Our office just received a fake invoice from Stock Quotes Professional Inc. last Friday.

We had no recollection of asking for a “rotating top banner with hyperlink” to our web site. The exact description on the invoice was: “Bi-annual online investor communications sponsorship”, followed by the hyperlink (spelled as hperlink) text above and then “International Stock Quotes”. The invoiced amount was $449 plus GST, amounting to $471.45.

Their web site is pathetic: www.stockquotespro.com. Who in the right mind would even want to post a banner there. It looks like a quick, five-minute web site. Take a look and see for yourself.

We called their toll-free number, 1-877-859-0117, to ask for clarification and were transferred to voice mail on two separate occasions. Further, I looked up the GST number in the CRA registry. I wasn’t shocked to see: “Not registered on the transaction date entered”.

Bottom-line: If you receive an invoice from Stock Quotes Professional Inc (Calgary, AB), do NOT pay it! As we have done, report them to the Better Business Bureau and the Canada Revenue Agency. A business is not allowed to charge GST unless it has been registered to collect GST.

The architects from Dynamic Architecture Group have devised a rotating skyscraper to be built amongst the Dubai landscape.

The concept is interesting, to say the least. Strong wind gusts will rotate the skyscraper’s floors for an ever-changing design. Owners of apartments will likely awaken to a new view each morning.

Coming from a technical background, I can only wonder if the parts required between the floors are durable for long-term use. Oh wait, they have plenty of oil to use between floors!

Given that the architectural landscape of Dubai is similar to that of the Las Vegas Strip, once the investors have gained a sizeable return on investment, I’m sure they will tear it down and start anew.

I’m going to discuss a type of e-mail scam I’ve encountered lately. Actually, I find my spam box littered with dozens of these so-called “job offers”.

I bet we’ve all seen spam e-mails promising $4K to $10K per month (or $200 to $300 per day) in residual income for processing sales orders. Most individuals safely ignore these e-mails, but some seek further details.. and eventually get caught up as a helpless victim (or jump ship early).

There’s plenty of legitimate opportunities for residual income processing sales orders. However, there’s also ones that are clearly illegal. Let’s start with an example. Joe has a factory in Europe that makes shoes. Joe does $100K a month in sales and needs individuals to capture some of the American and Canadian market on his behalf. In doing so, Joe will pay you 10% of the sales volume that YOU process on his behalf. Joe expects you to wire 90% of the proceeds from YOUR sales to either your bank account or a bank account or his choice. Sound familiar?

Let’s break this example down a little. Joe wants you to set up shop on his behalf, in your own country. With the sales volumes Joe’s doing, he could easily set up shop in your country using various methods. Next, Joe wants to use your bank account to collect the funds. Never give out your banking information. On top of this, Joe wants you to set up a merchant account with an online order processor. Then, Joe promises you he’ll send you a couple hundred orders per month for you to process. Well, guess what? Those orders aren’t really “orders”. They are false orders created using STOLEN credit card numbers and customer data. Now, I hope you can put two and two together and see where I’m going with this (money laundering). In the end, you make nothing and actually lose money spent on credit card processing fees and chargebacks from unknowing “customers”.

In the end, you will be held accountable for YOUR actions, not Joe in Europe. If you have landed yourself in hot water by falling victim to such a “job offer”, I have information that can help you out.

Disclaimer: I discovered the information above a couple of years ago, being inquisitive and pressuring details out of a individual posing as a marketing manager for an online company. Sometimes, you just have to play dumb, but yet not fall victim.

Microsoft released the last major update to its Windows XP operating system on Tuesday.

Since several people have already asked me, you can download it by clicking here (32-bit version). It weighs in at about 316 MB, so it may take awhile to download depending on your Internet connection.

Some users have complained about various issues installing SP3, ranging from random crashes to endless reboots. However, none of the seven systems (all Windows XP Pro) I updated had any issues. Well, one did. I decided to install SP3 on a co-worker’s laptop over an UNC share and the installer didn’t like that too much. Once I copied it to the desktop, the installation went smoothly. At home, I installed SP3 on a couple of systems over a network connection without any issues.

A Microsoft PDF summarizes all of the changes in SP3: click here to view it. I believe this service pack includes 1224 bug fixes (cumulative since first release).

I’ve been running SP3 for a few days now and it seems stable. Of course, if it doesn’t work out, you can always uninstall it

I received an envelope from Imperial Majesty Cruise Line Vacations (aka Ramada Plaza Resort) today.

