Computers – Page 16 – Spinor Info

Why I don’t buy computer games anymore

Computers, Intellectual Property, Internet No Responses »

Mar 142010

Like any good geek, I like computer games. I’m not obsessed by them (the image of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons serves as a powerful deterrent) but I do enjoy the occasional play. And I certainly have the disposable income to buy a new title when it comes out.

Except that I haven’t bought a new game in years. Ubisoft’s official explanation about their “always on” digital rights management system is a good example why. A company that needs to know every time I am playing, a game that kicks me out of my Internet connection drops momentarily… why would I want to pay good money for that? Come to think of it, why would I even want something like that for free on my computer?

The answer is, I don’t.

I have no statistics to prove it, but I think DRM does far more harm than good. It may (or may not) deter piracy. On the other hand, I bet that the number of customers alienated and put off by DRM far exceeds the number of those who suddenly see the light and, as a result of DRM, start paying for stuff they previously stole. So the net result may very well be a decrease in sales.

Perhaps one of these days, software, especially game software companies will come to their senses again and realize this. Until then, I’ll just enjoy the occasional shootout with some heavily pixelated aliens in Duke Nukem.

Windows Update day

Computers No Responses »

Mar 092010

Today is the second Tuesday of the month, and it’s Windows Update day. Not my favorite day of the month.

So here’s a curious question: why is it that I was able to upgrade Microsoft Virtual PC from version 2004 to version 2007 and it did NOT require a reboot… but when I installed a security update to version 2007 (making sure that Virtual PC as well as all its drivers are actually shut down) a reboot was necessary?

I don’t think I’ll ever figure out this Microsoft reboot misery.

Anonymity on the Internet

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Feb 152010

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a nifty Web site called panopticlick: it shows you just how unique your browser is. Even browser configurations that I thought were surely non-unique (such as a vanilla Internet Explorer setup on a Windows XP virtual machine or the off-the-shelf Mozilla Firefox that is installed on my Linux server but almost never used) turned out to have unique signatures, for which plugins, most notably Flash, are largely to blame. And you thought the [insert name of favorite most-hated intelligence agency here] needed cookies or some other tricks to track your every move!

Server crash

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Jan 242010

This is becoming almost traditional: just before I embark on a trip, my otherwise ultra-reliable server crashes while performing some routine operation.

Back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth and the Internet was still an exotic novelty for most people, my wife and I spent an unforgettable few weeks driving around the United States.

My server has been in existence for more than two years by then. No Web site yet… that came later that year. (Actually, I already had a rudimentary version up and running courtesy of my Internet service provider, but I digress.) The server was “connected” to the Internet via dial-up; it dialed regularly (once an hour; my wife and I still remember the little touch-tone “song” that we heard many times a day) to exchange e-mail, and it dialed automatically if I tried to visit a Web site, for instance. Otherwise, the modem line was open for dial-in… and I planned to dial into the server regularly while traveling.

Except that on the morning of our planned departure, the server crashed. Not a minor crash either… its hard drive died. Fortunately, not an instant death, and I was able to obtain a replacement drive and rescue all data.

Though it was still a genuine, no-kidding, bona fide kernel panic, today’s crash was a little less dramatic. I was merely testing streaming video from the server, as I always find it useful to be able to watch an Ottawa newscast in the evening when I am out of town. Instead of streaming the darn video, the video capture driver (which I’ve been using, completely incident free, for many years) crashed, taking the server down. Most unsettling!

VirtualBox

Computers No Responses »

Jan 172010

My laptop (the one I don’t want customs inspectors to be poking around on) runs Windows 7 (just upgraded from Vista). However, on it I also run a replica of my main Linux server, in a virtual machine.

After the upgrade, VMware Server, which wasn’t playing very nicely under Windows Vista either, started to give me serious trouble. The VM was due for an upgrade anyway, as its virtual hard drive was much too small. So I decided to… well, before upgrading the VM, I decided to check if there is perhaps a better option than VMware.

