Derik in Minnesota

02:19 am - Denno Coil vs. Clarkes Law

I should just stop watching mindscrew-anime. They’re always so fun and stylish to start off, and have a really tasty middle, but fall apart in the last act.

I’ve almost come to expect it, I didn’t begrudge Ghost Hound dropping its basket in the last few episodes (what was with the exploding canisters again…?) on that basis. But Denno Coil, which I picked up on the recommendation of jarodrussell managed to raise my hopes…. It’s set in a world of Web 5-6.0, dealing primarily with the concept of Augmented Reality… and it manages to get the technology right for once. Mentally correcting for what reality must look like without the augmentations becomes a sort of game as the series goes on.

02:17 pm - Chickenscratch Apocalypse

02:53 pm - The Four Revolutions

As of this writing (January 19, 2010) the United States is financially screwed, at least on paper.

Illiquid Equity

More debt than assets, the motization of debt rather than wealth, and a de-assetification of the entire economy into service and creative industries which can’t be easily liquidated in bankruptcy combine to create a sort of financial horror-story. The normal feedback-mechanisms for dealing with collapse is for one sector or pillar of the economy to implode and fall into receivership– taking its financial dependencies with it. Bankruptcy on a massive scale, combined with a sort of cannibalism by the industry-peers, shoring up their own shaky health by stripping value from their dead rival. If the dependents of the collapsing “pillar” can’t yield up enough cash as they are themselves liquidated, things begin to go all wonky, like a system starved for nutrients. Crazy, desperate, ill-thought-out things starts to happen, example: 4th place TV networks ditching dramas for “cheaper” unscripted talk.

Recent estimates put the number of Americans employed in “creative” jobs north of 40 million. While those kinds of businesses have some “strippable” assets in terms of intellectual property and copyrights, the majority of their value is locked in human equity. And not just ‘top-talent’ who can be snapped up and slotted into other companies like interchangeable parts… in the team; the synergistic and production relationships constructed between individuals which increases in value over time.
Webster’s defines an asset as “liquid” if it is cash or readily convertible into cash without significant loss of principal. By closing out a creative company to convert it for cash-in-hand, a majority of the equity in that company is simply lost.

So not only are industries under-performing… liquidating new-economy companies means a higher loss-of-value for the one doing the collecting.
Obviously there is only one option: China should bundle derivatives of sub-prime U.S. debt with the debt of other more financially stable countries and sell them to India. (Or possibly back to the U.S. I hear Americans are stupid!)

(Here’s why this doesn’t really worry me like it probably should.)

Lead vs. Follow

America was sitting pretty when we were the only game in town. We innovated in technology, economics, agro, bio, trade… and let the money come rolling in as we trounced less sophisticated culture-models. The rest of the world spent 40 years figuring out how to do what we learned to do in 20 years, and then how to do it better and cheaper. They’ve been chewing out trade imbalances since the late 1980’s while America rides high on its own inertia, expansion and economic lag, which are coming round at last.

The nice thing about the equity-destroying liquidations system is that it releases highly-trained creatives back into the workforce, laundered of the debt-fallout of their company’s collapse. The chances of them getting the same job at a new company are low, so they’re highly motivated to adopt new configurations and turn their energy and experience in new directions– to chart territory where they can innovate, which the imitative economies aren’t competing. To create the new economic structures that are goign to suck money back out of China the way Japan did the US in the 1990’s, and we did the world int he 1950’s.

Of course, that assumes there’s any new frontiers left.

Four Revolutions

In the last century, the U.S. economy has faced an Industrial Revolution, a Sexual Revolution, a space race, computer revolution, and an information revolution. One ‘revolution’ every 20 years or so.
These are fundamental change in the way we do things that derailed a future we imagined would be the-present-only-moreso, toppling entire industries from the bottom-up and replacing them with a better way of doing things. Revolutions are a form of transformative rampant, natural, hothouse growth that it’s impossible to imitate in real-time.

Well buckle up, because America is about to experience four of them at once.

Nanotech Revolution

Nanomaterial has been confined to the Sci-Fi ghetto of “speculative future applications.” We got $400 pants you don’t have to wash in the 1990’s… and that’s about it.
But it’s happening! And not just in high-tech leisure suits! Mostly in little fiddly-bits buried inside high-tech appliances we’re already familiar with.

And I don’t just mean transparent alluminum, stuff like buckyfiber carbon. A bunch of scientists got together and were all– “Hey, I wonder what happens if we take the basic element of life and heat it in a furnace hotter than the center of the sun?”
a) Regardless of the outcome, those scientists are awesome.
b) The result is a form of carbon that does not exist in nature, and would not exist in nature– ever– because not even supernovas get hot enough to create it! And it’s useful for about a billion things, including making steel that’s 20 times stronger than… well… steel! Mass-manufacture is slowly ramping up. (Frankly, I’m hoping they hook up with the people who made transparent aluminum to create lightweight see-through tanks you can ride around like dune buggies.)
That’s like carbon infused all the goodness of de-natured sugar except we don’t get to eat it.

Or the guys who figured out how to push water uphill using a specially treated surface which is powered by ambient light. I have absolutely no idea how that could ever be useful, but it is awesome. IBM designed the first personal computer, then shelved it because they couldn’t see what it would ever be used for. “Maybe to store recipes?”

These are enabling technologies. And what they enable is game-changing innovation in almost every industry.

Commercial exploitation of Space

Virgin Galactic is building a spaceport in New Mexico. That in itself isn’t a revolution, commercial interests might be able to develop spaceflight that’s cheaper and more efficient than the current model… but the “space tourism” market is a limited one, as are the potential efficiencies.
The real gains are to be had with space elevators, also called “beanpoles.” Though the International Space Elevator Consortium is little more than a placeholder group trying to stake a claim on an industry that doesn’t exist yet, the science is looking sounder every year, with groups competing for prizes to engineer viable tether-crawlers for future elevators. If it works, it will slash the price of lifting something into orbit by more than 90%. The sticking point at the moment is that there’s no way to make a cable strong enough to support its own weight. …enter the mass-produced bucky-fiber steel of the previous revolution.

