Category: My Computer

Les posts on the new MSN Web-based Instant Messenger, which is, indeed, pretty keen-looking.

I started using MSN Messenger some months back, but now am using the Exchange-based Windows Messenger instead (since it can tie into the MSN network, and thus is only one window open). While our company once had the IM ports blocked on the corporate firewall, they opened it up a while back due to use by various and sundry (and lacking an internal IM standard). It’s good to know that … well, there’s some other avenue open for communicating off of a web-only manchine.

What makes Les’ post mildly surreal is that he has a screen shot of my IM conversation with him about it this morning. Though, at least, he didn’t catch any of my typos …

There are new point releases for Firefox (0.9.3), Thunderbird (0.7.3), and Mozilla (1.7.2), which encompass various little security bits. They’ve also launched a $500 bounty program for folks who uncover critical security holes. Nice.

The Firefox upgrade seems to involve simply downloading and running. No glitches observed so far.

(via Les)

Doyce relates a fun Firefox-related anecdote. And then ends up linking a lot to me, which is mildly embarrassing (but gave me a chance to discuss my current tabbed browsing settings, for future reference).

Grrr. My computer can see the AT&T Wireless Wi-fi networks all around me here at DIA, but even though I have the SSID entered in correctly (and automatically), I can’t get connected. Rrg.

So I would still never dream of just casually reloading my PC, but there have been some positive aspects to the ongoing exercise.

1. Having done it, I’m better prepared to do it again.
2. Like moving house, it’s a great (if aggravating) opportunity for some good housekeeping. Lots of installed programs and crap that I don’t need to reinstall. Lots of stuff to remember that I now have.
3. Perhaps because of the previous point, my machine is running a lot faster than it did. Part of that’s the hardware, but part of it is just that the accumulated widgets and obsolete settings of a couple of years are now off the boards.
4. Things that weren’t working before — like Exchange-based IM (Windows Messenger) — are now working again. Which makes me think of a few other utilities that were mysteriously non-functional that would be worth checking out once more.

On the down side, the resolution on the tiny screen of this ThinkPad T40 is stuck at 1024×768, which is just killing me here. I like having a large (if microscopically rendered) desktop.

Work continues.

UPDATE (3:00p) – Got the loaner PC, a Thinkpad T40. Faster, but smaller (and lower screen res) than my A31. Ah, well, beggers can’t be choosers.

I’m going to lay out the stuff that I need to do to get my replacement/loaner PC up to snuff, in roughly the order it needs/I want it to be done, assuming I get a machine with a clean image of XP and Office 2000 (our standards) and contingent on where I am at the time I’m working on it. I’m putting the list here so that (a) if I lose my notes, I won’t be screwed, and (b) for the edification and brickbats of all:

Notes: DA=”install from Downloads archive”; DF=”needs data files from backup”

X Wireless PC card (at home; CD)
X Copy over Downloads archive from backup.

O Office 2003 (get discs from Rick/Sara) (Rick has them at home, dagnabbit)
O Lookout (DA, dagnabbit; too many things to look up.)
O IHateSpam (DA; dagnabbit)

X xReminderPro (DA, DF; need to be reminded of stuff!)

X Firefox (DF; see info on profile migration. The bookmarks.html should be available from DF, too) Installed, then copied over Mozilla profile directory. No sweat.
X Firefox extensions (DA? See here for partial list) Installed automatically.

X Thunderbird (DF; see above on profile migration, also here; verify mail copied over!) Installed, copied over Thunderbird profile, but ran into serious problems. Several partial rebuilds of the profile later, eventually got working in Safe Mode …
X Thunderbird extensions (DA?) … because for some reason the extensions didn’t load in, so it was getting all confused. Uninstalled them, reinstdalled them, all’s right with the world.

X Jaeger (DA; restore settings from DF?) Installed, then copied over Application Data directory. Oops, bad license code since the PC ID is different now. Working, but nagging.
O PSACards (DA, DF)

X AdAware
X SpyBot S&D

X XP PowerToys/TweakUI
X Set up ClearType.

