Recently in Technology Category

Thanks to MeeCiteeWurkor for letting me know that owners of the Amazon Kindle, the electronic book substitute, can subscribe to the Kindle edition of BatesLine for a mere 99¢ per month.

Why pay for something you can read online for free? Kindle automatically and wirelessly downloads updates to your subscribed blogs, magazines, and newspapers, making use of Sprint's network. When you're ready to read BatesLine, wherever you are, it's there, ready to read, just as you'd see it on the web.

And in answer to Mee's question, yes, I do make some sort of royalty from Kindle subscriptions, through my participation with Newstex's Blogs on Demand service, which makes BatesLine available through LexisNexis, CanWest and other licensees.

When the Sitemeter mess came to light over the weekend, I noticed that this site looked funny in my laptop's copy of Internet Explorer 6, which is still the second-most popular browser among BatesLine readers. (IE 7.0 has taken the top spot, and Firefox is gaining rapidly.) There was blue space around my header image, and the right sidebar had slipped way down the page and to the left. The header image and the text looked like it had been enlarged using a particularly bad algorithm, and I noticed that on most sites, images appeared to be stretched out and pixellated. It was as if I had the magnifier turned on just for IE, but I couldn't find anywhere to turn it off.

Here's what I saw in the header (click to see the full size version):

And here's the sidebar overlap:

Everything looks normal in Firefox 3.0.1 and in IE 7. A reader e-mailed to say that things looked strange in his browser, too, although he didn't say which browser he was running. I went to browsershots.org to see what it looked like in various browsers, and it showed everything looking fine in IE 6.

Here's what it's supposed to look like (again, click to see the full size version):

If BatesLine doesn't look like that, please drop me a line at blog at batesline dot com, and let me know what browser and what version of the browser you're running and what kind of weirdness you're seeing. (Click the "Help" menu, then select "About...", and it'll show you the version number.) Thanks in advance for your help.

There maybe something funky about my particular Internet Explorer configuration. Or it may be a problem with the style sheet. I don't think Sitemeter is responsible, as the problem persisted after I removed Sitemeter. (I'm going to put it back now.)

EUREKA! Don Danz identified the cause and the cure. Evidently Dell thoughtfully altered the DPI setting of my high-res display to make icons and fonts look bigger, and it messes up websites. I put the DPI back to the default (96 dpi) and all is well.

107-year-old C. Yardley Chittick is the oldest living alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Class of 1922) and of his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi. Earlier this month, the Boston Globe covered Chittick's return to Phillips Andover Academy for his 90-year reunion, the first alumnus in the school's history to reach that milestone.

After Andover, Chittick went to MIT, where he majored in mechanical engineering, was a low-hurdle track champion, and a proud member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. (The oldest living brother in the fraternity, he donated his membership pin to the Beta Theta Pi archives last year.)

After graduating in 1922, Thomas Edison offered him a job, but he turned it down, thinking it would be more fun to work for a company that manufactured golf clubs. When the Depression hit, he went to law school, passing the bar in 1934. He practiced until he was 85.

A great-grandfather of six, Chittick said yesterday that he does not really have any secrets to longevity. He sailed for much of his life, exercised regularly, and played golf well past his 100th birthday, the Concord Monitor noted in 2005.

He never smoked and drank in moderation - a screwdriver every night with dinner was reportedly his libation of choice.

Now residing in an assisted-living facility in Concord, N.H., Chittick makes his breakfast and lunch each day and dresses for formal tea each afternoon. He still plays the mandolin, and is known to break into the song "Take me back to Tech" when speaking in front of large groups, said his son, 80-year-old Charles Y. Chittick Jr., who was among the four generations of family present for the event yesterday.

At ΒΘΠ's 2006 national convention in Toronto, Chittick was called to the podium, where he spoke briefly then sang the MIT Fight Song, aka Take Me Back to Tech." Click here to listen to an MP3 of Chittick speaking and singing the MIT Fight Song. According to an e-mail from Bob Ferrara of MIT's alumni office, Chittick repeated the feat at last July's convention in Boston, and plans to do it again this summer in Dallas.

Here's another version of the MIT Fight Song, all but the first verse, sung by a half-century worth of alumni of MIT's a capella male choral group, the Logarhythms:

I don't understand this.

I have an older laptop, so I use a PC Card for a wi-fi connection. It's a Netgear WG511T, which is compatible with 802.11b and 802.11g. It works just fine with a b or a g connection, as long as WEP is enabled. It doesn't work anymore (at least not consistently) with a g connection that doesn't have WEP enabled (e.g., a coffeehouse with free wi-fi). It used to work under all conditions. By "doesn't work," I mean it gets stuck trying to acquire an IP address, or it gets an IP address but then can't ping the router, or it can't resolve any domain names.

I have an old CompUSA WLAN 802.11b adapter (actually made by Gigafast). It works fine with the non-WEP 802.11g connection at the coffeehouse.

it could be something the matter with the Windows XP installation. (It didn't work under XP SP1, and when I upgraded, it still didn't work, but I got more informative error messages.) I have reset the stack using netsh and reinstalled the TCP/IP protocol on each adapter, but nothing seems to fix the problem.

It's possible that the Netgear adapter is going bad; I don't have another 802.11g adapter to test. The fact that it always works if WEP is enabled on the router makes me think it must be software.

