Google Maps

Google Maps is generally great (when it isn't sending you to the wrong location). And the idea that you can hit a print button, and it will reformat your current view to be more printer-friendly is a great idea. But there are several problems with the print-friendly versions of the maps.

The major problem that I have is the lack of scale on the printed map. Let's say that you search for a location:


On the lower left-hand side of the map, there is a nice scale (outlined in red), indicating what distance on the map is equal to 2000 real-world feet. This is fine and dandy. Except that when you switch to the printer-friendly version of the map and actually print it, the scale doesn't show up.

I regularly print maps from IE and Firefox on two different WinXP computers and two different printers. One printer is a fairly old HP LaserJet 4, while the other is a relatively new model. No matter what combination I use, the scale doesn't get printed, so I'm fairly sure that the problem isn't specific to my computer.

Maps without scales are fairly useless. Especially if you aren't familiar with the area. Nowadays, I usually end up print screenshots of Google Maps, because the screenshots will actually have the scale on it.

Mogo Presenter Mouse

I recently got to use someone's Mogo Presenter Mouse [newtonperipherals.com]:


Now I want one. It's a wireless mouse that stores (and recharges) in a laptop's PC card slot. It has a small kickstand that allows it to sit surprisingly comfortably in the hand when used as a mouse.

They have a two-button version and a scroll-mouse version. The scroll-mouse version (the X54) is designed to be used as a presentation tool (allows you to navigate through a presentation), and it even features an integrated laser pointer.

The Web as your Servant

Recently, I saw a story on USA Today called Next Big Thing: The Web as your Servant [usatoday.com]. The article speculates on a coming wave of gadgets, websites and interconnectivity that will change the way we do things and find entertainment.

"One example... might be a service we'll call Travel Butler, or TB for short... Let's say it's 4 p.m. TB knows you have a flight scheduled for 6 p.m... [and] that you're at a meeting downtown... TB might see that accidents have backed up traffic for miles. It sends you a message, which finds you on your BlackBerry e-mail, saying that to make your flight, you'd have to leave now. TB also shows you an Orbitz listing of later flights."

"You decide to go on a later flight, so you click on the one you want. TB rebooks you, sends an e-mail to your spouse and contacts the car service in your destination city to change the time to pick you up."

This is all well and good, except that I wonder whether I'll ever see this kind of convenience (that actually works properly) in my lifetime.

I mean, right now, we're in a world where it takes longer to connect a Wifi device to a wireless access point (with WEP or WPA security enabled) than it does for the average hacker to figure out what the security key is. We have a bunch of Wifi devices around our house, and every time we get a new one (like our new Vista laptop), it is a huge ordeal to figure out what hoops we have to jump through to actually get it to work.

I'm totally pessimistic on any kind of interconnectivity, when every electronics company has managed to botch the implementation of the most basic type.

Microsoft Office 2007 Packaging

Congratulations to Microsoft for designing what is quite possibly the most frustrating packaging to open. Ever.


There are no instructions on the outside of the box telling you how to open it. And it is in no way obvious where it even opens.

See the tab outlined in blue? When you see a tab, you naturally think that you should push it (you know, maybe it'll release a catch that will allow the package to be opened). Except that it doesn't. Those tabs have a lip on them, meaning that as you push harder and harder on them, it makes the package harder and harder to open (which also isn't going to be obvious to any user).


It turns out that the key is to slice a sticker in two different places, and then pull the red tab that is sticking out (outlined in green) to open it up. And if you do that in the wrong order, the red tab will just rip right off (as I found out with the first one I tried to open).


This is the first package that I have ever needed to consult a webpage [flickr.com] in order to figure out how to open. I was on the verge of intentionally breaking the plastic (with a 5lb sledgehammer) when I stumbled on those pictures.

Toshiba Satellite A205-S5871 laptop

Last week [fluggart.com], I mentioned that we replaced Heimlich's laptop. What we bought was a TOSHIBA Satellite A205-S5871 laptop [newegg.com]. The description on Newegg has the full system specs and lots of pictures. We ended up buying it from Sears for $100 less than the price at Newegg (!), and it came with a case, a USB hub, and a mouse with retractable cord.

For all of the computer geeks out there, the vital specs are:

• Intel Pentium dual-core T2390(1.86GHz)
• 2GB DDR2 667 RAM
• 160GB HDD
• 15.4" WXGA screen (1280x800)

To reiterate my previous post, Heimlich's applications really don't require any horsepower whatsoever, so this is way more than adequate for her needs. And at well under $500, it was a steal.

