Memoirs of a Middle-Aged Geek Woman

In which I shed an infintesimal tear for a failed technology

2009-10-30T07:00:00.001-07:00

Reading the latest dead-tree issue of Maximum PC the other day, I learned that BTX is obsolete, keeled over like a dead buffalo. It is an ex-motherboard form factor. It is pushing up daisies.

In Maximum PC's "Doctor" section, they give advice to readers' questions about technical problems. The original problem was fairly complicated, but in passing, the Doctor noted that "Oh, and nobody makes BTX CPU coolers anymore, though you can still find old ones online."

I'm ever so slightly sad about this. See, when I was studying to be a computer technician around 2005, BTX was going to be the great white hope for keeping computer innards cool, at a moment when that was becoming a real problem. Hang on for some heavy technical stuff.

If the CPU (Central Processing Unit) is your computer's brain, the motherboard can be seen as its nervous system. The motherboard connects everything together, so that the brain, the CPU, can talk to and get information from everything else. Okay?

As with most analogies, that's not exactly true. But it will do for non-geeks.

Over the years, motherboards have come in different shapes and sizes. In geek-speak, these shapes are called form factors. The most common form factor today, and the one that's been dominant for a number of years, is the ATX form factor. The ATX first became popular in 1996, which means it's really old now.

Along around the early 2000's, the ATX form factor started to have problems. For one thing, CPUs and other bits and pieces of computer innards were becoming more powerful, and as a result they were getting hotter. A lot hotter. The ATX form factor was never really designed to get rid of that much heat. Computer insides need to be kept cool, or they'll overheat and the delicate electronic components will fry, leaving you with an expensive doorstop instead of a computer. Putting in more fans will help, but fans are what make those whirring noises inside your computer, and putting in more of them means more noises. There are also limits to what fans can do, no matter how many of them you put in.

So, around 2004, Intel put forth a whole new motherboard form factor, the BTX. The BTX was designed to have better air flow, so that it would keep the inside of the computer cooler right from the start.

Trouble was, it went over like a lead balloon. Among other things, the ATX just had too much invested in it. Besides, along with hotter CPUs and graphic cards have finally come better fans and coolers that do their job. Intel canceled the creation of any more BTX products in September of 2006, according to this Wikipedia article.

And thus, BTX joins zeppelins and analog-based computers (along with many more that I don't know about) as one of the failed technologies that, if it had succeeded, might have made the world look a little different. Maybe not nearly as different as the zeppelin, but it saddens me mere ever so slightly anyway, as all failed hopes do.

The death of an old computer and the entrance of a new one

2009-06-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

This is what happened to my old computer in December. I built the computer with my own hands in July of 2007, the first computer I ever built myself; it was a small but definite tragedy to see it die.

One morning in December, I started the beast up and heard a horrid racket. It had been having some issues with the top case fan inside -- all or most computers today have internal fans to keep them from overheating. I figured that this was the day I'd finally have to make the trip down to Fry's and buy a replacement fan. I opened up the case to check on things, and discovered that the source of the racket was not the top fan at all, but the CPU fan instead. Uh-oh.

I didn't really know how to get it out, and stupidly didn't check the instructions; one of the pins proved to be stuck anyway. I noticed that the thermal paste had dried, of course. But nothing seemed obviously wrong, so I ended up putting things back together again and restarting the beast. Not only was the fan racket still there, but now the fan refused to move. I tried another restart. This time, the fan ran -- bit it was still whining horribly.

Worse yet, as Windows XP loaded I got two of the longest motherboard warning beeps you ever heard. Motherboards beep when loading, but also beep (in a different way) when there's something wrong. The code depends upon the manufacturer, but any change in the beeping pattern is something to be wary of. Double uh-oh.

While wrestling with it, I managed to lose my balance and fall on the case's side door, which I'd taken off entirely and laid on the floor. I bent it and cracked the clear plastic of the windows that were supposed to show off its insides.

I managed to start up the computer again, and made emergency backups of my data. Then I enlisted the help of a neighbor (since I don't have a car) to help me take the beast to Best Buy's Geek Squad.

Now, I am wary of the Geek Squad, because a few years ago they became notorious for simply wiping people's hard drives, reinstalling Windows and telling them that the computer was "fixed". But my favorite chain, PC Club, is out of business, so it was a case of any port in a storm.

We got there as they were opening, so thankfully I didn't have to wait in line. The Geek Squad man tried to start the beast up, heard the godawful long beeps, and agreed that it was a hardware issue. The old trick of just wiping and reinstalling Windows and telling the customer it was "fixed" wouldn't work -- a point I also established by talking with them enough to make it clear I was knowledgeable and might notice if they tried any shortcuts or runarounds. They said they'd keep it for a day and run diagnostics on it, to the grand tune of $70. I counted my blessings that it didn't cost any more, and left it with them, with the understanding that they would call me the next morning with a report.

They didn't. I tried calling them three times, then even the Best Buy sales department, and got no answer. That afternoon, I drove there on my motorcycle there to see if they'd suffered a terrorist attack or what. As it turned out, they thought the motherboard was going bad. The tests had been interrupted by errors several times, but the problem didn't seem to lie anywhere else. Triple uh-oh.

A call to Fry's revealed that they no longer carried that brand of motherboard, period. (No big surprise, as it was at least a year and a half old, which makes it fairly obsolete.)

After a few hours of thought, I made my decision on what to do. Without easy access to the Net, I couldn't even order parts, or research another motherboard. There was only one thing left to do, and I promptly did it. I asked another car-owning neighbor to take me to Best Buy this time, and I bought one of those pre-made abominations, a fairly expensive Dell computer.

The new beast quickly confirmed my prejudices about pre-build computers. It had Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition installed on it, naturally, but I'd already figured I'd have to make the switch to Vista anyway. But it had bigger problems.

-- To start off with, its two hard drives were set up as RAID disks. I won't go into detail about what RAID is here, except to say that it involves making the computer think that two hard drives are actually one BIG hard drive. Why a home computer needs such a setup, I do not know.

-- Worse yet, it has a raid utility that appears to be embedded in the motherboard.

-- The two hard drives had been turned into one massive partition that took up THE ENTIRE RAID PARTITION -- all 1.5 terabytes of it! Disk checking and defragmenting would have taken hours!

Thankfully, I'd long since purchased a copy of Vista Ultimate, full retail (which I'd been trying out on the old machine). So the first order of business was to get the network drivers downloaded so I'd be able to get online when I was finished, and the next was to wipe the hard drives and Do It My Way.

Unfortunately, as soon as I had wiped out the partitions and set up the hard drives the way I wanted them, it turned out that the Windows XP install CD couldn't even look at the shiny modernistic hardware without screaming and dying. What was more horrifying was that the Vista installation DVDs, both the Ultimate and the Home Premium that had come with the beast, now decided that they had no idea how to make a new partition.

Thank gods for Ubuntu Linux, that's all I can say. This sort of mess is why I'm never without a CD of the latest version of Ubuntu. Without it, I would have had no choice but to bring the computer back to Best Buy and ask them to fix whatever I'd screwed up. But that wasn't the end of my troubles. Ubuntu, booted live from the CD, could set up a new partition and even set the bootable flag on it, but Vista still refused to accept the partition as suitable, even when I formatted it in NTFS. Go figure. My best guess is that some issue with properly setting up the master boot record was somehow involved.

Finally, as a last desperate resort, I installed Ubuntu in the partition I wanted to use, made sure it was working and bootable -- and then I tried installing Vista Ultimate over it. Vista finally complied. After that, Vista Home Premium 64-bit had no trouble installing in another partition. The whole thing booted up just fine; I installed the network drivers; I got on the Internet to grab the updates from Microsoft, and all was well.

Has it really been nearly three months?

2009-05-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Apparently so.

-- My home-brew computer died in December, and had to be hastily replaced by a Dell computer.

-- As a result, I am now using Vista.

-- My job search has been suspended until further notice while I try to lose enough weight to qualify for knee-replacement surgery. Oh, joy.

-- I have rebuilt a neighbor's obsolete ailing computer, while gently introducing her to the notion that new computers have become quite affordable.

I'll tackle these things one at a time in the next few posts.

Note for those using Trend Micro's PC-illan antivirus

2009-02-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

Like I do.

Last night, I started to have classic Blue Screen of Death crashes in Windows Vista. At first I thought it was World of Warcraft that was somehow crashing me; however, both it AND Trend Micro had just updated themselves, so I wasn't sure which one was the guilty party.

Then, I saw PC-illan pop up a message. It explained that the update it had just done was causing repeated Windows crashes and reboots, so it was discarding the update and reverting to its earlier version. I just wonder how many people started screaming when the problem began, and how fast the reports came in, for Trend Micro to react so quickly.

Unfortunately, the crashes continued. As it was now something like 10:30PM, I finally turned off the computer entirely -- which I do NOT normally do for the night -- and went to bed, in hopes that PC-illan would have a new update and fix itself in the morning.

When I woke up an hour and a half ago, and started up the computer again, I took no chances. I immediately ordered PC-illan to update itself, which it did.

The problem hasn't recurred. The strange thing is that there seems to be no notice of this at all on Trend Micro's website; it's like the incident never happened. Yeah, way to build trust up, Trend Micro.

Is no place sane?

2008-12-09T06:24:00.000-08:00

It would appear that Germans are even more hysterical about the terrible dangers of video games than many Americans.

In 2004 the Bavarian authorities sent in the state troopers. Ostensibly it was as a response to a claim made by a former employee that we had illegal software installed on our machines. Their remit, however, appeared to be a lot wider. When the small tech team appeared to inspect our computers, they were accompanied by over one hundred flak-jacketed riot police, all armed with Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns.

How about that? Maybe Jack Thompson should move to Bavaria.

Some years ago, a German teenager (now commonly known as "Angry German Kid") mocked this hysteria with this video:

Sad thing is, most people don't know or perceive that it's acting. Or want to. But yes, folks, like many viral videos, it's staged.

Oh, and as for this stuff about games turning our children into drooling homicidal maniacs? The hard fact is that video games were introduced to the general public in the 1980s, and the rate of violent crime in the US reached its lowest level ever in 2005. And crime rates among juveniles declined in keeping with this trend.

Of course, if you still want to believe that video games turn children into murderers, by all means do so. This is America, and you have the right to believe there are fluffy lavender unicorns flying around over your head if you like. But please don't expect me to support laws based on such willful insanity.

An Internet horror story dissected

2008-11-22T21:27:00.000-08:00

It's been making the news rounds: a 19-year-old announced that he was going to commit suicide, then broadcast it live over a webcam, and people joked, egged him on, and didn't call the police. The father, of course, thinks the website operator and the people who watched are to blame, and says this proves that the Internet needs better regulation.

Some facts:

-- The man announced his intentions on a website for bodybuilders (none of the articles I've found have specified the URL), and his webcam was shown on a webcam site, Justin.tv -- kind of like a YouTube for webcams only. Needless to say, a bodybuilder website and Justin.tv do not constitute the entire Internet. Yes, the Net can be a cold, hard, heartless, sociopathic place, but so can meatspace -- as Kitty Genovese could tell you today, if she weren't dead long before there was an Internet. There's even more of a diffusion of responsibility in cyberspace.

-- Also, in point of fact, "[a]lthough some viewers contacted the Web site to notify police, authorities did not reach his house in time." I have to admit, in these circumstances, if I saw someone apparently killing himself on live webcam, I wouldn't be sure who to call. The police? Possibly, but what if he gave no hint of where he was? "Well, Officer, I'm not sure, but he's speaking American English so he's probably somewhere in a house somewhere in the U.S. . . ." The FBI, perhaps. Then they'd have the job of tracking down where the webcast was coming from. The website operators? They bear no responsibility for the literally thousands of webcasts that probably pour in every day, nor could they. They can react when informed of something inappropriate, but probably not instantly. Which brings me to:

-- Just how was the website operator supposed to prevent this? Keep in mind that an operation such as Justin.tv probably has many different operators, and they are NOT watching every single webcast as it plays -- any more than the people in a bookstore can read every single book they sell and determine whether it's appropriate or not. Get real. Checking the website, I'd probably use the Help Channel and tell them someone is killing themselves live on webcamera . . . but of course, the person at the other end may not be in a position to check where that webcast is coming from, either. Help might not come until it's too late.