What would really help is a new laptop, or at least a newer, gently-used laptop. I've had good luck with buying used from individuals. My first two laptops were bought from co-workers. Each was about a year old at the time and cost about half what it would cost new. The 1997 Toshiba Satellite 435, which runs Windows 95, is still running, although it can't do much. The 2002 Dell Inspiron 4000 is still going, too, although every component except the LCD has been replaced at least once.

If you happen to have a gently used but fairly recent laptop that you'd be willing to sell cheap, drop me an e-mail at the address on the left. What I'm looking for would have Windows XP (NOT Vista!) and media for drivers, built-in wi-fi, USB 2.0, a DVD writer, at least 1 GB RAM and at least 60 GB disk. I have a preference for Dell -- they're easy to work on, and Dell provides step-by-step instructions for taking them apart and putting them back together again.

A panel at the Wharton Business Technology Conference inspires mobility guru Russ McGuire to ponder bygone days:

My key reflection from this panel was that in 1995 I founded an Internet startup, had to buy a $20,000 Sun server and pay $1000 a month for T1 access to the Internet. In 2001 I founded another Internet startup, bought a $2000 Sun Internet appliance and payed $100 a month for business DSL. Today I continue to launch Internet-based projects (because I love it) but today I'm using Google Apps (for free) to set up the basic infrastructure, and am beginning to mess around with Amazon Web Services for a very scalable and affordable solution instead of a server or traditional hosting. My how the world has changed in a baker's dozen years!

FlightGlobal.com reports that American Airlines is looking for a 150-seat narrowbody aircraft to replace its fleet of MD-80s and 757s. The engines for this new short-haul fleet will need to make less noise, consume less fuel, and produce a lower volume of emissions. CFM (the GE / Snecma joint venture) and Rolls Royce are considering open-rotor technology for their next generation jet engines. Instead of the fan blades being inside a cowling, they'd be exposed. (Here's a photo of an open-rotor engine.)

This technology, and the promise that this could give a 25% to 30% improvement in efficiency, "seems to be really a paradigm shift in fuel consumption", says [American Airlines executive VP of operations Bob Reding].

He notes, however, that questions still need to be answered concerning the maximum cruise speed that aircraft can fly with open rotors, the noise characteristics and certification requirements.

"There will probably be some blade-out requirements," says Reding, adding that since certification requirements are not yet written "that is certainly one of the unknowns and certainly one of the issues that will have to be addressed".

By "blade-out" I think he means, "What happens if a rotor blade breaks off and goes spinning through the air like a ninja's throwing star?" Given that the United Air Lines DC-10 Sioux City crash was caused by fan blades from a cowled engine severing the hydraulic lines to the control surfaces, that could be an important thing to test.

AT&T has announced a deal that with Starbucks that will, among other things, give AT&T broadband subscribers access to free Wi-Fi at the coffee chain's 7,000 company-owned US locations. That's in addition to AT&T basic Wi-Fi access already available at McDonald's and Barnes and Noble Bookstores. The switch-over from Starbucks' current provider will take the remainder of 2008. Having to pay for Wi-Fi is one of the reasons I avoid Starbucks in favor of locally-owned coffee houses. (Better coffee, later hours, a more interesting clientele, and not doing evil things like threatening a local coffee company over use of a generic term like Double Shot are other reasons I like local better.)

In order for an AT&T DSL subscriber to qualify for free basic AT&T Wi-Fi, you have to subscribe to at least the Express level of service (1.5 Mbps download). Check your bill: I started back when unlimited access to AT&T Wi-Fi (then called FreedomLink) was an extra $1.99 a month. They're still charging me for it, but they shouldn't, since I qualify for free access.

It'll be nice to have more Wi-Fi connections available in a pinch, but I expect I'll still make places like Coffee House on Cherry Street, Shades of Brown, Double Shot, and Cafe de El Salvador my caffeinated, wireless homes away from home.

My browser was filling up with tabs I opened in trying to diagnose a problem which I thought was related to Windows. (I'm beginning to think it's really a hardware problem.) For my reference and yours:

DevCon: A Microsoft tool to list, check status, enable, disable, and update devices and drivers from the command line. Handy for when your system is too sick to handle running the graphical Device Manager. There are versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions. Works with Win 2000, XP, and Server 2003.

SC, the Service Controller: Built-in command-line tool to view status of and control services and drivers. Full command details here.

Windows command-line reference: The complete list of commands and how to use them. Nice for us old-timers who grew up on VMS and Multics and Unix and DOS. Most if not all of the system management and admin tools can be manipulated from the command line.

driverquery: Another built-in command. It outputs a table of info about all the installed drivers. With a switch and redirection, you can have it produce a CSV file that you can manipulate in Excel or another spreadsheet or database program.

Windows XP Support Tools: Won't vouch for it, but this site purports to offer for download the tools that come in the "Resource Kits" for various versions of Windows.

Debugging startup hangups: Enable boot logging via msconfig or when hitting F8 on startup, then check the log in %SystemRoot%\Ntbtlog.txt. You'll see the sequence in which drivers are started, and may be able to detect a pattern.

Several issues of InformationWeek's Langa Letter have been helpful:

XP's No-Reformat, Nondestructive Total-Rebuild Option: "Fred Langa shows you how to completely rebuild, repair, or refresh an existing XP installation without losing data, and without having to reinstall user software, reformat, or otherwise destructively alter the setup." It's not easy to find this option, but it's there, and it may solve your problems.

The OS Inside The OS: "Fred Langa shows how a simple tweak turns XP's low-level Recovery Console into a complete, standalone mini-operating system--in effect, an XP DOS!"

