tesla can capture that benefit without the investment, and their timing couldn’t be more perfect.

Downsides – They are always there. Usually at the bottom of the article. Luckily, these downsides are pretty manageable. The Tesla roadster charges in “as little as 3.5 hours.” With the 250 mile range, plugging it in at night will work just fine almost always. However, If you wanted to take a cross country drive, it would be handy to get a full charge while you stopped for a meal. Technological innovation should take care of this. That portable electronic market is no doubt funding this technology as well. The car costs $100,000. As much as I want one, I won’t be buying one anytime soon. The good news is that it would cost almost that much to make a Toyota Camry if they were only building 100 units a year. With mass production comes affordability. Tesla just needs to get through to that stage, and the cost woes will disappear.

In Conclusion – I sure hope they do. They seem to have all their ducks in a row as far as I can tell. They are selling out their limited numbers like hotcakes, and have a more affordable sedan that should be launching next year. If these guys go public, buy some stock. Not only will you help bring the price point down, you just might make enough money to buy a Tesla Roadster. After all, two of their main investors are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and I hear they know a thing or two about making good decisions.

Hey Tesla motors, when you are ready to open the doors at the Chicago sales office and need an enthusiastic salesman, or if you just want to take me for a ride in the roadster let me know. A guy can hope can’t he?

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This script is no longer necessary with the development of the Benchwarmer application, and was removed.

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While performing desktop support, I’ve run into my share of issues. One of the most common issues is email backup. Most of the better users will have backups of their desktop and their documents folder, but never think about backing up their email. While it is simple enough to do with for the intermediate or advanced user, the novice user needs a little help. I created a simple Applescript to make this easy. Heres how it works.

• It checks to see if Mail and/or Address Book are open, and prompts the user to close them before continuing.
• It then asks the user to confirm their intent to backup.
• Using the unix zip command, the current user’s (~) mail and address book data are compressed into a single file called Mail_backup.zip which is placed on the current user’s desktop.

The user now has a single file that can easily be placed in a secure location. You could always use iCal to trigger this app to run at a desired interval.

Spam sucks. Canned meat, email, all of it. What is it? Why do we get it? What can I do about it? Read on.

What is spam?

The definition of spam is argued regularly. Because I will be specifically speaking on the subject of email, we can at least narrow down the definition a little. Three categories come to mind In regard to email spam.

• Bulk – the copy of the message you received was sent out en masse to many people at once.
• Unsolicited – You never agreed to receive the message.
• Automated – There isn’t someone frantically typing all of these messages; They are automatically created by a computer.

To say that any email fulfilling one of those categories is always spam is an overstatement. I receive automated emails every day that help me do my job. To say that any email fulfilling two of those categories is somewhat accurate, but what about those messages you get from your favorite retailers informing you of a new sale. Those messages are both bulk and automated, but not spam. However, if an email fulfills all three of these categories (bulk, unsolicited, automated) you can be almost certain it is spam. What is the purpose of spam? It has many faces, but the root intent of most spam is to separate the recipients with their hard earned money.

Why is it so bad lately?

I recently heard an estimate that 9 out of 10 emails are spam. How can this be? I send out approximately 20 emails a day. That means that there are 180 equivalent spam emails going out? It used to be a few messages here and there – what happened?

Costs went down. In the beginning, spammers were using remedial programs to generate text-based messages from their own computers. All of these messages required a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth is costly. In addition, these messages weren’t too hard to block. Nowadays, spammers use botnets. A botnet is a network of computers. These computers can be scattered all over the world. They have a backdoor maliciously inserted by a virus or worm that spammers can use to send these computers instructions. The spammer sends out one message to the botnet, and those computers (and their bandwidth) do the dirty work of replicating and redistributing. Now spammers can send out millions of emails with the cost of sending just one. With a cost that low, even if one in a million emails completes it goal, a return on the investment is made. With those kind of odds, it is too good of an opportunity to pass up. So you have accepted the fact that the emails are floating around out there. But….

Why is all this spam making it to my inbox?

Aside from adjusting your own habits, you have only two lines of defense: A spam blocking service and a junk mail filter. On the pre-delivery side, your mail provider (yahoo, Gmail, your company) usually will have some sort of frontline defense system for spam. These systems inspect email, look for emails that are suspicious, and quarantine them. In addition, you (hopefully) have a post-delivery junk mail filter enabled. This filter will perform a similar function to the pre-delivery service. Essentially, these are the same things. By using multiple filters that are updated and managed by different sources, your chances of catching and quarantining spam are significantly higher. So with all this protection in place why do you still get spam?