Our initial experiences with the machine have all been positive. The touchpad has a sufficient recess so that you don't touch it inadvertently while typing. The screen is huge and bright, the keyboard is comfortable (and has a large backspace key), there are 4 USB ports on the sides, and the system is plenty responsive.

A common problem that used to happen with computers was that the hard drive would come with a single partition, and there wasn't much you could do about that because you only received recovery disks. So, unless you knew your way around a Linux live-CD, there weren't really many options you could use to repartition the hard drive into a system partition and a data partition (vital for the annual reinstalls that I perform). The Toshiba recovery disks that came with this unit actually allow you to change the partition table, so that you can do this yourself. I suspect that this is a standard feature nowadays, but this is the first computer we have bought in 4 years.

So far, we're really happy with Toshiba.

Computers from Sears

We just bought a computer at Sears.

Ok, that is definitely a statement that I thought I would never say. To me, that is something akin to saying, "I just bought a car at JCPenney's." Anyway, I'll explain this part in more detail, but first some background info...

We have been limping Heimlich's laptop along for the past few months, and it finally developed an irreparable problem (as we knew it would eventually). It was bought in 2003 (right before she left to spend her second year in Austria). The three most commonly used apps on her computer are: Firefox, iTunes, and Publisher. Nothing that requires any horsepower at all. Clearly, any new computer is not only going to be fine, but an order of magnitude faster than what she was using. So, we were looking in the budget laptop segment.

The budget laptop segment actually has a lot of great computers. You can get a big screen, a reasonably large hard drive, and 2 gigs of RAM -- way more than sufficient for the tasks at hand. The problem is that most of the computers in the segment have all kinds of weird design issues.

Let's take an Acer Extensa EX5620-4020 laptop [microcenter.com] (Intel Dual-Core T2370, 2gig RAM, 250gig HDD) which you can buy for $500:


What's wrong with this picture? Well, the keyboard is "ergonomically-shaped", which means that it's going to be really hard to get used to and annoying to use.

Or, take the HP 530 laptop [tigerdirect.com] (Centrino Core Duo T2400, 1gig RAM, 160gig HDD), which is also $500:


Ok, what's wrong with this picture? The touchpad is centered on the chassis, instead of being centered on the keyboard. So, you will constantly hit the touchpad while typing.

It ends up being a constant battle to find the laptops in this segment that aren't weird or unusable. To be continued...

TigoTago

Like many people, I have a huge mp3 collection. Many of the ID3 tags (the metadata like artist, song title, album, etc) in those files are incorrect, so I started looking for a way to batch edit large numbers of mp3s. What I have started using is TigoTago [tigotago.com], which is freeware. TigoTago can also manage other types of files (avi, wav, wma, wmv, and asf).

You can select a directory of files to edit, and then batch edit them in many different ways:


Typically, I have renamed the files from the tags or created new tags from the filenames, but as you can see, there are a bunch of other options (including getting tag info from online databases).

If you choose to create new tags from filenames, you are asked to enter in a mask to be applied:


In this particular case, my files have a dash in between the artist and song title, and it warns me if it finds more than one dash in the filename.

After renaming the files or rewriting the tag information, you can review the changes in the application before the changes are actually made. This is handy as I frequently make a lot of mistakes.


The ones in beige are the ones that have been modified. And writing out hundreds of files doesn't take much time at all.

There are currently two versions available for download: 1.0 and 2.0.0.3 beta. Each also requires you to install a version of the .NET framework. I already had version 2.0 of the .NET framework installed for another application, so I chose to use the beta version of TigoTago (TigoTago 1.0 requires version 1.1 of the .NET framework). On the TigoTago download page are links to the install files for the .NET framework (which are also free).

Anyway, this software does everything I have wanted it to do, and it's free! Managing my mp3 collection is way easier now.

Google News and Subscription Sites

I have yet another suggestion for Google (maybe I should start a "Google suggestions" category for my posts)...

I used to use Google News exclusively when I read news online. It's great, because if you are interested in a story, you could read several stories on the topic on different news sources (allowing you to get past each news source's bias). Now I don't use it so much anymore, and it's because of the all of the links to interesting news stories on subscription sites (or ones that require free registration):


I'm not going to create an account on every crappy local news website just so that I can read one or two stories. I'm not going to give them my information so that they can use it to target ads towards me (or do who-knows-what with it). And, quite frankly, I'm just too lazy to fill out the forms.