XP's Little-Known 'Rebuild' Command: "There's an easy fix for "Missing HAL.DLL," "Invalid Boot.Ini," and several other fatal startup errors, Fred Langa says."

On January 31, 1958, the U. S. launched Explorer 1 into orbit, America's first successful satellite launch. The Soviets had already launched two Sputniks, including one with the dog Laika. Vanguard, our first attempt at matching the USSR, crashed and burned in December 1957. We could have beaten Sputnik into space, but President Eisenhower didn't want to use a military ballistic missile derived from the German V-2 for the civilian space program. When Vanguard failed, Wernher von Braun and his team at Redstone Arsenal got the go-ahead to use their Juno I rocket for Explorer I.

Cuffy Meigs has a blog entry about the Explorer I semicentennial, with newsreel clips (narrated by Ed Herlihy!) of the Vanguard disaster and the Explorer launch and links to more articles about the event.

(The Explorer launch newsreel also includes an item about the founding of the United Arab Republic, a union of Egypt and Syria, which began on February 1, 1958, and ended three years later.)

If you're interested in space history, you owe it to yourself to visit the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas, one of the top space museums in the entire world, and just a four-hour drive from Tulsa. They have an excellent presentation of the Space Race between the United States and the USSR, starting with the German rocket program during World War II. The story is told with documents, text, movies, and artifacts, including a V-2, the Mercury Liberty Bell VII, Gemini X, and Apollo XIII capsules, and Soviet space vehicles and full-scale engineering models. The museum has the biggest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside the old Soviet Union.

Don Singleton, the longtime president of the Tulsa Computer Society, has launched a new tabloid newspaper called Tulsa High Tech. The first issue is out, and you can find it at library branches, coffee houses, and other locations around town, including Coffee House on Cherry Street, DoubleShot Coffee Company, and Shades of Brown.

Here, from the advertising rate card, is a kind of mission statement for the paper:

Tulsa High Tech is a new free newspaper which is solely advertiser supported. It will be distributed throughout the greater Tulsa area, covering information for the novice computer users, end users, small business owners, developers, and IT Professionals. We will include news on many different "High Technology" related organizations in Tulsa including Tulsa Computer Society (TCS), Tulsa Users of Macintosh Society (TUMS), Tulsa AutoCAD (TAUG), ASM Tulsa, Microsoft IT Pros of Tulsa (OKITP), Tulsa Java Users Group, Tulsa Linux Users Group (TLUG), Tulsa Small Business Server User Group (Tulsa SBSers), Tulsa SQL Server Group, Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group (TSPIG), TulsaDevelopers.NET, and other computer organizations, as well as graphic art, amateur radio, and other engineering, science, or other technology related organizations. We are offering to list their meetings and publish other information about their group in return for their members helping us take copies of the newspaper to businesses near where they live or work.

While there are a number of computer and technology-related user groups and classes around town, there hasn't been a central place to find that information. That is the niche that Tulsa High Tech seeks to fill.

The premier issue includes a review of Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, a story on how to recognize "phishing" e-mail scams, a profile of Helping Tulsa (an organization that refurbs computers for use by non-profits here and overseas), a "Beginners' Corner" column covering some e-mail basics, a review of a 3D visualization program called Vue.

You may be wondering, in this age of e-mail and the World Wide Web, what point there is in putting out a technology newspaper. The answer is that many of the people who would benefit most from connecting with local computer user groups and classes are those who are least able to find those resources online. A tabloid paper at the local wifi coffee shop or library is an accessible way for computer users to find the help they need.

Don would like to know if others share his vision for this kind of publication. If you would like to advertise, help distribute papers, or otherwise make this paper happen, please contact him via the Tulsa High Tech website.

P.S. Don compares Tulsa High Tech to the I/O Port newsletter published in the late '90s by TCS. But of course, a few regular features of I/O Port won't appear in the new paper as times have changed. He's posted a PDF of the June 1999 I/O Port issue. It's a real walk down memory lane from the days of dial-up, complete with BBS listings and access numbers for local Internet service providers like Internet Oklahoma (IOnet), Galaxy Star, Telepath, and Webzone.

MORE: Don Singleton has posted a couple of comments; I think they're worth reposting out here.

Michael, thank you very much for mentioning TulsaHighTech

If anyone is with a group that would like to be listed in TulsaHighTech, if they want an ad in the paper, or if they know of a place that would be willing to distribute the paper, and if they can pick up some for it, they can email me at donsingleton@cox.net or call me at 622-3417

One other thing in the premier issue was an announcement for a Photoshop Workshop that Paula Sanders is hoping to start. This is one reason why I feel Tulsa needs a regular paper like TulsaHighTech, because she tried to publicize her new workshop in the Tulsa Whirled and they did not even run her listing, even though they had it way before the deadline, and it was sent directly to the person in charge of the column. She is going to hold one additional meeting in February, but if no one shows up again she is going to drop the idea.

This is not just a Photoshop class, it is an effort to create a high level exchange of ideas and techniques between established artists that use Photoshop.

Emphasis added. There's value in promoting cross-pollenization of ideas among computer users.

The lack of posting the last few days is the result of business busyness, lousy access to WiFi at my hotel, and, most recently, the apparent failure of my laptop hard drive. (Can anyone suggest a good data recovery service? I had a fairly recent backup, but not recent enough.)

