Alright kiddos..

Yes, I’m channeling Chris, shameless copyright infringement and all..

If there is one thing you do this weekend..

Drive..

To see.. the.. best.. movie.. EVAAAAAH!

I can’t even explain just how good of a movie this was, how dirty, how inappropriate.. I mean, perfect.. the whole 90 minutes are. Stay all the way through the credits to hear Maggie’s first words!

And even if you’re not a diehard fan of The Simpsons. You. Will. Love. IT.

Guaroooooooooooooooooooooooonteed.

Now I live right outside of Disney World. The address is actually Lake Buena Vista, Disney is my next door neighbor. So, when we go to the movies, we go to the place where everyone from Disney goes because… well, it’s across the street and I imagine easier to deal with than I4.

So, we went to see the movie today at AMC in Downtown Disney and the theater was packed. Mostly adult audience too. And what made the movie?

Bart Simpson is playing around in the trains luggage compartment, going through other people’s things while Marge and Lisa sit in their seats. He straps a black bra to his head and pops his head down looking like Mickey Mouse and in the squeakiest voice possible says:

“I’m the mascot of an evil corporation”

And the entire audience explodes in both laughter and applause! So much for a magical place

There are a lot of other great moments too. Everything from ridiculing environmentalists, beastiality, taking some fine shots at the unemployability of fine arts majors, gratuitous nudity and hypocrisy.. whats not to love? This takes the funniest movie ever title which I had previously awarded to Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

Go.

See.

It. NOW!

Today is the 8th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Remember to thank the people that keep your systems up (most of the time). As for me, the box of these is on its way to Dallas:

Thanks folks!

One of the most common questions people have when they see my collection of Windows Mobile phones is how we get them, are we made of money? Apparently so, since Katie is now even giving away handsets, box and all.

The second question usually follows me saying “it’s locked to…” – Whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean by “locked” and in the mobile world that word takes on a few meanings. In a general sense, “locked” means that you don’t have access to a particular part of the phone. Some locks are enforced by the manufacturer, some by the carrier, some by the user and some even by users stupidity. The most common are:

• Sim locked - can’t put your own SIM from another carrier and expect the phone to work. Most common case with USA carriers, because T-Mobile doesn’t want you taking the Dash to an AT&T account and AT&T would rather die than see a Blackjack on T-mobile.
• Bootloader locked – Stops you from loading your own “cooked rom” onto the device.
• Application locked – For security purposes, stops the applications that haven’t been digitally signed from modifying the registry.
• PIN locked – Your usual password protection that you should have on your device. 

So, what does any of this have to do with AT&T or Cingular you ask? Well, my main number is on T-Mobile. Meaning that pretty much every device that comes into Casa de Vlad needs to be able to run using my SIM card from T-Mobile, even if its an AT&T device. More importantly, if you aren’t stupid (enough to sign a two or more year contract on a phone that will fall apart with heavy use well within the first year) you are always better off buying the phone off eBay. eBay market for used / preowned GSM phones is like heaven because they are ridiculously poor in quality – meaning lots and lots of refurbs because they tried to shave 2 cents off the battery cost and now brand new phones end up on eBay, stickers and all. But, if you’re awake at the right hour of the day you can get that $500 phone for less than $200 sometimes even less than $100.

But, when that new cell phone comes in, it will be locked. You will put your SIM card in and as Windows Mobile boots they will let you know that the SIM card you are trying to use is not supported that the device is locked and that you need to type in an unlock code or move your account to AT&T.

Not so fast.. Start the phone up, dismiss the warning, type in *#06# and hit send. It will echo back your IMEI number, which is usually also printed on the sticker inside your battery compartment. Call Cingular / AT&T and say the following:

I just purchased a _Phone Model Here_ from eBay and want to use it with my own SIM card on another network. I was told I could call you and obtain an unlock code for a used, eBay phone.

They will take the usual blood sample and the like and call you with the unlock code in up to 7 days. Don’t feel like waiting – plenty of places on the net will “unlock” your phone for just a few dollars meaning no more long contracts for emerging technology (which is often just plain broken and will not last the length of the contract no matter how much you baby it)

In terms of legality, in USA, SIM card unlocking is legal.

You will not learn anything new from this post, everything about it is common sense. On the other hand, there are a lot of smart people out there with no common sense at all. Then there are a lot of people who either have never worked in a real big company or worse, got out of a real big company and had marginal success with their little business that they lose perspective of how big companies and more importantly, how big company employees work. The longer that marginal success lasts, the unhappier the little company becomes with the love it gets from the big company. Why?