The practical effect of a cheap lift capacity is in manufacturing… advanced material science and microgravity environments go together like peanut butter and chocolate, feeding back into the Nanotech revolution again.

Web 3.0

Blah blah blah… I’m as tired of hearing about the internet as the rest of you. But the next resolution is breaking down the barriers between one ‘world’ and the other… where the internet stops being a place we visit, and starts reaching out into the “real world.” Where you walk down a street and see adds for products you like in shop windows because your cell-phone knows your physical location.
Like most of the revolutions above, I can’t imagine the impact of that kind of interaction, it’s too far “around the corner” from today. I just know that the way we interact with cell-phones isn’t the way we interacted with car phones, and that’s going to change again… and probably just as radically.
3D displays, Augmented Reality, infospheres as tangible things. What happens when computers stop being islands chained together in a web by hubs and start being ad-hoc locational ecologies where data flows like water and have to be managed like rivers? When Computronium (either definition) becomes a major component in almost all manufactured products?

Expect something more different than you conceive.

Biotech Revolution

The $3,000 Human Genome is an economic holy grail in the Health Care industry. (Well, on the development side of it. The administration side has other things to think about.) That’s the point where sequencing the DNA of a kid is cheap enough to really change the way they do business.
Everyone isn’t equally predisposed to all health problems. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what people’s risk-factors were? What the health-care providers actually need to worry about vs. what can be safely ignored? Individual DNA profiling.
And an exponential increase in the number of genomes on file with attached to medical histories will make finding genetic markers by pure statistics possible. Knowing what does what, identifying it. Changing it.
Biocompilers are becoming financial realities. Not just the custom-produced gene therapies– no longer confined to the lab but becoming a common procedure… the ability to send a computer-designed genome out into a 3rd-party company and say “hey, build this for me.” Like the scientists who sequences the starch genome, and then re-built it in the lab using commercially-available equipment. (I can’t find a link for that one. This is a rant I’ve been giving in-person for the last 5+ years, not just a regurgitation of Wikipedia articles.)
Edit: Actually, I think it was the Yeast genome, not the Starch one. I still cant’ find a link but Johns Hopkins University is in the process of re-buildign the Yeast Genome from scratch again… and removing all the junk code from it, creating a fundamentally un-mutateable (possibly un-crossbreedable?) super-stable strain of Yeast with a lower energy overhead and a much smaller DNA chain.

Presumably one they get the stripped-down Yeast genome working, they’re going to figure out how to make it last longer on the shelf, rise faster… and Vegemite taste like strawberries instead of death. This is a development platform they’re building– a stable bacteria with documented functions ready for experimentation and expansion.

Change-Based Economy

So the moral of this story is… I’m not emo about the state of the American economy! The credit-card-debt situation that seems like it’s only going to get worse? The broken health-care system? The cheap-food/good-food oppositional paradigm? Change is coming to America. Four revolutions simultaneously– whole industries are going to disappear and rise up. Old players will transform and new ones will appear. Up will be down, black will be white– the future isn’t just stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.

And if there’s one thing Americans do well, it’s change. Countries that invested billions over 30 years from the top down to “do what the Americans do, only better” …not so much.

By the time it’s through, it’s entirely possible that America will have a manufacturing-based economy again… albeit the manufacture of itty-bitty things made out of impossible materials produced in improbable locations to do the unthinkable… to unbelievable purpose.

I’m not saying that whatever we wind up with will necessarily be better… but if the only way to kill ossified parasitic economic institutions is to hit them with a storm they can’t weather-out so they collapse… well, there are quite a few I’m not going to shed any tears over.
(If we’re really lucky, we’ll have just gotten through privatizing those industries when they implode, so all the bad debt ends up in the hands of worthless legal entities instead of the U.S. Government. That would be sweet!)

Because frankly, I’d prefer our “revolution-based economy” not be a literal one.

12:00 am - CES: Grace Under Impact

At last weeks CES Sonim CEO Rob Plaschke challenged BBC Dan Simmons reporter to “do anything he likes” to test their new ‘unbreakable’ cellphone.
Simons succeeds in breaking the phone in under 3 seconds.

Plaschke’s response is great though; rather than the stuffed, deer-in-the-headlights look you’d expect in that situation, he breaks out into giggles and tells the reporter it’s fine when he tried to apologize.

1. Maybe it’s because he figured the audience would know that slamming the screen into corner of a sharp metal fish tank wasn’t really a measure of “hardiness” that the phone was likely encounter ‘in the wild.’
2. Maybe it’s because he’d made sure to mention the company’s “if you do manage to break it we’ll replace it no questions asked” policy– so he could just hand the reporter a new phone.
3. Or maybe it’s because the Simmons was swinging the phone as hard as he could in a worst-case-scenario impact… and it still took four tries before the screen gave out.

Either way, the Sonim XP3 Quest “redefines rugged” by not merely being durable, but by failing gracefully when the limit of that ruggedness is reached.
So you can giggle, shrug it off and get a new phone too.

02:19 pm - Cuko for Coco

Conan O’Brien took over the Tonight Show on June 1, 2009. On June 10, Conan hosted a focus group to see how he did with the “Leno Audience.” (The older demographic.)

http://www.hulu.com/watch/76839/the-tonight-show-with-conan-obrien-focus-group-part-1
http://www.hulu.com/watch/76838/the-tonight-show-with-conan-obrien-focus-group-part-2

12:50 pm - Ditpatches from Safe Mode: On Forward Compatability

I have an (ancient) HP Scanjet 2200c scanner, produced in 2001. It’s been with me through 3 computers and 4 OS’s. (Starting with Windows 2000.)