UPDATE: The drive (a Seagate 40 GB drive) seems to be OK, but not the laptop. I put the drive in a USB enclosure and was able to power it up, connect it to another computer, and copy critical data off of it. When I tried to reinstall it in my ancient (5 year old) Dell Inspiron 4000, the BIOS still couldn't see it. The BIOS had also stopped seeing the aftermarket DVD+RW I bought a while back.

Here's what I think happened: Thursday during a break at the convention I was attending, I headed over to the WiFi hotspot to check e-mail. I had the laptop set up to standby when the lid is shut and restart when the lid is open. I put it back in the backpack, thinking I had the lid shut all the way. It must have bounced open just enough in my laptop backpack to restart, and surrounded by all that nice padding, it overheated and something fried. When I pulled it out to use it during a session, it was already restarted when I opened it, and there was an I/O error dialog box in the middle of the screen. The laptop was non-responsive to my inputs. When I reset it, it refused to recognize the DVD+RW. So I popped that out and tried again, and it refused to recognize the hard drive. The BIOS init process seemed to hang at about 95% on the progress bar.

This laptop, which I bought for $700 second hand in June 2002, has had a new video cable, a new and bigger hard drive, new and more memory, a new motherboard, a new DVD drive, and a new keyboard installed at one time or another. Plus I bought a WiFi card and a USB-2/Firewire combo card to make up for the absence of those features. In other words, I've spent as much keeping it running as I paid for it in the first place. Still, it's been a good machine, it's been with me all over the country and across the pond, and it's been cheaper to pay the incremental costs over time than to buy a new machine in one fell swoop. Plus, I haven't yet faced the problem of reinstalling everything.

So if I do buy a new laptop, should it be another Dell? And should I stick with XP, go with Vista, or chuck it all and make this one a Linux machine?

My friend and fraternity brother Jim Reisert writes to let me know about a recent story in Computerworld about how Tulsa's Monte Cassino School is solving the problem of providing adequate and backed-up disk space for faculty and students.

Monte Cassino, a Catholic K-8 school, is paying a hosted storage service called School Web Locker, which will give each 7th & 8th grade student 100 MB of space, and a gigabyte to each faculty member.

"We knew this year [students] would be creating movies and doing other things, [so] they needed a lot more space," she said. The hosted offering "resonated with me as easy to manage," Stutsman said, adding that "we had problems with kids' files disappearing a lot last year. [The new system] would relieve a lot of that."

School Web Lockers also includes chat, calendaring and collaboration capabilities, she noted. In addition, the hosted system lets school administrators monitor and track all files uploaded to the system and enables them to lock out individuals for misuse.

And there's no need for boltcutters if someone forgets their combination or tries to use the locker to conceal contraband.

The system also includes password access that students must share with their parents, she said. The system also scans all files uploaded to School Web Lockers servers for potential viruses using Sophos PLC's security software and default controls, said Kelly Agrelius, marketing associate for School Web Lockers.

A school official estimates the system will cost them about a dollar per user per year.

If you don't currently have AT&T DSL service, you're eligible for their basic $10 a month plan if you're anywhere in AT&T's service area, even if you've been told that (up until now) DSL is not available for your phone number. It's part of the price AT&T is paying for the privilege of reassembling itself, according to Eric Bangeman at Ars Technica:

AT&T has quietly begun offering DSL service for $10 per month for new customers. Offered as part of the concessions the telecom made to the Federal Communications Commission in order to gain approval for its merger with BellSouth, the speed is nothing to get excited about: 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up.

AT&T is also doing little to publicize the new offering. In fact, I was only able to discover any reference to the low-price service by clicking on the Terms and Conditions link at he bottom of AT&T's residential high-speed Internet product page. A note on AT&T Yahoo! High-Speed Internet buried six paragraphs down says that the "basic speed ($10.00)" tier is available to new customers only, those who have not subscribed to AT&T or BellSouth DSL during the past 12 months, and the service requires a one-year contract.... In addition, AT&T must offer broadband to 100 percent of all residential living units in its territory, with 85 percent of that delivered by wire.

This is good news for people like my parents, who, although they live in a subdivision in the City of Tulsa, have been told that AT&T can't deliver DSL to their number. Their only option for broadband has been far more expensive cable Internet.

(Hat tip to Patric Johnstone.)

We have an Apex AD-1200 DVD player. It was the cheapest thing on the market when we bought it, but reviews on VideoHelp.com said it would play just about anything, including JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MP3 files burned to CD-R. It has worked pretty reliably.

A couple of months ago, CD-Rs stopped playing. We discovered this when we were getting ready for my nine-year-old's spring school project. He had created some short stop-action animations with his Digital Blue camera. I converted the resulting AVI files to MPEG (using TMPGenc) and burned them to a CD-R. We were going to take a small TV and the DVD player to school so we could display his creations alongside the projects of his classmates. (We did this last spring, when he used the Digital Blue for another project.)

This time it didn't work. Commercial DVDs were OK, but not a single CD-R worked. Every CD-R, regardless of color, brand, or age, brought up a NO DISC error message on the screen. Using a commercial cleaning disc didn't help any. We were able to borrow my dad's AD-1200, which could play the disc just fine.