Google, stop indexing the news sites that require a subscription or free registration. Or let people customize their Google News page to include or exclude those sites. Because right now, even though there are much fewer subscription sites indexed on Google News, it's still driving me (and probably tons of others) away.

Google Maps Suggestion

I have a suggestion for an improvement to Google Maps. I frequently use Google Maps as a quick and dirty way to get directions to a location. You type in an address, and 9 times out of 10, you get the correct location pointed out to you on a map. Take the following map of the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, NY:


Most of the time, I don't need door to door directions. I can pretty much tell what highways I'm going to use to get into the area. I just want to know the quickest way to get from the highway to that location. What is the quickest way to get there from the highway in the above map (what exit/what turns)?

Problem #1 is that anytime there is a highway with a marginal, Google Maps doesn't make it easy enough to see where the exits are, and where you will be dumped off the highway. If they were easier to see, I could just plot the route myself.

Problem #2 is that you can't just click on the map, and ask for directions from the clicked point to the highlighted location. I really wish they would fix this problem. It would make using Google Maps to get directions so much faster.

Archive Quality DVDs

I am always surprised when other people are surprised to hear that burned CDs and DVDs don't last very long [computerworld.com]. I mean, people have been burning CDs for a long time, so you would think that this problem would be more well-known. I have several disks that I burned only a few years ago that are now unreadable (which thankfully, contained nothing important).

I am on the paranoid end of the spectrum, as far as data backups. Anything that I have that is important is copied everywhere. I even go as far as to burn two copies of critical data onto archival-quality DVD-Rs -- one copy to keep at home, and another to keep in a safe-deposit box.

For the past few years, I have been using mam-a archival-quality DVDs [mam-a.com]. However, they have changed their product line around since I have bought media last, and I wasn't that happy with the past batch that I bought. So, I began looking for another brand.

I recently saw this weblog post [adterrasperaspera.com], which has a frighteningly long description of how CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are produced, and how archival-quality media differs. The post recommends a Japanese brand called Taiyo Yuden, which can be purchased at supermediastore.com. So, I'm going to give them a shot.

Back up your data properly, people!

On-Line Dating Fraud

Recently, I saw a link to an article about on-line dating fraud [cnn.com].


The jist of it is that there is a growing problem with people finding suckers on the internet, form what the victim thinks is a deep, loving relationship, and then convince the victim to send them money. Here's a quote from the article:

"Barb Sluppick runs RomanceScams.org, a Web site dedicated to helping victims of romance fraud, like herself. She said the site has had more than 30,000 members since its start in June 2005.

"The number of broken hearts aside, romance fraud costs victims millions of dollars each year. Of her 30,000 members, Sluppick said, 883 people have reported their financial losses. They add up to $8,244,800.05, she said."

I was actually fascinated when reading the article. Just another reason why I would never be a good criminal -- I just don't have the creativity to come up with an idea like this.

On the other hand, I think that it is surprising that it is so easy to convince people to send money to a person they have never met in real life.

Picture courtesy of Thomas Hawk's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

More Matlab Gripes

Ok, here's another gripe that I have about Matlab (at least, the older version that I own and use). Let's say that you want to plot two sets of data, so you write a simple script:


The output from this script is the following plot:


If you look at the manfile for linespec (which define properties for things like lines in plots), you will find the following pre-defined colors that are available to use.


So, let's say that you use the same script, but want to specify the colors. One would reasonably expect that the pre-defined green in linespec is the same as the green that is used by default in plots. But it's not. Let's say you run the same script, but specify that one line should be blue and one line should be green:


You will get the following plot:


Not only is the green a different color, but it's a color that often does not show up well when shown on a projector. So, the result is that you have to constantly define your own custom colors if you want to specify line colors in scripts (if you care about people being able to read them, that is).

Backup of Windows

Adam recently posted [livejournal.com] that he was looking for a way to backup/clone a Windows installation. There are a number of pieces of commercial software that will do the job (some better than others, of course). I use a different approach to backing up and cloning Windows installations...

What I have found is that it is pretty easy to make a backup of a Windows installation from another operating system. For instance, if you had two different Windows installations on the same computer, you could use one to make a full and complete backup of the other one (by simply copying the files from one location to another, then compressing or burning to disk).

