Monthly Archives: May 2005

Proximity sense travel cards are vital; processes support falible memory

I lost my train ticket the other day. My monthly. A hundred bucks worth. I recalled that I’d validated it on the bus to get home (because the bus was there; I don’t wait for it if it’s not there – the timing’s a little vauge and I’m not that adverse to exercise). I remembered left in my back pocket along with a bus timetable. And I knew it was lost, because I have processes to deal with a decaying memory. I lock the car with the car keys now, because the car can be locked without them and I know that I can and have left the keys in the car; so locking it with the key means I can’t do that. I knew that I’d only recently walked in the door, and that I’d only been in a limited number of places. I knew that there was only one place it should have been, where I leave all my pcoket stuff – phone, wallet, MP3 player, keys, coins, ID lanyard and travel ticket. And it wasn’t there. Because I was in the process of trying to put it there. But the other stuff was. It wasn’t in any of my pockets.

I concluded that the only remaining explaination is that I had dropped it, which seemed ludicrous. How could that have happened? It was in my pocket! I retraced my steps back to the bus stop, and halfway there I found the bus pass. Another hundred metres and I found the ticket. During the walk home it had worked its way out, sliding up against the bus timetable and onto the footpath.

Now, the reason I had it in my back pocket was because it was a Friday, and on Fridays its casual day at work and as such my shirt didn’t have a pocket in it. So, there was process failure there, but it was to be expected. Little I can do about casual day.

I’ve had scares like this in the past. The reason I keep my ticket in my pocket is because I need it easily accessible, for feeding into the barriers to let me in and out of the train stations. There are most secure locations I can keep it, but they are less accessible. So I’ve left it in the pocket of the previous day’s shirt and not realised until I’ve arrived at the train station.

But the crux of the matter, the reason this is a GeekRant article, is because if the damn ticket was proximity detect I could keep it in my wallet or on my ID lanyard and never lose it and also have it ready to validate at a moment’s notice. The lanyard would be best, because then I couldn’t get to work without taking my lanyard with me, which would remove another thing I could forget and would inconvience me. And this is all the more important now that I’m lugging a thousand buck yearly ticket around with me. It’s not like it can’t be done either – all the validating machines have proximity sense detectors on them. At least the yearly tickets are plastic and will survive a trip through the washing machine.

Stupid MetCard.

Is Windows getting too net-centric?

Searching Microsoft Office onlineIs Windows (and Office) getting too net-centric?

Case 1: Printer drivers

I hooked up my Lexmark E322 printer to my new computer. Windows XP recognised it, then wanted to go out onto the Internet to get the driver. But the computer’s not online yet. The XP CD apparently doesn’t have the driver. I suppose I could use a separate (online) computer to go to Lexmark’s web site and find a driver, but isn’t that over-complicating things? If XP knows what the printer is, why doesn’t it have the driver on the disc?

(Hey, here’s the web page for Lexmark’s E322 drivers. Someone please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke having three URLs embedded in one like that.)

Case 2: Office 2003 help

To take a theoretical example, search in Word Help for mail merge. It searches Office Online, then presents me with some options. The most useful one turns out to be on their web site.

Obviously having a lot of this content online is beneficial in reducing what is installed on local machines, and even the size of install packages on CDs. It also lets the vendors easily keep software and content up to date.

But… What if my network’s down for the day? What if I’m in a corporate environment and haven’t been granted Net access through the firewall? What if I’m setting up a PC for my mother to use just for word processing, with strictly no Net access?

Today I can re-install and use old versions of Windows, including printer drivers and application help, without network connectivity. Will the same be said for Windows XP in ten years? What if Microsoft drops support for it, including their online driver library? Will Office 2003 still have help available at the end of this decade?

Of course it’s not possible to keep users’ CDs or computers updated with the latest drivers and help files, but shouldn’t at least a basic version of these essential materials be available without network connectivity?

PS. Even after I did get the PC connected to the Innanet, when it tried to go get the driver by itself, it couldn’t find it. So I’ll be downloading it from Lexmark after all.

Prank

So, that shiny new computer I’ve been given and my propensity to save power have combined with boyish enthusiasm with a practical joke to create a very embarrassing situation for the two other contractors I work with.