I first tried the obvious: Microsoft’s Virtual PC, which is a standard add-on to Windows 7 Ultimate. Nope… it didn’t play nicely at all, not with a Linux VM. So what else is out there? This is how I happened upon Sun’s VirtualBox, a (mostly) open source virtual machine solution.

I installed VirtualBox on a 64-bit Windows 7 test machine. Worked fine! Then I installed a complete Slackware 13.0 setup. Still good. I then did a full backup of my server to this VM. This also worked, though there was a minor snag: in the morning after the backup, I noticed that the host OS was completely locked up and needed a hard reset. Was it related to VirtualBox? Perhaps.

I then transferred the VM to another 64-bit Windows 7 machine and there, too, it worked well. So now it was time to move it to my 32-bit Windows 7 laptop. As Murphy’s Law dictates, that’s where I had the most trouble. For some reason (leftover nastiness after the VMware uninstall?) VirtualBox only sees network interfaces if it is run as Administrator. I also needed to enable multiprocessor support in the VM in order to eliminate a nasty (especially on a laptop!) problem of the VM consuming too much CPU, even when idle. Oh yes, and there was a crash, too.

Right now, all seems to be well though, and the VM works reliably, much better in fact than VMware. So maybe I have found the right solution. I’ll find out soon, when I’ll be doing a little bit of travel with this laptop in my suitcase.

A lovely morning

Computers No Responses »

Oct 292009

This morning, I decided to clean my main workstation, as it’s been noisier than usual these last couple of days. Sure enough, it had plenty of dust and cat hair in it, but I also noted that a little motherboard fan was not working. I had spares, so I decided to replace it. Removing it is not easy, as it is in an awkward location, and I also had to resolder its connector onto the new fan.

That having been done, I rebooted my machine. Or, I tried to anyhow, but it failed to boot. It failed to do anything after the BIOS initialization. After a while, I realized that for some weird reason, it was trying to boot from an attached USB device. I disconnected the device, but still nothing… worse than nothing, actually, as it told me that my system disk is unbootable.

Actually, I should say disks, as I am using a dual drive mirror configuration in this computer. After poking around in it some more, I realized that I have inadvertently knocked out a cable from one of the drives. Unfortunately, reconnecting this cable didn’t help… the system was still unbootable.

And I’ve seen this before! A while back, a similar thing happened… one drive was disconnected, and when I reconnected it, the stupid RAID controller somehow managed to wipe the boot sector from both. What on Earth it did that for, I have no idea. But this is why I have a spare computer with identical drives and RAID controller… once I understood what was happening, the solution was to simply remove both drives, put them into USB cases, connect them to the other computer, and then copy over the boot sector using a raw disk editor. Easier said than done, of course, especially as I couldn’t find a raw disk editor on that spare machine (I swear I used to have one installed!) but eventually downloaded HxD, a very fine free disk editor that I have used before.

Two hours after I began, I had a working computer again. Still, it’s not a fun way to start a morning when you need both a soldering iron and a raw disk editor to get your computer working again…

Activation strikes again

Computers, Intellectual Property, Internet No Responses »

Oct 262009

When will companies finally learn that Activation and copy protection do little to deter real piracy, only punish and alienate legitimate users? Here is something I just came across in a PC World blog:

“Microsoft support reps were still replying to users’ questions about product keys with a canned response citing ‘several reasons why a product key might not be accepted.’

“Essentially, either, ‘You mistyped it. The product key you typed doesn’t match the key assigned to Windows on your computer. Microsoft has identified the product key you entered as counterfeit,’ or ‘the product key has already been used on another computer,’ according to Microsoft.

“One person griped: ‘I Have been on the phone since 4 pm EST and I still don’t have a valid product code. Thank you Microsoft! Thank you for wasting my valuable time! Time is money and this had been a flagrant waste of it,’ wrote thatguy38.”

So all you’re trying to do is install legitimately purchased software, and you end up with a major headache, a useless computer, lots of wasted time, and on top of that you might get accused of theft. Talk about a strong incentive to either use cracked pirate copies or to forego using commercial software altogether, switching to open source instead.

Street View and privacy

Computers, Internet, Legal, Society No Responses »

Oct 082009

Google’s Street View has just been introduced in Canada.