-- I can perfectly understand the father's desperate wish to "do something" to "regulate the Internet". But what law, exactly, would help? I've already explained the problems involved in making websites responsible for watchdogging user-provided real-time content. Sure, the viewers who joked about it or did nothing were reprehensible. But "good-Samaritan" laws have proven almost impossible to enforce and are often declared unconstitutional in the courts. Unfortunately.

-- Ultimately, it was Abraham Biggs Jr. who killed himself -- sad as that may be, mentally ill as he might have been. Not the Internet. It's hard to say now how he could have been stopped, or why he chose to broadcast his suicide live; we can say it was a cry for help, a plea for attention, but the one person who could shed the most light on his real reasons is now dead. In case anyone reading this feels an urge to do likewise -- in fact, anyone who is considering killing themself -- I urge them to read this article which originally was in Readers' Digest a great many years ago. It's a much shorter version of the original, but it should get the idea across to you what the consequences of suicide or attempted suicide can be.

Cool if useless Windows XP trick #1

2008-11-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

Here's a neat trick for Windows XP.

Unlike Vista, Windows XP can't play a video file as desktop wallpaper. But you can fake it with VLC Media Player. Here's how:

1.) First, download and install the beast if you don't have it already.

2.) Open the video file of your choice in it. (If no picture opens up, then VLC can't play that particular video file, so find another.)

3.) Click on "Video", and then on "Wallpaper". VLC will start playing the movie on your desktop background.

4.) Minimize VLC. (If you don't know how already, just click on the first of the three square boxes on the upper right, the one that has what looks like a dash or underline symbol in it.)

You should now have the movie playing as a sort of animated desktop wallpaper. The sound, if any, will be playing as well. Isn't that neat? This works beautifully with movies such as Discover Channel's Sunrise Earth series of DVDs.

The memes of techo-nerds

2008-10-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

One thing many techno-fetishists like to do is make, upload and watch "unboxing" videos on YouTube. In an unboxing video, you see the nerd's hands unbox, unwrap and open up some new toy such as a camcorder or an iPod, along with his commentary on the process and on his reactions to the packaging. No, really.

Here, Samsung parodies this tradition with its unboxing ad for an all-in-one phone, with the help of blogger Technivater.

A geek moment

2008-09-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

This morning, driving back from the gym, I noticed the license plate of a car ahead of me read I (heart symbol) STMPS. I puzzled over it: did STMPS mean "stumps"? Or perhaps STMP, the oldest existing server protocol for sending emails? But then, why the plural?

Then realization came: the license plate just meant "I love stamps."

Repair a computer, go to jail?

2008-07-02T09:15:00.001-07:00

Well, isn't this special. A Texas state law passed last year requires anyone who performs repairs on a personal computer to have a private investigator license. Otherwise, you risk up to a year in prison and/or a $4,000 fine.

The Institute for Justice, a legal advocacy group for entrepreneurs, has filed suit to have the law struck down. Whether it has a hope in hell is quite another thing. Techie watering hole Slashdot has a lot of discussion in the comments.

I just hope California lawmakers don't get any ideas from this. Why a computer repairperson should need a PI license, I have no idea. Something like CompTIA's A+ certificate, I can understand -- that's supposed to be a direct measure of how much you actually know about computers. But a private eye license? What's next, a demand that we scan our customers' hard drives for any instances of child porn, terrorist plans, or anti-Bush sentiment?

"Gin, Television, and Social Surplus"

2008-05-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

This essay is one of the most interesting and significant articles about the Net that I've read in a very long time.

Clay Shirky a computer scientist and specialist as well as an adjunct college professor in New York, has the following hypothesis:

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . . It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

He draws an analogy between gin in the 19th century and television in the 20th. In the 20th century, he states, Western society had a new crisis: for the first time in history, the majority of people no longer had to work from dawn to dusk, but had significant amounts of free time -- what Shirky calls a "cognitive surpluse". Yes, this was a crisis: what kept society from imploding was the advent of television as a way of soaking up all that free time.

Now, I can confirm that there was very real fear back then that we would be overwhelmed with too much free time, if our entire day wasn't filled with work. Quaint as it may sound now, there were even very real fears that work would be eliminated entirely because everything would be automated. I even read science fiction stories that took as their plot the notion that society would collapse, or that people would be reduced to madness with sheer boredom, unable to find any meaning or purpose in life -- completely unable to find any way to amuse themselves.

With the advent of the Internet, we finally have a way of treating that "cognitive surplus" as an asset rather than something to be gotten rid of. He offers the Wikipedia as an example: an entirely volunteer effort by people who have found something more productive to do with their free time than watch TV. "And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television," Shirky points out. If even a tiny portion of that free time is now being redirected into the interactivity of the Net, he suggests, we're going to have massive, unpredictable social changes.

Because that's the thing about the Net as opposed to TV: it's interactive. This is another of Shirky's crucial points -- TV is a form of consuming. People do like to consume, but they also like to produce and to share. The Internet allows them to do all three, while television permits only passive consumption.

Shirky then goes on to share some anecdotes regarding a television producer he talked to who seriously didn't get it. Her reaction to the Wikipedia debate was "where do they find the time?" (This from a woman whose business model involves people sitting on the sofa with their mouths open, watching Jerry Springer.) To World of Warcraft players' guilds: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves." But, Shirky asks, is this really any more pathetic than watching Gilligan's Island and wondering who's hotter, Ginger or Mary Ann?

And finally, Shirky gets to the meatiest part of a very meaty essay, what I might call the money shot: an anecdote involving a friend's four-year-old while a DVD movie was playing. The kid jumps off the couch and goes behind the screen, then starts rummaging through the cables. Asked what she's doing, she replies: "I'm looking for the mouse."

At four years old, she already expects media to be interactive. This Internet thingie is not a fad, as the television producer thought. Shirky believes the change is not only fundamental, it's permanent.

From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

I'm hoping he's right. For now, all I can say is: my television is gathering dust, and hasn't been turned on in three years.

It's something to think about.

Why website designers get paid so much, part 1

2008-04-03T03:49:00.000-07:00

How does your website look to someone who suffers from color blindness? You might be surprised.

There's more than one kind of color blindness, and more people than you might think suffer from it (estimates for its prevalence among Americans is around 1.7 percent). Many people, particularly men, have color blindness and don't even know it, because they've never been tested. In fact, you could have color-blindness and not know it. (You can do a kind of preliminary test yourself at this website, but the real test should be administered by a doctor, optometrist or some other qualified person.)

Think about this. So much of the way you read a web page is guided by color -- the links, the headers, etc.

If you want to test this, take a look right now at your website or mine with this handy tool that simulates different kinds of colorblindness. You might be surprised how much harder your site is to navigate or make sense of. Even the text might be hard to read, if it's not black font on a white background.

Truly skilled website designers learn to take color blindness into account when they design websites. Links in the main body of text should not only have a different color from the regular text, they should be underlined or otherwise set off. Links anywhere should not only have a different color from the background, they should also be either a great deal lighter or darker.

When you made your own website with Dreamweaver, or even with an online tool such as Yahoo offers, did you consider this?

When you download mp3's, you're downloading terrorism!

2008-03-29T22:28:00.000-07:00

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has claimed that copyright piracy is now funding terrorism. No, I am not making this up.

Another breath of sane air

2008-03-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

"How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?"

One woman, for example, told me that she became hysterical when her eight-year-old stumbled onto a pornographic photo. She told me that she literally dove for the computer, crashing over a chair, yanking out the power cord and then rushing her daughter outside.

You know what? I think that far more damage was done to that child by her mother’s reaction than by the dirty picture.

For myself, I can remember as a child being more frightened by adults' hysterical reactions than by the things I saw on TV or read in books.

Anyway, the rest of it is worth reading as well. The comments . . . are interesting: mostly sanity, but one is unintentionally revealing:

The internet creates positive reinforcement for kids who are attracted to risky behavior; they will find a supportive environment that creates a sense of normalcy and acceptance around behaviors and beliefs that are far from normal or acceptable in society.

Notice this father's concern: NOT that his child will be scarred for many years by a kid-toucher's abuse, NOT that they will be scarred by bullying. He's much more worried that his son will develop a lifestyle (he doesn't say what -- it could be atheism, it could be homosexuality) that he and his subculture don't approve of. The issue for many such parents isn't protecting the children; it's controlling them.

I'm currently watching the PBS video he recommends, "Growing Up Online".

Some refreshing sanity about video games

2008-03-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

Yet another study about video games' effect on children . . . but this time, the authors conducted their study a little differently.

Until now, the most-publicized studies came from a small group of experimental psychologists, studying college students playing nonviolent or violent games for 15 minutes. It’s debatable whether those studies are relevant to real children, playing self-selected games for their own reasons (not for cash or extra credit!), in social settings, over many years. But media reports and political rhetoric often ignore that distinction.

Also, the most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence. Their studies were designed under the assumption that violent video games are harmful, which dictated the questions they asked and how they framed their results. Media violence is just a small part of what we do, so we could look at the issue with fresh eyes and no agenda.

A few of the ways our research was different: Our studies focused on real kids. Our survey involved over 1200 kids in two states, far more than previous studies of middle-schoolers. Our kids were an ethnically and economically diverse group. Unlike earlier studies, virtually every child at school on the day of our survey filled one out; this high “response rate” means our results are more representative of typical kids. We also surveyed parents, to see how parents and kids differed in their views. Our surveys and focus groups actually asked children why they played video games, and looked at how those motivations were different among subgroups of kids (including children with symptoms of attention deficit disorder and depression).

I'll just add one observation to this. The awkward fact for the anti-game activists is this: during a period of twenty years when use of video games and their realism has steadily increased, the rate of violent crime among teenagers has dropped equally steadily.

Impending seller strike on eBay

2008-02-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

Seller "strikes" on eBay have actually happened before, but so few sellers joined in that eBay was able to just ignore them. This time, according to this article on CNNMoney.com, things might be different. The boycott is scheduled for the week after next -- Feb. 18 to Feb. 25.

This time, the boycott was triggered by yet another eBay fee hike (to 8.75 percent), a 21-day hold on some PayPal payments, and a new policy of not allowing sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers.

You probably already know that there are a lot of people with small businesses on eBay -- people who make a lot or all of their living from their eBay shops. Complaints that eBay's policies are squeezing out small sellers have been getting steadily louder and angrier over the years.

"For those who do not understand, 5.25% and their listing fees in addition to ebay's PayPal fees of 2.99% (including s/h fees, which ebay expects we keep at actual rates) with their per transaction fee typically takes away 30-60% of a seller's profits. For which they REFUSE to offer support," states the BoycottEBay Myspace page.

On the same page, there's a very interesting accusation:

"As some of you may know, eBay executives held an Ecommerce meeting in January with its top 200 Powersellers. It is no coincidence that shortly after the meeting eBay decided to make changes in fees and policies that disproportionately affects the small seller.

I firmly believe that it is eBay’s intention to drive the small seller out of the marketplace in order to help increase the profits of the huge powersellers."

Whether this is true or not, the root problem is this: eBay, like Microsoft, has become a de facto monopoly. There are other auction sites, but none with more than a small fraction of the sellers and buyers that eBay has. Without competition, eBay can do whatever it pleases -- at least unless and until the rival sites acquire enough sellers to really compete with it. Of course, if eBay continues to outrage its sellers enough, the competition can only grow.

Awww, what a shame

2007-12-28T21:35:00.000-08:00

Remember the days of Netscape? I do. It was the second browser I ever used (the first was Mosaic, in 1995).