It is kind of annoying (and time-consuming) to install Windows a second time, for the sole purpose of backing up the first one. Plus, if your hard drive dies and you have to replace it, you would have to install from scratch before you could restore the image that you created.

This is why I use linux. On all of my Windows computers, I have a small partition on the hard drive with a bare-bones linux installation (no GUI) that I use to back up the Windows installation from. The partition is large enough to store a copy of the Windows installation, so that when I want to reinstall, I just have to wipe the Windows partition and copy the files from one partition to the other. I reinstall all of my Windows computers once a year, and it takes a fraction of the time it would take to install from scratch.

If you didn't want to put a linux partition on your hard drive, you could use a Knoppix live-CD [knoppix.org] (or similar) to burn a copy of the Windows installation directly to DVD (and then you could easily restore in the same manner).

Using this method gives me full control over what is backed up and how. I have found that a clean Windows installation with drivers, etc can be burned onto a DVD (after deleting pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys).

Matlab Gripes

I have a lot of gripes about software. Here's a grip that I currently have with Matlab (at least, the version that I own).

Let's say that you have a directory full of figures you have created in Matlab:


But you want to delete them. So, you open up the directory in Windows explorer, highlight them all, and hit delete. Except that you have a brain fart, and instead of hitting the delete key, you hit the enter key. What will happen is that Matlab will try to open 20 (or however many figures you have selected) Matlab sessions. And if it can't, it will crash and take your computer down with it.

If you already have Matlab running, why can't it open a figure without trying to launch a completely different session of Matlab? Why would it ever be desirable to run multiple sessions on the same computer (unless you were trying to make your computer crash)?

If you highlight 20 image files (whose extensions are associated with Photoshop), Photoshop won't try to launch 20 different sessions of itself. It will just open all of the images in the one Photoshop session that is running.

Of course, this problem requires you to have .fig files associated with Matlab. This problem is so annoying that I am debating about breaking that association.

Roundcube

The provider for one of my numerous email accounts is trying to transition people over to a new webmail client - Roundcube [roundcube.net].


In general, I don't have a problem with it, and it is an improvement over whatever was available before. But there are some peculiarities. One is that the search field looks suspiciously like Spotlight in Apple's OS X:


That is obviously a total ripoff. At least Firefox makes an attempt to cover up that they are ripping the idea off.

One of the major dealbreakers for other people is that you can't highlight and select text if you are using Internet Explorer. I have no idea why that is, but I have tried it using two different versions of IE, and when I try to select text, all of the text on the page ends up getting selected. Selecting text is no problem when using Firefox -- but there are some places, like work, where I have no choice but to use IE.

You have no idea how much you copy and paste text into and out of email until you can't do it anymore.

Bitching About Google Maps

Has anyone else tried to use the traffic monitor in Google Maps? It took
me a while to figure out that grey roadways are sections with no data,
and not roadways with mostly free-flowing traffic.

It is a good first effort, but is mostly useless without being real-time.
It would be far more useful if you could click on a section of roadway,
and it would bring up a traffic webcam of that area.



Just having the map itself isn't very useful. Above is a map of Cleveland
during morning rush hour. And shockingly -- SHOCKINGLY -- there is a lot
of traffic and congestion going into downtown. I never would have
guessed. It's a good thing that Google is on top of it.

As the data evolves into a real-time traffic and congestion map, it would
be amazing to be able to see that screen in a car. An accident occurs?
That section starts blinking red, catches your eye, and you know to
re-route.

But right now, it really doesn't tell me anything I don't already know,
and is far worse than the traffic report on local radio.

Laptop Dilemma

Way back in 2003, I bought a Sony PCG-V505AX laptop [pcworld.com]. It's been great -- it's small, light, and is fast enough when booted into Linux.

On the other hand, it's ridiculously slow in comparison to anything on the market now. When I try to run a simulation, I almost can't tell whether it is running reeeeally, really slowly, or whether it has locked up. The video card is so slow that I can't run any games, basically. I used to play Neverwinter Nights [wikipedia.org] on it, and it was a little choppy... as long as there weren't too many other people in the game at the time (at which point the machine was just wholly inadequate).

