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New PNC Bank Overdraft Solutions

With the new consumer financial protections that are going into effect very soon, PNC Bank will no longer offer overdraft coverage by default on checking accounts.  You’ll need to opt-in if you want any sort of overdraft coverage.

In researching the options – I wanted to be sure I knew exactly what was going on – I found that PNC offers two forms of overdraft “solutions” that you can opt into.  (The information on these is found here on the PNC site.)  One of the options seems much more consumer-friendly than the other, and it seems like PNC is making it as difficult as possible to find information about it and opt into it.

Note: you should double-check everything with the PNC site and talk with one of their customer service people before taking any action based on this info. I’m presenting information here based on my own experience with PNC and the questions I’ve asked their customer service people.

Option 1: Overdraft Coverage

The first option PNC offers, and the one they seem to really want you to use, is called “Overdraft Coverage”.  This is the coverage that we’re used to from before the consumer protections: if you overdraft, the bank charges you an exorbitant fee (around $35) and gives you a short-term loan that covers the amount of the overdraft.

There’s a lot of information on their site (linked above) about this option, and it’s easy to opt into it from the online banking interface.

Option 2: Overdraft Protection

The second, more consumer-friendly solution is called “Overdraft Protection”.  With this option, when you overdraft your checking account, PNC will deduct the overdraft from your savings account.  The fee for this is $10 per overdraft – less than 1/3 the fee for “overdraft coverage”.  (This is presumably because the bank isn’t technically loaning you money. They just charge you $10 for the benefit of using your own money – how nice! </sarcasm>)

There’s not much information on the PNC site about this option.  PNC mentions that it exists and provides a basic summary, but there is no in-depth information online.  You’re told to contact customer service for information or to opt-in.  You can’t opt into this protection from the online banking interface, either.

Conclusion

It’s pretty clear to me that PNC would like you to enroll in “overdraft coverage” – they have much more information about this option on their site, and you can get information and opt in using the online banking interface.  It’s obvious why this might be – the bank makes more than 3 times the profit if you overdraft using this coverage rather than “overdraft protection”.

If you’re looking for some form of overdraft solution, I’d recommend that you ask customer service for information about “overdraft protection” and strongly consider that option – it’s much, much more consumer-friendly.

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By Chris Dzombak – July 22, 2010

University of Michigan Google Calendar Updated for Fall 2010

I’ve updated my University of Michigan (Ann Arbor campus) Google Calendar for the Fall 2010 Term!

You can find the calendar & directions for using it on the calendar page.

Posted in UMich Academic Calendar Updates.

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By Chris Dzombak – July 21, 2010

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan

A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.

- from Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan by Mohammad Qayoumi

An interesting and thought-provoking article and photos.

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By Chris Dzombak – June 17, 2010

Redirecting site visitors without affecting OpenID

I recently needed to redirect an old domain which was still running an OpenID endpoint.  Naturally, I didn’t want to redirect access to that endpoint.

There’s no definitive way to tell whether a client is an OpenID client, but I’ve put together a set of .htaccess rules which do a pretty good job.  These rules let you redirect human visitors (HTTP 301) but not affect OpenID clients looking for an endpoint.

These rules can be found on my code site, and any updates will be posted there as well.

Posted in Tech & Science.

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By Chris Dzombak – March 15, 2010

Building OpenSSL with Symbol Versioning

I compiled OpenSSL on my Dreamhost account to support my local installation of Git, PHP, Rails, and Redmine, among other things. 1

However, whenever I ran git (or a few other programs which depended on OpenSSL), I got several messages like the following:

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git: /home/chris/local/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8: no version information available (required by git)
git: /home/chris/local/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8: no version information available (required by git)

The worked properly, but the these messages were quite annoying, and it was clear that something wasn’t quite right.  I won’t go into the details of symbol versioning here.2

Some research revealed that some people have had similar issues, but many solutions simply involved copying “working” versions of these libraries over the nonworking ones, which isn’t possible in this situation (and is a hackish solution at best).  The closest to a solution I found was this December 2006 post on the Debian mailing list in which one of Debian’s OpenSSL maintainers mentions that you should add a line to Configure and that you need the file openssl.ld.

