Microsoft Expression Encoder Problems with Smoothwall/Squid proxy

This might save some headaches for somebody else who's been struggling to get Microsoft Expression Encoder Live streaming to work from an intranet to a cloud/Internet server.

Here's the two problems and solutions:

1) Expression Encoder triggers Linksys firewall DoS (denial of service) rule and blocks the HTTP POST from the encoder to the server. Turn off DoS checking.

2) Smoothwall uses the Linux Squid web caching proxy server, this interferes with long HTTP POSTs needed by Expression Encoder. Maybe setting the maximum block size to huge might work but turning off web caching definitely works.

Finally, we kept caching enabled so that our internal network stays zippy and used another port (8080) on our Azure cloud server to push streams and bypass the cache. 6 hours + 3 guys to fix this.

the labyrinth

Started a new blog over here to ramble about stuff I find in the labyrinth of my mind http://simplysanj.posterous.com/the-cognitive-ladder-of-progress

Some lessons

I haven't posted for a while so I was feeling a little guilty and put together a bunch of random thoughts that wouldn't fit on twitter. One problem with twitter is that deep thoughts get buried under a lot of noise. This seems like a much better forum to persist and preserve them. Here goes in no particular order.

Lessons Learned

1. You’re body is getting progressively less useful after each decade. Plan to cram as much young stuff in as you can while you can still enjoy it and defer the other stuff till you’re old.
   
   
2. You need meta-time to evolve. If you can’t break away and have a bird’s eye view of what you’re doing in any facet of your life then your big deep brain will be drowned out by the noise of your small helpless brain that’s struggling to stay afloat. You need the eagle-eye, the worm-eye will make you sad and helpless.
   
   
3. You need to have peak experiences regularly to be productive. How can you think about going through life without the occasional spurt of adrenalized joy? Buying shoes isn’t going to help.
   
   
4. You spend 15 years in school learning how to avoid risk, being penalized for taking risks and marginalized for risky behavior. Nothing awesome ever materialized without risk. A life without risk is a death sentence to die of boredom.
   
   
5. There are no shortcuts for 99.999% of us. There’s only hard work, smart planning, focus, discipline and showing up. Yep, showing up is the hardest part.
   
   
6. If you don’t have a goal, a deal that you’ve made for yourself, a destination that you’ve planned then you’re just a pawn in somebody else’s plan.
   
   
7. Forty five to ninety million heartbeats, that’s what it takes to become a world class master at something. That’s from the 10,000 hour theory. If you spend any less time trying to master something, you’ll become awesomely mediocre.
   
   
8. Practice and repetition are useless without risk. If you keep doing the same thing over and over you will plateau, stagnate and then decay. If you aren’t falling, crashing, scaring the shit out of yourself then you’re rolling backwards.
   
   
9. Persistence is underrated. Most people never realize that persistence is the iceberg under the water that you can’t see. Success is the tiny nub sticking out on top.
   
   
10. There’s no such thing as luck but without training yourself to exploit opportunity, you’ll miss them as they pass.
    
    
11. Sadly, society doesn’t really care about your pain. Only when they feast on the failure of the fortunate, then sorrow becomes a spectator sport without any trace of empathy. See Amy, Charlie, Lindsey, et al.
    
    
12. We’re all spending way too much time fucking around on computers and phones and should spend a bunch more time outside making life better.

The Boulder of Life

Some days you roll the boulder uphill, some you chase it down. Some days it runs you over and some you can't even find it #boulderoflife

Wikileaks and Privacy

I'm a little conflicted about wikileaks. On one hand, this Assange fellow wasn't the guy who actually stole the documents, on the other his organization is the one releasing it and should be held accountable.

Why I ask myself? Isn't leaked information free to roam the interweb? Shouldn't governments be more transparent? The answer to both is yes but there are some caveats.

Caveat 1 - Privacy and Personal Security

There are a bunch of sources mentioned in the leaks or at least that can be traced back to individuals who are now at various levels of risk from embarrassment right up to execution. This doesn't pass the smell test and is just plain wrong, malicious and evil. How about if he was leaking all of our tax filings, would that be treated differently? How about when somebody starts leaking stolen facebook account chat transcripts? What's the difference?

Caveat 2 - Information Bunkers

By leaking this information, all new records will be pushed deeper into the secrecy envelope and making transparency much worse than it ever was. This is already in play. All the screaming hacktivists and journalists haven't quite got this point.

Caveat 3 - Our Security

Some people believe that everything the government does should be public all the time. If that was the case, then our country and government would be under constant economic, cultural and physical attack by those governments, corporations, individuals and organizations that don't play those rules.

It's a very sticky issue but I think that wikileaks is responsible for threatening security and privacy of individuals and countries and should pay the price. This isn't simple journalistic integrity at stake. Whatever happens next will redefine journalism and already has redefined inter and intra gov't secrecy for the worse.

Bad Religion

Just saw these guys live a day ago, forgot how much I love them:

Samsung Captive w/Froyo quick review

Just upgraded a couple of days ago to an unlocked ATT Captivate on the Rogers network. Had a blackberry plan and it took a call to Rogers to reset my connection before it worked (no charge). So here's the ups and downs in a quick review;

Ups
- Killer OLED display, looks better than iPhone 4 side/side to me and iPhone owner
- More screen and less bezel than a lot of other phones (4")
- GREAT browsing experience with Flash 10.1, all video sites work fine
- Great homescreens user configurable
- Sweet live backgrounds
- KILLER FEATURE -> wifi hotspot woo hoo!
- Gmail is pretty much instant
- Super light and thin next to BBold and iP4
- Pretty smooth app store
- No iTunes required
- Easily load stuff through USB or micro SD
- Skype over 3G and Wifi (in Canada woo hoo!)
- very clear phone, good reception, good speaker phone
- Swype keyboard, getting used to it

Downs
- Stock email app checks email every 5 minutes WTF??? Got to use Gmail for speed
- Need to be a techie to re-flash and screw around with settings to get 2.2
- Somehow got stuck in landscape mode after 2 days
- No LEDs to tell you missed calls, msgs or emails (WTF?? you have to unlock)
- No flash for camera
- No camera button
- No front camera for video conf (don't really care myself)
- No keyboard

All in all, I love it and couldn't go back to my blackberry until I get some email crisis that this thing gorfs on. I think that the svelte form factor and light weight will make me eventually ditch my keyboard dreams (still craving the Dell Lightning).

Recommended? Yes, in 5 months when you get 2.2 or Gingerbread off the shelf.