I normally leave my box locked overnight, shutting it down on a weekend. So a discovery of a week ago had to wait until Monday to play out.

My new computer has a temperature sensitive main case fan that’s ducted – at higher temperatures the fan is cranked up to increase the airflow over the water cooled CPU heatsink. There’s a BIOS setting to set the idle fan speed; the default value is almost imperceptable, the highest is a roaring not dissimilar to a jet taking off (mainly because of the ducting and air being forced through the heatsink – all the turbulance is very noisy) and certainly seems to move a lot of air. Apparently the other guys here discovered this setting, and thought it would be a great idea to crank up the idle fan speed to “stupidly high” while I was away.

When I powered up the box, and the roaring fan started, I immediately went to Dean, the guy who did the swap-over to the new box. Having a CPU cut out because of overheating is not cool; I imagined that the heatsink might have come off somehow. He couldn’t imagine what was going on, and did note that the air wasn’t hot. Opening it up revealled everything in its place.

At this point the pranksters saw that this could escalate well beyond a prank and intervened with an explanation. Whilst I wasn’t put out, other people put the pranksters in their place. So, kids, be careful with those pranks. They could blowback on you (oh, I hadn’t intended that pun!).

Daniel’s new box – part 2

Part 2. Took the day off to pick up the machine. My friendly computer shop guy let me know he’d found a better keyboard/mouse bundle which saved me a few bucks, so the total cost was exactly $1200.

12:25. Just the basics plugged in — monitor, mouse, keyboard. Power it up. Certainly boots into XP fast. “27 days left for activation.”

Fiddle around with the defaults. The shop thoughtfully named the main account after my company name, but I want it to be Daniel… try renaming it, but the Docs & Settings subdirectory won’t rename. MyDocuments can be moved, but not its parent. So eventually I just create a fresh account for myself. Accounts for the kids too — no Administrator privileges for them, oh no.

14:10. Speakers plugged in and working. More playing about with settings (Hello Windows Classic theme). Tested a DVD. All works well though the eject button on the drive isn’t overly responsive. Hooray, the bundled PowerDVD happily grabs frames, something I sometimes want to do. The bundled Nero looks a bit light-on though… will want to be getting a real copy for DVD burning.

That’ll do for now, other stuff to do.

New console wars start

Microsoft announces a bunch of XBox 360 game collaborations and confirms XBox 360 will be compatible with (old) XBox games, though there’s some doubt over how it will be achieved, and evidently it won’t be clean: Microsoft representatives did say they would start with more popular titles such as “Halo,” then move down the line.. Yeuch, sounds messy.

Meanwhile Sony has pulled the covers off the Playstation 3, with what sound like some very impressive performance stats.

Oh, and some mob called Nintendo with a console called Revolution appears to be destined yet again for third place.

(Thanks Tony)

Daniel’s new box – part 1

I’ve got a new PC. After the old one died, I’ve been surviving on a single machine for a while, but it was time to have a second one again, if only so both the kids can play games at once while I’m busy on the XBox!

Part 1… the purchase. Well I considered various things…

Notebook or desktop? Notebooks are getting more powerful, and I love the idea of surfing from the couch. But really I need a good, speedy workhorse machine with plenty of connections.

Mac or Windows or Linux? My brother-in-law is a strong Mac advocate, and I love my iPod, but ultimately I wanted to stay in my comfort zone. I’ve used Windows for many years, at work and at home, and I’ll continue to do so for quite some time. And on occasion I need to do work from home, and some of that involves Microsoft proprietary tools (cough, cough) like Visual Basic. So for now it’s gotta be Windows.

Which vendor? I’ve had my share of little companies and of big ones when buying PCs. But over the years I’ve heard from various friends about the good work of Landmark Computers, a medium-sized company here in Melbourne. So I decided to try them.

So I went along last Thursday to their city shop and talked to one of their guys, figured out what I wanted by starting with their “Predator” model, fiddled the config a bit (no monitor as I already had one, no floppy, no modem, 1Gb RAM, XP Pro instead of Home, that kind of thing) and put in the order. I was hoping it’d be ready by Saturday, as it would be very convenient to drive in and get it. They said they couldn’t promise that, so points for honesty.