This week I found a solution on the web, and tonight I tried it out. Someone called Xcusme posted five possible causes for the Apex NO DISC error, with a series of possible remedies. The most likely fix, Xcusme wrote, was stretching the springs which lift the laser assembly into place:

These loaders are designed to float the laser transport assembly on 4 rubber washers, one in each corner. Two of these are shown in the next picture below marked 'A'. The washers are held down with screws with large built-in flat washers. The rubber washers are molded from very soft rubber and act as shock absorbers. Underneath these 4 rubber washers are 4 small wire springs. Their job is to support the rubber washers. If these 4 springs collapse due to age OR from being weighted down by the laser ribbon cable (see #2 above) or just plain old age, the laser assembly will not be in proper alignment to read the DVD/CD. The laser can and will make adjustments for a misaligned DVD/CD, but only so far. Normally, when the laser is pointing straight up, it can read the DVD/CD just fine. If the laser beam is not striking the DVD/CD at a right angle (because of weak springs) it can't detect the DVD/CD, hence "No Disc."

One quick way to tell if this is the problem is if there's a gap between the screws' built-in washers and the rubber washers. If the springs are healthy, they should push the rubber washers up against the screws' built-in metal washers. Sure enough, that was the problem.

The fix is to remove the laser transport assembly by removing those same four screws. That allows moving the assembly out of the way enough to pull out the springs. After removing, stretching, and replacing each spring, I put the assembly back in place, replaced the screws, and tested it. Every CD-R I used worked flawlessly. (Normal DVDs still work, too.) For what it's worth, these springs are about three-eights of an inch wide and about half an inch long, made of fairly heavy gauge wire, and they aren't actually attached to anything; the platform sits on the springs and the springs sit on something else.

It wouldn't have broken the bank to buy a new DVD player, but I take a great deal of satisfaction in having fixed this one, using helpful info I found on the World Wide Web. Thanks, Xcusme.

If you're going to design a computer system that controls every aspect of a house's operation by voice command, maybe you should find a more reassuring name:

HAL software taps the power of your existing PC or PC device to control your home. Once HAL is installed on your PC, it can send commands all over your house using the existing highway of electrical wires inside your home’s walls. No new wires means HAL is easy and inexpensive to install.

HAL’s voice interface makes HAL easy to use. The user may pick up any phone in the home, press the # key, and then tell HAL to dim the dining room lights or close the garage door. It’s a two-way conversation, with HAL confirming that it has, indeed, performed the requested action.

HAL turns your PC into a personal Voice Portal. Is there an easier way to turn on the front door lights when you’re returning home late at night than to call ahead and tell HAL, "Turn on the front door lights"? With HAL, any phone -- anywhere in the world -- enables you to step inside your home and control it as if you were there. And you can ask HAL to read you your E-mail, give you a stock quote or a sports score or a TV listing -- because HAL automatically harvests Internet information for use when you want it.

Hopefully, this HAL isn't too intelligent. Can't you imagine? You're coming home in zero-degree weather in the dead of winter:

"Open the garage door, HAL."

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

(WAV file via moviesoundclips.com.)

This HAL (not the fictional, sentient, and murderous HAL 9000) has received some national attention for its use by "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" as a way of making homes more livable for those with physical handicaps.

HAL (the initials stand for Home Automated Living) offers an add-on to give the system a more human-sounding voice than the standard package. Four voices (combinations of male or female, British or American) are available, with more planned for the future. Maybe they'll offer celebrity voices at some point.

Wouldn't it would be cool, if a bit creepy, to have Douglas Rain's voice responding to my request to dim the lights? Or Stephen Moore: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to turn up the thermostat. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cause I don't."

I'd be even happier if HAL answered the phone with "KXXO, good evening."

BONUS LINK: The Case for HAL's Sanity. This writer claims that the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't go insane; he committed premeditated murder. Isn't that reassuring?

It's the golden age of the autodidact.

An increasing number of universities are making course materials available online for free. The materials can't be used for course credit, but they are available for one's personal enlightenment and enrichment. Two institutions where I gained some higher learning offer online course material.

First, there's the MIT OpenCourseware program.

For example, the Urban Studies and Planning department offers materials from well over 50 undergraduate and graduate courses, with syllabi, reading lists, lecture notes, and assignments. Their introductory course, 11.001J, looks like an excellent, well, introduction, to the history, terminology, and trends of urban planning.

The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department offers everything I took in my undergraduate program, including the four foundational courses taken by all Course VI undergrads (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Circuits and Electronics, Signals and Systems, Computation Structures); Artificial Intelligence; Automata, Computability, and Complexity. They even have Strobe Lab, including the required lab experiments (student must supply own stroboscope, rifle, ammunition, and target objects).

Back in the early '90s, our church offered extension courses from Covenant Theological Seminary, and I took about a half-dozen until our church dropped out of the program. Covenant, in St. Louis, was founded in 1956 as the seminary of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), a denomination which, through a couple of mergers, became part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which denomination the seminary now serves. (There's a newer EPC, founded in the 1980s, which has no connection with the earlier denomination.)

Anyway, Covenant Worldwide offers materials from the 20 courses that would constitute the Master of Arts in Theological Studies program if you were taking the courses on campus. For each course there is lecture audio in MP3 format, plus lecture notes in PDF format, and a list of recommended reading materials.

I can highly recommend Ancient and Medieval Church History and Reformation and Modern Church History, both taught by Prof. David Calhoun. One of my fond memories about his lectures is that he always began with a prayer written in the age he is covering in the lecture.

The Francis Schaeffer course is interesting, too -- not only because it's about the background, life, and work of the renowned evangelical writer, but because the milestones of his life were the milestones that shaped modern evangelicalism, from the fundamentalist/modernist controversy in the '20s, through the break between separation-minded fundamentalists and evangelicals in the '50s, to the beginnings of Christian political activism in the late '70s.