The software was last updated with Windows XP. (And I can’t really blame HP for that. Should they have to rewrite drivers 7 years after the product was released?)

Under Windows Vista it would barely function anymore. No integration with programs like Photoshop at all, no point-and-click scanning… I was about to coax it into scanning with the standalone utility by forcing it and several associated files into compatability mode– using a trial and error system– so that the standalone utility would start up ONCE per startup… and sometimes scan something.
Once I closed the utility, it was dead uless I was willing to commit to several restarts to hope it would deign to perform again.
(Oh– and the light wouldn’t shut off. So I had to unplug it when I was done using it.)

So it was with a heavy heart that I fired up the installer this weekend to try and get it working under Windows 7…

It installed with no errors.
The program starts up and stops normally.
The light performs correctly.
It’s integrated with all my applications.
And it’s not running in compatibility mode.

$%^&*( Vista!

03:53 am - The Exiguous Incidence of Backwards-Compatible Shaggy Dogs in Redmond, WA

The plan to wipe my OS and clean-install Windows 7 (somewhat complicated my my non-functioning optical drive) quickly derailed; I underestimated the how much pure spite Vista would muster on the way out.

In order to fully back up one of my program’s settings, I had to upgrade Vista to the most recent service pack.
The Service Pack installer installer departitioned my hard drive.
(Alright, technically the Service Pack installer simply hard-crashed the laptop and hosed the registry, rendering it unbootable. It was the mid-task crash of “oh crap!” system recovery tools on the emergency partition which scagged the partition.)

Long story short; after I recovered the recovery tools, I had a factory-fresh Vista SP”0″ install. Reasoning that if there was any upgrade scenario Microsoft could be counted on to not screw up “upgrade from a virgin install” was it, I walked Vista up through all its service packs and did an upgrade install instead of wipe.

It was pleasantly easy! While Vista committing Hari Kari makes me one of the 1% of installers who encountered major but fixable problems, once out from under its thumb things went a lot smoother.
The registry is an awkward mish-mash of Vista and Win 7 values… but I’m not sure that’s not just what Win 7 looks like. I’ve already caught it replying on registry values for windows layout that the MS documentation claims have been deprecated with Win 7 in favor of new bitwise value stacks, and it’s got this eye-crossingly-bizarre “optical illusion” double system folder structure for compatibility with old programs (need to figure out how to hide those non-existent folders while still viewing hidden files…) but overall it’s gratifying stable.

I’m being gentle on the system, exerting only minimal registry edits and deep-system settings changes so far. Once I get my software installed, I’m going to make a disk snapshot I can roll back to if/when the system gets Horribly Wrong in the future. “Vista + 7 days of setup.”
Reset button!

Redmond English: Where “Compatibility” Means New, Not Old

Some of Win7’s interface changes are baffling, but this is my favorite so far.

If you try to run a program that’s not Win-7 compatible it pops up a dialog box telling you that it’s not compatible with the OS, which you close… and 2 seconds later Windows pops up a second box telling you the exact same thing.
That’s not horrible by Microsoft’s standards, it’s just silly.
The fact your only two options are “reinstall” (which of course assumes you still have the installers on your hard drive) and “nope, there are no problems”… that’s funny.
The Program Compatibility Assistant doesn’t modify the compatibility settings of the program so that it will run– it makes you to reinstall it instead. It doesn’t even mention Compatibility Mode.

If you go to the help page linked at the bottom of the window it doesn’t mention Compatibility Mode either, though there is a buried reference to a Program Compatibility Wizard (separate from the Assistant and not launchable from it) which probably configures it.
At no point is “right-click, hit ‘properties’, see the Compatibility tab” mentioned. The Wizard which configures Comparability Mode is mentioned… but it’s not linked from the assistant or the help. They have completely obscured the actual program-compatibility settings in favor of uninstalling and reinstalling the program.
What if it’s it’s an old program and the install disk is either missing or doesn’t work on Vista? Buy a new version! Sure, it probably would have worked fine in Compatibility Mode… but we’re not going to tell you that.

The Shaggy Dog Has Failed, Do you With to SEND an Error Report?

That’s still not the funny part. If you find the double-warning annoying and want to turn the Comparability-Assistant-which-doesn’t-assist-with-comparability-but-instead-just-launches-uninstallers off, the Help file insists “you really shouldn’t!” and then grudgingly tells you it can be “adjusted by using Group Policy,” and links you to the Microsoft website for IT professionals.
Not to a page about Group Policy. To a landing page.
A landing page for Windows Vista users.

Apparently by coincidence this month’s “spotlight” article on the landing page is an article on Group Policy… written 18 months ago? (Come February you’re really going to be out of luck, it’s the only time the subject is mentioned on this page!)

Assuming you manage to plow through the metric shit-ton of high level system-management-for-IT-departments theory, it does finally tell you all this magic is accomplished via the Group Policy Editor, and gives instructions on how to launch it.
(This is the funny part.)

The Group Policy Editor is only available on Windows Professional editions (or Business editions for Vista.) So:
$bull;To disable their program Compatibility assistant which does not assist in compatibility,
$bull;Which pops up a redundant warning on a lag,
$bull;And obscures the existence of real Compatibility support which would fix the problem,
$bull;In order to make things simple for the home user…
Windows Help says you can;
$bull;Not disable it,
$bull;But you can “adjust” its Group Policy…
$bull;And links you to a website for IT Professionals,
$bull;On a Vista landing page that has nothing to do with Group Policy,
$bull;That if you are lucky enough to visit in the right month,
$bull;Might link to an article on the subject,
$bull;Telling you to use a program,
$bull;Which most Editions of Windows lack.