Let me tell you a story of a guy from a few groups I read, a guy who had obviously ended up where he is at because he couldn’t get along with his coworkers and didn’t keep his skills sharp enough to get a new job when everyone got fed up with his incompetence and arrogance. This guy ended up somewhere on the bottom and crawled just high enough to reach a keyboard so he can spend his days in front of a monitor whining about how nobody loves him, how his Action Pack isn’t arriving on time, how his Action Pack didn’t come with all the CD’s, how Microsoft is unfair with the SBSC program, how Microsoft with $50 billion/quarter in revenues needs to spend a lot of it to make his $120/quarter-in-licensing-business more profitable, how Microsoft doesn’t love him, how nobody loves him.. sniff.

Almost brings a tear to our eye, doesn’t it? Ok, no, it doesn’t, but its the similar line of thinking that diludes a lot of people into thinking that because they are hard working and visionary gamblers (maybe risk takers sounds better?) that everyone else is. That because they are willing to drop everything to help and even bend their rules and policies for a greater good, everyone else ought to, too! Or, if they are a tad more reasonable they adopt the “change influencing feedback” and talk to the wall for years because they don’t understand big company dynamics, employees and motivation.

How are BIG company employees different from Entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are willing to forgo the immediate gratification and safety for a big payoff in the future.

Employees are seeking the highest possible immediate payoff with the least amount of hassle.

There are thousands and thousands of ways you can over-analyze the difference but at the end of the day thats all there is to it. Employees take no risk and they know all the returns. Entrepreneurs take (sometimes) calculated risks for an unknown but hopefully huge returns down the road.

How do you get huge returns? By being flexible, open to change and ideas, optimistic, through sacrifice, hard work, self-motivating, etc. You put in long hours, you deal with people you probably wouldn’t deal with if you could, you’re willing to work under different conditions day in and day out, you accept, embrace and cause change. You keep on trying, and trying, and trying to find the change that will get you to the big payoff faster.

Now, if you’re a BIG company employee, how do you get huge returns? You don’t, you’ve got two numbers you need to hit: one to keep your job, the other to get a bonus/promotion. Thats it. No need to change. No need to sacrifice. No need to get to the payoff faster. You just mind your place, your performance and over time you move up higher up the chain. And if you don’t, you get another job.

The Core of Employee

Big company, small company, it doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about employees alone. They are in it for the now. They get the security that their job will not change day to day. They get the security that their pay will not change week to week. They get the security of knowing what their health insurance coverage is, what their pension plan will be, when they will be able to afford a new iPod, when to take that next vacation with the peace of mind that they can be away from everything and not a thing will go wrong while they are gone.

So their incentive to go against the grain and challenge the policies, their bosses or other peoples bosses is slim to none. Their incentive to work harder than they ought to hit their numbers is not there either, sometimes it even works in the opposite direction - “if I kill this month the boss will up my goal for next quarter and there is no way I am going to be able to hit that number, let me defer this deal”;

Motivation? Management? Over 50 years ago Abraham Maslow published the Maslows Hierarchy of Needs, which tries to explain the motivation and how workers can be motivated differently depending on how some of their basic needs are covered. Ironically, he did his research on rhesus monkeys..

So what does the pyramid say? Well, it looks at the needs a person has as they go from the very basic biological and physiological needs for survival (food, water) all the way to self-actualization, finding the meaning of life, etc. It stands that at each stage different incentives can be offered to help the person reach that next stage in life.

So what motivates corporate employees? Well, there are your basic needs such as free soda and occasional company lunch. Then there are safety needs, that is likely a cubicle with three walls - so here they are motivated by having their own office. Then there are needs related to belongingness and love - being on a successful team that takes care of each other, that is respected by others, that gets some cohesion. Then we climb into the esteem needs, the corporate awards, promotions, big titles for even the most unessential of employees (ever notice how companies call their riff-raff sales people “product, project, business development, managers even though they manage essentially no one?). Step up to the final stage, that of realizing your potential (shooting everyone in the office, burning down the building, etc)

Thats at least the theory. So, what motivates that lowest of an employee who though his or her inexperience has the unfortunate misery of dealing with your whiny butt? To get as far away from you as possible, of course. How? By making you as happy as possible so you hand over as much money as possible so they can get as quick of a promotion as possible! It’s that simple. In corporate environments everyone starts at the bottom. Very bottom. If they have any brains, they are promoted, quickly.

Are they going to go up to their superiors and tell them everything they do is wrong - heck no, they don’t want to get fired. Are they going to violate their employment contract or company policy - and get fired? Are they going to try out different things for a few quarters, just to see what might really pay off eventually? Why? God willing things look good and I get to move over to that other team, lord just give me the strength not to kill the bastard in the next cubicle for four more weeks and I’m on the easy street!

