I had a busy week using USB on my system.

1. I've needed to connect to my Android phone using developer tools through USB.
2. Install MagicJack.
3. Fix Microsoft Lifecam to work with my system again to video chat friends on Skype.

Getting my Windows 7 to read the Android phone was a minor PITA.  It worked in the end.

I needed to MagicJack to work.  Calling tech support *about* your cellphone is a hassle when your cellphone is the only number you have.  Skype voice, even if it sounds great to your friend on the other end on Skype, always sounds terrible to tech support.  My theory is that the call gets transferred at the other end of customer service from general to tech or advanced tech support over VOIP and the double sampling kills the quality.  MagicJack should also be susceptible to the same weaknesses as Skype, but I was desperate for a solution, and willing to give it a shot.  A MagicJack number is also good to have to support Google Voice, especially if you have more than one GV account.  Mobile numbers can only be used as such on one GV account.

I got it to work... on my Vista machine.  Windows 7 x64 was a problem no matter what I tried.  There are downloads for both firmware and the program on that MagicJack website.  The latter supposedly supports Windows 7.  I couldn't get Windows 7 to recognize the MagicJack.  I thought updating the firmware by plugging it into the Vista box and running the update and then plugging it back into the Windows 7 machine would work.  No dice.

Then my Microsoft Lifecam Cinema stopped working.  This device too also has a program update and a firmware update.  Both worked fine on the Vista machine.  Again, Windows 7 refused to recognize the webcam and install the drivers.

0/2 left me wondering if I did something to mess up my USB setup or if an update broke things.  Scouring the web and trying OLD solutions over and over -- for better or worse, Google likes long old threads on authoritative websites, like Microsoft Tech Social -- I got no closer than when I started.  (I didn't listen to the Microsoft support drones who are fond of telling you to reinstall the OS.)  I probably rebooted my computer two dozen times today, easily, in futile cycles of uninstalling and reinstalling.

Finally, I did a search on Microsoft's main tech support pages and found a USB hotfix for seemingly unrelated issues.  I figured that if something is broken with the USB, repairing with the latest USB system files could surely have collateral benefit.  I was right.

After applying kb 978258

USB devices that are connected to a computer may not work after the computer is idle for more than one hour Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2

My Windows 7 x64 machine was able to see and install the drivers for both MagicJack and the Lifecam.  (The Lifecam required uninstalling and reinstall and twiddling with the registry settings.)

Yay!   Let me know if this works for you.

Installing Datamapper on Ubuntu 9.04, I got this mysterious error:

$ sudo gem install do_mysql
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing do_mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install do_mysql
extconf.rb:3:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:3

After much googling and trying other solutions like installing libmysqlclient16-dev, I stumbled upon Al Hoang's related problem and solution:

$ sudo aptitude install ruby-dev

Then

$ sudo gem install do_mysql
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed do_mysql-0.10.0
1 gem installed

Installing libmysqclient16-dev could have anticipated a problem that would have arisen later--it may or may not be necessary.

I got this cryptic SMS this afternoon on my phone:

Sender: type@arlingtonvafcu.org

Arlington Virginia F C U system notify-unhandled exception . TOLL FREE 877 858 9026

Arlington Virginia Federal Credit Union happens to be legit and so is the domain of the supposed sender.  But how did this get onto my cellphone--and why??  The toll free numbers on the FCU website do not match the one in the text message.  When you call the TOLL FREE number, a synthesized voice asks you to verify your account by entering card numbers, passwords, account numbers, etc.  (I didn't have the patience to listen for more than few seconds.)

Phishing scam!

This FCU happens to be near me.  My best guess is that they harnessed the power of simple marketing or geographical databases or directories and wrote a script that blasts a SMS gateway with locally customized phishing messages directing everyone to the same automated toll free number.

Devious and sophisticated!

Who do you report a disembodied crime like this to?

* * *

The Credit Union knows about the scam and has put up an alert on their website:

!FRAUD ALERT!

Several new "phishing" and "SMiShing" attempts using Arlington Virginia Federal Credit Union's name have been detected.  While they are in no way related to the Credit Union, we want our members to beware ANY email, phone call or text message asking you to give out, or validate, your account information.  To protect yourself from "phishing" and "SMiShing" and other types of identity theft scams, simply don't give out your personal, private information to anyone... ever... over the phone, the Internet, your cell phone, etc... AVFCU will never call, email, text or contact you in any other way and ask you to provide your personal, private information to us. DON'T FALL FOR THESE SCAMS! Click here to read more.

Vishing and SMishing are the new variants of phishing.

I'm making my way through Toby Segaran's excellent new book "Programming Collective Intelligence," and I'm posting here some of the errata I've found in the code thus far that hasn't been reported or published on the O'Reilly site yet. I'll report them but also want to explain them here. (I can't get the Python code to indent using the code markup plugin. Please let me know if you have suggestions.)

Chapter 3, Discovering Groups

generatefeedvector.py

The main body of this file bombs on

 
title,wc=getwordcounts(feedurl)

because the URL http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/feed/ toward the bottom of

http://kiwitobes.com/clusters/feedlist.txt

no long returns an RSS feed. We could remove that URL from feedlist.txt, find the working RSS URL for techeblog, or make our code more robust to deal with this problem in general. To enable the last option, encapsulate getwordcounts in Python's error apparatus:

 
try:
   title,wc=getwordcounts(feedurl)
except AttributeError:
   continue

The variable feedlist in the line

 
frac=float(bc)/feedlist

is referenced but not initialized or computed before that.

The fix is initialize feedlist and increment it as each feedurl is processed:

 
feedlist = 0
for feedurl in file('feedlist.txt'):
    try:
        title,wc=getwordcounts(feedurl)
    except AttributeError:
        continue
    feedlist += 1
    wordcounts[title]=wc
    for word,count in wc.items():
        apcount.setdefault(word,0)
        if count>1:
            apcount[word]+=1

Lastly for Chapter 3, the string handling chokes on a character from one of the feeds that doesn't bridge the ascii and unicode worlds. I googled for a solution and came up with this one simple fix:

 
out = open('blogdata.txt','w')
out.write('Blog')

to

 
out = codecs.open('blogdata.txt','wb','utf-8')
out.write('Blog')

You must

 
import codecs

I'm not up to speed on unicode so don't ask me how it works; it works.

That's it for Chapter 3. More later as I make my way through the book. Btw, I just checked Toby's blog and found that you can download the source code.