On Friday they rang to say there was an issue with the graphics card, and if it was okay they’d bump me to a higher model for an extra $25. They also said they’d go for a better case for no extra cost, and that it wouldn’t be ready before Monday. Cool, I replied.

Stand by for part 2…

Xbox 360

XBox 360As everyone on the planet would know by now, Microsoft has revealed the design of the new version of the XBox — which they’ve called the XBox 360, which shows the marketing bods have won over the dev geeks, who I’m sure would have been happy to call it the XBox 2.0.

There’s a bunch of info on the hardware specs which make it sound suitably groovy, with the most notable thing being a move away from Intel CPUs over to the Power PC. Presumably this will give it more power for the money, which after all is MS’s money, since it’s not like Wintel machines where they just tell the manufacturers the spec — oh no, this thing they have to build themselves, so they’ll want it to be as cheap as possible.

There seems to be no official word on XBox 1 compatibility with this thing, though evidently a user survey hinted that the 360 would play the old games. They must have some pretty good brains working on getting that going, but then I suppose these days you can run PC software on Macs using Virtual PC, so software Intel emulation on a PowerPC isn’t anything new.

And the price and availability? Well they’re saying end of the year for US and Japan (and Europe???). The rest of us will have to wait for sometime next year. With the price of the console likely to be about double what an XBox costs now, it remains to be seen if the games for it will really blow people away enough to shell out for it though.

Hey I wonder if, unlike the PS2, it’ll stand up like in all the pictures without you having to buy an optional stand?

Ten years ago…

Yesterday, I bought a computer. With a bit of luck it’ll be ready on Saturday.

As it happens, it’s not quite ten years since I bought my first “new” PC. (Before that I’d used 8-bit computers and an aging 286.)

Just for a little nostalgia, here is part of the advert from the company I bought it from all those years ago, the now defunct Rod Irving Electronics, of A’Beckett Street in Melbourne. This is from the 6th June 1995 edition of The Age “Green Guide”.

The system I bought from them was the Pentium 60 on the right hand side. I’m sure you’ll be impressed at the spec, as well as the marketing. (At the time, the Australian Peso was worth about USD0.60, by the way).

Rod Irving Electronics catalogue from 1995

This computer was finally disposed of in rather spectacular fashion in 2003, though the speakers and that mighty 4x CD player still work (currently stored as spares).

MSDN fun

A couple of rather silly-sounding entries from MSDN…

Visual Basic: Class ContainedControls

Member of VBRUN – A collection that allows access to the controls contained within the control that were added to the control by the developer who uses the control. — What?

Win32 API: DeleteFile (via Josh)

Windows 95: The DeleteFile function deletes a file even if it is open for normal I/O or as a memory-mapped file. To prevent loss of data, close files before attempting to delete them. — uh huh.

New iTunes stores

iPod (from apple.com)Apple has opened new iTunes stores in… Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with a free track for every Swiss citizen. (Großmutter! Schnell! Was ist Ihr voller Name und Geburtsdatum?)

And Australia? Well The Register says It was claimed this week that only major label troubles prevented the company from opening ITMS Australia last month as planned. Damn labels.

Meanwhile Apple continues to dominate in sales of music players, with new stats showing the iPod Shuffle has more than half of the US flash player market, and iTunes recently sold its 350 millionth song download.

All this is good news for the continued availability of non-copy-protected music. While Apple continues to sell and support MP3, but not WMA, and remains dominant in sales of hardware, MP3 will remain strong.

I don’t want a music format that’s copy protected. I don’t want to pay for music and have it die with my player. Like CDs, it has to last (I’ve got 17 year old discs that are still going strong) and be copyable, so I can move the music onto whatever the Next Great Device for my music is — whether it be a replacement iPod when my battery eventually gives up, or some other new and shiny device in a few years when the iPod seems old and clunky.

Though of course, in Australia at present, even just ripping your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

PS. 11pm. Actually I should probably use iTunes Store before blessing Apple too much, since there seems to be a lot of rumbling about whatever DRM they use.