How Microsoft managed to nearly kill it, how Firefox -- then named Phoenix -- rose from its ashes, how the Phoenix project seemed nearly dead but then came roaring back to life in version 0.9 with the wonderful tabbed browsing, how Firefox has become the main competitor to Internet Explorer . . . well, it's a long and convoluted story about web browser history, and I won't go over it here.

Anyway, AOL -- which has owned Netscape for a while -- is finally killing it once and for all. It never really seemed to know what to do with it, and in the end Netscape just couldn't compete with its own offspring, Firefox. Now, it's discontinuing support for Netscape once and for all, and telling people to give Firefox a try instead.

There's lots of sweet nostalgia, most of which I agree with, over on Slashdot.

*pauses for a single sad sniff*

Here's a tough and complex one

2007-12-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

Certainly tougher than the case of Ms. Amero.

This case has reached the Superior Court of Pennsylvania (it is a state, not a federal case). A man brought his computer into Circuit City to have the technicians install a DVD burner for him. The techs informed him it would take about an hour, and he left it with them.

They installed the burner, of course, and installed some software to run it as well. The problem begins with what they did next. They wanted to make sure the burner worked, of course -- but, if Declan McCullagh's account on ZDNet is correct, they also wanted to test the software. Now, to do this, they could have simply found a DVD with movie or video files on it, popped it in and checked whether the computer could play the files . . . but either they didn't have such a DVD handy, or the technician working on the computer decided not to bother. Instead, he searched the computer's hard drive for a handy video file to try to play. I'll quote McCullagh directly on what happened next:

"When searching the Windows XP computer for some sample video files, a technician named Stephen Richert allegedly spotted files that 'appeared to be pornographic in nature' based on their names. Richert clicked on one that had listed a male name and an age of 13 or 14 and found a video he believed to contain child pornography."

Richert, of course, called the police, who came and seized the computer. When the customer walked in to pick up his machine, the police arrested him.

However, things got interesting when the case hit the court system. The big question this case presents is: when you bring your computer to a technician, what privacy rights do you have in regard to what's on it? The big problem is that -- believe it or not -- there is really no specific law and no precedent for this situation.

The trial court decided that the customer did, in fact, have a reasonable expectation that the Circuit City techs would not poke into his hard drive. Therefore, it ruled, the evidence about this child pornography video could be suppressed.

The prosecutors appealed the case to the Superior Court, which disagreed, overturning the lower court's decision. Among other things, it noted that the customer had freely given access to the computer to Circuit City, and that the techs were not searching for contraband on the customer's computer but were simply using "an accepted commercial procedure" to check their work. Nor had the customer told them that they could not look at or use any files at all on the computer.

I urge you to read the McCullagh column for more details about the implications of this case. There's also a PDF of the court file itself on the Pennsylvania court system's website. (The word "code X" seems to be a court reporter's mistake -- the term is actually "codec", plural "codecs". This is just very specialized software that helps the operating system read a particular type of video or sound file.)

Obviously, this means something to me as a budding PC technician. What do I do if I find child pornography on a customer's computer? Most likely I will report it, unless there are very good legal reasons forbidding me to do so. But I'm not supposed to search your hard drive looking for stuff to report. I am not a forensics expert, and I refuse to even play one on Slashdot, and ethically I feel I have no business snooping through other people's belongings on a whim.

Many technicians are NOT that scrupulous. Judging from what I read on Slashdot (I know, I know . . .), they aren't above rifling through your hard drive -- whether they're just curious, looking for porn or downloaded music to copy for themselves, or up to something more sinister (such as looking for personal data and credit card info).

Looks like this one is starting to really circulate in the blogosphere; Google turned up a number of hits on the customer's name, and it's also hit Slashdot.

Just something to think about, when you bring your computer in for a technician to look at.

Sometimes even geeks get things wrong

2007-12-18T16:24:00.000-08:00

It's true.

Actually, it's by screwing up royally, and then learning what you've done wrong and researching how to fix it, that you become a computer geek. I don't recommend this approach for learning brain surgery, but it's how a geek is born.

At any rate, here's a quick lesson in hard drives: hard drives are where all the data is stored that doesn't disappear when you shut down the computer. (RAM memory, on the other hand, is where data is stored that the computer is using at the moment.) As you can probably imagine, having a hard drive with enough space is very important if you keep a lot of stuff on your computer -- which most geeks do.

I have a 200-gig hard drive, which I wanted to transfer to this computer when I built it. First, though, I wanted to wipe all the data off it so that I could start fresh. I didn't use Windows XP's tools for this, nor did I use Partition Manager; instead, I used an obscure program on The Ultimate Boot CD, which I liked.

Second lesson in hard drives: they're not just data space. There is a "controller board" in each hard drive, whose job is to communicate between the hard drive and the rest of your computer. Most programs and tools will not touch this controller board, and I thought that the program I was using wouldn't touch it, either. I was wrong. OOPS.

I found that Windows XP couldn't see the wiped hard drive. I took it to PC Club, where the nice boys in there informed me that I had managed to wipe the controller board clean, and that the program I used was actually first invented as a destructive hacker's tool.

There was nothing they could do at PC Club, so I ended up buying a new 250-gig hard drive that was better anyway. This is the hard drive I'm using now, but I kept the 200-gig hard drive (in a special electrostatic-protection bag, protecting it from static electricity). This is because some hard-drive manufacturers make software that you can download and use to reprogram a wiped hard-drive controller board, bringing it back to life.

This weekend, I made a last-ditch attempt to salvage the hard drive. I looked through Western Digital's site (they were the manufacturer of this drive), but couldn't determine which software to use. I ended up emailing Western Digital for advice.

Their advice was to download a diagnostic program that they had, and run tests on the hard drive. If the controller board really was wiped, they advised me, there was nothing to do except throw it away; they have no way of reprogramming wiped controller boards.

I took my computer outside to the wooden table I keep for this purpose, and performed the operation, installing the hard drive in it. This isn't a terribly complex operation for a trained geek, but I don't recommend it for non-geeks. It can be made even more difficult by an over-affectionate neighbor's cat who wants petting just then. ;-)

I downloaded and installed the diagnostic program, and ran it on the hard drive. It could detect the hard drive. Alas, it complained: "Cable test::Read diagnostics sector error". I checked the cables, but nothing was loose. Then I used Google's exact-phrase matching search on the error message (it's in Advanced Search), and found exactly what I'd feared: this is a typical error you'll get when the controller board is wiped.

I'd thought I knew what I was doing when I wiped that hard drive. I didn't know as much as I thought I did, so now I have a 200-gig paperweight.

Live and learn . . .

Oh, so true!

2007-12-05T09:42:00.000-08:00

Aren't they pretty?

2007-11-23T22:12:00.000-08:00

I really liked the book Native Funk and Flash as a teenager. Now I'm desperately fighting the urge to get into case modding -- the hobby of modifying your computer's case, or chassis, into a work of art, a garish display, or at least a more efficient case. All this, because of these two gorgeous pieces of work.

-- A steampunk laptop. Those clockwork gears don't actually do anything, but man, they look cool!

-- This beautiful hand-carved wooden case from Ukraine. It looks like it belongs in a museum. But what I want to know is, where are the air vents?

One thing I dislike about Blogger.com

2007-09-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

. . . is the lack of an ability to "friend" people, as one does on LiveJournal. I've just discovered Prehistoric Pulp, and wish there were another way to monitor it than adding yet another bookmark to Firefox.

Oh, well.

Collateral damage in the war on "child porn"

2007-08-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write about the case of Julie Amero for some time now. Ms. Amero was a substitute teacher in the state of Connecticut who was convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or "impairing the morals of a child" -- apparently for being caught in a porn pop-up circle.

The basic facts of the case are these: on October 19th, 2004, Ms. Amero was working as a substitute teacher in a language-class schoolroom in Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Connecticut. While the regular teacher, Matthew Napp, was out of the classroom, some pupils used the teacher's computer, so Julie took charge of it. Napp had already logged into it, and as a substitute, Amero did not have her own ID and password, so she did not log out before taking charge. The school was using Windows98SE as their operating system, although it is ten years old. The computers all had an anti-spyware program installed on them, but the program had never been updated since the installation, so it could not catch any bugs, trojans or other malware released after its purchase. The computer abruptly began showing pornographic images.

I can hear you say, "Yeah, that's happened to me a few times, too." If it hasn't, the phenomenon is called a porn pop-up circle. Clicking on a seemingly innocent-looking link makes a new window open up with an ad for a porn site. When you try to close the window, another one pops up . . . and another one, and another one. The circle can't be broken without rebooting your computer.

So why didn't Ms. Amero simply reboot or shut down the computer, even if that meant pulling the plug? Most likely because she had no right to do so, and she knew it. If you've ever been in a workplace with computers, you'll know that one thing IT asks that you never do is shut down or reboot the beasts. Ms. Amero did not even have privileges to log into the computer on her own, much less reboot or shut it down. In short, she had no idea how to break out of the pop-up circle.

In any reasonable world, the result would be that when Napp walked back into the room, Ms. Amero brought the problem to his attention, he'd shut the computer down and report the problem to his superiors, who would then call IT, which would then clean up the spyware that likely caused the porn circle popup. And that would be that. Maybe they'd finally pony up the money for Windows XP or at least 2000 and a license to update the antivirus, too.

You'd be an optimist. Everyday reason, common sense and logic clearly were in short supply in this school, and in the judicial system of the city of Norwich. Instead, when the school administration was informed of what had happened, they declared that Ms. Amero would never work in their school again. The case then went to the police. I'll quote the result directly from Wikipedia:

On January 5, 2007 Amero was convicted in Norwich Superior Court on four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. Her sentencing was delayed four times after her conviction, with both the prosecution and judge not satisfied that all aspects of the case had been assessed. The felony charges for which she was originally convicted carry a maximum prison sentence of 40 years.

That's right, convicted of "impairing the morals of a child" for having the bad luck to get caught in a porn pop-up circle. Not to mention undoubtedly winding up on the sex-offender list and having her career and her life effectively ruined.

Norwich Police Detective Mark Lounsbury did the forensics work. Oddly, he seems to have been ignorant of facts well-known to anybody who has spent much time on the Web -- such as the fact that porn pop-ups can force your browser to visit web pages without your clicking on anything further. At the trial, the district attorney claimed that Ms. Amero must have physically typed in the URLs. Since then, more computer experts than I can easily count, most of them far more knowledgeable than I, have disagreed with him, pointing out just how easy it is to get spyware and adware on your computer. Here's a small sampling:

Mouse-Trapped
Security pros work to undo teacher's conviction
Crime and punishment and technology

Thankfully, this won't be the end of it. From the Wikipedia:

On June 6, 2007, a New London superior court judge threw out the conviction of Amero, she was granted a new trial and entered a plea of not guilty. The new trial date has not yet been set; it is unclear at this time if the State's Attorney of Connecticut will pursue a second trial.

I can only hope Ms. Amero is cleared of all charges -- and that a good civil attorney will offer her pro bono services to launch a counter-suit against the school administration, at the very least.

From this, I draw several conclusions:

1) How computer-literate the public is can make the difference between freedom and imprisonment for an innocent person;

2) So can proper computer security in our classrooms, and spending the money to keep our equipment and software up to date;

3) Working with children and teenagers in this country has become extremely risky, due to the current moral panic over "protecting the children." As such cases pile up, it will become more and more difficult to persuade anyone but genuine pedophiles to risk taking such jobs;

4) In their zeal to make political points and be seen as 'tough on pedophile predators," prosecutors and police have taken to going beyond all bounds of decency and even common sense and are quite willing to sacrifice obviously innocent people in the pursuit of their careers.

I have a darker suspicion of my own for the reasons behind the school administration's bizarre reaction. I have read some reports that Ms. Amero had earlier complained about the lack of a firewall and updates for the protective software. I can't help but wonder . . . was the administration afraid that Ms. Amero would file some sort of hostile-workplace or other suit against the school? Did it fear that she might speak to enraged parents about the protective measures the school had neglected to take? And if so, did it decide to use the tactic of the massive pre-emptive strike and attack first?

Does this make me a Jedi now?