Inside the envelope, there was a travel voucher worth $1300. I was promised 4 days & 3 nights at a Ramada Plaza Resort in Florida, another 3 days & 2 nights at another Ramada Plaza Resort in Florida, a 2 night Caribbean Cruise and 7 days transportation by Alamo Rent-A-Car with unlimited mileage.

Too good to be true? Well, you know how the saying goes.

This Ramada Plaza Resort scam is fairly well-known. In fact, back in 2005, I filed a complaint with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and also the Florida Attorney General upon receiving this scam. They acknowledged the complaint as I received a formal response from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

This “deluxe” vacation package consists of two sub-standard hotels and a very old, poorly kept ship. This “deluxe” vacation package also violates the following sections of the Sellers of Travel Act: 559.932 (Vacation certificate disclosure), 559.933 (Vacation certificate cancellation and refund provisions) and 559.9335 (Violations).

If you have been scammed by Ramada Plaza Resort, contact me using the comments section of this blog entry. I have enough legal documentation to get you a full refund.

I finally managed to get my hands on the highly sought Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU.

I’ve been waiting weeks for my reseller to receive stock on the CPU. I kicked myself for not purchasing it earlier from another reseller, as it fell to a low of $199, and recently the price surged to $260 due to a shortage of the CPU’s. I managed to acquire it for $222, which was a price I was willing to pay.

The Core 2 Duo E8400 is one of Intel’s first 45 nm CPU’s. Intel’s 45 nm CPU’s consume less power and run cooler than their 65 nm (Conroe) counterparts. They are also very overclockable. The CPU (stock) is currently running at 24C, which is significantly cooler than my E6400 at 40C.

I ran wPrime v1.61 to compare the computing power of both CPU’s. wPrime is a multithreaded benchmark that calculates the square-roots of large amounts of numbers — 32 million in this case. For this benchmark, I used Gigabyte’s P35-DS3L v2.0 motherboard (BIOS revision: F8b).

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.00 GHz): 32M test completed in 26.952 seconds.
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13 GHz): 32M test completed in 41.297 seconds.

I realize it’s not a fair clock-for-clock comparison, but it shows the sheer computing power of each CPU. Simple math shows us that the E8400 should be approximately 29% faster than the E6400. The E8400 beat the E6400 by a significant margin (as expected), 34.7%, using a combination of higher clock speed, a faster FSB (1333 MHz vs 1066 MHz) and more L2 cache (6 MB vs 2 MB).

Given the price point of the new Intel 45 nm CPU’s (T8xxx/T9xxx), I recommend waiting out and purchasing them over the current Conroe / 65 nm CPU’s (T5xxx/T7xxx).

It’s been a few months since I last posted an entry to my blog. Life has been busy. This blog has been busy, in terms of web traffic to my Anonymous Letters and Starbucks posts below.

Time for a tech post. I had the privilege of upgrading an ancient Red Hat 9 Linux box to CentOS 4.5. Red Hat Linux has been EOL for a very long time, and was superceded by Fedora, which has had seven major releases. That’s the equivalent of running Windows 3.1 Well, not quite Anyhow, the box at hand appeared to be a custom web server. I will outline the steps I used to successfully upgrade it to CentOS 4.5.

1. Download the CentOS 4.5 CD set or DVD image from www.centos.org.
2. Put in CD 1 or the DVD image.
3. Reboot the old Red Hat 9 box and ensure that the BIOS allows booting from the CD/DVD drive.
4. Enter the following at the linux boot prompt and press Enter: linux upgradeany
5. The system will happily hum along while Red Hat 9 is upgraded to CentOS 4.5.
6. If ‘yum’ wasn’t installed, you will need to install it:
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
7. Now, run the following command and press Enter: yum update
8. Allow yum to run and update the required packages. Reboot if yum downloads and installs a new kernel.
9. Since the box in question had a custom Apache and PHP configuration, I reinstalled them manually:
yum install httpd
yum install php
yum install mysql
yum install mysql-server
yum install php-mysql
10. I had to update the MySQL configuration to point to the correct socket:
Update my.cnf:
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
instead of
socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
and add the following to use your existing database passwords
old_passwords=1
11. Copy any required PHP extensions to new system path:
cp -R /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/* /usr/lib/php4
12. Edit /etc/php.ini:
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
extension=mysql.so
13. Finally, set services to start up automatically:
chkconfig –level 345 httpd on
chkconfig –level 345 mysqld on
chkconfig –level 345 sendmail on
14. There you have it. The server should be happily running CentOS 4.5 now. Remember to keep it up-to-date by running yum update regularly.