I’ve now figured out how to build OpenSSL 0.9.8l on Debian (specifically, in my home directory at Dreamhost) with symbol versioning.3

The patch file mentioned below is very simple and changes a few lines in the Makefile and the Configure script; click here to download the file and look at it yourself to see exactly what changes.  This patch file is not specific to Dreamhost’s environment; it should work wherever you want to build OpenSSL.

This procedure will install OpenSSL in your ~/local/lib. You should create the directory tree ~/local/src if it doesn’t exist already.

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cd ~/local/src
wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8l.tar.gz
tar xzvf openssl-0.9.81.tar.gz
wget http://chris.dzombak.name/files/openssl/openssl-0.9.8l-symbolVersioning.diff
patch -p0 < openssl-0.9.8l-symbolVersioning.diff
cd openssl-0.9.81
./config shared zlib --prefix=$HOME/local
make
make test
make install

This solution seems to be working for me, and I’ve documented it here in the hopes that it’ll save someone the time it took me to figure it out.  The patch file should be pretty easily adapted to future versions of OpenSSL as well.

Additional Links

Footnotes

  1. I’m planning to post some directions eventually about setting all this up on Dreamhost. [↩]
  2. My understanding is limited, but I think symbol versioning lets an application or library know what version of OpenSSL it’s linked with. [↩]
  3. Note that building it from the latest Debian patch should also work, but it’s not the latest version and I didn’t think of that until very recently. And, frankly, it’ll take a while for me to trust the maintainers of that package after the recent debacle in which they broke the OpenSSL PRNG by commenting out two lines of code when they “[had] no idea what effect this really has on the RNG”. [↩]

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By Chris Dzombak – March 14, 2010

Music Library Management

Keeping your digital music library organized is important for several reasons, but it’s often overlooked because it takes time and most people don’t think it’s worth it.  I’m hoping this quick post on the organizational methods and tools I use can be helpful and can save you a lot of time in organizing your library.

Organization

My music library is organized by folders in the format Music/Artist/Album. Pretty simple.  Filenames are in the format <track> – <title>.mp3.

For multiple-disc albums, I still only have one folder for the whole album, and then the files are named <disc>.<track> – <title>.mp3.  This makes more sense (to me, anyway) than having separate folders for each disc – it’s all the same album, anyway.

I still don’t have any good way to take care of Various Artists albums, though.

There’s also a Music/Soundtracks folder, which contains a folder for each soundtrack I own.  This seems like a more logical way to organize these than by artist.

Tools

For collection of music, I use either Exact Audio Copy or Amazon MP3. Exact Audio Copy rips CDs with the highest accuracy possible.  I usually rip to 256 or 320kbps MP3s.  Amazon MP3 is great because it provides 256kbps MP3s with no DRM (both advantages over iTunes).  Even better, it’s not too expensive and you’re still supporting the artists.

Once I’ve obtained MP3s via any avenue (except Amazon MP3), I run the album through MusicBrainz Picard to ensure that all the ID3 tags are accurate.  Sometimes, though, I need to resort to fixing parts of tags manually.  (I don’t do this with Amazon MP3s because files from that service are already accurately tagged.)

I use ID3-TagIT to fix tags (especially adding the disc numbers to multi-disc albums) and rename files.  This program can rename files based on the ID3 tags, making renaming a bunch of music files super-easy. It can also organize files into a folder structure (like the one I described above) automatically based on the ID3 tags – great for taming an out-of-control music library.  This is a really great, powerful program, and I’m sad to see that it’s no longer being maintained…I’ll have to find a replacement eventually, I guess.  For now, though, it looks like it’s still available.