2007-07-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

Once, in Slashdot, I saw a quote that has stuck with me ever since: "A Slashdotter who didn't built his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber."

Well, I have now built my own computer. It started when my old PC, the one I bought in 2005, started to have problems. I had to buy a new graphics card, and as long as I was spending money on that, I decided to splurge and buy a much better one suitable for gaming. Then it turned out that my power supply was too feeble for it, and so I had to buy a new and more powerful power supply.

Then I began to have problems with the CPU overheating. Upon taking it to PC Club, it was discovered that a fan on the motherboard no longer functioned and that the fan on the CPU itself needed replacement. Although it ended up completely wiping out my savings, I decided to buy more parts to build my own computer. (Normally, I don't recommend this as a money-saver, but I had already sunk so much into new parts that building my own was the better solution.)

I cannibalized the old computer for as many parts as I could: the DVD/CD combo drive, the floppy drive, and the old hard drives all went into it, but that was about all that I kept. Oh, yes, and the week-old graphics card and power supply went into it as well. The motherboard, the CPU, the case, the RAM memory are all brand-new.

It was an exhausting four-day struggle to dismantle the old computer and assemble the new one, because I've never done this before and there proved to be many gaps in my knowledge. However, before my hardware class at Long Beach City College, I wouldn't have been able to do it at all. Probably the most emotionally exhausting, nerve-wracking task I've ever undertaken, but in the end I was successful.

The new computer is more powerful, has better air flow for cooling (very important), is in a bigger case (not so good, but again better air flow), and in general is a better machine. It also has lots of spectacular blue lights on fans and LEDs which look cool but don't do much else. Better yet, I can play Oblivion on it!

What is Linux?

2007-06-25T07:35:00.000-07:00

Put briefly, Linux is an OS. You can use email and the Web, create graphs and graphics, and generally do almost anything on Linux that you could on Windows. Almost: Linux has never been especially good for gaming.

However, in terms of philosophy and what's "under the hood", Linux could hardly be more different from Windows. First of all, it's an open-source OS; not only can you get most versions of Linux for free, but you are entitled to see the source code if you wish, so you can see exactly how it's made. In fact, if you want to, you may tinker with it and create your own special version of Linux. But if you do, there are restrictions on actually charging money for it. Check Wikipedia's open-source software entry for more details on this.

This, of course, means that there is no one company that is the owner and central authority for Linux. Microsoft owns Windows and controls it; you can't just make your own version of Windows, even if you give it away. But no one truly controls Linux as far as the different kinds are concerned. This can be confusing to non-geeks, so let me explain further.

As I have said, anyone who wants to can make their own special sort of Linux. And a lot of people and organizations have. A few of the best-known ones: Ubuntu, Mephis, Mandriva, Debian, Gentoo. These different versions of Linux are called distributions of Linux, or "distros" for short. Thus, we have the Ubuntu distro, the Debian distro, and so on. There's a bewildering variety of distros, but only a few have become so popular as to be names on every geek's lips -- and you, as a non-geek, don't really need to know even all of those. For now, I'll just say that Ubuntu is probably the best distro for beginners and non-geeks, and don't worry about the others unless you really want to.

A few versions of Linux are not free. This is most often because the particular organization or people that created them offer tech support, or other value-added services, or they've put things into that version of Linux that are proprietary (the opposite of open source), such as QuickTime, and they have to pay the creators of that software for the privilege. Usually such versions of Linux are aimed at workplaces rather than the home user: Red Hat and SUSE are good examples.

In this bewildering thicket of different distros, one thing is universal: they all use the Linux kernel, thus they are all Linux. The kernel is the part of an OS which lies beneath all the pretty eye candy. MS-DOS is what lies underneath Windows 3.1, 95 and 98, as you may remember; well, with Linux distros, what lies underneath is the Linux kernel, always.

So how on earth do people make money off of this thing? Well, by and large, they don't. They charge for tech support. But many creators of distros don't even do that. Many are simply idealistic geeks who want to offer a new Linux distro to the world -- the Ubuntu people are a good example. Usually such distros are meant to serve a particular need (such as Knoppix, which is often used in troubleshooting computers), or to suit a particular audience (such as Ubuntu, specifically designed to be a beginner's form of Linux that anyone can learn to use). Yes, believe it or not, there are many, many people in this world who put out software totally for free, and often very good software at that! In fact, there's a whole open source software subculture that does this; it has what is called a "gift economy", based not on money and profit but upon who can give the finest, largest gift. Those who give the best contributions gain the most prestige in this subculture. This may be hard for some readers to grasp, but in fact it has worked fairly well for many years -- well enough to create and improve the Linux operating system.

But enough anthropology and economics. To continue: how does Linux stack up next to Windows as an OS? Linux is more secure (usually), not just because fewer virus-writers and hackers know how to target it, but because its security really is better. (However, it is not bulletproof.) Most versions are not as easy for non-geeks to use as the Windows and Mac OS's are -- though the Ubuntu distro may well be. I've already said that Linux is not as good for gaming as Windows is; but it's better for running a network, and almost as good for day-to-day use such as websurfing and email. It is also almost as good for office use -- but it can't run Microsoft Office, because Microsoft refuses to make Office compatible with Linux, and the Office-like software that does run on it, such as Open Office, is not totally compatible with Microsoft Office. And in one thing, Windows cannot compete with Linux -- most versions of Linux are free for the downloading!

In one thing, Linux delights geeks, while scaring off most non-geeks: you almost have to use the command line at times. Ubuntu is making great progress in making everything point-and-click, but it's not completely there yet; there are still things done better at the command line.

And here's one thing in which Linux is very, very different from Windows: for most distros, you do not simply call in a company's number and ask for help if you have a question. This is why many businesses have been reluctant to change over from Windows to Linux. (Some, like Ubuntu, do offer special commercial support for businesses and such.) Instead, you have to find a forum you trust and ask your question. Generally it's best to go to a forum specifically devoted to the distro of Linux that you're using.

Linux has found its niche in network server use, where it's almost ousted some older OS's that were never meant for home use at all, such as Unix. But for home use, it's still used only by a small minority of people -- possibly fewer than use Mac OSX.

Should you feel the urge to try out some version of Linux, it's easy to do without the hassle of installing a whole new OS, and no, you most certainly do NOT have to give up Windows. For beginners, like most Linux users, I recommend Ubuntu. You'll need to go to the official Ubuntu website to either order a CD for a nominal fee, or download a CD image to burn (if you know how). Now, here's the good part: it's possible to use it without actually installing anything. Just boot from the CD and choose to use Ubuntu without installing it, and your computer will run Ubuntu from the CD! This will give you a chance to try out Linux without major tears.

I would encourage absolutely anyone to at least try out Linux in this way. However, there's no doubt that Linux is not for everyone as a main OS. The main thing is to have choices.

What is Windows?

2007-06-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

Windows is not so much an operating system as it is a series of operating systems, all produced by Microsoft. If a computer user doesn't know what OS he's got, the odds are very good that it's some sort of Windows -- most likely whatever version was the current one for home users when he bought the computer. That has more to do with Microsoft's sharp (and monopolistic) marketing practices than any superiority of Windows, but more on that when I've finished the technical side of things.

The technical side of things
I'll try to keep it simple and easy to understand for non-geeks here.

The first OS that Microsoft released wasn't Windows at all, but MS-DOS -- see my previous post for more information about MS-DOS. (The first OS to have a graphical user interface wasn't Windows at all, but a computer model put out by Xerox all the way back in 1973.) In 1985, as users began to demand GUIs, Microsoft released Windows 1.0 as a nice little add-on to MS-DOS. However, it wasn't until 1990 and Windows 3.0 that Windows really got popular.

Explaining the improvements from one OS to the next would require me to go into details such as memory management, 16-bit versus 32-bit architecture, and so on. This would interest geeks on a basic level, but probably not most non-geeks. If you're curious, here's the Wikipedia article. For the average user, the important thing to know is that since 1993, Microsoft has made two different types of Windows: the "home user" branch and the "professional IT" branch. The home user versions have one thing in common: they're designed to have more eye-candy and are better for playing games and video files and such -- but they're not as secure as the professional versions, which also have more features, can do more complex things in regard to networks and are sometimes more stable.

Two examples of home user Windows are Windows 95 and Windows 98. Both of them actually run on top of MS-DOS; they're essentially pretty eye-candy while MS-DOS runs under the hood, so to speak. Another example is Windows XP Home Edition, but I'll discuss that beast in more detail in a moment.

In 1993, Microsoft released its very first professional version of Windows, Windows NT. Windows NT was never meant for home use; it was meant to manage networks of computers and be used in workplaces in general. For it, Microsoft programmers rewrote the code from the bottom up; Windows NT is not based on MS-DOS at all, but is an OS all its own.

Since then, it has been followed by Windows 2000 and finally by Windows XP. They have the same underlying structure as Windows NT (no MS-DOS), but of course have improved greatly on it. Windows 2000 is meant for workplace computers. Windows XP comes in several varieties, but beneath the surface it's based on the Windows NT OS, vastly improved.

Workplace use of computers falls into two categories:

1.) Workstations. You log into these computers when you enter the office and (if you remember) log out when you go home. All the workstations in your office are managed by a separate computer run by an administrator -- and no one can touch that central computer but the administrator.

2.) Servers. The server is that separate computer run by an administrator. It is used just to manage and run workstation computers.

Now, you may be thinking: "But I have to log into my computer at home, just like I do at work! What's the difference?" Plenty, when you look more closely, but I think I'll save the concept of user profiles for a later post. For now, just note that user profiles in Windows 95 and Windows 98 aren't very secure: even when logged into your own account, other people can get into your files and look at them. The profiles are there mainly for things like choosing your screensaver, background, etc., not for security. And if you want to break into someone else's account, there are some very easy ways to dodge having to know someone else's password. With Windows NT and 2000, on the other hand, user profiles are more secure. You can't get into another user's "My Documents" folder unless you have administrator privileges.

Windows ME was kind of a stopgap version of Windows that was meant to combine the home-user and workplace branches. It was horribly unstable, widely mocked, and became completely obsolete when Windows XP was released. Even Microsoft and computer tech training textbooks such as mine like to pretend that Windows ME never happened.

Windows XP
So we have two branches of the Windows OS family: the home branch and the workplace/professional branch. However, with Windows XP, Microsoft united the two branches, making the difference much smaller -- a matter of just a different edition of the OS, not a different and largely incompatible OS. Microsoft tried to combine the ease of use of the home branch with the security and stability of the workplace branch, and has largely succeeded.

It eliminated the MS-DOS underlying structure totally; even Windows XP Home Edition doesn't have MS-DOS underneath it any more. So now the professional sort of Windows is what's "under the hood". However, XP is also designed so it can play video files and sound right out of the box (not movie DVDs, though) and generally be friendlier to the average user -- even in its Pro edition. (Windows XP Pro is what I use on a day-to-day basis for everything.) But its GUI isn't the same as Windows 95 or 98; it was redesigned to make it more user-friendly. (There were a lot of complaints about this at first, but after five and a half years, everybody's used to the new GUI.)

Windows XP Home Edition can't really be used in the workplace, because it can't be made into a workstation managed by a distant server. Windows XP Pro, obviously, can.

Windows XP Media Center Edition is basically a souped-up home-use edition meant for giving you more tools for playing with video files and watching and recording TV.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft has continued this approach: again, the differences between the home and workplace editions are much smaller than between, say, Windows 95 and Windows NT.

Non-technical stuff, like why so many people hate Microsoft and Windows
Most important reason: monopolistic practices!

One good example is Microsoft's requirements for retail computer merchants selling computers with their OS pre-installed on it. The deal is, or used to be, that if the chain sells only computers with Windows on them, Microsoft sold them the Windows licenses at a relatively cheap price. (Yes, computer stores need to license the copies of Windows that they install on their computers.) However, if the chain dared to sell any computers with other OS's installed on them, such as Linux or BeOS, Microsoft's terms are different: it charged a far higher price for Windows licenses. This pretty much gave merchants a choice between between selling only computers with Windows, and selling only computers with OS's other than Windows -- and since Windows was by and far the most popular OS, the second option was pretty much a non-starter.