Bonus round: Nowhere in the text of the page on the site, or the landing page, or even on the home page above that… do the words “Edition”, “Business”, “Premium”, or “Ultimate” appear. “Professional” appears… but purely as an adjective, not a proper noun relating to a Vista edition.
The entire site which you are directly linked to by the Windows 7 help reference for instructions on how to accomplish this task… is written with the assumption that you have the most expensive version of Windows. The one all the software engineers who developed the OS (and apparently write the help files) use.
And they are so isolated from the consumer-level editions of Windows that talk of “editions” doesn’t even appear on the site– the people writing the help and support files are themselves– institutionally– blind to the fact that the vast majority of the people using Windows are running crippled versions with features and utilities removed and restricted user rights.

A Mental Disconnect to Make You Lose Your Head

This is not exactly a surprise. When looking up help for Windows Vista I’d sometimes be directed to use the Command Prompt.
While my command prompt reads “C:/Users/MyName,” and the screen-shots in the instructions would invariably read “C:/”.
Because the people writing the support documentation are naturally all running the Administrator accounts. No, not “an administrator,” the Administrator– the secret “True Administrator” account that doesn’t have all ther permissions restrictions that Users set as “an Administrator” do.

Step 1 — Switch to the root directory of your drive.
RRAUGH! NORMAL USER ACCOUNTS CAN’T SWITCH TO THE ROOT DIRECTORY OF THE DRIVE. THE CAN’T BACK UP ANY HIGHER THAN “C:/Users/UserName”! EVEN WHEN THE COMMAND PROMPT WAS LAUNCHED WITH “Run as Administrator!”

(That was a frequent Vista irritation for me. It may have changed under 7.) The point is… the corporate culture at Microsoft is getting extra toxic. OS editions are no longer separate products developed for different platforms or needs… they’re a single product with features messily yanked out for anyone who doesn’t feel like paying twice as much.
Because the “editions” are no longer developed as distinct products there are no software engineers who know what the Home Edition is like– they never worked on it because the Home Edition isn’t a separate project, they worked on the Ultimate Edition!
And is that their fault? Do we honestly expect a software engineer or IT professional to be running his OS in crippled-mode with no rights and half the core utilities missing?
But they’re the ones providing support… So the support we get is consistently out of touch with the actual experience (and abilities) of the user.
HOME EDITION USER: “My family has no bread, they are starving!”
ULTIMATE EDITION SUPPORT: “Let them eat cake!”

Meanwhile at the other end… User Experience people are trying (desperately) to scale down this huge Ultimate-OS monolithic OS into something moms can use to send pictures of their kids without screwing it up. So they take away all their rights, restrict them to user folders, create an account level called Administrator that doesn’t actually give them Administrator privileges so they can’t fuck things up too bad… and we get Compatibility Assistant help files that don’t tell you about the actual Compatibility controls out of a desire to ‘keep it simple.’
“Can you turn it off? Um, that’s… do they even have access to that? …look you really shouldn’t, but here’s a link– good luck!”

Caveat: The Fault Lies With the Business, Not the Engineering

Fair shake to all involved here… I strongly suspect the Group Policy Editor (or some version of it) was originally slated to be standard in all editions of Windows 7 at some point; it shows up a lot in Microsoft’s Win7 Support files and there’s never a mention of Editions. Features like “Use Classic Start Menu” were moved from the Start properties to the Group Policy Editor (what does this have to do with Group Policy?) should obviously go hand in hand with the new Classic Theme. The editor seems to have been ganked from Home Editions by beancounters at the last minute when they realized people would pay an extra $100 to get the classic Start Menu back with the click of a box.

That’s the last item on my list before I consider myself properly “moved in.” GPEdit is just a registry wizard, the classic menu can be enabled without it! …it’s going to be painful though.
Maybe I can get someone who has Ultimate to snapshot their registry before and after enabling it and create a .reg of the difference? That would at least tell me what parameters are in play.
Hrm, I suppose the the UI elements for the classic menu might be sequestered in a shell .dll Home lacks, but the .reg entries would indicate which one, so that’s not a big deal to get around…

That’s still not the funny part…

In all the failure, poor communication, poor support, institutional autism, goals at cross-purposes and general slow-motion train wreck that is Microsoft in general and the Program Compatibility Assistant in microcosm… that’s still not the funny part.

The PCA’s documentation is wrong when it said you can’t deactivate it. It’s a Service.
• Search “View Local Sevices” in the [Control Pannel],
• Open “Program Comparability Assistant” from the alphabetized list,
• Change it to “Disabled.”

It takes about 20 seconds. There are no registry edits, curly braces or system handles nested within %’s. It’s point-and-click.
How did the IT-gurus writing the documentation miss this?

Answer: It’s a mental blindspot. Disabling the service that way kills it on the Local Machine, it will be deactivated for all user accounts. IT-gurus oversee IT departments, managing and maintaining system and user profiles across dozens or hundreds of systems. So they naturally think in terms of users and groups… which can only be modified via the Group Policy Editor, a tool designed specifically for managing those kinds of floating profiles.
Local Machine settings affect just that machine, and it forces the setting on other users who use that computer too! It’s completely outside of the “User Account” system. That approach probably wouldn’t even occur to the kind of IT-guy who writes this documentation, because it’s Not The Way to Do Things for an IT Department.
…but for a home user that’s only running one account it’s perfect.

The Funny Part

So caught up in dumbing down the Windows Compatibility Assistant’s documentation for the “home consumer” that they forgot the “Home” part, ignored the simple answer and ended up overthinling it. Method recapitulates Mindset.