Many people consider it a “gross invasion of privacy” that someone can take pictures of their streets and post it on the Internet. “What if they see my car in my driveway?” they scream at the top of their lungs, as if Google broke some long established taboo by photographing a public street.

But wait a minute… are these the same people who readily submit to having their laptops searched, its content, personal and business, examined and scrutinized, just so that customs can catch the occasional pedophile?

For what it’s worth, I couldn’t care less if Google posts photographs of my street or my house. On the other hand, I am so concerned about real invasions of my privacy, I am willing to face the wrath of customs agents by using Bruce Schneier’s method of laptop protection against unwarranted searches.

Curiously, most of the people commenting on Schneier’s article completely misunderstand his point: it’s not that I have anything illicit or shameful on my laptop that I need to hide. That would be easy. It’s that I object to the principle of strangers going through my entire life.

The really scary thing is that so many people, citizens of supposedly free countries, already adopted such a strong police state mentality: rather than looking for a lawful way to maintain their privacy, they are discussing various ways to break the law without getting caught. What I like about Schneier’s method is that it does not involve breaking the law: all my statements to customs agents would be truthful. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished… I’ll likely be harassed more than the smartalec who just creates a hidden partition on his laptop and keeps the visible partition sterile. But, at least I’ll suffer with a clean conscience, whatever good that does.

SPF

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Sep 092009

Finally, an idea I’ve had years ago seems to have occurred to others, too… namely, cutting down on spam e-mail by verifying that the originating server is a valid server for the sender’s domain. The mechanism developed for this purpose is called SPF, or Sender Policy Framework. I just set up my domains with SPF records… let’s see what happens! Of course SPF is not going to do the trick until a number of major providers begin to adopt it, but the fact that gmail has done so is quite encouraging.

Duke Nukem and a computer mystery

Computers No Responses »

Aug 062009

I built myself this dual-core computer several years ago, and it has been my main workstation ever since. By and large, it’s a good and reliable machine (not counting a broken fan and some fried capacitors on its motherboard… never mind, I now have spares of the same motherboard just to be safe) but there have always been a few minor glitches.

One of those glitches concerned MIDI files… if I played back a MIDI file on this computer, its tempo was all off. That is, unless I set the processor affinity of the MIDI playback program to play back only on a specific CPU core. Go figure. If that’s the worst problem I have on a machine that otherwise runs for months without a reboot despite being used for everything from software development to video editing, I guess I can call myself lucky.

But now, years later, I ran into another curious problem. There’s this computer game from the 90s, Duke Nukem, that I, for some reason, still find quite enjoyable. I usually run it on an old Windows 98 box. Recently I found out that there is an open source effort to develop and maintain a multiplatform Duke Nukem executable. I downloaded it and tested it on a test machine… it worked fine. So the other day, I put it on my main machine. It didn’t work fine… if I hit a key on the keyboard, it registered as a large number of very rapid keystrokes to the program.

I’ve been searching for a solution and came across a comment about CPU drivers and processor affinities. Whoops! Restricting EDUKE32 to a single CPU did the trick as a workaround. And then, I remembered that two years ago, I chose not to download a processor driver update from Microsoft Update, following the good old principle of “don’t fix it if it ain’t broken”. So now I took a deep breath and downloaded this update (okay, I wasn’t too worried, since this update already ran fine on a test computer with nearly identical hardware.)

Bingo! EDUKE32 runs like a charm and guess what… so do MIDI files? A years old mystery solved. Now I can happily shoot some heavily pixelated aliens in post-apocalyptic L.A…

Another software product I’ll not be buying…

Computers, Intellectual Property No Responses »

Jul 292009

Another software product I’ll not be buying because of activation is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I just received a promotional e-mail from TigerDirect Canada, offering this software for only CAD 59.97. Back in the old days, I’d have placed the order without much hesitation. But that was before the days of activation.