The battery has aged to the point where I can only run for 10 minutes without having it plugged in. And my wireless card just died (at least, I hope that is what happened, and that it is not a larger problem). Not surprisingly, the lack of wireless isn't a huge deal, since I can't run off of batteries anyway.

So, I'm faced with a dilemma now. I could buy a new one, or I could buy a new battery and wireless adapter for my current machine, and limp it along for another year or two.

The decision is made even more difficult by current laptop prices. If they were any cheaper, I would definitely buy a new one. If they were any more expensive, I would definitely wait. Maybe I'll wait to see if I can score a deal right after Christmas...

PDFCreator

On Nelson's Weblog [somebits.com], I saw a link to PDFCreator [pdfforge.com], which is a free tool to print files to a PDF.

Previously, I had some experience with PrimoPDF [primopdf.com], but really didn't like it because it didn't render images nicely. The image rendering is important to me, because most of the documents I want to send to others have some sort of figure or picture in them. Otherwise, I wouldn't need to create a PDF -- I would just send text.

Heimlich and I have been looking for a new free PDF tool to use at home, where we only need to make PDF files occasionally. So, we'll be evaluating it, and I'll probably be writing a review post here soon. So far, it seems to render images better than PrimoPDF.

And of course, I still use FoxIt PDF Reader [foxitsoftware.com] to read PDF files at home.

@$&@* Debian Kernel Packages!

Self, you are an idiot. There should be licenses required to operate computers, so that yours could be revoked. Repeat after me: Set the status of kernel packages to hold. Set the status of kernel packages to hold.

On my primary machine (which happens to be a laptop), I am running Debian Etch (which earlier this year became the Stable branch, after long being the Testing one). For years, I have been using apt-get to handle package management, but it is quickly losing it's luster in my eyes. I liked it because I could type:

# apt-get upgrade

and it would go through and automatically update all of the packages I had currently installed to the latest versions. The problem is that every time a new kernel image is released, it totally hoses up stuff for the custom kernel that I have compiled. So, I end up having to download the newest kernel source and compile another custom one. Which just seems like too much work (although getting the latest kernel source is good), and I wouldn't have to do all of that, if I would just remember to set the status of those packages to hold (which tells apt not to download and install the newest version). Mental note, to set packages to hold:

echo "package_name hold"|dpkg --set-selections

This would be so much easier if I would stop trying to do all of my package management at the command line...

My Lax Password Security Procedures

Like everyone else, I don't change my passwords often enough.

Most of the time, it's ok. I mean, most of the passwords are to things like message boards and whatnot. So, if someone manages to get my password and starts posting as me, who cares? I'm sure that everyone who knows me through a message board already thinks that I'm an asshole...

But then there are passwords that I use when checking email, changing my server settings, checking my credit card statements, etc. I'm actually relatively paranoid about those -- to the point where I don't even trust Firefox's password manager to handle them (which, unfortunately, is a fear that is not unfounded [slashdot.org]). But I still don't change them often enough.

I think that I know part of the problem. For the longest time, I have been relying on my (terrible) memory to judge when each password should be changed. And because of the uncertainty of when they were last changed, I tend to wait too long until the next change. So, from now on, I am recording the date when each password was last changed, which will hopefully encourage me to change it more often.

Windows Vista Content Protection

I'm a little behind the curve on Windows Vista, because I have no intention of installing it on any of my computers in the near future. Recently, I saw a link to this article [auckland.ac.nz], which goes into detail about how the content protection schemes in Vista work, and how they will affect users. Undoubtedly, many of you readers have already seen similar articles. What sets this article apart is the level of detail and how comprehensive it is. Having no experience with Vista and not being a software developer, I'm not sure that I have the best background to evaluate whether the author is being needlessly alarmist, though...

This paragraph should give you the gist of the article:

"Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format)... Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content..."

Here's how Microsoft will enforce hardware manufacturers playing ball with their schemes:

"Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will no longer be fed anything considered to be premium content. What this means is that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all premium content-handling ability for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found. "

OS X Mouse Acceleration Problem

On Adam's weblog [livejournal.com], I caught a link to this article [tidbits.com] which describes the problem with the way that Mac OS X accelerates the mouse pointer.

I used to have to do a lot of video editing at work. And for that purpose, we had a G5 available. That was really my first in-depth experience using OS X. I had to use it all of the time. And I always had problems getting the mouse pointer over what I wanted to actually click on. First, I would way overshoot the target, and then it would take me forever to stabilize the pointer over the icon (or whatever I was trying to click).