Of course the really funny thing is… Because the IT gurus who write the documentation now all have Full Power editions of Windows with registry wizards that manage complex settings changes for them– and are omitted from the Home Edition–they no longer have any reason to fully document what the registry values do … while more and more unskilled home users (lacking wizards) will be attempting them by hand!

Ha ha ha he ha! …wait.

That’s not funny.

07:55 am - Dispatches from Safe Mode: Non-Linear Upgrade Path

Thus far, my system upgrade is going very much as I expected:

10:20 am - Dispatches from Safe Mode: Ninja Update Fail

My Windows Vista install has been screwed since forever; installing updates has a tendency to render my laptop unbootable so I have disabled Windows Update. “Do not look for updates unless prompted, do not download updates, do not install any updates without asking me first.”

You may imagine my surprise when I discovered this in my Windows Update log today:

Yes, Windows Update has been downloading and installing Windows Defender updates twice a week for the last year. As well as the occasional general Windows update. Silently.
Apparently “don’t install updates and tell me before you try” does not apply to some updates!

This is, obviously, Fail. The irony of this failure being caused by Windows Update succeeding… is not lost on me.

The key here appears to be that Windows Defender is installing these updates rather than Windows Update, as part of its ‘check for updates daily’ feature, and is simply noting their installation in the Windows Update log.
This is either a very conscientious move on its part; tracking all installed updates centrally… or a kind of deceptive spamming of the Windows Update log.
I’m leaning towards the latter interpretation. It took me several puzzled minutes to work out that the WU log was including non-WU updates, as there is no indication which Windows component was ordering them. In the case of the Defender updates, it was relatively easy to figure out… but the general “Update for Windows” on October 14 provides no such clues, and I have no way to figure out which Windows component is sneaking around behind my back.

Regardless, wouldn’t you think that both Defender and Mysterious Other Component would defer to my Windows Update setting to “ask before installing anything”? Bah.

Oh, and FYI… my Windows Defender is disabled. That is… it has all its scanning settings turned off, you can’t actually disable or uninstall Windows Defender, because apparently Vista was developed under the premise that no one would ever want to turn off their doesn’t-work virus protection, and thus Windows cannot run without it.
So while Windows Defender isn’t actually doing anything, it’s still updating itself and those updates are loading into memory at startup… where they then sit idle, chewing up memory and potentially causing new software conflicts to appear.

Which is exactly why I disabled updates in the first place.

07:38 pm - Failmail

On one level, this makes perfect sense. On every other…

E-mail newsletters are a terrible way for connecting with over-connected youth. If I’m visiting my e-mail, (which I try to avoid) it’s because I want to get stuff done, “casually browsing headlines” from a special-interest newsletter is counter-purposes to that, which is why I had ~40 unread copies jamming up my mailbox.
If I was 50, I’m sure I’d love it. Which is probably why the ‘newsletter’ is formatted like a letter, with no headers or clear subject, etc… unless you’re willing to read the entire thing.

(I am calling the Libertarian Party old. What are they gonna do, shoot me?)
(Sure, they’ll try, but between the arthritis and failing eyesight…)

Thoughts of the Moment

• THREADSY: I’m testing out “threadsy” as a new inbox/social networking aggregator. It seems to have a good top-down model. I’m not happy that it’s web-based instead of client-based… but the Digsby client’s phobia about sending you back to the web even when its tools are inadequate to the task at hand is the reason I dropped it. We’ll see.
• AMAZON: is apparently testing out a new flash-based product-image overlay. (Um, possibly just on books, it appears the “see larger image” links are now launching the “look inside” app.) I guess they don’t want anyone to ever blog about books then? Or at least to be able to save a picture of the %^&* cover to go with the blog entries? This will cost them referral-sales.
• GOOGLE: I predict 2010 will be a hellish year.
$bull; RAPIDSHARE: Is apparently reducing its file-retention period to 60 idle days. This strikes me as probably important, but I don’t know what it used to be. (And am a little worried they left that information out of the e-mail announcement.)

I have 6 different blog entries on 6 different subjects I’ve started, gotten 80% completed and abandoned in the last week. Hopefully some of them will be finished in coming days. (I get to be an Angry Old Man about Wikipedia / Those Kids Today!)

Busy. Busy. Bus~

11:09 pm - Hasta la Vista: Backing Up

One of my Christmas presents is going to be Windows 7. In theory I could purchase and upgrade pack… but my Vista install is so screwed up I don’t trust the (cheaper) upgrade path to work, so this will be a clean install.

I’m not looking forward to the solid week which I know I will spend reinstalling software and beating out Microsoft’s institutional stupidity. But knowing that this is coming, I figured that I should start early.

I picture my upgrade path thusly.

1. I make a full hard drive backup, with partitions and boot sectors so that I may restore back to my broken vista install in the events Things Go Wrong. (Always anticipate things going wrong with Microsoft!)
2. Boot from an external device (CD-Rom or USB drive) and reformat the hard drive for a nice fresh start. (Presumably the Windows 7 package will include a bootable install disc, but I want a more robust option that allows me to restore from my Vista image when Things Go Wrong℠)
3. Suffer through the multi-hour install process.
4. Suffer through reinstalling essential software.
5. Suffer through castrating every unacceptable aspect of the OS that I encounter in the previous step.
6. Restores my essential files. Ideally by simply mounting the Vista backup I made as if it were a virtual drive. Messily otherwise.

That seems like a sane(ish) workfow. So tonight I’m investigating backup options. One of the first things I discover is that VISTA has a backup utility! “Sweet” says I, “It’s here and free!” So I run it up, click “yes” to every option, and am rewarded by this screen.