O Restore partial My Documents directory. (Since size will be an issue, do not bring over My Pictures or My Music for the moment, maybe more)
O Templates
O Spelling dictionaries?

X Windows Messenger (does it work now?) Yes, it does!
X MTClient (DA)

O Palm basic software (CD? DF – CUSTOMIZE TO LOAD STUFF FROM PALM, DESKTOP, OR SYNC BEFORE FIRST SYNC (my Palm’s okay).)
O PocketMirror
O BackupBuddy
O SplashID
O BalanceLog!!
O WordSmith
O BrainForest
O Installation directory (DF)

O SmartFTP (DA)
O RoboForm (DA; DF?)
O Siggy (DA)
O EditPad Lite (DA)
O FontMinder (DA?)
O SharpMT (does it work now?)

O home scanner software (CD)

X PaintShopPro 8.1 (CD)
X MS Project (CD)
X Visio (CD)

Do not install:
X iTunes (for now; no music files)
X POPfile (no need)
X OE Backup (no need)
X SyncIt (no need for now)
X AZZCardfile (no need for now)
X MSN Messenger (since WinMsgr works)
X SETI@Home (let’s hold off)

Now you see why I didn’t want to have to start over from scratch. And, at that, I’m sure I’m forgetting all sorts of stuff.

It’s a good thing Friday night is Bachelor Night at my house …

The Case of the Corrupted Kernal continues …

Attempts to push the image down to the only free 60Gb drive we have — so that I can then get rid of some of the stuff, and then reimage it, then push it down to a 40 — have failed. Don’t ask me why. So …

They can (and are going to anyway) get a 60Gb notebook drive, which would arrive on Friday. At that point, they could (hopefully) push the image down to that, plug it into a spare notebook and go from there.

I.e., two more days without my PC’s image. At least. Probably the weekend, too.

No.

So, Plan G. They get me a clean notebook as a loaner. I rebuild it into my desired image, use the data files from my backup drive at home, and I’m up and running by COB tomorrow. I hope. Then my old notebook can be shipped off to IBM for a week or twelve, and when it gets back, we transfer an image from the loaner notebook to mine, and I’m back to where I should be.

Rrg. Pain, to be sure, but I’m sure that, in a decade or two, we’ll look back on this sort of PC migration the same way we today look back on “I dropped my only copy of the typewritten manuscript on the ground and the pages got all messed up and some flew away, so I had to retype it all” as quaint and thank-god-we-live-in-a-modern-age way.

I hope.

The Case of the Corrupted Kernal Continues …

So, we finally decided to ship the thing back to IBM for warranty service. Okay. So, before we do that, we need to Ghost an image of the hard drive.

Hilarity ensues.

Well, not much hilarity. Just looooooooooong Ghosting. After all, there’s about 40Gb on that 60Gb hard drive.

And, um, a lot of it’s MP3 files which aren’t work-related. Etc.

Now, had I given it a thought (and gotten to the keyboard), I’d’ve wiped those off. Not because they’re non-work-related things, but because it would have an impact on the folks working on my machine and I have the frelling things backed up. So it would have been no loss to me, and would have helped the cause.

Didn’t think of it.

They finally got the Ghost image complete, and then went to the next step, to see if they could write it down to the hard drive on an alternative notebook. That’s got it’s own risks (different model), but there was a good chance it would work.

Except, of course, we don’t have any notebooks with 40Gb of drive space on them. Which means that the large number of unofficial files on my notebook (which is that way because, dammit, I carry the damn thing everywhere, work and home) not only slowed down the whole process, but made it impossible to complete.

*Sigh*

Okay, fine. Let’s trash My Music and My Picture — in fact, the whole Personal directory, too. Then upload it. I can restore those files when I need to. Okay?

Well, no. The hard drive, once Ghosted, was formatted to see if it detected anything wrong with it. Which it didn’t. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not the drive, but doesn’t indicate that it is.

Oooookay. Well, then, let’s reinstall that image back to the old hard drive, okay? Then we can delete these directories, cut off a good 10-15 Gb, and all’s right with the world, right?