I've never heard his lectures on theology, but Robert Peterson served as pulpit supply at our church during two periods when we were between pastors, and he's a wonderful teacher. His course, Humanity, Christ, and Redemption is online.

Many thanks to TulipGirl for the tip.

Paul Ford writes on two different kinds of distraction, one good and one not so good:

But when wide distractions are available I avoid the narrow distractions, and those are the useful distractions. Let's say you're thinking hard about a concept--say, kittens. Kittens are young cats. They have paws and they are sometimes friendly. Your stepmother, you remember, didn't let you have a kitten. Why was that? Was she allergic, or did she really just hate you? Now, that's something worth thinking about. A concept worth exploring. That's a narrow distraction, a good distraction.

But with a wide distraction you think about kittens and all of a sudden your email pops up and you're thinking about Viagra, and about how horrible the world is and how it's filled with rapacious greedy spammers. You're not able to think about kittens any more so you check out the news to find out that China has a manned space program. Click. And that peak oil is a real problem and we might be living in an age where electricity becomes prohibitively expensive. Click. And that Apple just released a new iPod again, and everyone is all aflutter. There's really no way to bring all of that back to kittens. You've been broadly distracted. You might as well play some solitaire and go to bed.

In another article, he writes about how he copes with the temptation to broad distraction from his computer -- he uses Word Perfect for DOS and a little electronic keyboard that does nothing but store the text that you type for basic composition and editing.

And lately I’ve been working hard to become more productive. I’ve started quit every application that isn’t relevant to the issue at hand and tried my damnedest only to allow the good distractions to come in the door, rather than to let the broad, wide world in at all times. I try not to multitask when I can help it. I think of this as "Amish Computing." You push the worldly things away because they distract you from your goals.

I actually came across these a few days ago and was going to post something about them, but I got... well, you know.

Wow.

While giant squid have been snagged in fishing nets, and dead or dying ones have washed ashore, expeditions have repeatedly failed to photograph a live one in its natural habitat, the inky depths of the sea.

But in an article to be published Wednesday in a leading British biological journal, two Japanese scientists, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, report that they have made the world's first observations of a giant squid in the wild.

Working some 600 miles south of Tokyo off the Bonin Islands, known in Japan as the Ogasawara Islands, they managed to photograph the creature with a robotic camera at a depth of 3,000 feet. During a struggle lasting more than four hours, the 26-foot-long animal took the proffered bait and eventually broke free, leaving behind an 18-foot length of tentacle.

Hat tip: Eve Tushnet.

You've read about some of the problems I've had with my Dell Inspiron 4000, specifically about the motherboard failure that prevented the machine from even loading the BIOS. (See here, here, and here.) I have since replaced the motherboard and the machine works pretty well, although I've had some intermittent keyboard glitches -- a column of keys will stop working, but that's unusual. So far, on this box I've replaced the hard drive (original was too small and went into infinite repeated clicks if I accessed the Dell help file), the video cable (snow and occasional scrambled garbage), and the motherboard.

Julie R. Neidlinger has her own story of woe. The problem wasn't the computer but the Dell phone sales rep, who lied to her about the "benefits" of financing her new PC by opening a Dell Preferred Account through Dell Financial Services. When she realizes the DPA wasn't as good as promised, she went through another level of Dell Hell trying to close the account.

She's posted a detailed entry in hopes that Google will notice and point people her way when they search for Dell Preferred Account. This entry is here to support her quest, and I'll even throw in some Technorati tags to aid in the effort.

The presence of a good little Dell repair shop here in Tulsa with quick turnaround has made it more like Dell purgatory than The Bad Place for me, but I doubt such a place can be found in Julie's corner of the Lone Prairie.

We have a digital camera that takes great pictures, but we have had so many mechanical problems with it that I'm sorry we bought the thing.

We had been putting off the purchase of a high-quality digital camera for some time, thinking that we weren't quite to the point where what we wanted in the way of quality would be available in our price range. We had a less-expensive Kodak, the CX4300, a starter camera given to us by my in-laws -- no optical zoom, very limited exposure control, and a significant delay between pressing the button and capturing the image, but it was a digital camera nonetheless.

I took a closer look at digital cameras just before Christmas and found that there were a number of very good cameras in the $300 range. The Kodak DX7440 received high marks, and it boasted a 4x optical zoom, a built-in lens cover, a larger than normal screen, and the ability to capture QuickTime movies. So I bought one for my wife for Christmas.

We discovered the first shortcoming as soon as we opened the box -- it uses a special rechargeable battery, not AAs. I'm not sure how I missed seeing that in all my research, but I did.

As soon as we had to remove the battery to recharge it, we discovered a second shortcoming -- the camera cannot remember the time with the battery out. I would have expected a small power source to keep the clock running, or at least enough capacitance to maintain the current time while the battery is being changed. Instead, if you simply remove the battery for a second, the date reverts to 1/1/2004.

Within a month, that was the least of our problems with the battery. I was replacing the battery after charging it, and the plastic piece inside the compartment that holds the battery in place just broke off. There was no fixing it. I had to send it back to the factory for warranty repairs.

Shortly after getting the camera back, the lens cover, which automatically deploys and retracts when you turn the camera off and on, started sticking. Sometimes it would stick open, sometimes it would stick shut, or partly shut. Usually a nudge with the edge of a fingernail was enough to make it open all the way.

During out Florida vacation, the lens cover started working reliably again. Hooray! Then, the night before we drove to Orlando for our days in Disney World, the flash select button and the shutter button stopped working. Everything else works -- the viewscreen, the menu and review buttons, the USB interface, the zoom -- but I can't make the thing take a picture. Changing batteries had no effect.

