Category: Computers and Internet

I see that Google Earth has at last got higher resolution imagery for the Isle of Man. I can now clearly see at least some of the houses where I lived as a child. But the old Ivanhoe hotel, where I spent most of my childhood, was demolished some years back – a car park now marks the spot.

 

The Google Earth and Maps team introduce the new imagery by running a quiz on their blog. The Isle of Man was supposedly the answer to this bizarre question:

Er, no it isn’t. That’s like saying that the currency of England is known as English. Sigh.

 

Update: Gawd, it gets worse. In the blog entry providing the answers, the Google team say that the Isle of Man is part of England. No, it isn’t, you stupid people!

Well, I’m back (touch wood) after a few days without an Internet connection. My ISP (Internet Service Provider), XS4ALL, has been having problems this weekend. It also happened to be the weekend when my ADSL connection was scheduled to be moved from KPN across to XS4ALL. So, bright and early on Friday morning, KPN pulled their ADSL plug on my line. The idea was that XS4ALL would then plug in their ADSL service shortly afterwards. Alas, some network-wide problem hit them, with a few thousand subscribers being unable to get internet access, so they put a hold on adding new clients until they got it sorted. Me being one of them, of course.

 

Not having ADSL has both pushed my frustration levels up, but also given me the opportunity to catch up with my book reading. Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black is highly recommended.

 

I even managed to be pleasant, and share a joke or two, with Dennis on the XS4ALL Helpdesk today. Clearly I’ve calmed down from the idiotic fury I was spitting at some hapless minion in network control last Saturday. Whoever you are, I’m sorry. My emotions got the better of me.

Jim Gray was an outstanding and influential computer scientist. He made major contributions in the field of database design. He vanished without a trace while on a short solo sailing trip on January 28 2007. I see from Pat Helland’s blog that there is to be a tribute to Jim on May 31st at UC Berkeley. He is missed.

Cliff Longman, of Kalido, has a very good explanation of why XML should not be regarded as the universal panacea for data integration. He also talks about the genesis of Kalido. It was a tool developed to tackle the horrendous problems of data integration within the oil products businesses of Shell. As Cliff says, at the time, there were a hundred different operating companies, none of which agreed on the same way of defining their data. Trying to discover how much oil had been sold worldwide, and to whom, was a complete nightmare.

 

(hat tip to Andy for the link)

A garden benefits from regular weeding. So does my list of links to web sites stored in the "Favourites" of my web browser. Up until now, I’ve done it manually, but with currently over 1,200 links in the list – it’s a real chore to check for dead links. Thanks to a tip I found on Watching The Net, I’ve discovered AM-Deadlink, a utility that will weed out all those dead links for me automatically. A terrific little tool that does its job very well indeed.

While Microsoft Vista has been getting some bad press, on the whole, I’ve been pretty satisfied with it, and would not want to return to Windows XP. True, in the early days, the shortage of proper Vista software drivers from third party hardware manufacturers was a real issue, and I suffered from that as well. But now, those problems are mostly behind me(*), and my Vista systems have been humming along nicely. Until, that is, a couple of weeks ago.

 

I began to notice that free disc space on the main drive on one of the systems was vanishing at an alarming rate, and I could see no reason for it. Gigabytes were disappearing daily. I ran the Disk Cleanup utility, but, as expected, that reported it could only recover a couple of gigabytes from the disc space allocated to my files. I began to wonder if the disc was beginning to fail, so I ran the low-level error check on the disc. This also revealed nothing untoward. Meanwhile, the relentless tumble in the amount of free space continued.

 

Finally, I stumbled across the additional option in Disk Cleanup to delete Shadow Copies and Restore Points. Now, my versions of Vista (Home Premium) do not have the Shadow Copy feature, but they do use Restore Points. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought I and selected the additional option as I tried the Disk Cleanup utility again. This time, I got over 100 Gigabytes of free disc space back… 

 

So, that was the cure, but what was the disease? Why would Vista’s Restore Points be taking up so much space? After further googling, I came across this excellent article: How To Reduce Disk Space Used By Windows Vista System Restore. It turns out that, by default, Vista should be set to use up to 15% of a drive to store Restore Points, but on my system, it was set to "Unbounded" – in other words, Vista was free to keep on grabbing disc space for Restore Points. I used the vssadmin command as described in the article to change from no limit to a reasonable 30GB (on a 400 GB drive). Something had occurred in the past few weeks to set that parameter on the Shadow Copy Service of Vista to "Unbounded" – I still don’t know what it was, but at least I have got it back on track.