The article explains:

"For mouse motion to feel natural (at least for most people), the [pointer acceleration] curve has to start by moving upward fairly moderately, then gradually flattening out as the value of X increases. Mac OS X's, curve, however, starts off by being too steep, staying too steep for too long, and then flattening out too abruptly. In practical terms this means that, frequently, as a user tries to use the mouse to move the pointer from point A to point B, the pointer motion feels sluggish. The user then tries to compensate for the sluggishness by moving the mouse faster, and the pointer suddenly goes flying across the screen and overshoots point B."

That feeling was incredibly annoying, and really gave me a negative feeling about OS X (along with all of the other annoying things about it). But I could never put my finger on what was wrong with the acceleration. But I had that problem, no matter how I adjusted the pointer speed. And for supposedly being such a user-friendly environment, you sure had to go through a ton of hassle to fix it.

Stupid Windows Explorer

Whenever I'm booted into Windows, I always have a Windows Explorer window open:


I find that it is nice to quickly be able to switch windows to look for a file, or to transfer something, or whatever.

One of my biggest peeves with Windows Explorer is that the Undo doesn't always work. Occasionally, when I am typing on a laptop, the palm of my hand brushes the touchpad and causes some unexpected things to happen. For instance, sometimes a directory will be grabbed from the Windows Explorer window, and then dropped who-knows-where. And of course, the default in Windows Explorer is to move the directory if the target is on the same volume. And since I wasn't intending to copy or move a file, I have no idea what was moved, or where it was moved to.

So, now I have a misplaced directory somewhere on my hard drive, and I pretty much have no idea how to find it so that I can move it back. Naturally, the first thing I think to do is to hit the Undo button, but it doesn't allow you to undo that action.

Why the hell not?

Internet Exploder Sucks Balls

I frequently run into people who only use Internet Explorer 6. I can't understand it. When people ask me for help with their computer, and I see that is what they are using, my first thought is that is their problem. Not only is it a huge security headache and an entrance point for all kinds of crap into their computer, but it doesn't have any of the features or enhancements that have been created over the past few years.

For instance, Firefox now has a built-in spell check, which checks in real-time:


Regardless of any other feature or security enhancement, I would switch just to get that. To me, using IE 6 is like going back to using a version of Office which didn't have a real-time spell checker.

I can't figure out why more people haven't switched.

Stupid Windows

One of the other things that took up all of last weekend was reinstalling the Windows installation on one of my computers.

I think that I've mentioned this before [fluggart.com], but on every computer that I have that runs Windows, I reinstall it about once a year. Windows just accumulates all kinds of cruft, and reinstalling maintains optimum performance.

To speed things up, I make a backup of a clean installation of Windows on that computer. When I want to reinstall, I just wipe the hard drive, and copy the backup back onto the clean partition. That way, the actual OS part of the reinstall takes about 5-10 minutes, instead of the hour that it takes to actually reinstall through the Windows installation media.

The thing that makes the process take forever it reinstalling all of the applications. Now, you're probably wondering why I don't just back up the Windows installation after I have installed all of the most common applications. There is a reason why. It's because there are always new versions of all of the things that I use by the next year. So, I end up reinstalling the clean install of Windows, and then going straight for the install of the newest versions of all of the applications, which reduces cruft.

Plus, the applications that I use change so rapidly from year to year. When I make the backup in the first place, there is no way for me to tell if any of this crap is really going to be useful to me a few years down the line (assuming I'm still using the computer).

I just keep thinking that there has to be a better way to go about this process. It would be great if Windows didn't need to be reinstalled every year, but I don't see that happening. It seems like everyone else gets around the problem by buying a new computer every time theirs needs to be reinstalled, but that goes against everything that I stand for...

Old Computer Tech

On Adam's weblog [livejournal.com], I saw a link to an interesting post on Coding Horror [codinghorror.com]. It has pictures of one of Google's first custom built production servers.

I was very interested in seeing the pictures, because I'm a computer nerd. But also, I remembered reading lots of stories [baselinemag.com] about why Google would custom-build thousands of their own racks in the first place. Back in the day, data centers would charge customers by the square foot -- thinking that you could only put a certain number of computers in each square foot. But what Google's founders did was take cheap-assed commodity hardware, and built custom racks that could pack several times that number of computers in the same physical space. Genius.