Simply put, I don’t buy software the license of which is tied to my computer hardware. My computer hardware is always changing. I have backup and test computers, and I often install software on those before risking my main computers. I only use licensed software and I abide by the terms of the license, but I do not put up with police state nonsense. Software companies do NOT have the right to police which of my computers I install their software on, so long as the spirit of the license is not violated: I am the software’s only user, and I only use one copy at a time. The purpose of test/backup installations is not to violate the terms of the license but to ensure that my ability to work remains uninterrupted by system failures or software incompatibilities.

In any case, my computer has no money. It is silly to tie a license to my computer, which has no ability to purchase anything. I, on the other hand, do have money, and I can purchase things, but why would I want to purchase things that would be tied to a computer that really is a transient entity: tomorrow, its hard drive may change, the day after, its motherboard, and so on? (The particular computer on which I am writing this text has been through many incarnations since the days when it began its existence as an Intel ‘486 machine on my then two-computer home network in the early 1990s, yet in a sense, it still has the same “identity”. Unfortunately, not quite in the sense in which computer identities are interpreted by activation software.)

Activation was supposed to boost sales by reducing software piracy. Perhaps it does that, though I remain skeptical. Meanwhile, at least in my case, I probably saved several thousand dollars over the years by no longer buying software on a whim. What can I say… their loss, my gain, I get to keep more money in my retirement account or pay off my mortgage faster.

I also note with a mild degree of amusement that cracks for most popular software are widely available on the Internet. Further, because activation and copy protection can be cumbersome, a growing number of people who purchased legitimate copies actually use cracked versions for comfort and convenience. I am guilty of doing the same: in order not to have to insert the blasted CD every time I play some particular games, I am using cracked versions instead, in which the copy protection code is bypassed. And this is when one feels compelled to ask the obvious question: if I, a legitimate purchaser, am nonetheless forced to use cracked (i.e., illegal) copies of software just so that I can use it the way I want to, what’s the point of paying for it in the first place?

This is a sad question to ask, given that I also make a living from writing software and as such, software piracy can hurt my wallet.

0xC0190001 error during VISTA SP2 install

Computers No Responses »

Jul 142009

I have to thank a fellow blogger (ouch, does that make me a blogger, too? I still can’t stand this word, but I suppose it’s now inevitably part of the English vocabulary) for an excellent post that helped me out: during the install of VISTA SP2 on my laptop, the machine failed with the error code 0xC0190001 associated with explorer.exe. The first thing I did was to try Google, and the first Google hit I found was the above-mentioned blog entry, advising me to reboot into Safe Mode, allow Windows to do its thing and reboot again, and presto: VISTA is back, with SP2 properly (I hope) installed, and I saved myself a significant amount of unpleasantness associated with a system reinstall.

Or maybe I’ll have to reinstall something in the end… because although SP2 came up just fine, for some reason I lost the Aero desktop altogether, and I am back to a standard Windows 2000 style theme, the Aero theme nowhere to be found. Curious. Good thing that laptop is not mission critical, except when I am traveling, which I am not planning to do anytime soon.

Ah. Stupid service pack upgrade disabled the Themes service. It also monkeyed with one of the VMWare services, but now that I started everything that needed starting, things seem to be working fine.

Weird

Computers No Responses »

Jul 132009

I have this hard drive. Two hard drives, actually, two out of many, these two being distinguished by the fact that at one time or another, they’ve been used in my old Fujitsu laptop.

The original drive was a 40 GB drive, which I replaced with an 80 GB drive years ago. I’ve since used the 40 GB drive in an external enclosure as a backup drive. I have several other drives of varying sizes in similar/identical enclosures.

Then there is the 80 GB drive, which has been the drive in this laptop for the last couple of years. But now that I no longer use this laptop myself, I figured I’d set it up for my wife. And since she doesn’t need an 80 GB drive, and the 40 GB drive was proving to be rather small for my backup needs, I decided to swap the drives back.

But then, the 80 GB drive that I took out of the laptop refused to function properly in the external enclosure. It was recognized alright, but no data could be read off it, not even the partition table. Same behavior on several computers running different operating systems (various Windows versions and Linux.)

Oops, I said, and swapped the drives back. Lo and behold, the 80 GB drive was again working fine, inside the laptop. But when I put the 40 GB drive back into the enclosure, I was in for a surprise: it was no longer working!