Right. Except that there was a problem doing that, and now they have to recompile the Ghost image which, hopefully, will work, and then still …

1. Reimage the old hard drive.
2. Delete the junk.
3. Create a new reduced Ghost image offline.
4. Reinstall the reduced image on a new PC with a smaller hard drive.

All of those steps have something that could go wrong with them. And it’s going to be at least until COB tomorrow that I’ll know whether I’ll have “my system” (or a reimaged version of it) to work from, or whether that will have to wait the inevitable 3-6 weeks for IBM to scratch their heads and figure out what the problem is.

Rrg.

For the last few months, I’ve been using a faboo program called Lookout, a background search indexer for Outlook that lets me find any message in my multi-hundred-megabyte multiple message stores in a matter of a few seconds (vs. minutes for a by-folder check like Outlook provides). Sweet!

Now comes word that Micro$oft has bought them. Which means that the program is no longer available for purchase, and probably means that, rather than an independent product, the functionality will be bundled into Outlook Enterprise Edition XP 2008, available separately for $500, or as part of the Microsoft Seach Creation Enterprise Windows bundle for $13,000 …

And it won’t work, either.

Congrats, of course, to the two-man shop who put together a great product, and doubtless just made a big bundle o’ cash.

Note for self once PC is back in operation: check out the Picasa photo imaging software available free from Google (which acquired it earlier this month). Looks pretty cool, and has some good press.

(Amusingly, if you search for “picassa,” Google recognizes it as a possible misspelling — and asks if you were searching for “Picasso.” Heh.)

My PC crapped out again — same BSoD, etc., undocumented online (and we’re looking for the WinNT DDK to see if it gives us any clues), same endless cycle of reboots.

On the up side, my PC’s data is fully backed up.

On the bad side, you can’t back up aps, only image the whole frelling thing.

So while I could be handed a loaner whilst my still-under-warranty notebook went back to IBM, there to disappear for several weeks of diagnostics, I’d still be the equivalent of living in a rented motel while my house was being rebuilt. And then having to rebuild it.

So … they’re imaging the HDD, then they’ll see if they can push the image to a different model notebook, to serve as a loaner in the interim. And a few other glitches have delayed that until … well, it’s been 5 hrs, and nothing yet, so I finally asked them to hand me a notebook loaner and (mutter mutter mutter mutter …)

Looks like Margie and I will be sharing a machine at home tonight. (And, again, mutter …)

P.S. I miss tabbed browsing. I miss password managers. I miss ad blocking. Damn it …

P.P.S. I miss my RSS feeds. I miss my link bar. I miss …

P.P.P.S. I miss my popup blockers, dammit!

In the interest of trying to improve the inexplicably dismal performance on Margie’s PC (a long-term problem that I’ve spent many hours tweaking settings regarding), I spent the weekend yanking out the Outlook monolith, replacing it with a reinstalled Palm Desktop (for her calendar and contacts and PDA sync) and Thunderbird (for her e-mail).

On the down side, the performance still sucks.

On the up side, it got rid of Outlook.

I have another cunning plan to address the performance, but I think it’d better be a success before I start talking about replacing her IE with Firefox …

My PC crapped out again on me today, in the middle of a phonecon (for which I was, alas, taking the minutes). BSOD with a “KERNAL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR” pointing at atapi.sys, then an endless chain of the same “bad boot sector” errors as before.

Joy.

Dropped it off with the techies, they did a CHKDSK on it (the HD slaved to another machine), and all’s right (for the moment) with the world. Ran an IBM HD diagnostic that came up with no errors.

Gotta keep working on that backup strategy …

More Firefox news, this on new features planned for the 1.0 release (due this September). Keen.

(via Les)

My virtual life flashed before my eyes.

I mean, it’s a bad thing, when you get a BSOD and a message that says “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME,” right?

Holy hell.

No booting for me, ha-ha. After about 15-20 minutes trying to get my PC working again, I turned it over to the experts, our PC tech group. Their hysterical laughter didn’t calm my nerves.

After watching them try what I’d been trying, I shuffled back to my office, and start organizing the mess on my desk. What else was there to do, other than give in to a panic attack.

