The Kitchen

First, a little background about our shipping procedures. We use a program from UPS called WorldShip to print our UPS shipping labels in the morning.

WorldShip works by taking the XML files created by our website, extracting the name, address, and other shipment info, and turning that into a label. WorldShip does this by looking for XML files in a specific directory. For each XML file WorldShip creates one label, and then renames the file from a .xml extension to a .xxx extension, so that it doesn't process it again. Then it moves on to the next file.

On the day in question there was some kind of hiccup and one of the .xxx file wouldn't stay named that way. This meant that WorldShip cheerfully kept re-processing that one XML file over, and over, and over again until a human operator noticed that it was printing out a heck of a lot of labels this morning.

All told, we ended up printing out 761 identical UPS labels for that one file, when all we needed was one. At around $10 each (this would be a shipment going to the other coast), we were looking at a hefty bill. And of course, you can't just void 760 shipments on the UPS website.

After a few frantic phone calls, we finally got things straightened out. Thanks again to Damien and the fine folks in the UPS Preferred Customer division, especially whoever got stuck copy and pasting all 760 shipments. The credit is supposed to be arriving back to our account sometime this week, and we're left with a cute story :)

Norman Borlaug passed away on September 12, at the age of 95. If you don't know of him yet, you should. By some counts, Borlaug is estimated with saving the lives of over a billion people.

Borlaug won the Nobel Prize for his work as a plant scientist, developing strains of staple grains with higher yields and more disease resistance. This is a major part of why the Malthusian apocalyptic predictions of the 1970's never came true. You can catch an interview Penn & Teller did with Borlaug, starting at about 2 minutes into the video, here:

As my fiance pointed out, though, Borlaug did have a long life, and perhaps his passing will be an opportunity for people to learn more about his work and carry it on in the future.

Here's a gem from Fail Blog that seemed apropos:

This is a completely geeky post. For those of you not into computers, you may as well skip it. For those of you who are, I just had to brag :)

By the time you read this, I will (hopefully, air-travel-gods permitting) be in sunny California (which is totally a change from sunny Miami Beach), hard at work bringing our glorious low-cal wares to the denizens of that Golden State.

Now, lets say you're in you're a road-warrior looking to catch up on calls from your hotel room. What are your options?

You could use your cell phone, but the coverage isn't always great (especially in old hotels with thick walls), plus you'll eat up a ton of minutes. The hotel phone ... they want how much for long-distance?! Yikes.

Now, I happen to use Vonage as my primary office phone, which means I should be all set so long as the hotel has Internet. Right? Well, not exactly. The Vonage device needs to plug into an Ethernet (CAT5) cable, and most hotels only offer WiFi, not wired connections. Great for laptops, but that leaves my Vonage phone high and dry. And I don't feel like ordering the special Vonage USB phone thing just for the few times I'm travelling.

Fortunately, my laptop runs Linux. And like most laptops, it has both a WiFi (802.11x) chip and an Ethernet port, of course. Ah-ha! What if I could use my laptop to tap into the hotel's WiFi internet, and then use the laptop as a bridge to connect my Vonage device to the internet?

A few minuts of Googling gave us all the info we need. First, I set up my laptop's ethernet card with a fixed IP (say, 192.168.2.1). Then use DHCPD to have it hand out an address to the Vonage device (in the 192.168.2.100-200 range for this example). Make sure the gateway is being set to the same gateway the hotel is telling your laptop to use, though (192.168.0.1 for instance). DHCPD can also specify to use an open DNS server, which I found handy. Oh, and on Debian you use "sh /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server stop" and "sh /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server start" to restart DHCPD after changing the dhcpd.conf file.

We then use iptables to turn your laptop into a very expensive NAT router. Just keep track of which is eth0 and which is eth1! I got it backwards the first time, and couldn't figure what I was doing wrong.

One handy thing is that you won't need a hub or switch to connect the Vonage device to the computer port - a standard CAT5 cable (not even a crossover) will connect them just fine.

The Vonage device worked like a charm over my wireless at home, and after plugging in a phone I was up and calling. With any luck my portable office will work well in the Best Western too!

Here's a fun thing I found over the weekend. You end up dealing with a lot of different companies when running a business like FiberGourmet. Recently the logo of one of the trucking companies we deal with, CH Robinson, caught my eye. Here's their logo:

That probably doesn't look like anything significant to most people (a bunch of spokes on a wheel, perhaps?), but in a previous life I was a computer programmer. And you can't be a tech geek without obsessing over Star Trek, Star Wars, or (preferably) both. It's de rigeur. Now, check out the logo of the nefarious Galactic Empire from the Star Wars universe, and you'll see what caught my eye:

Looks kinda similar, no? It's either a sheer coincidence or their logo was dreamed up by someone in the tech department. Either way, you can bet I'll be paying their bills on time. ("I find your lack of payment ... disturbing" *ack ack cough*)

Congratulationss to Roni for landing on the cover of Woman's World Magazine!. It's a great Thanksgiving present to have your likeness distributed to 1.6 million readers across the country. And you should definitely check out her blog, it's a great read. Here's the review she did of our pasta, for instance.

We have a little part in the magazine, too - I'm pretty sure that headline plastered across the front page in 150 point type is referring to our pasta. :)

Looks like Google Checkout has some scheduled maintenance coming up:

On Monday, October 22, at 9:00 pm PDT [midnight here on the East Coast], Google Checkout will be unavailable for approximately 30-90 minutes as we conduct server maintenance. During this time, the Google Checkout button will not appear on merchant websites, and merchants will be unable to process orders

Not such a big deal since it's at midnight and only for a few hours, but if you happened to be trying to checkout just then, you're probably pleased to find this post.