What the… I swapped the drives back and forth, they were both working fine in the laptop, but not working in the enclosure. Perhaps the enclosure is faulty? A logical thought, except that when I swapped enclosures using one of my several other backup drives, the enclosure was working just fine… but neither the 40 GB nor the 80 GB drive works in any of the three enclosures that I tested them with so far. Yet they both work fine in the laptop.

I must say I am stumped. I’ve never encountered a problem like this. Why would a drive work fine in a laptop but not in an external enclosure? Why would another drive, which used to work fine in the enclosure, fail after it has been inside a laptop (with, I should hasten to add, no operating system booted, so it’s not like there was a chance for a virus to affect the drive or anything like.) Modern drives do have persistent memory, but surely there are no persistent settings that would affect a drive like this? In any case, the 40 GB drive used to live in this laptop for years, and worked fine afterwards in the enclosure for years. But now, after it has been in the laptop again, it fails in the enclosure. Why?

Weird.

And I am supposed to be an expert at this.

End of an era

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Jul 022009

Long before there was a commercial Internet, there were dial-up service providers, bulletin board systems, and the like. At one time, the largest among these was CompuServe, offering a comprehensive range of services including hundreds (if not thousands) of forums, online chat, downloads, and games. Indeed there was a time when no self-respecting computer company existed without a support forum on CompuServe.

I became a CompuServe subscriber in 1991 I believe. Soon after, I discovered a wonderful game hosted by CompuServe: Richard Bartle’s original Multi-User Dungeon, running under the name British Legends. Ten years ago, CompuServe discontinued British Legends using the bogus excuse that the game is not Y2K compatible; I have been running a faithfully ported version of this game on my server ever since.

But the CompuServe service remained. Under the brand name CompuServe Classic, the original service stayed in operation in all these years. Its value was greatly diminished, but it was still usable as a reliable international dial-up Internet service provider (indeed, this is the reason why I kept my CompuServe subscription active.) That is, until now.

A few months ago, they sent out an e-mail informing users that the Classic service will be discontinued on June 30.

Out of curiosity, I tried logging on to CompuServe moments ago. Yes, the old text-based services were still available until recently. But today, this is what I am greeted with:

$ telnet gateway.compuserve.com
Trying 209.154.35.102...
Connected to gateway.compuserve.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

User ID: 70674,3414

?? LOGSTU - System BHC is temporarily unavailable

Well, what can I say? So long, and thanks for all the fun.

MOJ459P

Computers, Internet, Television No Responses »

Jul 022009

There is something positively charming about the random nature of the Internet.

I am watching a British comedy, One Foot in the Grave, on Vision TV (as to why a supposedly religious channel is broadcasting somewhat risqué British comedies in the first place, now that’s a question for another day, but I am certainly glad that they do.) At one point, the story features an old Citroen that appears in a trash dumpster in front of the protagonist’s house. The car has a license plate: MOJ459P.

On a whim, I entered this license plate number into Google. Surprisingly, there was a hit: http://www.convergence.cx/. For no discernible reason, the page features nothing else but the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and an immortal quote from Charles Babbage, pondering the sanity of members of Parliament who were wondering if his machine could give correct answers if given wrong data.

And it is a weird Web site. The page contains an invisible link to a host-side script that barfs back a series of random generated e-mail addresses. Or, I should say, almost random generated; among a bunch of bogus addresses, the e-mail addresses associated with the registration information of the IP number from which I perform the query also appear. What this means, I have no idea. The site doesn’t seem malicious, but then what is it? The top-level domain .cx is the country code for Christmas Island, but the site itself is registered as a “Convergence Organisation Object”, in London, the United Kingdom, since 2001. I have no idea what it is. Curious.

Skype 4? No thanks…

Computers, Programming No Responses »

Jun 252009

A few days ago, I upgraded to Skype 4.

I use Skype for overseas telephone calls a lot. I also call a few people occasionally using Skype-to-Skype. And, every once in a while, I use it to chat with people.