 

Aren’t computers fun?

 

* It took over a year for Creative Technology to release proper Vista drivers for my EMU 1820m audio hardware. And I gave up waiting for Creative Technology to sort out the problems with the Vista drivers for the Audigy range of soundcards. I finally ripped the Audigy card out of my PC in disgust and replaced it with a soundcard from Terratec, which came with working Vista drivers. I’m still not completely out of the woods though. Steinberg, the company that many musicians love to hate, announced, to an angry chorus of frustrated users, that it would not be releasing 64 bit Vista/XP drivers for its Midex 8 interface. So that means I have to stick with the 32 bit version of Vista, where I can use the old XP driver for the Midex 8.

Microsoft released the first Service Pack (SP1) for the Vista family of operating systems a couple of days back. There are two machines running Vista in our house; one reported that SP1 was available to install, the other did not. It turns out that the machine that did not react is behaving perfectly correctly. I have a Logitech webcam installed on that machine, and there is a known conflict between a Logitech driver file and one of the files in SP1. The update process checks for the presence of files that can cause problems on target machines, and does not proceed if it finds a potential problem. I’ll just have to wait until Microsoft resolves this issue.

 

That’s fine, but what I found disconcerting was the experience I had with the other machine, the one that flagged that it was OK to install SP1.

 

I gave the OK to install SP1, and the process began. While it lasted a while (about 45 minutes, I think) and included a reboot, that was acceptable. What I don’t think is acceptable is that when the machine was finally up and running, it was clear that, even though a successful upgrade had been reported, something was not right. It turned out that:

 

Both of these were caused because the upgrade process did not use the required specific hardware drivers, but used default drivers from Microsoft. Now, because I’m a geek, I was able to use Vista’s device manager to diagnose and correct the problems by reinstalling the NVIDIA and RealTek drivers for the display and sound hardware respectively. But for the non-geeks amongst us, this would simply be a disaster.

 

Even more alarming, Windows Update started reporting that it had one more important update to install, but every time it attempted to install it, the process failed with an error code 80070103. Vista’s Help and Support system suggested reinstalling the update (it was an new software driver for the touchpad), but this didn’t help – the process simply reported that the latest software driver was already installed, and meanwhile Windows Update kept on insisting that there was an important update to install. In the end, I had to completely uninstall the touchpad driver manually, and then let Windows Update take over to install the new driver. Once again, I can’t see that non-computer folks would be comfortable about doing this.

For the geeks amongst us, Joel Spolsky has a terrific post explaining precisely why Microsoft’s IE8 team are damned if they do or damned if they don’t.

OK, if you’re not a geek, this will mean nothing to you. Tim Bray writes about the people behind XML. Wonderful. I have had the privilege of meeting some of them. What continues to give me electric shocks is the self evident fact that Ted was right; Tim BL has reinvented the whoopee cushion and the joy buzzer in Internet terms. But, ultimately, that doesn’t matter. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

I see that scamming is alive and well. I’ve just had a message "From The Desk of Mr. Thompson John" [sic], who purports to be the head of the auditing department in the Buckingham Palace Road branch of Barclays Bank in London. Yeah, sure. You’ll forgive me if I don’t bother to claim a share in the $10.5 million that you claim to have just lying around waiting for a sucker to send in their bank details to you.

 

Actually, there’s now an emerging sport of folks who spin out the line to these scammers. My favourite at the moment is the exchange between Lewis D. Noogie and the Contract Killers. Worth reading… 

I’ve just noticed that Microsoft has introduced a change to Windows Live Spaces. For some reason best known to themselves, they’ve bolded the fonts used on Custom Lists, and the descriptions of List entries are no longer displayed when the list is displayed in narrow layout columns.

 

This non-displaying of descriptions has transformed some of my lists into total incomprehensibility. For example, in my "Wines I Have Known" list, I used the description field in the entries to display a rating. Now, these ratings no longer show up on the main page – all you see is a simple list of links to the wine producers. Not very useful.

 

Needless to say, Microsoft made this change without telling anyone. The Spaces product team even have a Windows Live Spaces blog – The Space Craft. I would have thought that they could have used it to announce changes like this; but no, they are wittering on about The Oscars. As if I could give a toss… I’m in full GOM mode today.

 

Update: Well, as of the 27th March 2008, I’m pleased to see that Microsoft has responded and rolled back some of the changes. In particular, my wine list now works as I intended. Good stuff. 