To give you a comparison, this is comparable to Coca-Cola going to all the supermarket chains that sell Coke, and telling them: "If you will sell ONLY our drink, you can buy them wholesale for $20 a case. But if you insist on selling Pepsi, Dr. Pepper and our other competitors as well as ours, we're going to charge $200 a case."

And mind you, that's just one reason. You can check out the Wikipedia entry on United States v. Microsoft for a starter.

Second reason: Microsoft's attitude toward security.

This gets technical, but Windows is far more prone to viruses than many other OS's, particularly Linux. This is partly due to the fact that it's by far the most common OS, so virus-writers prefer to target it . . . but not entirely. The OS has some genuine weaknesses that Linux and Unix do not, which make it easier for trojans and viruses to infect it. Microsoft has historically treated security as a P.R. issue rather than a technical issue: it's been more interested in convincing you that Windows is safe than in actually making Windows safe.

Third reason, which is now obsolete: Windows 95 and Windows 98 were horribly unstable OS's. They crashed a lot, and you always had to reinstall them every few months as they accumulated junk and deteriorated. This was not true of Windows 2000, nor is it true of Windows XP. I think the longest I ever kept my Windows 98 installation without reinstalling was a year and three or four months.

(A lot of users who think their computer is just "getting old" like a car would benefit from a complete Windows XP reinstall, but this is not so much because the OS itself gradually self-destructs the way Windows 95 and 98 did. Rather, it's because the user didn't properly maintain the OS. I'll probably make a post about how to maintain your OS in the future.)

What an operating system is

2007-05-19T21:48:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of fuss lately in some of my favorite tech-related news sites about something Microsoft has done recently, claiming that Linux and OpenOffice violate some of its patents. This is unlikely, for a number of reasons, but I spent some time trying to figure out how to explain it to people who don't know the first thing about Linux or the issues here.

In the end, I realized that there was just too much Stuff to explain to the average person. I'd need to explain what Linux is, and very probably I'd need to explain what an operating system is, first, and that together with explaining the real significance of Microsoft's claims would make for an entry longer than the Encyclopedia Britannica -- well, maybe not that long, but too long for me to enjoy typing and way too long for most people to want to read.

So instead, I'll use this entry to explain what an operating system is. In fact, I'm going to copy an entry that appeared in a LiveJournal of mine a few years ago, edited a bit.

What an Operating System is

As simply as possible, it's what negotiates between you and the physical computer itself. It also communicates between the computer hardware and whatever software is on the computer. It even lets the keyboard, monitor, mouse, CD/DVD tray and other stuff talk with the hardware inside the computer itself. It's not stuff like Microsoft Office -- that's an application, not the OS itself. Two examples of operating systems are Windows XP and Windows 98. Without an operating system (usually shorted to OS), the computer is pretty much an expensive doorstop. It doesn't know how to talk to its various parts; it doesn't know how to set up the things it needs to work, such as its memory; it doesn't understand what you type into the keyboard, or what you do with the mouse; it can't print anything back onto the monitor. It can't do much of anything at all.

In fact, Windows is an OS, or more accurately a series of OS's produced by Microsoft. Windows is not the only OS that there is. Macintosh (on Apple computers) is another OS, probably the best-known besides Windows. There are also Unix, Linux (which you don't have to pay for!), BSD, OS/2, and lots more, some of them specialized for certain kinds of machines.

One early OS was MS-DOS, which was kind of the predecessor to the Windows OS's. I'm going to talk about it because it illustrates some things about what OS's were like many years ago, and because chances are you can see it for yourself. If you're running Windows XP, you can still see and play with MS-DOS: click on the Start button, click on Run . . . (on the lower right) and type cmd into the text box that springs up, then click on OK. You'll see this odd little box spring up, with nothing inside but white letters on a black background. That's actually MS-DOS.

Now, look at the MS-DOS box. You'll see something like C:\Documents and Settings\Mary Joe>, and a blinking cursor at the end of that. (The "Mary Joe" part could actually be anything -- it's your username on Windows XP, nothing more.) This is called a command prompt. With early OS's, that was all you saw on the screen -- not the pretty "Bliss" wallpaper you see on Windows XP, not the taskbar at the bottom, nothing but a black screen with text on it. You used it like so:

Type dir. Yes, this is perfectly harmless (I promise you). You'll see the letters dir appear after the >. Now, press the Enter key on your keyboard. You'll see some words and letters and numbers and stuff appear on the screen, which may look pretty mysterious to you, but what MS-DOS is really doing is telling you stuff about your hard drive and the files inside the folder with your username on it. That's what you had to do before modern OS's -- you had to type in commands and understand what the computer was saying back to you.

Imagine that little black window being your whole screen -- no Task Bar at the bottom of your window, no mouse, no nothing. Imagine not being able to get back to your regular desktop -- because there is no colorful, pretty desktop, just that black and white window. That was what it was like to work in old operating systems, before the advent of Macintosh and Windows. OS's such as this are called command-line OS's, because you type lines of commands into them instead of clicking on buttons and menus with a mouse. Today, if you've got Windows XP installed on your computer, you can't even boot into MS-DOS any more . . . which most people don't miss.

(You can close the window now by typing exit into it, and hitting Enter again. And I promise I won't expose you to MS-DOS again in this entry.)

See, OS's weren't always these colorful things with pretty graphics. Once they were all like MS-DOS -- no pictures, nothing to click on; you just typed stuff in, and it would show plain old letters, numbers and words back at you. That was how you ran MS-DOS, for example. Yes, a surprising number of people did manage to cope, at least in workplaces. I wasn't one of them; at the time, I was afraid of computers other than Apple. I hated my first exposure to MS-DOS back in the early 1990s, and never did figure it out. I had a full-scale technophobia attack, near-tears and shaking, and went running back to Macintosh (more on Macintosh in a moment).

Why on earth did computer users put up with this? Computers back then didn't have the horsepower to run pretty graphics all the time. Even games were quite basic compared to today. At first, no one even had the idea that anything else was possible, any more than Mesolithic hunter-gatherers guessed that guns or farming were possible.

Today, of course, things are different -- and somewhat easier. What we have today, with the buttons to click on and menus and the colorful desktop wallpaper picture and all, is called a graphical user interface (GUI). The average person did not even begin to think about buying a home computer until the GUI became common during the 1990s, because the command line was too hard to use for anyone who didn't want to spend a lot of time learning how. Thus, GUI's were a Great Leap Forward in making computers popular. Apple Computers, which makes the Macintosh OS, wasn't really the first company to make a GUI for its OS -- but it was the first to popularize it on computers intended intended for use at home instead of a business. In fact, you couldn't get into a command line at all with Macintosh -- you could only use the GUI. At the time, this struck a lot of computer geeks as really strange. They laughed at it, saying it would never catch on. But the first computers I ever worked on were Apple computers, running early versions of Macintosh. I was fascinated by the After Dark screensaver collection and loved to play with changing the screensaver and the wallpaper tiling. Then Adobe Photoshop 1.0 came out, and I was even more fascinated. Without the GUI, I would never have become interested in computers in the first place. And that was true for a lot of people.

Windows XP has a modified version of MS-DOS built into it for the convenience of power users like me, but it isn't actually based on MS-DOS. You can't boot into MS-DOS at all if you have Windows XP installed. Today, virtually all OS's have a GUI, and you control them through that GUI rather than through a command line prompt. Linux is an exception to this rule; while most versions of Linux today do have GUI's, you can also boot into a command line, and go back to the black screens with text of yesterday. The reasons for that would be hard for non-geeks to understand. Let's just say that most Linux users, myself included, like it that way.

To summarize: operating systems let you talk to and control the computer and let the hardware run and talk to its parts. An OS does NOT have to have a beautiful interface. There are several different OS's, such as Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

Now, here's an important thing to remember: you have a choice of OS's, even after you have bought your computer. Even if your computer came with Windows already installed on it, it is your legal right as the computer owner to wipe Windows off of it and install another OS, such as Linux. Better yet, you can even install another OS, such as Linux, alongside Windows. If you do this, when the computer boots up you'll be given a choice of which OS you want to boot into. It's also possible to buy computers with Linux preinstalled instead of Windows, if you so desire, such as you could buy a Macintosh computer with the Apple OS preinstalled. And finally, you can buy a separate CD or DVD of an OS, just like you would buy a packaged CD or DVD of Microsoft Office or a game, and install it on your computer. Usually, you would do this for Windows, or for a commercial version of Linux such as Red Hat Linux or SUSE Linux. Most versions of Linux are free, amazingly enough, so you can just download the CD or DVD and burn it yourself if you know how, so you don't need to buy them in a store -- in fact, you usually can't buy them in a physical store (although you can order pre-burned ones at certain online stores). However, you cannot buy Macintosh in a store at all; you can only get it preinstalled on an Apple computer. But there are versions of Linux that you can install on Apple computers!

So for now, just remember: Windows is not the only OS, and you can put whatever the heck you want on your home computer. As for how you'd do this, and why, that's a topic for another, more technical entry. This one is long enough already.

And they call this a problem?

2007-05-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

Techies shunned as workers fix own IT problems is the title of the article, but after actually, you know, reading it I'm not much worried. For one thing, the study it cites was done on office workers in the UK. For another, at least some of the things these workers are trying rather than calling IT are the common-sense things techies have been trying without avail to get customers to do for years: turning the computer off and then turning it on again, even (gasp!) actually reading the manuals. (No word on whether they'd consider checking that everything is plugged in properly.)

But "a brave nine per cent claim they would attempt to take the computer apart and try to rebuild it without guidance". Oh, my -- there's something I'd like to see.

The horror of the bad user interface

2007-05-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know, software developers are the people who write the programs that you use on your computer AND on the Web. Unfortunately, because they've learned to think in the intricacies of coding languages, they usually have a very poor grasp of how you actually see their products. This is why most of the software you use is so confusing and hard to figure out.

One example everybody likes to give is the Windows Start button. Yes, a green button is a good way to have the user start things -- but it used to be very, very confusing to someone with their first computer when you also had to click on the Start button to shut the computer down.

This is really very far from the worst example of bad planning. The worst just may be this example of the user interface for wGetGUI, at Coding Horror. I can actually figure out a little of it . . . because I'm used to using wget in Linux, typing in my commands by hand into the console. Once you learn to do that, very little in the way of bad user interface design can frighten you. But most users will probably run away screaming.

Botnet world goes dog-eat-dog; what that means -- and what it might mean

2007-04-26T09:28:00.000-07:00

What it means

First things first: a botnet is a network of computers that specialized hackers have broken into and put spamming software on. A geek term for these computers is "zombie computers". So a botnet is a network of zombie computers. Nowadays, botnet hackers run in packs -- they form criminal organizations, and make a profit hiring themselves out to spammers to send their spam via these botnets. This has all happened in the last few years.

As many as one-fourth of all personal computers may now be part of botnets according to this BBC article, so botnets are a serious problem.

For more information, here are some Wikipedia entries for you:

botnet
zombie computer

The dog-eat-dog part

In a strange recent development, botnet hacker organizations are now turning on each other -- taking over each others' zombie computers and kicking each other out, and even using their botnets in mass hacking attacks against other organizations' botnets, according to this article on Dark Reading, a security-news website. Increasingly, they're designing their software so that when it takes over a computer and makes it a zombie, it also protects the new zombie against other organizations' software.

What it might mean

Strangely enough, there's a measure of hope in this.

It shows that botnets are now having to compete against each other more and more. That, in turn, may mean that the supply of easily infected computers is no longer growing very fast; it's staying stable, or even (dare I hope?) shrinking, as users become better at keeping their personal computers secure.

Even so, sadly, we'll probably never see an end of spam or even of botnets; as users and security become more sophisticated, so will criminal hackers, in a weird evolutionary arms race. I'd love to be made to eat my words on that.