I immediately started thinking about my backup strategy, which is about as well-considered (and successful) as, say, the strategy behind the War on Drugs: occasional self-satisfied gloating over some minor accomplishment, but don’t press for a full accounting of whether anything substantial is occurring.

Like, say, having to actually restore my machine.

The problem is, it’s not just my work machine. It’s my home machine, too. So it’s not a matter of letting the PC techs reformat the hard drive and restore a standard image. Just to reinstall all the software — even discounting the stuff I don’t use any more — would take at least a full day. Assuming I could find it, and remember it. Like an amnesiac rebuilding his life, it would be a very uncomfortable month or two, constantly running into reminders of stuff I’d forgotten.

Let’s not talk about the data, either.

So. Home e-mail gets backed up weekly. That’s actually not too bad. Check.

My blog and wiki are up on my web site, so that’s cool. Except the files to rebuild things or old versions of data and web pages are … on my hard drive.

My Documents folder … hmmm, I did a full-blown backup of that to CD a few months ago, I think. Except for the My Music folder, which … well, I still have all those CDs (sob).

That leaves off the Downloads folder, sitting under my desktop (which is probably a bad place for it). That hasn’t been backed up in several months.

And then there’s applications that keep their data in their own folders. And the aps themselves, which would need to be reinstalled (from CD, or from that aforementioned Downloads folder).

Okay, and what aps are those? Start writing them down. Big office aps. Minor aps. Utilities. Things I won’t remember until I go to run them and they’re gone … lots, and lots and lots of aps …

Wonderfully depressing.

Continue reading “Breathe … breathe … breathe …”

Okay, so Doyce has moved to a different browser. And Les has been talking a lot about the same subject recently, too. And any number of other people whose opinions I respect seem to be using other, non-IE platforms …

Granted that IE has security issues, riddle me this:

1. Is there something about IE”s architecture that renders it particularly, intrinsically insecure vs. other browser platforms, or is it just that the Bad Guys find IE a more attractive target than less-used browsers? And, if so, is this more a matter of security through obscurity than anything else?
2. If the danger in IE is its openness to hostile scripting (via Java or ActiveX), how is a non-IE browser going to work around that and still maintain the web functionality folks (i.e., me) want?

3. I haven’t been bitten by a security hole yet, and have the full array of AV and spyware-blocking and anti-spam stuff running on my machiune. I avoid most risky behavior (don’t open spam, don’t hit file-sharing and adult sites). How much risk am I really taking here for what return?

I’m looking here for something a bit more sophisticated than “Micro$oft bad, Firefox Pretty” here. Any input welcome.

I’m looking for a utility to track what applications/processes are running on my machine that are using the network connection(s) present (bandwidth utilization would be a nice feature, too).

Anyone know of such a thing that they could recommend?

I got a GMail account just before we headed out to California (thanks, Fred), but haven’t really gotten into as of yet.

But if I ever do, GTray will be an essential part of using it. It sits in your system tray and alerts you when mail has come into your GMail account. Cool.

(via Seki)

Now you can download MP3 and WAVs of Bush and Kerry doing their “I’m MyNameHere and I approve this message” bits from their political ads. The intent is to have phone ringtones, but since there are WAV files, too, you can set your e-mail chime (or system abend warning) to the same politicky fun! Mix-and-match ’em — use your Favorite Savior of the Republic for calls coming from people you like, and your Despised Destroyer of All That Is Right and Just as the ringtone for people whose messages you want to ignore! Loads of fun!

Oh, yeah, that Ralph Whozits guy is in there, too.

(via BoingBoing)

One of the more unique nagware reminders I’ve seen come with SmartFTP. I’ve been using it as my default FTP client for about a month, since getting into the wiki thang. It allows for extended chmods, as well as having some related decent features, though it’s by no means perfect.

The tool is free for personal/educational use, $30 for commercial use. After the 30 day trial, a nagware screen comes up.

But here’s the clever (albeit still annoying part). It only comes up when you open up the ap between the hours of 8 and 5. If it’s for personal use, it’s less likely (I guess the thinking goes) that you’ll be using it during business hours (ahem), whereas it’s more likely that commercial users will be doing so.

It’s a clever idea. But it may lead to a rethinking of that “free” version.