Stuart Pinfold got bored during the night shifts at the BBC, and ended up writing a Google Earth mashup that shows where the Beeb’s correspondents are located around the world, and their most recent stories. Fascinating.

The Rijksmuseum offers a computer desktop widget that is supposed to display a new picture from the museum’s art collection every day.It’s a brilliant idea, and it’s been delivering a new piece of art to my desktop since last March. That is, until it stopped working a week ago. Since then, it’s just sat there, complaining that it can’t connect to the museum. I’ve sent a couple of emails to the Rijksmuseum alerting them to the problem, but so far, I’ve had neither an answer or even an acknowledgement. I’m not impressed.

 

 

 

Update 30 Jan 2008: dunno what has changed, but the gadget started working again this morning… Normal service appears to have been resumed…

 

Update 1 Feb 2008: I see that Peter Gorgels, who works at the Rijksmuseum has commented on this entry to say that, indeed, the servers at the museum were configured wrongly. The probem has been fixed. Thanks for letting me know, Peter.

I’ve never much cared for the phenomenon that is Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson, in today’s Guardian, has a powerful piece that dissects not just Facebook, but the people behind it. Not pretty reading.

The name probably doesn’t mean anything to those of you who are not computer geeks. And I suspect that even the younger generation of computer geeks won’t know who he is. But Donald Knuth is one of the seminal figures in computer science. I’ve just seen that he was 70 yesterday, so belated birthday greetings, Professor Knuth!

 

Jeff Atwood, over at Coding Horror, has more links to the life, work and humour of Donald Knuth. Worth browsing.

I was working on my photos today, refining some metadata. I use IDimager to do this. It has a nifty feature to search for photos where metadata in the image files themselves is not synchronised with IDimager’s internal catalogue. On using this feaure, I was surprised to find that 435 photos were flagged as being out of sync. Further examination showed that IDimager was also flagging them as being offline – in other words, no longer on the computer.

Odd, thought I, they should be in the folders where I keep my photos… That was when I discovered that all the folders holding photos taken in February 2007 had been deleted. I have no one to blame but myself, and I don’t know when this happened, but somewhere along the line I must have accidentally deleted the folder for February 2007, which contained the daily folders holding the photos themselves.

Luckily, I have had a Windows Home Server system running on the network since November. I opened up the backup taken in mid-November, and there were the folders. A quick copy and paste, and all the missing photos were restored back to their rightful place. Whew!

(Note: IDimager is no longer available. Its successor is Photo Supreme, which I am now using)

In the ultimate scale of things, a missing apostrophe is not really important, but whenever I see bad grammar, I mentally want to rip the intestines out of its still-living perpetrator. Overreaction? Yes, I know, but I just can’t help it.

 

The latest example comes from Fujitsu-Siemens extolling the benefits of their Windows Home Server Scaleo:

Aarggh! And what’s with the American accent for a product that is being released in the European market? Death to the Fujitsu-Siemens Marketing Department, say I!

I have never learned to touch type. My style is not quite hunt and peck, but I do need to look at the keyboard almost continuously. I was always very jealous of a colleague (hi, Harvey!) who was an excellent touch-typist. Over the years I’ve tried to improve. I’ve bought various incarnations of Mavis Beacon, all with little result. Now there’s a web-based training programme. Perhaps I should give this a whirl, but I fear it is a tale of old dogs, new tricks yet again.

There is a UK comedian called Jasper Carrott who, when faced with human idiocy, sums it up with a certain gesticulation whilst uttering the immortal word: Dickhead.

 

He came to mind today when I read a Microsoft Knowledgebase article reporting on an issue with Windows Home Server. The article contains the advice:

Errm, doesn’t this blow a rather large hole in the raison d’etre of Windows Home Server? An environment that exists primarily for the purpose of making backup copies of important program files?

 

Talk about shooting oneself in the foot…

 

So Dell has finally announced the availability of its contender in the Tablet PC market: the Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC. Back in May, I commented about this, and had concerns that it would be aimed at the corporate, rather than the consumer market.

 

Well, it looks as though my concerns were correct. While the specs look good, the price is simply horrendous; it starts at $2,499, and goes up from there. No wonder the comments over at Direct2Dell are focusing on price. Dell has just shot itself in the foot with this. The timing is also particularly unfortunate, given that Toshiba has just announced its latest Tablet PC range, the Portege M700 series. This starts at a full $1,000 cheaper than the Dell. Guess which machine I’m going to be taking a closer look at?