DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A friend recently reported that he was unable to send me email. He received bounce messages that were not helpful at all — the message was generic, like “your message could not be delivered.” Apparently that’s a technical term from Microsoft; the meaning is “Exchange Server blows big chunks,” or possibly “Due to our contempt for users, who we think are too dumb to be exposed to anything so scary as an SMTP error message, we’ll hide the cause for this failure and instead give you a bland and useless note that discourages you from finding out what’s really happening, much less fixing it.”

After several hours of research, I discovered the problem: my server was configured to refuse inbound mail from remote servers that have broken reverse DNS.

“Broken reverse DNS” means that a computer’s address has no corresponding name in DNS, the Domain Name Service. I know of no reason why any public mail server would be configured this way, except through ignorance.

So, basically, the reason my friend couldn’t send me email is that his employer’s IT department screwed up their DNS configuration.

I called the company’s help desk to report the bug. This caused no small amount of consternation, for I’m not an employee. They have no procedures in place for handling bug reports from non-employees. But to their credit, they took the report… and then sat on it for two weeks. I called back weekly — long distance! — to check status. “We’re still working on it” is all they’d say.

Finally I got a call back. The tech told me they would be unable to fix their broken DNS because their security software prevents it. This sounded to me like a brush-off. Certainly it’s possible that some sort of Windows security software would prevent established Internet standards from functioning… that’s no less plausible than Exchange Server’s crappy bounce handling.

I asked the technician if he realized that that meant nobody at his company would be able to send mail to AOL. He was understandably mystified, until I explained that AOL’s inbound mail servers, like my own, block mail from remote servers that have broken reverse DNS.

We set up a test. Lo and behold, his test message never arrived at my AOL account. This had the desired effect; my original bug report was amended and kicked up to a higher-level tech. It seems that not being able to send mail to me is not a concern. But not being able to send mail to 35 million AOL users is a problem worth fixing.

Three days later, they’d fixed their DNS and asked me to help them verify it. I was so pleased, I laughed out loud. “Our security software prevents it,” indeed.

According to ClimateStar.org,

If every family in the US replaced one regular light bulb with an energy saving model, we’d reduce global warming pollution by more than 90 billion pounds, the same as taking 7.5 million cars off the road.

That sounds like a staggering amount of pollution to prevent. Of course, there are a staggering number of families in the US — we’re talking about lots of new bulbs.

I have few wasteful “heat bulbs” left to replace. But I know people who appear to insist on spending 4x as much energy to light their homes. Perhaps for their next birthday they’ll receive a selection of Compact Fluorescent bulbs and a card with the quote above.

(I’ve written before about the color of compact fluorescent lights… information that is relevant for first-time CF buyers.)

wreckedexotics.com: the internet’s largest collection of exotic car crash photos

Wired’s Googlemania is a collection of 10 stories about Google. It offers short takes on several interesting facets of the Google story, like Google vs. Microsoft, 3rd-party Google API apps, PageRank-killing comment spam.

The opening piece, “Surviving IPO Fever,” contains a list of IPO cautionary tales: sudden wealth going wrong, culled from longtime members of the Silicon Valley community:

• The mousy guy in accounting who dumps his mousy wife and runs off to Mexico with the admin.
• The lonely programmer who goes off to a men’s club to celebrate his new wealth and marries a stripper he meets there.
• The sober family man who, upon discovering that he’s half-Native American, renounces his US citizenship and moves to an Indian reservation so he won’t have to pay taxes.
• The programmer who quits, buys the sports car of his dreams, crashes, loses everything in the resulting personal-injury lawsuit, and ends up broke, back in his old job.
• The senior executive who takes his new wealth up into Los Altos Hills and spends the next decade putting the money up his nose one gram at a time.

Another great story of the darker side of IPOs comes from Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first employee:

“Before [eBay] went public, I used to send out a company-wide joke each day, just as a way of loosening things up,” says Skoll. “The day after the IPO, I sat down at my computer to write that day’s joke and in walked the general counsel. He says to me, ‘You know that joke of the day thing? I think it’s very funny.’ Gosh, thank you, I replied. ‘Well, stop it,’ he said. ‘We are a public company now, and we don’t want to offend anyone. If you want to keep sending out jokes, they can only be about lawyers.’ So I tried sending out lawyer jokes for two weeks - and then I gave up.”

In 2000, a band called Transatlantic released an album featuring (among many other moments of musical transcendence) an extended piano solo, performed by Neal Morse.

The band was channeling the Allman Brothers, specifically Chuck Leavell’s extended piano solo on the song Jessica, from the 1973 release Brothers and Sisters. The Allman Brothers was not a progressive rock band, but the members had this in common with the guys in Transatlantic: they could play.

I hear stylistic similarities when I compare the two solos. Listen to this figure, used by Leavell, and then by Morse. Now listen to the way the drummer and pianist play off one another, first in Jessica and then All of the Above. There’s an organic energy to these solos that appeals to me — an energy that says, “this might be magical, or it might get taped over in 60 seconds.” They were right the first time.

Here are the solos in their entirety:

• Jessica, The Allman Brothers Band, Brothers and Sisters
• All of the Above, Transatlantic, SMTP:e

I’d like to write that the piano solo in Jessica is one of the finest musical passages released in 1973, but that was too good a year — Camel released their eponymous debut then, and Genesis released perhaps the most wondrous progressive rock album of all time, Selling England by the Pound. And the ink was still drying on Jethro Tull’s 1972 release, Thick As A Brick, also the most wondrous progressive rock album of all time.

As far as Transatlantic goes, I have to say that the entire discography kicks a whole lot of ass. Buy them all, like right now.