I had brought along the other, cheaper Kodak digital as a backup, but when I took it out of the bag, the battery cover popped off and wouldn't go back on. You remember building Revell models? Where you had all the little plastic pieces connected to a plastic framework, and you had to carefully twist back and forth to free a piece from the framework without damaging it? Remember how the plastic connection turned white just before it separated? That's what one of the two little pegs that hold the battery cover in place looked like. I might have rigged a fix, but I could just imagine the batteries sproinging out at inconvenient moments. So during our two days at Disney we relied on our good old Canon EOS Rebel 35mm, with no way to tell if we got a good shot or not.

The sad thing is that the DX7440 really takes great photos. The presets -- e.g., for bright beach scenes, backlighting, fireworks -- really work well.

I'd love to hear from other DX7440 owners: Are we to be plagued with problems forever? Or are we just unlucky?

Another way the web is changing the way products are sold: Matt Galloway doesn't care for Microsoft's name for its new version of Windows. The problem is that the name "vista" is so generic, it makes it difficult to use analytical tools like BlogPulse to track web interest in the product. Matt notes that Microsoft benefits from its unique corporate name but tends to give its products generic names, while Apple has a generic corporate name but unique product names.

Matt also has some interesting things to say about word-of-mouth marketing and how traditional marketeers still don't get it.

Phil Zimmermann, hero developer who made secure public-key encryption available to the masses with the program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) -- and endured much tribulation because of it -- has figured out a way to make his phone number available without too much difficulty to those who need it without making it too obvious for those who don't:

To reach me by phone, please read the following:

(1) Some people tell me that it is not a good idea to put my home phone number on my web page. (6) They say that I will be swamped with phone calls from everyone who has a question about how to use PGP. (5) Experience has shown that they are right. (0) I would rather that people who have questions about how to use PGP read the fine manual, or failing that, contact PGP Corporation to ask those questions, or, failing that, ask any other randomly chosen private citizen who knows how to use PGP. (3) But I want to make it possible for some people to reach me directly; journalists, for example, or prospective clients for my consulting business, or sales inquiries from corporate customers who want to buy more than a few copies of PGP, or any other business contacts.

Interesting way to number his points, isn't it? If you really need his phone number, you really will have to read the whole thing.

A bit of blegging -- that's what you call begging on a blog -- if you don't mind. We have a couple of Kodak digital cameras and they both have the annoying habit of reverting to default date and time when the batteries are out for recharging. Of course, we don't usually remember to reset the date and time until we've taken a couple of dozen pictures. When we look back at our digital archives in 20 years or so January 1, 2004 will look like a very busy day.

I'd like to go back and change the file date and/or the embedded "taken on" date for these photos to the actual date while I can still remember what it is. Anyone know of an easy -- and preferably free -- way to do this?

Today is a major milestone in my professional life. After 19 years in one industry, 12 at the same company, I'm starting in a new business and a new position. I've made it a policy not to talk about my work on my blog, so while I won't be telling you about my new situation, I'm free at last to tell you about what I used to do for a living.

I found it hard to keep quiet about my old job. It's a company that does important work, and I worked with wonderful people doing very interesting stuff. I was proud to have been a part of the team for 12 years. The company has a significant impact on the Tulsa economy, providing hundreds of high-tech engineering and skilled manufacturing jobs, but it mostly escapes the notice of the politicians and the "economic development experts" at the Chamber of Comerce.

A week ago Friday was my last day as a Staff Engineer in the Computer Systems Group of FlightSafety International, Simulator Systems Division. FlightSafety, founded in 1951, operates a fleet of over 200 highly realistic FAA-certified aircraft simulators to train pilots. The company operates 43 learning centers across the U.S. and in Canada, France, and England. Many of the centers are adjacent to aircraft factories or maintenance centers -- for example, the Savannah center is next to Gulfstream's factory; the Fort Worth center is around the corner from Bell Helicopter's Hurst, Texas, facility. The purchase price of a corporate jet often includes FlightSafety training. FlightSafety also has learning centers near major regional airline hubs, such as Memphis, Cincinnati, and Manchester, England, where pilots can train to fly regional jets like the Canadair CRJ700 and the Embraer EMB-145. In addition to pilot training, the learning centers offer aircraft maintenance training for technicians and emergency evacuation training for flight attendants. Founded in 1951 by Al Ueltschi, in 1996 FlightSafety became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.

The simulators for those centers are built in Broken Arrow by the Simulation Systems Division (SSD). SSD also builds simulators and other training devices for the military and for training companies and airlines in other parts of the world. SSD is currently in the middle of building simulators for Flight School XXI, a major U. S. Army helicopter pilot training initiative.

SSD employs about 600 people here in the Tulsa area. It is the largest private employer in the City of Broken Arrow. It has no local customers -- every penny of the payroll comes from revenues generated by training time sold by the learning centers or by simulator sales to outside customers. SSD also uses local companies for component manufacturing and software subcontracting, representing more outside dollars coming into the Tulsa economy. Remember that the next time some economic imbecile tells you that the convention business is the only way to bring new dollars into the local economy. Besides FlightSafety, at least three other companies build or upgrade flight simulators or training devices here in Tulsa: Thales Training and Simulation (once known as Burtek), Safety Training Systems, and Cymstar.