Filtering is essentially an uphill, losing battle. Spammers can generate emails that the filters don’t catch faster that the filter can be programmed to catch them. This is the reason they get to your inbox. When filters were able to pick up words and phrases in emails, spammers would obfuscate words to bypass the filters. Viagra became \/1agra. Those messages would bypass the filters for a while until the filters were updated to block them. Then V1agra became Viagr@. And so on so forth.

Eventually the filters became sophisticated enough to pick up almost all the patterns that spammers would send out. It seemed we would be free of this nuisance. Then the image based spam came. Spammers would display their text-based message within a graphic file. The anti-spam companies then scrambled to create scanners to inspect the attached graphics for these messages. By the time these changes were implemented, spammers had developed and implemented methods to continually change visual patterns in the graphics so the filters had no consistencies to detect. You have no doubt seen these messages, usually offering stock tips with some random images contained in the message or in the background.

By the time our filters can detect these messages, you will be looking at a message using a newer filter bypass technique. Basically we are spending millions of dollars to continually stay behind in a losing battle.

Why Stock Tips?

What happened to good ol’ Viagra ads? Viagra ads require web links, at least the ones that come from spammers who want to get paid for their work. This gives the filters an easier time to detect and quarantine the message. The stock scam is much simpler. No links required. For example, lets say I find some garbage stock selling for $0.50 a share. I buy 1000 shares of it for just $500. I then send 2 million spam messages through my botnet telling people that some up and coming company (the one I bought stock in) has some amazing advancement or just acquired some essential patent to making iPods. I am positive the stock will be worth $5 a share by the end of the week.

At first glance you think to yourself, “Who cares? No one actually clicks on that.” Wrong. You don’t; and for every one of you there are a thousand more like you. You are just an innocent bystander in this game. The spammer has no intention of trying to get you to buy into the scam. It is the 0.0001% of people who do buy into these scams that are the audience. Unfortunately, the only way to find these people is to email all of us.

Think of it this way. 90% of the people who are sent this message don’t receive it because they were able to filter it out. 90% of the people who actually get it shake their fist in the air, say “Curse these spam messages!”, and immediately delete it. 90% of the people who actually read it dismiss it as a hoax and delete it. 90% of the people who read it and don’t dismiss it don’t have the resources to buy it. And the remaining people fall for the scam. Even though 99.9999% of my emails returned no results, 200 people bought the stock. Because of the trading volume, the stock triples in price to $1.50 the next day. The people who fell for the scam are delighted! This is actually working for them. They decide to hold onto the stock until it gets to the $5.00 mark, as promised it would. Meanwhile, I sell all my shares for $1.50. By the time I have made my $1000 profit, it is discovered that it was all a hoax, and the stock has tanked. Those people are out their money and vow to never fall for this again. That’s fine, next time I’ll send out 4 million emails. Now you can see how easy this really is, why so many people do it, and thus why you have so many spam messages in your inbox.

What can I do to be part of the solution?

• Don’t believe everything you read – How true this adage holds. People you don’t know are not out to help you make money. If you believe that, I know a great place to buy Viagra….
• Get two email addresses – The more your email address floats around, the more spam you are going to get. Everyone should have two. Give one out to family, friends, and co-workers. Use the other to sign up for downloads, receive free newsletters, and “keep you up to date with news and special offers”. You can get a secondary email for free from many providers – I suggest using google or yahoo. All it will take is a few minutes of setup. I have recently discovered 10 minute mail. This is perfect for those situations when you have to give a valid email address to access a download. You can setup a temporary address, submit that address as your own, access it to get the download link, and it will cease to work after 10 minutes. It can come in quite handy.
• Don’t ever “click here to stop receiving these messages” – Finally a simple end to your misery! Not likely. All you are doing is informing the spammer that you are actually reading their emails. Now they can put you on their preferred recipient list!
• Keep your antivirus up to date – For all you know, you are sending yourself spam. It is entirely possible that your computer is part of a botnet that is causing your own frustration! Not all of the spammer programs that add you to their botnets are delivered as viruses or worms, but most are. By keeping an up-to-date firewall and virus program, you can reduce your chances of being part of the problem.

Signbot – Make your own cheesy side-scrolling sign GIF.

Fridge in the table – Why didn’t I think of this? You are eating your dinner and you get thirsty. What are you going to do, get up and get something to drink? I don’t know about you but I don’t have time to go on some head in the clouds quest to the kitchen in search of treasures that probably don’t really exist. Hitting a button and a fridge popping out of the center of the table? That my friends I have time for.

ChaCha – Basically, it is google for your mom. Submit a query, and an operator (an actual person) will search the internets for you and return relevant results. Since I don’t plan on teaching your mom how to use logic statements and quotes in a search engine anytime soon, my hat goes off to ChaCha.

The 50 Greatest Commercials of the ’80s – Nothing washes down my McDLT better than a New Coke!