*facepalm* Only in Microsoft world® would “Complete Backup” and “Include All Files” not back up the System files. Apparently this is Microsoft’s “Back up your photos and other files” tool, independent od the OS, installed programes, etc.
I have a nasty tendency of throwing stuff in folders located in the C:/ drive’s root directory. It seems these would not be included in the “complete backup” because this is actually a complete backup… of your user folder. And just your user folder if I read between the lines correctly.
Not that the utility actually includes an explanation of what it does-and-doesn’t-do; just the warning I screencapped above.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this… in fact it may be useful to some users! But the Backup utility is categorized as a System Tool. And it backs up everything except the System.

For argument’s sake, I could use HP’s system-backup utility to create a snapshot of the core system files on 4-6 DVD’s… and then when Things Go Wrong℠ use those to restore the OS, and Microsoft’s file backup to restore… er.. COME of my other files. I say “for argument’s sake,” because Vista permanently lost my optical drive several months back and I can no longer read or burn DVD’s.

Oh well, with Microsoft’s track record, it’s entirely possible that any disc image the Vista backup software created would be in a proprietary format which neither Windows 7 nor Windows XP supported, making it impossible to restore my Vista install without a working Vista install.
(I shall doubtless be better off having bypassed Redmond entirely.)

Is there a backup for Google’s Chromium OS? I wouldn’t mind booting that off a USB drive to make the backup or restore. (And it’s be better to discover any driver incompatibilities now rather than later.)
I’m also curious about setting my laptop up to dual-boot as Chromium. I’m very interested in having an alternate (if minimal) OS to fall back on so that I can still access my files when/if Windows 7 breaks.
(Back when I was running Windows 2000, the system got hosed to regularly I just kept a second install on the same machine to switch to and used that to wipe and re-clean-install the other, but I seem to recall hearing Microsoft doesn’t let you do that anymore without paying for the additional install…)

08:20 am - AIDS is adorable

Koalas are dying of AIDS. And Chlamydia.

Clearly abstinence-only education is the answer. Only by allowing the slutty Koalas to be struck down can the entire species be saved from extinction. Also, all efforts to stem the deforestation of their high-carbon-sequestration habitat should cease, because Global Warming is a myth, and worshiping the false-idol of carbon-emissions is an insult to God.

*thumbs-up*

02:15 am - RRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAARWRWRWRWRWRWRWR

Woke up.
Discovered a meme I started 8 months ago on 4chan has been turned into a t-shirt.
Went back to bed.

(Fucking internet.)

12:21 am - Dispatches from Safe Mode: Google Chrome is the worst browser ever made

Preramble

I picked up a virus on… fridayish.
I call it a virus– I suppose technically it’s considered adware. My web searches get routed through ad sites instead of Google. Or my Google searches appear to go through– but any attempt to go to those sites instead gets routed through an ad-site. (It’s most annoying.)

Now, I picked up this virus from a WMA (a window media authenticated file) so you might think that this thread would be about how Window Media Player sucks, or the WMA format sucks (80% of WMA license-required files I’ve ever dealt with have been trying to infect my system with viruses) and loudly decry the death of the format.
…thing is, everyone knows that already.
I could decry Windows Defender, which warned me about the virus it saw Windows Media Player installing, and claimed to have caught it before it executed, which is clearly did not. But again– everyone knows Windows Defender (like most anything with “Windows” before its name) does not work. What’s the point?

So with my Firefox and Opera (I didn’t bother with Microsoft Internet Explorer… do I need to go into why?) thoroughly buggered, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Google Chrome browser showed no signs of infection.
You’d think that would make Google Chrome the best browser ever made, right?

09:58 pm - Test

TYhis is a test post. You should ignore it.

08:00 pm - LEGO More Dakka?

Awesomely unsafe at any speed setting.

I learned two things tonight:

1. When connecting a LEGO TECHNIC™ building set to a Dremel rotary tool, no matter how favorable a gearing is used, a drive shaft spinning at 15,000 RPM’s will generate enough friction to melt plastic.
2. Despite its excellent performance in loosening tight mechanisms, WD-40 is in fact a cleaner, not a lubricant, and is highly flammable. It should not be used to combat friction in a gearbox.

I could probably have arrived at both of these discoveries via Socratic reasoning had I stopped to think through the implications of my actions beforehand.

…but where’s the fun in that? (Video of attempt #3 below the cut.)

11:15 pm - Coincidence Is Not Just a Valley in Egypt

Reading House of Leaves, and my hot water has just gone out.

…I shall wait until it’s light out to look into this.

(No spoilers, I want to be surprised.)

02:43 pm - Remote Wiki Backup

I am not a trusting soul.
When the Wiki I contribute to crashed a few months ago, we discovered that our backups were not being performed as billed. That was a great sadness, and a scramble to back up ~27,000 pages out of web-caches, plus re-creating some very complicated templates from scratch. It was not fun.

Several months later… TWiki is safely ensconced in a new host and humming along. Our new host’s backups have been tested and verified to work.

I still worry. I mean… it’s not like the backups are off-site. A fire would wipe us out. A properly robust backup system must allow users to download their own backups.
(Quite aside the fact that our ostensible philosophical commitment when departing from Wikia should compel us to make reasonable backups to allow others to leave from us.)
Complicating things… I don’t have database access, so any backup system must, perforce, run remotely.

With all that in mind, I’ve been noodling at a script to scrape the name of every page in every namespace from the wiki, then archive’s the page’s raw contents. No history, no user data, no IP addresses… just the essentials.

…it’s harder than you’d think. We’ve got plenty of articles with multibyte names (non-english characters) in addition to multi-byte text. MySQL handles multibye text easily enough… as does PHP if you beat it hard enough, but the default behavior of mySQL seems to be to deliver multibyte-encoded content as latin-1, scrambling foreign characters. Getting all the ducks lined up has been a back-burner project for a couple months.
(It was actually backburner since BEFORE the Bookworm Crash that wiped out TFWiki. I regret not having it worked out before then.)