And therein lies the core benefit of employment - that if you are unhappy for whatever reason you can with very limited risk find a different job elsewhere.

Entrepreneurs don’t get this.

Everything written above is an outright spit in the face of the entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneur does not and will not comprehend the lack of motivation, lack of incentive, lack of.. I mean, for the love of god, they do the same shit every single day and they don’t rip their heads out?!? I could never do th..

But just as you’re sounding that last word out, consider just how much stability YOU demand from the really big company. You never want them to change. How happy are you when the bank you rely on goes through a magical transformation that doubles your fees. Or when your phone company gets bought up and the service you now get falls apart. Or having to deal with another person where you already established a relationship with ….

Starting to get it now? Those are your safety needs, your reliability requirement so you can continue to grow your business without things underneath you constantly changing without your explicit consent.

So how do we work together…

The major cause of unhappiness between entrepreneurs and big company employees is in their lack of understanding for each other. Entrepreneur wants the big company employee to change their company so it can serve the entrepreneur better. The big company employee wants the entrepreneur to be the asset that makes their key performance indicators go up. The two are in direct conflict with each other, and frankly impossible.

So.. back to the agrarian society and bartering?

No, through tolerance. Through understanding what motivates each other and how to best form a relationship based on understanding. But, lets consider ignorance first - if the big company employee screws the entrepreneur, the entrepreneur will find another company to deal with. If the entrepreneur screws the big company employee they will get a new job, stop doing their current job to the fullest potential, take a 2 week vacation during the entrepreneurs busy season or put their entire focus on another entrepreneur who has their best interest at heart.

So.. how do we all win?

Through give and take. You like what that big company employee is doing for you? Understand their needs. Write to their boss and tell them what they have done for you. Tell others why they need to work with the big company employee. Understand where the big company employee needs to go and help them get there. Same goes for the big company employee. Understand your entrepreneurs needs and where they want to go. Try to give them the direction the big company is taking and how they can meet their need - the big payoff. When the really big company employee does something remarkable for the entrepreneur, that entrepreneur is closer to their payoff. So that entrepreneur better be cognizant of the fact that the big company employee wants to be happy too - so make them happy. Life is beautiful! Until there is a problem. Neither side can go far in either direction - entrepreneur can’t take the risk, the employee can’t get fired. So they lie to each other - “Oh, we’re going to get that done in FY08″ or “I have a huge deal I am working on” or “I’ve been in meetings all week to resolve that problem” or “We’re too swamped to look at that new offer you guys have” (because we’re trying to take all our business to the other big company)..

When companies (be it entrepreneur or big company employee) go out of their way to BS one another the whole system falls apart and neither wins. When companies work together, understand each others motivations and needs, everyone has a chance to win. The key is tolerance and understanding.

How ridiculously simple is that?

I rarely ask for help here but with all the deadlines converging this is one less project I can dedicate half a day for setup / build / test so I’m hoping someone out there has this in place and can take the 10 minutes out of their day to help me build a curl library that allows insecure mode by default. I need curl to pull data of a secured site without verifying that certificates authenticity.

I need to rebuild curl (for win32) with zlib/openssl support with one slight modification – I need the -k switch hardcoded which is quite easy, just edit src/main.c and change line #1548 from {”k”, “insecure”, FALSE}, to {”k”,”insecure”, TRUE},

Save, recompile and send me over curl.exe

So, anybody willing to help me out? You know where to find me..

P.S. For what it’s worth, I need it compiled with MinGW, I have the environment setup and can compile it fine (without SSL), so if anyone has any suggestions as to which packages need to be installed and how to make the configure aware of the existing OpenSSL libraries on the system.. I’m all ears. 

P.S.2. Never mind, got it done with Visual Studio. I had to recompile half the GNU project in the process but what would have taken 2 minutes in Linux has taken 3 hours on Windows. Will post instructions in the articles section this weekend.

I know how alergic you are to clickthroughs so I’ve reprinted the whole article Vijay wrote because its perhaps the finest piece of social/business reflection on what it is most of us do. If you are moved to respond please do so here.

Microsoft has a fixation for case studies which are compete based i.e. you replaced a Linux solution with Microsoft. They’ll jump all over you for this! Tell them you have stories where you deployed SBS 2003 and it transformed the way a business operated and it’s yawn city for them! The point is this, that SBSC Partners do this day in and day out - keeping small businesses operating and giving them modern IT infrastructure. The change in some of these businesses can be amazing and on the surface may seem nothing, not even worth reporting but boy do they have an impact on the way people work. Microsoft continues to be completely underwhelmed by the work we do and the range of technologies we deploy - we perform minor miracles! The greatest stories are those of ordinary people doing ordinary things or maybe I should say ordinary people being empowered to do extraordinary things. Microsoft needs to come and see what we do and you can’t do that from the comfort of Microsoft HQ.