Afterword: keeping your own computer secure

There's so much advice I could give here that it's probably best left for other entries. But the best anti-malware software for Windows that I know is still Spybot S&D, which is still completely free (but you can throw the author a donation if you like). Install it. Update it at least once a week (the best anti-malware software in the world is useless if it's not updated often). Run it at least once a week, on every account on your computer.

Some antiviruses do a decent job of detecting and destroying trojans and other malware, and most can work alongside Spybot S&D. Norton is the only one you see in boxes in stores as a rule, but I prefer to recommend Trend Micro's products. If you don't feel you can afford a commercial antivirus program, use the freeware Avast!.

Leaving your WiFi connection open? Bad idea

2007-04-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

With a wireless connection to the Internet, you don't need cables or a telephone line to Web-browse, check your email, or even download stuff. (If you don't know what a WiFi connection is, just skip this entry; this one's not for you.) Trouble is, if your WiFi connection isn't secure, someone else can connect to the Net through it, and do whatever they please with it -- including downloading stuff that's illegal. Got all that? Good, let's go on.

Now, let's suppose you, in fact, want to use your WiFi connection to download stuff that's illegal -- such as copies of the latest movies or music -- but you're worried about being sued by the MPIAA or the RIAA if they learn that files are being downloaded at your IP address. Well, if you haven't secured your WiFi connection, you could argue in court that someone else hacked into your connection and downloaded those files, and you aren't actually responsible at all. There's no law against being stupid and/or naive, after all.

A lot of file sharers have thought of exactly this. In fact, a surprising number of people deliberately leave their WiFi connections open to anybody, just so they can use this defense in court.

Good idea? Not really, as a recent child pornography case showed. You can read the full story there, on Ars Technica, but the basics are these:

Someone used the Yahoo account "famclpe" to send an instant message containing underage pornography to a woman in New York, using an IP address that belonged to Javier Perez in Texas. The FBI tracked the address down to Perez's apartment and searched his room, finding CDs with child pornography on them. during the trial, Perez plea-bargained and got a reduced sentence of four years and nine months.

Then Perez appealed the judgement, saying the CDs should not have been used as evidence because there was no proof that he used the IP address to share the child pornography, and there was, therefore, no "probable cause" to search his room in the first place. He had WiFi access to the Net, and that access point was wide open; anyone at all who'd been nearby could have used it to go online and talk to the woman in New York. In short, just because it was his IP address didn't mean he'd committed the original crime.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit didn't buy it. While the judges understood that someone else could conceivably have logged into Perez' WiFi connection and used it, they pointed out that Perez was the most likely person to be using it at any time. Therefore, the fact that the IP address was his was probable cause to search his room, and the CDs found in his room were legally evidence.

The case gets more complicated because while the IP address used to send that instant message was Perez's, the Yahoo account used was "famclpe". This account belonged not to Perez but to someone named "Mr. Rob Ram". Perez had a roommate in the same apartment, named Robert Ramos. However, the FBI did not search Ramos' room.

You tell me what really happened; I have my suspicions. For now, I'll just say that I think the FBI should have searched Ramos' room, too. However, the Fifth Circuit court made a point: being stupid enough to leave your WiFi connection open to hackers is no defense. You can be held legally responsible for anything that happens using your connection.

In short, if you're a P2P filesharer downloading illegal stuff, and you try to use the "someone else must have hacked into my WiFi connection" defense, it may not work. To quote the Ars Technica article's closing lines: "You may be able to demonstrate down the line that it actually was someone else downloading The Carpenters' Greatest Hits over your open network, but doing so may prove to be a very expensive proposition."

MS Word 2003 tip: tired of having to type out that long, strange word?

2007-04-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

Ever found yourself getting tired of typing some overly long, strange or just plain tricky name into Microsoft Word? Well, there's a way around it, but it's not intuitive. Here it is. (The text I used for these screenshots was the article on Bagua Province in the Wikipedia.)

"Utcubamba" is the word we'll select here -- long, unfamiliar and easy to misspell. Even so, it appears twice in this article. So, I'll make a way to put it in the file without misspelling it, every time.

Step 1: I find the first occurrence of the word in the file, and highlight it by dragging the cursor through it:

Step 2: I move the cursor up to "Insert" on the menu, and select "Autotext . . ." As you can see in the screenshot, a little sub-menu pops up:

Step 3: On the submenu, I pick "New". Now this little panel pops up, with the selected word in the field:

Step 4: The idea here is not to have to type out the entire word in question, so I rename the Autotext entry to a nice shortcut that I'm not likely to type otherwise, "utc". Then I click "OK". The panel disappears.

Step 5: What happened? Nothing, it appears. But in fact, something did. :-) Now I reach a point in the text where I want to type "Utcubamba" again. I simply type "utc".

Step 6: Now the magic happens. I type the F3 key, once. Lo! "Utcubamba" is magically inserted into the file -- correctly spelled and all!

From now on, whenever I want to type "Utcubamba" in any Word document, I simply type "utc" and then press the F3 key. That's all there is to it!

(The red wavy line just means that the word "Utcubamba" is not in Word's dictionary, so Word thinks it might be a possible misspelling. How to put it in that dictionary is a tip for another post.)

Now, suppose some fine day I decide I want to remove that "Utcubamba" entry from my Autotext list, whether to save space or whatever. That's easy, too.

Step 1: Again, Insert->Autotext.

Step 2: However, this time I pick the second "Autotext", and choose the Autotext tab if it isn't shown already. This panel comes up:

Step 3: Notice the little scrollbar on the right side of the list of Autotext entries. Scroll down it, and you'll see the entry "utc".

Step 4: At this point, you may have a suspicion what I'm going to do next. Yep -- I click on the entry "utc" in the list, and then click on the Delete button to the right. Finally, I click on "OK", and everything closes up. The Autotext entry "utc" is now gone, as if it never existed.

It appears I must eat my words

2007-04-18T17:37:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, I admitted that I dislike cell phones and have no reason to own one.

Today, I spotted this article in the Wall Street Journal, "Texting When There's Trouble" (free feature, no subscription needed), which describes how universities, communities, and local governments have started creating automated electronic alert systems that can send voice, email or text messages to residents when emergencies or disasters loom. Virginia Tech, alas, did not have a complete system in place. Emails were sent, but students had to be logged into their computers to receive them. Ironically, last semester it began considering an emergency-alert system to send messages via mobile phones, in the wake of an incident with a prison escapee.

Now, I have no idea as yet whether Los Angeles County or the city of Long Beach have even considered such a system. There are private-enterprise text-message systems such as e2Campus and Mobile Campus, and some universities employ them. But given the sheer scale involved and that every resident would have to have a text message or cell phone, I'm not holding my breath for it to happen. It will take years to hammer out the problems and best plans.

If and when they do, I just may buy a text messager or cell phone after all.

An observation (or platitude)

2007-04-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

Cheap, user-friendly, or secure: you can only have two of the three.

Windows is fairly cheap (since you can buy a computer with it pre-installed) and fairly user-friendly, but not secure.

Macintosh is extremely user-friendly and fairly secure, but not cheap.

Linux is cheap (most distros are free!) and secure, but not user-friendly.

You know, it's a weird thing . . .

2007-04-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

But despite all my interest in things technological, I'm not keen to acquire every gadget on the market. There's my relative poverty -- but beyond that, I just feel no need for a BlackBerry or other PDA. Or for a laptop or a vidcam. Or, so help me, a cell phone (I don't even like them). And especially not a Wii. If you asked me how to use one of these things, I would not be able to tell you to save my life.

I don't even have an Xbox or other gaming machine; I play all my games on a regular PC.

Mainly, it's because I don't buy new technology unless I think I need it. I bought my router this past winter because I have two functioning computers I want to link up to the Net, and most of all because I wanted to learn more about networking and routing. It also provides an extra layer of safety against hacking script kiddies and worse. If I decide that I actually have a use for a PDA, I'll probably do research and buy one.

Less defensible is the fact that I've also never messed with wireless technology, or with Firewire. I really need to, eventually, because I need to know about how those work if I'm to do tech support. But for now, USB 2.0 satisfies my limited needs.

Obviously, I need to do some self-change. I wonder if there's a twelve-step program to becoming a real, true technophile who craves learning about every technology, programming language and gadget that comes down the pike.

Should I say something, or should I not?

2007-04-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

I don't want to exploit the atrocity at Virginia Tech by making it into a talking point. Is it appropriate, I wonder, even to use it to point out how students and faculty used cell phones, emails and even blogs and social networking sites like Facebook to inform and keep in touch with each other even as the shootings were happening?

Except: K.C. Jones and Alexander Wolf at InformationWeek did. And to quote Wolf's blog: "In that regard, the best of the Web is in evidence in that there's some sense of a community coming together in the photos being shared on Flickr, and on the blogs covering the shooting, as we all try to make sense of the senseless."

The Net is about healing as well as hype.

EDIT: According to this Reuters article, students and others began shifting their communications to Facebook communities when the cell phone networks became overloaded.

A "failed" technology

2007-04-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

Normally, I reserve this blog to stuff about current and future technology, mainly computers and the Internet. Not today.

Earlier today, I went with a visiting New Zealand friend of mine to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. The MJT is a strange place, seemingly devoted to copying the disorganized museums of curiosities of the 19th century and before, but really devoted to . . . well, that's open to debate. Its organizers aren't academics, they're more artists, philosophers and maybe students of culture and ontology. That's enough big words for now; they are crazy, and they are good at what they do . . . whatever you call it.

Among the endless dimly-lit exhibits is one on a technology that is not only obsolete now but which proved a failure, more or less: vectography, a sort of early 3D photography devised in the 1920s. Oh, it worked; it was technologically possible. What it wasn't was practical. It was promising and exciting, but no one could get the costs down to the point where it could be used for much.

You can read a little bit about vectography over here on Wikipedia. It involves using polarized light, and then viewing the photo through special polarizing glasses. (Yes, I know some of you are thinking of the "3D" movies of the 1950s and 60s, but that's a different technology.) The problem lay in the special films that had to be used to display vectographs. They were difficult to make and therefore expensive, and no one could figure out a way to make them more cheaply with the technology that existed then.

The MJT has a hall devoted to vectography, with a number of vectographs displayed under glass on the walls of a little "hall". It arranged with a manufacturer that found a way to produce the film and the pictures at a cost the Museum found reasonable. Visitors can view the vectographs through sets of glasses carefully aligned in front of each photo. The photos show horses and cows and houses and even a topographical map (the military was quite interested in vectography for modeling terrain, for a while), but the most charming for me and my friend was a diagram of the "celestial sphere" of the night sky, in white lines and text on dark blue. It's definitely less confusing when you can see it in 3D. :-)

So with today's technology, vectography might finally be practical. It won't catch on, of course; it can't possibly compete with holography. In a way, I think of it as disproof of a common claim: "What can be built, must be built." Vectography, the latest greatest technology of photography, was possible, but it was not inevitable; indeed, it never really took hold and was finally abandoned.

Bet you didn't think of this

2007-04-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't have, either. A former Berkeley flower child and mother of four now-grown children is blogging in Baghdad. Furthermore, the blog is getting attention.

See, you can too speak your piece on the Net and actually find people listening to you. That's almost the only lesson I feel like drawing from this article right now. All the stereotyped media ponderings about how yessiree-Bob-the-Net-is-changing-the-rules-of-the-media, its supposed ability to give anybody and everybody a voice, the subversion of mainstream news media rule, and so on -- well, it's past 10 here, and I need to take a friend on a tour of the Museum of Jurassic Technology tomorrow, and I don't feel like staying awake just to dish out cliches to you.

The only other lesson I want to draw from this is closely related. People think only celebrities are real, that their own lives are gray and uninteresting and not quite as "real". This is the only explanation I can think of for why so many people obsess and cluck-cluck over the sex lives of actors, actresses, and crappy pop singers, and make celebrity gossip magazines sell so well. They must think Britney Spears' life is more interesting, more "real" than their own.

