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Dan's Blog

Xbox 360 Dead = New Xbox Arcade

Written by Dan Schaefer

It’s official. My Xbox 360 died for the very last time. My son was playing on it last Saturday night when it died. He didn’t say anything about it Sunday morning, but I knew something had gone terribly wrong. I suspected the Xbox was broken because my son woke up Sunday morning and actually spent some time with the family. After an hour or so, I finally asked him what was wrong with the Xbox.

He raised his eyebrows, perhaps surprised that I’d figured out something was wrong. “Oh, it’s giving me the E74 error message,” he replied.

“What’s E74?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders. “I looked online, and there’s no easy fix for it.”

“So I guess it’s really dead, huh?” I asked, with a voice solemn enough for a funeral.

“Uh huh. And I don’t think it’s under warranty,” he added. “Maybe we could try to fix it ourselves. I watched a YouTube video about it, and it’s not that difficult.”

Yeah, right.

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Technology is Difficult

Written by Dan Schaefer

You may have noticed that I haven’t blogged lately. It is not that I’m ignoring ureadit; on the contrary, I’ve been very busy putting together some good articles for the Solutions Page. Also, I’ve been working on a Flash-based program that can be used to help create closed-captioning for Flash movies. (I plan to make a limited number of copies available soon so that people can beta-test and provide feedback. Stay tuned!) Additionally, I do have a full time job that I need to maintain in order to remain financially secure. Of course, I’d love to blog all day, but so far, I’ve only made enough money in blogging to super-size my meal at McDonalds.

Most importantly, I’ve been spending a lot of time helping my wife out with her site. She runs a personal blog that chronicles her life in the U.S. Having just emigrated from the Netherlands about a year ago, she has some very good insights and experiences to relate. And she’s finding that there are a lot of people interested in what she has to say. And, hey, she’s getting a lot more traffic than me at this point, so I’m giving her as much help as possible.

We recently gave her WordPress-based website a face-lift. We’ve been using the website template software from Artisteer (one of the companies on my affiliate list). It’s a rare occasion that I can say I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of software that costs more than $100, and Artisteer is one of them. There are a few bugs, however, especially when dealing with their Joomla-generated templates. But as I explain to all my colleagues, I’d rather spend a few hours debugging code than a few months creating it from scratch.

And now – the moment you’ve been waiting for – I’ll actually make a point:

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Passionate About Passwords

Written by Dan Schaefer

For the past year or so, I’ve been leaving lots of comments on other websites. I’m finding that as I get older, I get more opinionated. Maybe that’s a right of passage or something.

Anyway, I came across an article in Network World Magazine dealing with the art of creating strong passwords. The author presumably had some good tips for creating strong passwords, but unfortunately, as of this writing, that critical part of the article was missing. I’m sure the folks at Network World will fix this soon.

Regardless of the fact that half the article was missing, I left a comment anyway, because this is a topic I feel strongly about. My belief is strong because I’ve had my website hacked by some Moscow-based hackers a few years ago. In that case, I was protecting my website with the password “Mizzou82”, which is a description of my college followed by the year I graduated. It probably took the Russians about 30 seconds to break it.

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Driver Download Scams

Written by Dan Schaefer

I’d like to be told that I’m wrong when I say that there are a lot of opportunists out there that would charge you good money for something you can get for free. Well, let me rephrase that: I’d like to be told that I’m wrong when I say that there are a lot of obstructionists out there that block your path to getting something for free. Many of them are very good at what they do, so they can convince you that you absolutely must pay for something, because it is not free.

Okay, what am I talking about?

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Show-Stealing Squirrel

Written by Dan Schaefer

A photo taken quite by accident has been making the rounds in many blog sites, and, well, why should I be left out? You can find the original photo and accompanying story at the National Geographic website. This cute little squirrel popped up just as the camera was starting to focus on a vacationing couple while visiting Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park, Canada. I couldn't resist the fun of photo-shopping the little critter out of the original photo, spinning some Flash magic and helping to make this little celebrity even more famous. I wonder if, in some way, he knows how famous he's become. If you'd like a copy of the Flash software for this simple application, just send an email message to the This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and I'll send you the FLA file.

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Implementing Good Ideas

Written by Dan Schaefer

Having worked in high-tech for nearly 30 years, I’ve learned a lot about the sort of politics that goes on in the office, especially the politics associated with good ideas. Ideally, good ideas are rewarded with raises and promotions, but in my observation, things don’t always turn out that way. Often what may seem like good ideas are condemned to premature deaths because they were either bad ideas, or – more likely – the person who championed the good ideas failed to navigate the political waters with sufficient skill. To be sure, I’ve seen some good ideas go the distance and end up as products that make lots of money, and I’ve paid close attention to the way it happens.