The SBSC Programme is like the Programme that dare not mention its name, in fact some who work within Small & Medium Business never mention it! If they were to meet a SBSC Partner you feel they would be like a rabbit caught in the headlights and try and make it to the safety of a Gold Certified Partner doing Business Solutions. I guess we can be a bolshy lot and that we don’t necessarily fit into nice neat Microsoft compartmentalised silos. We’re not going to cover many PAMs in glory - bless their little target driven cotton socks! Shock horror, we work with competitive technologies and have multiple vendor relationships and we speak our mind when things at Microsoft suck. We are unpredictable and ungrateful, probably in about equal measure.

One thing each and everyone of us has done has been to take real risks in life. We’ve bet our livelihoods, the growth of our businesses and the success of our customer’s businesses on Microsoft Technology so we deserve the maximum amount of support from Microsoft and for them to step into our shoes sometime.

To each and every SBSC Partner out there, I truly respect what you all do!

 

I figured banana.shockeymonkey.com deserved a public funeral for all the good stuff it brought to the community. Banana was the server that was used as the primary development/test platform for Shockey Monkey from 03/2006 to 08/2006 and it really made this wonderful project possible.

The server ran continuously without reboot since 03/2006 and was about as rock-solid of a platform for a standalone server as one can imagine. It was shut down finally around 9 PM earlier tonight.

So I’m sitting around this morning finishing up some bugfixes for ExchangeDefender v3.1 and I took a moment to look at yesterdays stats. So far so good for a Monday. Attachment filtering breakdown. Whooa, Microsoft Excel (.xls) in #2 spot? What the…

“Oh yeah. We’ve been seeing a huge spike in the number of forged Excel files doing the same stock pattern spam that we were dealing with a few weeks ago with pdf’s and greeting cards.”

Fun. Another attachment that can’t be trusted anymore.

So a little while back I wrote a thanksgiving post explaining how I would never have made it to where I am at today if there weren’t some incredible people along the way kicking my ass to do bigger and better things.

Around that same time I had decided that I would use this large vladville.com megaphone I have to give back and help better someone else… though there is a secret here, that other person has to be hungry, looking to better themselves too. So I figured if there was just one thing, one thing I could offer once a week, to pass some of my skills.. vladville would be a success.

So this first step, related to the AJAX post made the other day, gives you a 10,000 ft view of HTML, Javascript, SQL, Wordpress templates and internals as well as some very basic PHP. It is a simple article, one that you can easilly cut and paste and achieve identical results. That is by all means a huge lie, because learning comes with experimentation and trying new things, coming up with new problems and solutions. But at the very least this will give you a starting point and it is step #1 in a five step program to AJAXify your Wordpress installation and provide Facebook-style status updates.

I hope you enjoy it, click here to read article. 

Lord knows I hate Apple users. For decades Apple has been known for its delusions about being better while holding on to less than 5% of PC market share so now that they actually have significant share of a certain market they had to find a better way to insult potential customers: Charge people to come into the Apple store! One of the readers of Brian’s story said: “Five dollars to just walk into the store? It’s like they want to be elite snobs or something.” to which Vince Sciopiano, the VP of Apple Stores, said “That’s exactly the case.”

While I can fully appreciate the need to control the massive flow of people into Apple stores, pocket-qualification for mass consumer electronics is just a bad idea. How do I put this in a more plain terms.

“The very reason people pile into your store to look at overpriced yet shiny garbage is because the store is packed with teenagers to begin with. Your products (hint, 5% share) are not what draws people in, people in the stores draw people in to see what everyone is playing with.”

Consider your average camera store or electronics shop. Notice how it’s always empty, with one or two sharply dressed immigrants just waiting to pounce on you the second your foot crosses the alarm beam? They also cater to the elite crowd with deep pockets, in much the same way that a squad of aging women hunts you with perfume as you enter Dillards. Yet those stores are empty, or in Dillards case have more people passing through them from the parking lot than anything else.

Think thats by chance? Yesterday I was at my local Best Buy which just put in a huge Apple display and demo station. Guess what – EMPTY. Why? Because there was 1 table, with everything Apple makes, surrounded by 5 Apple dweebs. 0 teenagers. 0 audience. 0 sales. But hey, $5 entrance is better than the $0 you’re getting at Best Buy so go ahead, charge the customer into the ground while they are still loyal to you for some reason.

Moral of the story is: If you’re a dick to your customers while you’ve got the leg up, they will abandon you the second there is a reasonable alternative. Treat customers like gold and they will be your fans forever.