Seeing all of those warped motherboards attached to corkboard reminds me the computer I used as my first "server" (although that is way too grandiose a term). I had an extra ATX motherboard, but the only extra case I had lying around was an AT desktop case. So, the motherboard just sat on the bottom of the case, not actually bolted to anything. And I had some paper lining the case to prevent shorts. *sigh*

Anyway, seeing that old hardware really brings me back. The post on Coding Horror also has a lot of good information. Check out the commentary on Dell, which I think is right on.

Secure Apt

The following post is really only for my reference -- so that I remember what the story is the next time I have this issue. But I'll include some backstory in case anyone else is curios as to what I am talking about.

In Linux, one easy way to install new software is to download a package -- which is a bundle that is in a standard format, which can put the files in the appropriate places, put shortcuts where you would expect them to go, etc. It's similar to downloading an .exe for Windows machines. One advantage to the whole package management thing is that all of the packages can generally be found at one (or a small number) of package mirrors. If you wanted a program that could organize your pictures and automatically upload them to Flickr [flickr.com], you could just go and search for all of the packages that are available, and then install the one you want. Your package manager will the install any library files or anything else that your new software is dependent on.

Another advantage is that when you want to look for updates for your software to fix bugs or security holes, you can update everything at once with the same system and very few commands. You would just have your package manager compare the versions of the software you have now with the versions of the software that reside on the package mirrors, and download the ones that are newer than the ones you already have.

Recently, when updating the package list in my installation of Debian Etch (testing) [debian.org], I have been receiving errors about not being able to verify the signatures of some of the packages I have wanted to update.

# apt-get update
W: GPG error: http://security.debian.org etch/updates Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A70DAF536070D3A1

Here is how to manually add the appropriate key to the Advanced Packaging Tool's (apt's) list of verified keys... First retrieve the appropriate key from a keyserver (the key ID is listed in the error) and add it to your own keyring:

$ gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key A70DAF536070D3A1

I'm not a sudoer on my own machine, so transferring the key between keyrings ends up being a two part process. First, export the key from my keyring into an armored ASCII file:

$ gpg -a --export A70DAF536070D3A1 > A70DAF536070D3A1.asc

Then log in as a root user, and add the key to apt's list.

# apt-key add A70DAF536070D3A1.asc

Random File Copy, Part 2

Last week, I posted about how I wanted to figure out how to automate the process of being able to select a few random files from a directory and copy them someplace else.

First off, thank you to everyone who responded. I received a lot of good suggestions, which I am now trying to utilize. We'll see what I end up with. I also got emails from people that I didn't know were reading this. So, that was fun. People actually read this?

Almost everyone that emailed me had the same question - generally variants of:

"What kind of weird crap are you up to, where you would have the need to frequently copy files, but don't care which ones they are? Are you some sort of sick, sick, sicko, or is this just another one of your weird projects, where you try do weird crap for the sake of being weird or difficult?"

Anyway, the answer is, that I want to automate the process of synchronizing my Personal Media Player (PMP). I'm starting to get to the point where my music collection exceeds the capacity of my new player. So, I would like to have an automated process for deleting a portion of the music on the PMP, and then select songs at random to replace those.

That's it. There's nothing weird going on. And having to use Matlab to synchronize my PMP seemed excessively nerdy.

Random File Copy

I am going to describe a problem that I am trying to solve. If you have a solution that you can suggest to me, please email me.

Let's say that I have a bunch of files (say, 100 or 1000) in a directory. And I want to copy a few (say 10) of those to another directory. But I want to have those 10 chosen at random. And I want to be able to perform this action frequently in Windows, so I want it to be automated.

Does anyone have a suggestion for how to do this? All of the "programming" I have been doing recently has been in Matlab. And I think I have an idea for how to perform this action in a script using Matlab (although I'm not exactly sure). But I don't want to have to fire up Matlab all of the time just to copy a bunch of files. Right now, that's my plan B. One advantage to using Matlab is that I could use one command and get a list of all of the files in the directory (eliminating half the work):

listoffiles = dir('c:\temp');

I tried to figure out how to implement this in a .bat file, but I quickly became confused with .bat file programming.

I could also break out my C/C++ books and figure out how to write this function. One advantage to using C is that I could compile the program into an .exe. Then I could execute the .exe without having to load a huge thing into memory (unlike Matlab).

Anyone have any ideas?