After some debugging, this is what I have:

• A script that scrapes the names/namespaces of all the pages currently on the wiki– that’s about 37,000 pages.
• A script that will then query the wiki for the raw (pre-render) text of these pages and store them in a database.

This isn’t a great solution. Since I’m running on a remote web-server, it means making 37,000 individual queries to the server I’m querying. I could do this in minutes with database access, but since this is a live wiki, I’m throttling the queries to one every 10 seconds to prevent overloading the server, which means snapshotting all 37,000 pages will take… 10 days.
There is no guarantee that the version I snapshot won’t be a vandalized page, reverted seconds after i take a picture. Or with templates… that I’m not grabbing a micro-version that’s not working, or incomparable with an inter-dependent template snapshotted later. (My solution was to hard-code the templates to be snapshotted first, and simply monitor the recentChanges to make sure there were no edits to them while they were being scraped.)
And of course the results aren’t in an easily imported format– they’re BLOB fields in an associative database that doesn’t correspond to mediaWiki structure. You cant’ really do much with them in this form.

…except hold onto them. If something goes wrong… they’re not in the best format– but they’re archived with no character-encoding issues, in original wikitext. It would take some custom-coding, but the text would get back into the wiki with 0 loss.
Well, no loss… except the pages which have been edited since they had a snapshot taken.

In an ideal world… this script would be crontab’d and monitor its own progress and execution-time to adjust its own throttle, it would monitor recentChanges, and it would import the edits onto its own wiki– live-mirroring the other. Oh– and it’d do something about the images, which this doesn’t back up at all.

That goes on the backburner though. Next up for me is a total rewrite of the site’s bot, using some of what I learned here… there are some links it stubbornly refuses to fix, and I think that a proper systematic script will get it working better.

For now… I can hold onto this and be content. Whatever else may happen… I know the site will not be wiped out.
Bird in the hand.

09:48 pm - 5 Things You Are Not Supposed to Say About Race and Sexuality in America

From CNN: Black university passes “no-crossdressing” rules targeting targeting 5 gay students

We are by now conditioned for the usual “not targeted at any one in particular, just a revision of…” blah blah blah have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too spin cycle. Which is what makes this story so openly refreshing!

So just this once, I’m gonna gently touch on some stuff I’m Not Supposed To Talk About:

1. The Black Community is homophobic. Whether it’s rooted in class, religion, collective cultural memory of some of the ugly parts of Slavery you don’t see in movies or a lingering legacy of the Nation of Islam’s involvement in the civil rights movement I can’t say… but a black community that’s preached tolerance for 50 years isn’t big on practicing it themselves. The surprise defeat of Proposition 8 is the most public example, but the fact is that within Black circles expressing and even advocating for these kind of view is deemed is culturally acceptable, and no one wants to call them on it because… you know!
2. The Gay Community is extremely racist, or at least prejudiced. One of the “problems” with a cross-section of society defined by their preferred sexual partners is that this preference takes on a more prominent role in that culture; namely the ‘I’m not attracted to other races’ thing that exists across the board. It’s not that there aren’t black gays… (though on a per-capita basis there are fewer) it’s that a gay black man inherits a triple-burden of their own cultural baggage, stereotypical and/or degrading ideas of what it means to be black within gay culture, and in a society defined primarily by the dating scene black members can find themselves “separate but equal.”
3. I’m not black, so it’s hard for me to be sure on this… but I suspect a lot of this represents an “old guard” of leaders in the African American community, mostly the guys who were activists in the 1970’s; like Jesse Jackson, whose ouster in 2007 came because he couldn’t see the war they’d fought for 50 years had been won, and American could elect a black man President. That generation needs to learn how to be quietly gaycist like the Republicans! Sure, everyone knows what’s going on… buy you’d don’t go around giving interviews confirming that “yes, this is exactly what’s going on!” That whole “attitude” needs to be kept in the closet! You know… keep it on the down low!
4. The Gay community is changing, and it’s changing quickly! We threw out our irrelevant leadership 5 years ago and replaced then with younger, sexier spokespeople! Honored war veterans wrongly discharged, accomplished politicians, Sulu! The 90’s were a sea change… a whole generation of gays that (unlike their predecessors) didn’t grow up sucking off strangers in park bathrooms! And they’re a lot less screwed up as a result! Plus the ‘turnaround time’ on a gay “generation,” from emergent awareness of adolescent sexuality to joining the adult community… is only 10 years. That makes gay culture a lot lighter on its feet, able to adapt and respond to cultural changes faster than other groups. The de-institutionalization of racial identity we’ve been living through for the past few years is gonna hit big; 7 years from now the racial barriers in gay culture will be– if not gone– at least reduced to a knee-high fence that’s easily stepped over.
5. We know you’re pissed that it took Gays 15 years to go from persona-non-grata to #1 sitcom stars, episcopal conventions and the marriage rights you’re apparently still fighting for. (WTF?) Frankly, it caught us by surprise too, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to give it back. Tell you what… in 35 years when being Gay is considered about as significant as being Irish and our shared cultural identity has disintegrated, leaving nothing but a meaningless parade and “Queer 4 Beer” t-shirts… then you can laugh. You can remind us not to discriminate against the Trangendered, and we can keep our mouths shut instead of telling you that your insistence on a separate African-America culture is a big part of why your own progress is so glacial.

Deal?

03:05 pm - Dispatches From Safe Mode: Reverse Cowgirl

I Installed McAfee 2 days ago from my old disks. (I’ve been running without Anti-virus for months.)
I like McAfee. I’ve run it off-and-on for years. It’s much lighter than, say, Norton… just a tiny lag while opening files as it scans them.

So imagine my rude awakening when it downloads updates, (which I’m apparently still entitled to?) and I suddenly realize I’m running something called McAffey “Security Center.”