I have heard bad things about Skype 4 so I was not in a hurry to upgrade. But when, the other day, the software notified me that a major upgrade is available, I decided to give it a try.

Wish I didn’t.

The installation completed successfully, and Skype worked fine, but… well, it’s best if I just quote a few sentences from Skype’s own Web site where the new version was announced:

Skype 4.0 should certainly participate in the worst software redesign conquest.
Worst interface ever created for Skype and i’ve been using it ever since the 1st beta. Please dump this garbage
Skype 4.0 has an extreme ugly layout.
The UI of version 4 is a terrible disappointment. No matter how I tweak, it still consumes more screen real-estate than version 3 did.
Who are you people and what were you thinking when you released this kludge.
ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE INTERFACE
Skype 4.0.x is PAINFUL and FRUSTRATING TO USE.
I think this is the ‘vista’ of skype releases.
What where you thinking. Did you guys outsource? This version has all the hallmarks of a design by committee.
I truly do not like the new 4.0 version! I’ve tried it for a week, hoping to get used to it, and i’m just left cursing. I am reverting because…

I share these sentiments. This morning, I gave up and downgraded to the 3.8 version. Which is working fine, as always.

Updating Skype

Computers No Responses »

Jun 232009

I’ve been using Skype since last year. Initially, I resisted, but then there were to strong reasons to use it: one, regular phone line quality has been steadily going down the drain as long distance companies increasingly began to use VoIP, and two, I was doing a bit of traveling, and Skype is a heck of a lot cheaper than hotel phones.

I’ve had Skype version 3 installed, and by and large, I was happy. I’ve been using Skype a lot to call Europe, for instance, and it worked most of the time at least as reliably as the good old phone company.

However, lately I had some call quality problems and Skype’s advice was to upgrade. So, when the other day, the software informed me that a new version is available to install, I accepted it. The new version installed just fine, and it is working fine… I can’t really tell if it actually delivers improved sound quality, but I have no reason to doubt Skype.

What the new version doesn’t deliver is an improved user interface. Simply put, the version 4 UI is not pretty. “Compact Mode” is not really compact anymore, you just get multiple windows. In regular mode, the Skype window is just huge. And, it’s ugly. For manual dial, it has an unpleasant looking, overly large dial pad. For other modes, the interface is equally unappealing, with large unused areas.

What were these people thinking? Seriously, it feels like I went back 5-10 years in time in terms of UI quality. If Skype 3 was like Windows XP, Skype 4 is more like Windows 95. I’m seriously contemplating uninstalling Skype and reinstalling version 3. I’m just not sure if it’s worth the hassle.

Computer management

Computers No Responses »

Jun 102009

Being self-employed means, among other things, that I am not just using my computer systems, I am also responsible for managing them.

On the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft releases a batch of fixes. These fixes are important: they address known security issues among other things, and some of these issues may already be actively exploited by viruses or malicious Web sites. I prefer installing these updates by hand, because doing so allows me to test the updates on a test computer before putting them on “mission critical” machines. Also, my work is not interrupted by degraded system performance while an update is being processed, or by a sudden request by Windows to reboot.

A few months ago, I allowed Windows Update to install a bunch of Windows Live features on my main workstation, not because I needed them but, well, because they were available and they could do no harm, right? Well, they didn’t do any real harm, except for the annoying little issue of an Explorer window always opening up when I started the system, with the folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft, which contained just one subfolder called Search Enhancement Pack. So yesterday, since I was installing updates and rebooting the system anyway, I decided to do whatever it takes (short of reinstalling Windows, that is) to get rid of this thing.

Having done some research on Google, I decided to try a few promising-looking solutions. First, I used a command-line uninstallation command to get rid of a component called Choice Guard, which supposedly caused this folder to be opened on startup. Reboot… no cigar, the folder was still there.

One file in the folder in question was SeaPort.exe, a service component of the Search Enhancement Pack. On a hunch, I disabled this service and rebooted. Again no cigar… the folder was still there.

Then, I found the command-line command to actually uninstall the whole Search Enhancement Pack. I was sure that this would do the trick… but it didn’t. After reboot, the folder was still there.