If you're one of those people, I want to ask: "Why? Dear God, why?" Acting and singing are jobs like any other. Your life should be the one that interests you the most. It is not gray and dull, or at least not more gray and dull than they probably find their lives. And who knows -- if you put part of it on the Net, other people might find it more interesting and glamorous than you believe. Now get to it.

Overhauling the Internet: what it really means

2007-04-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

"Researchers explore scrapping Internet", the headline on Yahoo states. It begins with: "Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over."

As a former journalist, I understand just how attention-grabbing that first sentence is; I really do, and I understand also the writer's need to spice up a technical article that might otherwise be very boring.

Even so, I suspect a lot of non-geeks, reading only a lead-in or the first sentence or two attached to the link from another website, will get the wrong idea. This is not about tearing down the whole Internet and starting over. For one thing, that would be about as practical as scrapping all our dictionaries and instituting a brand-new, sensible spelling system for English starting Monday. Or, for that matter, changing over from standard English measurements like pounds and inches to the metric system overnight.

Having said that, let me talk about the substance here.

When you talk to another person, it only works if you both speak the same language. It's only practical to drive a car on public streets if there's a common set of laws and rules and traffic regulations for everyone -- such as everyone driving in one direction on one side of the road, and a red light on a traffic signal meaning "stop". Likewise, the Internet only works because of a series of "protocols", standard formats and rules that set forward how all these different machines talk to and understand one another, so that they can connect to each other and then ask for and send email, Web pages, files and so on.

These protocols and rules were hammered out (mostly) in the 1970s and 1980s, by college professors and technicians working with the U.S. government. Trouble is, intelligent though these men and women were, they couldn't possibly foresee the future of the Net; they really meant it only as a way for experts in universities, research foundations and government entities to talk to one another more conveniently than over the telephone or by mail. The protocols they created were never designed for hundreds of thousands or millions of users, nor could their creators foresee hackers and spammers. They didn't need much security, because hardly anyone but a handful of other computer geniuses knew how to use computers and the infant Net.

If they had to start afresh today, but knew what they know now, no doubt they would build it differently. Of course, if governments and corporations knew what they know now, they would also make darned sure that they had more control over the Net -- which a number of commenters are pointing out over on Slashdot. But they can't just start afresh, of course -- any more than we can just rip up all the highways and freeways and rebuild them bigger and better and more advanced. It's not going to happen, no matter what law enforcement or governments or corporations want.

The real beef of the article lies in this sentence: "A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture."

IP (Internet Protocol) addresses give a good idea of what might happen. IP addressing is complex and a detailed explanation would make readers' eyes glaze over, but an IP address is your computer's "name" or address on the Net, which it needs in order to talk to any other computer at all. Problem is, the way that the IP addressing system we mostly use now (called IPv4) was made back in the 1980s, there can't be more than 4,294,967,296 unique numbers for all the computers in the world. Now, more than 4 billion may sound like a lot, but due to the way this system works, huge swathes of these numbers can't even be used for public addresses -- they can legally be used only for private networks, or for certain purposes. And anything that connects to the Internet needs an IP address -- your mobile phone, your PDA, your laptop, you name it. Because of this, we're now running out of IP addresses.

There's a solution, and it's being implemented right now and has been for years. But it doesn't involve scrapping the whole IP addressing system, bringing the Net to a halt, and then putting in a new one.

As early as 1996, researchers were hammering out the final details of a new IP addressing system, IPv6. IPv6 can make far more IP addresses than IPv4 can -- a number represented by 5 followed by 28 zeros for each person on the planet today.

With some skillful tweaking, most computers, operating systems and network software can work with IPv6 as well as they can IPv4, because it's designed to be backward-compatible. And Windows Vista uses IPv6 right out of the box. Meanwhile, China is already going ahead with using IPv6 for all its addresses, and finding ways to integrate its IPv6 Internet with the IPv4 Internet of the rest of the world. You, the user, probably won't have to lift a finger here: the ISPs and hardware manufacturers and software writers will take care of it all for you, and you won't see the difference, unless you're a geek like me.

This is probably how it will go with most other changes that the university researchers dream up to improve the Net. There will be no "scrapping the Internet and starting over." Instead, the changes will be integrated with what we already have, and while some of the transitions will surely cause unexpected problems, others will be seamless. That means the changes that actually get a green light; all this is in the early brainstorming and discussion stages now, and most ideas won't make it beyond that.

Yep, it's deliberate

2007-04-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is pressuring computer sellers to stop offering computers with Windows XP already installed on them. Dell is resisting them, but will stop selling them by the end of this year. That's the gist of this article in PC World. Unfortunately, it's only the business computers that still come with Windows XP, even now. (More on this on this Dell blog.)

It's infuriating in a way, because Vista still doesn't work with a lot of hardware and software that's out there today. What will happen when new buyers can only buy computers with Vista-preinstalled, and find their favorite games and applications don't work any more? My guess is, they'll just give them up, unhappily but feeling they have no choice.

Well yes, you do have a choice. One is to hang onto your old computer for as long as you can, of course. Now is not (in my humble opinion) a very good time to buy a pre-made computer.

But there's another: when you buy that new computer, you could also buy a copy of Windows XP Pro, OEM edition. Not the "full retail" one, that goes for $299. But several places, including Frys, are selling the OEM version for less than $160. Then you can go on the grand adventure (to most users) of wiping your hard drive clean of Windows Vista and installing Windows XP on it. My best is that XP's install program will not wipe Vista even if you boot from the CD/DVD drive, but there's a free program Boot'N'Nuke that will wipe everything off a drive and leave it with no operating system.

If you have no idea how to do this, well, I'm not sure what other solutions you might have. At this risk of seeming to be condescending and elitist, I'll point this out: Microsoft has built its near-monopoly on users' lack of knowledge of computers and software, and on your doing what's easiest, not what's cheapest. Geekdom -- it's not just a fashionable pose, it's a survival skill that helps keep you from being screwed over. Free free to answer me back in the comments if you wish.

Such joyous news!

2007-04-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

It has at last arrived in the mail -- the fruit of my return to school and hard studying for three years. I now have two pieces of paper, one with a nice purplish-blue-and-white-technology design on it, stating that I am a CompTIA A+ Certified Professional. It's a pity that I don't have a camera, or I'd put up a photo here. I also have a wallet card and a congratulatory form letter.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am now a certified computer geek!

On Windows Vista

2007-04-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

I'd recommend not buying a new computer with Vista on it -- if you can help it -- for a year or so. Reason: not all repair people are familiar with it yet, security holes have already been found and it needs a security patch which won't be out for a while, and -- above all -- it doesn't yet work with a great deal of the hardware that's out now, nor does it work with most of the software, including your favorite games.

These were problems with Windows XP when it came out in 2001 or so as well, but after four years just about everything is XP-compatible. It will take a while to shake out the bugs in Vista, too. By the way, you can buy a Windows XP Pro install CD from Frys and some other places quite cheaply now. It's the OEM version rather than full retail, which means that you can only install it on one computer, but you can install it as many times as you like.

Baaad journalism on technological issues (so what's new?)

2007-04-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

What has me hopped up this morning is the second part of MSN's two-part series on criminal bot networks, "WHO'S BEHIND CRIMINAL BOT NETWORKS?".

The whole story can be boiled down to this: criminal gangs in Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil, and Asia are now hiring hackers to create and maintain networks of computers they've hacked into, and running extortion rackets. If the company they victimize -- usually the owner of a gambling website -- doesn't pay up, their hackers instruct the compromised computers to attack the website en masse, knocking it off the Net and costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

That's almost all there is of substance to the article. It's padded out with vague accusations that there must be terrorists involved somehow, but offers no specifics except that 50 hackers were recently busted in Egypt and Lebanon -- on what charges, the article doesn't state.

This may seem weird to you, but for me the topper is in the very first paragraph: "For years, computer hackers typically were precocious, anti-social teen-agers who committed digital violence just to get attention." Digital violence? I just looked up a definition of violence via Microsoft Word, and it fetched me this out of Encarta: "the use of physical force to injure somebody or damage something". What the Sam Hill is digital violence? How do you use physical force in the digital realm, unless you take a sledgehammer to a computer or something?

In short, we've got a juxtaposition of the words "hack", "gangs", "organized crime", and "terrorism" that seems designed to instill fear in the reader.

My advice to anyone reading this article is: take a deep breath, let it slowly, and relax. Terrorists are NOT about to come boiling out of your computer screen.

Then, get yourself a decent firewall and/or antivirus - I recommend Trend Micro's Internet Security, as that's what I use and I've had good luck with it. Learn to use them. Stop being afraid of your computer, and learn to take care of it. Then you can avoid having your computer taken over and made into a hacker's tool without your knowledge. And it will work better into the bargain.

Another kind of Easter egg

2007-04-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter, everyone who celebrates it.

Computer programmers, manufacturers and even movie makers like hidden treats as much as the rest of us do. In fact, they like them so much that they often put them in software, in computer games and even in movie DVDs for users to find. Microsoft Word 97 had a hidden pinball game you could play if you pressed the right keys; the Revenge of the Sith DVD has a video of Yoda doing rap with several stormtroopers if you click on just the right link in one of the menus.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Easter eggs.

Customer service: Best Buy gets it, Circuit City doesn't

2007-04-06T22:58:00.000-07:00

Is Best Buy better for customers than Circuit City? Let us count the ways, says the Associated Press.

Behind the poorer-quality customer service is actually another story. A lot of struggling companies lay off workers, hire less experienced and poorer-quality workers who cost less, even outsource to Asia, and otherwise try to save costs by sacrificing the quality of service, but Circuit City has taken it to a new level by firing 3400 of its highest-paid sales staff and replacing them with lower-paid, less experienced workers. “What you're looking at (with Circuit City) is that strategy on steroids,” a senior economist remarks in the article.

While the company's strategy will pare labor costs, many retail observers said it could backfire if its seasoned, high-volume sales staff is replaced by less-experienced and lower-performing workers.

“You can hire a bunch of cheap, inexperienced people but that has to show up as diminished service and probably lower sales,” Bernstein said.

Knowledge is still important and a competitive advantage. I find this . . . reassuring.

A handy Microsoft Word tip

2007-04-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

If, like me, you occasionally write fantasy fiction and give your characters non-English names, and you use Microsoft Word, you have a problem. When Word's spellcheck feature notices you typing out a name it doesn't know, like "Galadriel" or "Fornisothefameen", it will put a wavy red line underneath it, and insist on pointing it out when you do the Spelling & Grammar Check.

Tired of that? There's a way to stop Word from doing that.

Put your cursor over the word in question, and right-click anywhere inside it. You'll see a little context menu appear, with some suggested spellings -- and, among other things, an option Add to dictionary. Move the cursor over that option and click it, once. This will add the odd word to the Microsoft Word dictionary, and the spellchecker won't bother you about it again.

Where to buy PCs: one techie's opinion

2007-04-04T23:43:00.000-07:00

It seems like the number of entry points for junior computer techies is shrinking. We've got CompUSA closing half of its stores (including the one near me), while Circuit City is resorting to desperate measures in its attempt to keep up with Best Buy -- and Frys.

When you get right down to it, it's odd that Frys is still able to keep up with the competition. It's a good place to go if you know exactly what you want to buy, or if you have enough background knowledge to know what you're looking for, and they have just about everything imaginable. However, its stores are poorly-lit warehouses, the quality of its staff is unpredictable, and its name is hard to remember correctly: not Fry's, but Frys.

My advice for the best possible place to buy a PC: PCClub. True, its stores are even less impressive than Frys: a lot smaller, with a very limited selection of stuff. Most of the stuff you want, you have to order. But its customer service can't be beat; they'll really go the extra mile to accomodate you. And ordering the prebuilt PCs can be a real pleasure or an exercise in restraint, depending on how you look at it: on the website, you can order a system with default components, or you can choose from several higher-quality components to pay more ; or, you can even tell them to leave some components off that you don't need, to save money! I chose not to have a dialup modem card installed, because I had a perfectly good external serial modem that I'd had for five years and was extremely happy with, and I despise internal modems. When you get your machine, you don't just get a "recovery disk" with spyware crap on it that installs by default. Instead, you get an ACTUAL OS INSTALL CD (OEM version), and separate CDs of all the drivers.