Now, apparently this has existed since 2005… so I must have had Security Center when i was running XP. That sounds vaguely plausible… I have some memory of there being two active-process icons associated with the program.
But I remember the program I was interacting with as VirusScan– that was where all the “stuff” happened. …not anymore. I am now constantly aware of Security Center’s presence.

Here’s the thing… McAffee’s anti-virus program has grown into a whole suite of bloated crap I don’t want. So naturally… I only install VirusScan– all I want is on-access file scanning! I don’t want their firewall, I don’t want their wireless protection, SiteAdvisor or registry protection. I don’t even want constant scanning… I’ll do one manually when I feel like it.
All I want is on-access file scan. McAfee is good at on-access file scan! I know– I used it for years! It caught shit! So it’s the only component I install.

So I run updates… and my system bogs horribly. What? How could this be? This isn’t what McAffee feels like!
Turns out (upon research) that in mid-2008 McAffee pushed out and update that causes some systems to idiosyncratically bog horribly. It’s idiosyncratic, and somehow related to Vista’s “search for files” function.
Now, I understand how some of McAfee’s functions might intersect with that Vista function… by how in seven green hells is it causing my system to bog when the only thing I’m running is scan-on-access? McAffey is hogging my system resources… yet the only thing I’ve given it permission to do it scan-on-access! This bogging cannot be caused by scan-on-access!

You’ve probably already guessed what I slowly realized.
McAffee Security Center is the ‘hub’ management application meant to coral the 6-or-7 separate tools in their security suite. it doesn’t actually do anything… but you cannot install the tools without installing it, because many common functions run through it.
So despite only having installed VirusScan, and having de-activated 70% of VirusScan’s functionality specifically so the program would have the smallest possible footprint on my system… McAfee had installed a monolithic mega-program designed to insinuate itself into every nook and cranny of my system so that it can manage the 500 different ways its anti-virus tools can rape my performance in the name of perfect security… and then simply turned those functions off.

Security Center is riding my system like a reverse cowgirl. And this is why the spastic allegic reactions between McAffee and Vista’s search functions are going off even though I didn’t (theoretically) install anything that should cause them. Security Center did install itself in these areas. It does so regardless of whether or not you’re using those functions, even if you specifically chose not to install them.

*sigh*

Vista has all the system integrity of two bricks tied together with tissue paper. Thus my desire to tread as lightly as possible, installing a bare-minimum of functions to interfere with the already rickety OS. Anti-virus programs burrow even deeper into the OS than most programs, so this is a very deliberate choice.
And in order to get a single scan-on-access function running… I had to install SecurityCenter, which burrows down and insinuates itself into virtually every function of the system… despite the fact I specifically chose not to install the applications related to that burrowing.
And so, my system wigs out.

This, in itself, doesn’t make for a very interesting story. I uninstalled McAfee and the bog-down stopped.

The part that makes for a good story is that when I rebooted after having done so… my optical drive vanished again. One of the hundreds of system-hooks SecurityCenter first installed, then removed, has managed to fuck it up again.

I’m not a fan of Adobe Bridge, Nero Whatever-its-called or any other “monolitic central component that sucks” that seem to be all the rage in “software suites” these days. When you install Photoshop, you’re not installing Photoshop– you’re installing a special version of the Adobe Creative Suite (with the ‘bridge’ hub-program) whose only suite-component is Photoshop. …but you still get Bridge because the Photoshop program on a fundamental architectural level is no longer capable of ’standing alone.’

That’s fine for Photoshop and stuff… hell, for most suites. It doesn’t really bother me.

But anti-virus is… something different. People have been screaming for years that Anti-virus is terrible (The benchmarks I’ve been reading indicate a 700-1200% computer-slowdown is average for any anti-virus program.) The processing burden placed on a computer is not a subtle one. And when an OS, frankly, sucks as badly as Vista does… crap is going to start breaking. (Crap breaks on vista out of the box. It shipped with a search function that didn’t work.)
It’s… you can’t do this. If McAfee actually intends for it’s program to be useful for people who know what they’re doing… it has to be able to run components in a true standalone fashion, without a central hub that sends tendrils and execution hooks throughout Window’s unstable 47 dependency layers. That’s just daring the operating system to break!

But that’s a good, useful AV program. Which is not the same thing as a good, marketable product. A product has bazillions of functions, and a central hub so you can justify selling them all-in-one to the customer instead of piecemeal.
And a product mentality says… you want to make it hard for the customer to only install part of the suite, and certainly not encourage it. “Because if they buy our AV product, then get a virus… they say we have a bad product even if they’re the ones that decided to turn all the protection off. It’s better for our brand to impose a 700-1200% slowdown that renders computers unusable than to develop a product that leaves computers useful but offers less perfect protection.”

Guess what? Your product is terrible. Not just McAfee… all anti-virus products are terrible. Look at those benchmarks… the 1200% slowdown is middle of the pack. The industry has somehow come together to create a product category so terrible that the only way to use my computer is to run without anti-virus. There is literally not an anti-virus product on the market today that will not make you bleed out of your eyes.

Allow me to be more explicit… I have never had a virus that crippled my computer as badly, or made the system as unstable or as likely to lose data as an Anti-virus program does! These programs act more like viruses than viruses do.
As near as I am able to determine… there does not exist a serious AV solution that allows me to manually scan my computer computer once a week without also demanding I accept it insinuating itself into my OS so that it can fuck my system with perform real-time protection.

(All I want is a virus-scanner! With a single hook to check a file before I open it. 90% of the protection, 10% of the performance hit. I will pay money for this! WHY IS NO ONE WILLING TO SELL IT TO ME?)
Or at least have the decency to look me in the face when you’re screwing me!