OK, I don’t have time for this silliness, I thought, it’s time to get rid of all this Windows Live nonsense that I won’t be using much anyway. I uninstalled them all except for the Windows Live Onecare component. Reboot, and… the stupid folder was still opened by Explorer on startup.

Time to get rid of Onecare, too. I did, and rebooted… and once again, Explorer opened the folder. Mind you, by this time the folder contained only one file in a subfolder, a file called SearchHelper.dll, which many sites mistakenly identify as malicious (I believe that there is, in fact, a malicious file out there with this name, but this one is from Microsoft and not malicious. Well, not intentionally, anyhow.)

The final solution was also the lamest, something I could have done earlier had I not insisted on doing things the “right way”: I got rid of the folder in question altogether, just manually deleted it. This did the trick, but I do wonder: if for any reason, the folder is restored, would it open up again in the middle of my screen upon the next reboot? And why does Microsoft do this to us anyway?

Between this, obligatory backups, and updates to some half a dozen computers plus some virtual machines, my afternoon and most of my evening was gone.

Meanwhile, my wife received yet another spam e-mail with her own e-mail address used as the sender address. This became a new fad among spammers: why don’t we send spam pretending to be the recipient, perhaps this will trick spam filters? Well, it was time to do something about it, so I did. Unfortunately, these things can get tricky and sendmail’s configuration file, while extremely powerful, is more idiosyncratic than intuitive, with command lines like this:

R$* $| $=R $*		$@ OK

So it’s not easy to get it right (that is, filter out unwanted mail but still letting us send out e-mails with our own sender addresses) and I had to be careful not to disable legitimate mail service by accident. Eventually, since it was well past midnight already, I decided that I was too tired to do such delicate surgery, and I only finished it this morning.

Finally, I can now get back to doing something useful on these stupid computers. About bleeping time!

Busy days

Computers, Culture, Physics, Programming, Technology No Responses »

May 312009

I’ve been learning a lot about Web development these days: Dojo and Ajax, in particular. It’s incredible what you can do in Javascript nowadays, sophisticated desktop applications running inside a Web browser. I am spending a lot of time building a complex prototype application that has many features associated with desktop programs, including graphics, pop-up dialogs, menus, and more.

I’ve also been learning a lot about the intricacies Brans-Dicke gravity and about the parameterized post-Newtonian (PPN) formalism. Brans-Dicke theory is perhaps the simplest modified gravity theory that there is, and I have to explain to someone why the gravity theory that I spend time working on doesn’t quite behave like Brans-Dicke theory. In the process, I find out things about Brans-Dicke theory that I never knew.

And, I’ve also been doing a fair bit of SCPI programming this month. SCPI is a standardized way for computers to talk to measurement instrumentation, and an old program I wrote used to use a non-standard way… not anymore.

Meanwhile, in all the spare time that I’ve left, I’ve been learning Brook+, a supercomputer programming language based on C… that is because my new test machine is a supercomputer, sort of, with its graphics card that doubles as a numeric vector processor capable in theory of up to a trillion single precision floating point instructions per second… and nearly as many in practice, in the test programs that I threw at it.

I’m also learning a little more about the infamous cosmological constant problem (why is the cosmological constant at least over 50 orders magnitude too small but not exactly zero?) and about quantum gravity.

As I said in the subject… busy days. Much more fun though than following the news. Still, I did catch in the news that Susan Boyle lost in Britains Got Talent… only because an amazing dance group won:

Startup folder window annoyance

Computers No Responses »

May 232009

Ever since I installed a Microsoft update, not sure which one, whenever I reboot my computer, XP starts up opening a folder, notably C:\Program Files\Microsoft\.

Since I don’t reboot my computer that often, it’s only a minor annoyance, but I’ve learned long ago that minor annoyances can be symptoms of bigger problems, so I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

After some Googling, I took a closer look at my startup configuration using msconfig and the Registry editor, until I found that the default value under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run was not absent, as it should be, but rather, it was set to an empty string. Could that be the cause? I’ll know after the next reboot…

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