So, in the spirit of brevity, I’ll summarize my observations into a short list of ten tips on how to get your good ideas implemented.

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Contacting the Home Base

Written by Dan Schaefer

Let’s say your home computer is nearly always on and connected to the Internet, but you’re not always at home to use it. And you’re now at work or on a business trip, and you’d like to contact your computer at home. Perhaps you need to run a special program on it, or maybe upload a needed file, or you just want to look through your webcam and check on your cat. There are a lot of things you need to do in order to remotely access your home computer, and one of the first is to figure out your home network’s Internet address.

To do this, you could – before leaving home – go to What is My IP and write down the address it gives you. The folks at that website will give you your “public” IP address, which is the address that your home router uses to identify itself to the world. This address will appear as four numbers separated by a dot. For example, 96.247.87.34. When you’re away from home, you can then access your home network at that address. Ignoring for the moment that your home router may not let you in the door, you should be able to contact your PC.

But there’s a problem . . .

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An Outsider's Look at Startups

Written by Dan Schaefer

The word “startup” is beginning to make itself known more and more these days. I suppose in these deep recessionary times, it’s a good idea to put a startup to the test by seeing if it can survive in worst-case scenario. And if it survives the test, it ought to do awesome when the economy recovers, right?

Whatever the reason, I’m seeing an increasing amount of chatter about startups, and being nearly 50 years old, I feel slightly qualified to weigh in on the topic of startups – particularly startups based on technical ideas. I’ve been in several, lost my shirt in one and did quite well in another. And as a sales engineer for over 10 years, I’ve seen many startups from up close. Over the years, I’ve found a few patterns of success and many more patterns of failure. In this blog entry, I’ll list some of the most significant patterns of failure.

I'll state these patterns by uttering a phrase you may hear yourself saying when considering a startup, and I'll follow it with my own cold, blunt observations.

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A View Down My Driveway

Written by Dan Schaefer

If you tune into my blog page, you’ll see that I now have a “driveway-cam” that looks down my driveway here in Southern California. There’s really no practical use for putting this image on my blog; I just thought it would look cool. Normally, I use the camera for security, but on a whim yesterday, I decided to splinter off a bit of its bandwidth to show my driveway on my blog, with updates every five seconds.

Yes, I’m a geek, and I’m always on the lookout for something cool to do. To me, video has always been one of the coolest things. And I don’t think I’m alone in my opinion. Video is a big hit on the Internet, stressing out the classic TV industry as it scrambles to find a way to monetize it. Everybody is familiar with YouTube, Hulu and other similar sites, providing a virtual limitless experience of interesting videos. Why is video being deployed on the Internet? Because the technology allows it, and it’s just a matter of time before geeks like me start to use it.

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Getting Compromised

Written by Dan Schaefer

An excellent article at TechCrunch breaks down the chronology of the recent security breach at Twitter. The article details how a hacker, who goes by the name of “Hacker Croll,” managed to break into an employee’s account at Twitter, and eventually compromise the security of the entire company. How did he do it? Well, you can read the article, but in general, he took advantage of the lazy habits of an employee at Twitter. Actually, these lazy habits probably cover 98% of the online population. The major sin in this particular case was simply that an employee used the same password for all his accounts, both personal and professional. Once the hacker was able to compromise the employee’s personal email account, he was able to branch out and compromise all other accounts.

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Debugging with Chrome

Written by Dan Schaefer

If you’ve been watching my blog lately, you might have noticed it changing every minute or so as I debug it live. I’d rather not be such a cowboy about it, but to be brutally honest, I’ve been too busy to put up a ghost site to test with, and I can only hope that I don’t disrupt too many readers. I admit it’s not a very smart thing to do, so I promised myself that I’ll have a ghost site running by the end of August ‘09. Until then, however, you might get some amusement out of watching my blog morph before your very eyes.

Which brings me to Google’s Chrome web browser.

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A Time to Lose Data

Written by Dan Schaefer

When is it a good time to lose your data? It’s a simple question with an obvious answer. It’s never a good time to lose your data. Data is something you work hard to accumulate, and it’s far more valuable than the disk drive that’s holding it. But since disk drives are subject to fail, a better question would be, “What is your data-loss strategy?”

Like any man-made product, disk drives occasionally fail. And when they fail, they take all your data with them. Though disk drive failure rates are impressively low, failures do occur, and thus your data is at risk. To mitigate the risks, you could use a backup drive. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that both a primary and backup disk drive will fail at the same time. It’s a pretty good strategy . . .

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