Before adding the files to my music player, one more step: I run them through mp3val to make sure there are no issues with the files which could cause skipping, etc. This isn’t usually necessary with files from Exact Audio Copy or Amazon MP3, but it can’t hurt, and it’s invaluable for files from any other source. (mp3val is a command-line program, but there’s a graphical interface available for Windows at the Web site.)

Finally, you can add the files to your media player of choice. For iTunes, I use the free version of iTunes Folder Watch.

A Note

I know this looks like it would take a long time, but once you get the hang of it, it really only adds a minute or two to the process of importing each album – a small price to pay for a well-organized and maintained music library.

Posted in Tech & Science.

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By Chris Dzombak – March 7, 2010

IPGeolocationPHP / Geolocator-PHP Updates

I’ve recently done a lot of work on my OSS Geolocator-PHP class (previously known as IPGeolocationPHP).

The class now has many new features and more robust code with an improved interface.  It should be logical and easy to use.

By now, I’ve reached v2 alpha 2.5, and I think it’s sufficiently ready for users to begin implementing and testing in their applications.  See the project page for docs, downloads, etc.

Posted in Geolocator-PHP.

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By Chris Dzombak – February 5, 2010

Schneier on Airport Security

Security expert Bruce Schneier has made several interesting and insightful posts on his blog over the last few weeks about airport security and security theater.  These are a few you should check out:

I also highly recommend that you follow his blog.  He’s a respected security guru, he knows what he’s talking about, and it’s usually very interesting to read his stuff.

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By Chris Dzombak – January 9, 2010

University of Michigan Google Calendar Updated

I’ve made a few small updates to my unofficial Google Calendar for Michigan’s Winter 2010 term.

You can find the updated information and instructions for accessing and using the calendar on the calendar’s page, here: University of Michigan Academic Google Calendar.

Posted in UMich Academic Calendar Updates.

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By Chris Dzombak – December 29, 2009

Suggestions for a better Backblaze

I’ve been using Backblaze for online backup for a few months, and I’ve thought of a few ways their service and software could be much improved.  This is (part of) an email which I sent them today which outlines several of my suggestions.  I’m posting it here for others to review and discuss.

  • I’d like to be able to back up files greater than 4GB.  This would be especially useful for people (like me) who work with large video files and would like to back them up somehow.  I’d also be interested in knowing the reason for this restriction.
  • I’d like to be able to back up all types of files on my computer.  For example, if I master an ISO file of a DVD, I can’t back it up even if it’s under the 4GB limit.  Again, I’d also like to know why I can’t do this.
  • The interface of your software could be improved.  A few points in particular are listed below:
    • The “How long will my first backup take?” link should change to “How long will this backup take?” after the first backup has completed.  (Mine completed a long time ago, yet I still see this text.)  Additionally, the Web page which the link points to seems to think I’m still on my free trial.  (I’m not.)
    • In fact, why can’t you display an estimated time right in the application?  That would be best.
    • The “What is being backed up?” link should have an option where I can view lists of files which are being backed up, or more importantly, exactly which files aren’t being backed up.  Right now, the link is essentially pointless.  Telling me my files over 4GB aren’t backed up is useless.  Give me a list of files which I need to backup manually!  (My ISOs, files over 4GB, and anything else excluded from backup.)
    • Hidden options like Alt-clicking “Pause Backup” are too well-hidden.  There should also be buttons for these functions somewhere, perhaps in an “Advanced” tab under Settings.
    • Links in the interface should give some indication (like a little hand mouse pointer) that they’re clickable.  Just as you can’t expect your users to Alt-click on everything to see what it does, you can’t expect them to guess at what is and is not clickable.

I think these changes would make Backblaze’s service much better and much nicer to use.  I hope they implement at least some of these in the future.

Posted in Tech & Science.

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By Chris Dzombak – December 27, 2009