My advice to anyone ordering a new computer is to get it from PCClub.

Tip #1:

2007-04-03T19:22:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of tips I'm going to write that are geared toward people who really do know next to nothing about their computers. Like the sweet old guy who paid me $30 I didn't ask for, just to download VLC and install it on his computer. :-) If any such person ends up reading this entry, I'd appreciate it if you'd comment here and tell me how well I did.

You can maximize the window you're working in, or restore it to the size it had before, by just clicking twice on the title bar.

What's this mean? When you're working in something like Outlook or Microsoft Word, a panel opens up. You know that. It's called a window. At the top of that window is a long bar -- if you're using Windows XP, it's probably blue and looks sort of like glass or plastic. This long bar probably has the name of the Web page you're opened to, or the title of the Word document you're working on, or whatever. You get the idea. Thus, it is called a title bar.

Now, you probably know what the mouse is (I hope). You may know what it means to "click" on it -- it means clicking the left button. You may know what a cursor is: it's that arrow on the screen that moves around when you move your mouse around. Move the mouse so that the cursor is on the title bar of this Web page. Now click on the left button twice, quickly. If you're using Windows, you should see the window change size. If you double-click on it again, it'll return to the size it was before.

That's all!

Time to do more studying

2007-04-02T22:19:00.000-07:00

. . . and look for work. So far, I've had little success at either today. The problem is the sheer number of choices, keeping in mind that I wear two hats: Website designer/wannabe developer and computer repair technician. The former in particular means that there are staggering amounts of different things I could learn, from Adobe Illustrator to SOAP and Ajax. Even with the latter, I wish deeply that there was some way to learn ticket software that's used to keep track of customers and projects, before getting a job. I keep seeing demands for experience with that in job ads. It's the common Catch-22: I can't get a job because I have no experience, and I have no experience because I haven't had a job with that yet.

For now, though, I've settled on one particular thing I'm going to do: catch up on MS Office, even if it just has to be MS Office 2003. I have seen jobs requiring Office experience, too, and it's like your college Spanish: what do you remember, besides Como esta usted?

The biggest problem with that: MS Office is singularly unexalting. Really. It interests me about as much as a data-entry position. I can't get excited about it the way I can with Web technology, or with a programming language that might make a cool game or application.

Oh, mannn, I'm exhausted

2007-04-01T20:54:00.000-07:00

Actually, I did the hard drive wipe last night. I've spent the entire day installing XP and the programs I love and need. Already, one serious problem has arisen: I can't seem to put my saved Mail files back into the new Thunderbird install. I have no idea what's going on.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

2007-03-31T11:15:00.000-07:00

Now the question arises: what to study next? Brush up on my MS Office skills, which badly need it? Redo my website, which also badly needs it? Begin learning PHP and MySQL again, and maybe learning to actually make PHP secure? Learn Java?

That's the trouble with making a lifetime commitment to be a computer geek. You've committed yourself to a lifetime of learning -- where most people think they learned enough at school and college and shouldn't be asked to learn anything new, ever again. (Yes, hear my elitism roar.)

Unfortunately, I think all I'll be doing for the next few days is finishing clearing off my hard drives so I can reinstall Windows XP Pro. I was fortunate enough to have a techie friend who tipped me off. Frys is still selling XP Pro while most stores don't dare incur Microsoft's wrath, and for only $159 at that, so I ended up buying it. I'd been looking for a replacement for my Learning Alliance version of XP Pro for a while, because it's only good for ten installs -- and I've already used it five or six times. What Frys is selling is the OEM version, which means that I can only ever install it on one computer. But I can reinstall it as often as I like.

I have a confession to make here: I like installing operating systems, XP Pro emphatically included. But it's still a big deal when you're reinstalling it on your main computer. All the software and games you know and love have to be reinstalled, the updates, all the data carefully saved that you want on the hard drive too, etc. It usually takes two weeks before I even begin to feel comfortable again. Until then, everything else will languish neglected.

I passed!

2007-03-30T19:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I survived my second and last A+ certification exam -- the Core OS one. I only got 599, and the minimum for passing is 505, so my performance wasn't stellar. But these are famous for being very tough exams, and many people don't do much better.

I should explain here what the A+ certification is. It's a certification granted by the organization CompTIA to people who want to be "fully qualified" computer repairpersons , a job otherwise known as computer tech or computer tech repair. It's very widely accepted by employers, and is supposed to show that you know the equivalent of a year's worth of experience at a computer repair job -- kind of the entry-level qualification.

You do not join CompTIA in order to get the certificate. Instead, you take two exams, the Hardware and the Core OS exams. Hardware is what it says: computer and printer hardware. Core OS is a bit trickier. You need to know a great deal about the Windows operating system (that's the "OS" part), but also a fair bit about computer networks and about running a printer. Just being good at computer games or being "good at computers" is not enough to pass. You actually need to know how to run important built-in maintenance and troubleshooting programs. You also need to know -- and here's the kicker -- a lot of console commands, stuff you don't just click on to use. In the preparation classes I took, the console command stuff convinced a lot of students who thought they were "good with computers" to bail out at the beginning of the course. Not a lot of people outside of specialists and hardcore geeks know much about the Windows command line, or like working with it.

And, of course, you need to know a lot about the different versions of Windows that have come out over the years: Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Millenium Edition, Windows 98 and Windows 98SE, and even Windows 95 and NT.

I'll bet the new Core OS exam, which will come out this summer, will drop the questions relating to NT and Windows 95. Maybe the last edition of the test before this one was full of questions about Windows 3.1, god help us.

There are more certificates I could earn, of course, such as Network+, Linux+, and even the Microsoft certifications if I decide to go that way. But for a while now, I'm just going to concentrate on finding my next job and enjoying my triumph. I have my foot in the door now.

2007-03-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

The final A+ certification exam is tomorrow at 8:45AM.

I'm scared.

Alarums and Excursions, and a bizarre coincidence

2007-03-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

I'm the happy owner of an odd sort of external hard drive enclosure. The oddity is, it does not require a bona fide external HDD -- instead, it takes your spare internal HDD that you happen to have lying about, and turns it into an external HDD that you just plug into your machine using a USB 2.0 cord and socket, which virtually all recent computers have.

This required a bit of shuffling of my old computers and some spare resources. I removed the 80-gig hard drive from my eMachine computer (what does a machine manufactured in 2001 at the latest need an 80-gig drive for, after all?), put it in the hard drive enclosure and set it up as a new drive on my latest computer, where the extra storage space will be a blessing. I then had a useless eMachine computer, so I examined the two old spare hard drives I had been given (one holding all of 10 gigs, the other 14), determined that the 14-gig one was missing a jumper, and decided to install the 10-gig one instead . . . which looked suspiciously like it was actually the original one for the eMachine. (For one thing, it had a curious soft rubbery plastic frame around it. For another, it had no guide at all to how to put on the jumpers.)

Then I had to take the eMachine out to my workbench on my porch, to mess with its innards. After installing the 10-gig hard drive, and determining that the beast could still boot up (and that the hard drive had Windows Millenium Edition installed -- yuck!), I nuked the hard drive with Boot'N'Nuke.

Then, I got ambitious. The eMachine has onboard sound -- which doesn't work. So, I pulled out my own old PC from 1999, a PCClub beast in nonfunctional condition, opened it up on the workbench as well and pulled out its sound card, an ancient ATI Rage Pro II thing that originally had a 16-bit real-mode driver (yes, it's that old), and installed that in the eMachine. I still have no idea whether it works or not; I have to install the drivers at some point or other. Anyway, on with the convoluted tale.

Then, the trouble started. The eMachine already had a CD-reader drive (no burning, nor can it read a DVD); however, the CD drive was plugged into the motherboard, to the non-existent onboard sound (of course). Naturally, I tried to plug it into the sound card instead, and that's when I discovered the true evil of eMachine: the plug was unique, with three prongs where it should have had four. It fitted fine into the proprietary eMachine motherboard, but it wouldn't fit into any ordinary sound card.

Solution? Replace the CD drive with the CD-RW drive in my 1999 PCClub computer. Since that had been plugged into the sound card before, it had no trouble plugging into it now. But it confirmed my firm belief in the evil of eMachine and proprietary computer innards.

I then got even more ambitious, and decided to rearrange the low table on which I keep both my old computers, the new external hard drive in its shiny new enclosure, my DSL modem, and my router (along with other assorted debris). In putting down the PCClub computer, I somehow managed to wedge the Ethernet cable attached to my latest computer in between the 1999 computer's cover and its chassis. I didn't discover this until I was cleaning up and getting everything ready to be turned back on.

And now, my latest and best computer, the one I bought in 2005 and that I use for virtually all tasks, could no longer connect to the Net.

Rebooting did not work. A check confirmed that all cables and cords were firmly and properly plugged in. That didn't help. As my usual first step toward troubleshooting the network, I pulled my router out of the network and hooked up my computer directly to the DSL modem. Still no joy.

I was getting dial tone out of my phone, so presumably my phone jack still worked. What followed was perhaps a half hour of exhaustive troubleshooting, in which I tried one Ethernet cable after another (I have three, which I did not realize) to no avail. The DSL modem claimed it was contacting its masters at Surfcity just fine, but nothing was getting through to my computer. My computer could detect whether or not it had an Ethernet cord plugged into it just fine, so hopefully the hardware was undamaged. I tried rebooting into Ubuntu Linux and connecting. I couldn't connect through Linux either, so it wasn't just Windows XP playing sillybuggers again -- the problem had to be in hardware. But where?

Mentally exhausted, I took time out for a midday snooze for two hours. Did I mention that this was on Sunday?

Returning to my troubleshooting, I finally decided that the problem had to be in one of two locations: my computer's onboard networking, or the DSL modem. And by now, I strongly suspected that the modem was to blame.

DAMN. I had to meet a friend online at 6PM, and of course there was no chance of getting a new modem shipped to me until this coming week. Nevertheless, I called Surfcity to tell them what had happened. To my amazement, I actually got their pet techie. What the hell was he doing in his office on a weekend? Well, good luck for me.

"Do you have a dynamic or a static connection?" he asked me.

"Dynamic," I said.

"Well, our DHCP service is down," he said. "We hope to have it back up in a couple of hours."

My mistake

2007-03-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

First, Io.sys loads, and it checks Msdos.sys and Config.sys. Then it loads Command.com, Autoexec.bat and Winstart.bat. Win.com then loads the real-mode core components, whatever they may be.

After that, Io.sys cuts out, and Vmm3d.vxd (which sets up a virtual machine AND starts the static vxd drivers named in the registry, System.ini and \Windows\System\Vmm32.vxd) starts up.

Gaah. The NT/2000/XP process seems quite a bit simpler. But that's what you get when you make a bastard hybrid between the earlier MS-DOS technology and the (then) new 32-bit technology.

Meanwhile, the joys of hacking your .htaccess file have reached the blogosphere, which makes me happy. Of course, the idiots at ABC are characterizing this as a "hack". Trust me, anyone who happens to be reading this yet -- this is NOT a hack, in the sense of breaking into someone else's server. All Mike D. did was upload an image and modify a single file on his own website.

Oh, yes, and the Abram Friedman Occupational Center turns out to be a truly hideous building in south central L.A. not far from the warehouse garment district. I'll have to pay for parking, of course. And probably start out two hours before.

First post!

2007-03-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

I can't believe the A+ exam is in four days . . . and I know far less about the Windows 9x boot process than I realized.

Ouch.

Let me see how much of this I've got right:

- After POST, when the mobo hands over control to the OS, Io.sys takes control -- but it's in real mode (meaning the software can talk directly to the hardware). Io.sys first checks Msdos.com and Config.sys, two configuration files, checking for any overruling settings.

-- Then it launches Msdos.sys (?) and Command.com (the core of MSDOS).