I worked in the Computer Systems Group, and most of the work I did involved getting the various computers and aircraft avionics systems that make up a simulator to talk with each other. At one time or another I wrote software for communicating via TCP/IP, UDP/IP, raw Ethernet, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), CANbus, DR11-W, ARINC 429 and MIL-STD-1553. I've worked on simulators for civilian aircraft like the Lear 31, Dassault Falcon 900, Gulfstream 450, 500, and 550, Bell 212, Bell 412, Canadair CRJ, Embraer EMB-145, Citation Jet, Citation Sovereign, and for military aircraft like the RAF's Griffin, USAF's KC-135 tanker, the T-6A Texan (Navy and Air Force primary training aircraft), and the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor.

I traveled to FlightSafety learning centers in Savannah, Tucson, Wichita, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Teterboro and worked in East Aurora, New York, RAF Shawbury near Shrewsbury in Shropshire, and Altus AFB in southwest Oklahoma. For the most part, I enjoyed the opportunity to see a new place on the company dime, and I would get in as much exploration as I could while still getting the job done. I had only one really miserable trip, which was my last -- a three-day trip to the gloomy industrial hinterlands of northern New Jersey that stretched into 10 days.

Yes, I did get to fly the simulators once in a while, but usually only on visits to a learning center, because the simulators usually aren't fully assembled and operational when they leave the Broken Arrow facility. I feel confident that, in clear skies, with no wind or weather and no other planes in the air, I could take off, fly and land a plane, although not necessarily on the runway. A hazard of learning to fly via simulator is that a real aircraft doesn't have a "crash suppress" button.

FlightSafety's slogan is, "The best safety device in any aircraft is a well-trained pilot." It was good to be able to go to work every day knowing that my efforts were ultimately going toward saving lives. FlightSafety's simulators allow pilots to practice emergency situations without putting any lives at risk. In the simulator, a pilot can deal with engine failures, hydraulic failures, loss of instruments, and severe weather conditions like windshear. He can practice over and over again until his reflexes are trained to handle the situation in real life. In addition to the technical operation of the aircraft, FlightSafety puts emphasis on "crew resource management" -- pilot and copilot working together as a team, maintaining situational awareness at all times, working effectively and calmly during an unexpected situation.

It sounds cliched, but it's true: The best part of working for FlightSafety was the people I worked with. FlightSafety is blessed with friendly, intelligent, good-humored, talented, hard-working people. You hear about workplaces full of office intrigue, self-promotion, and backstabbing, but I never encountered any of that there. There’s a spirit of working together and doing what needs to be done to finish the job.

My new job is a great opportunity for career growth and advancement, one I couldn't turn down. I am, for the first time in my career, not working in a cubicle. Still, it wasn't easy to leave behind such a great place to work, and I wish the folks at FlightSafety all the best.

Maybe you knew this, but it was news to me: The 8-track tape was developed by the Lear Jet Company. The website 8-Track Heaven has an interview with Frank Schmidt, a member of the design team at Lear that developed the 8-track. Schmidt talks about the technical challenges -- the head mechanism, the rollers, the motor, the cartridges -- and what it was like to work for Bill Lear:

He was a weird character. One of the first things we had to do when we set up our plant in Detroit was remove all the clocks out of the building. The Lear factory, office, plant, whatever, never had a clock in it. It was like a gambling casino… he didn’t want you to know what time it was....

We had a weird place in Wichita, too. It was the only aircraft plant I ever worked in that had a barbershop. Bill felt that your hair grew on company time, so it should be cut on company time! (laughs) You could call down there, get an appointment, and get a hell of a nice haircut. The other thing we had was a kitchen. It was a walled-in area right in the middle of the building. You could go in there 24 hours a day and you’d find a nice big kitchen with 4-5 tables, and everything you’d find in a kitchen: stove, sink, refrigerator, freezer, oven, the whole works. Completely stocked. Dishes, food, anything you’d want. It was all free.

Ron Coleman calls attention to an aspect of setting one's affairs in order you may not have considered -- what happens to your e-mail account when you die? The parents of a Marine who was killed in Iraq are seeking access to his Yahoo! Mail account. Yahoo! is sticking with its terms of service, under which an e-mail account is closed down and wiped after 120 days of inactivity. Yahoo! terms of service specify that there is no right of survivorship in e-mail. Yahoo! may terminate an account and delete its contents upon notification of the account owner's death.

I feel for the parents, and I can understand why they want access to their son's e-mail -- it's something more of him that they can hold onto. I'm sure they'd also like to let all of his e-mail pals know what happened to him. Ron Coleman suggests that they might be able to seek a court order if there were a "specific compelling reason" for them to need access, and even then someone with no connection to the family should be given the job of sifting through and finding the relevant information.

Were I putting myself in harm's way and wanted someone to have access to my e-mail in the event of my death, I'd put the password in a sealed envelope and file it with my will. And I probably should provide a relative or trusted friend with a regularly updated list of people, to be notified upon my demise, along with their addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses.

Perhaps the parents could ask the court to access the account and send a message to every address found in the account: John was killed in Iraq. You can contact his parents at this address. They would appreciate any memories of John that you could share with them. If you have e-mails from him about his time in Iraq and feel comfortable sharing them with his parents, they would be very appreciative.

I think that would meet the parents' concerns without violating the Marine's privacy.

Were I a gambling man, I'd bet that we will see an epidemic of dowager's hump over the next 10 years -- more and more men and women with a pronounced forward curve of the upper spine. The cause won't be osteoporosis but cumulative deterioration of soft tissues caused by years of computer work. Chiropractic and massage, whatever temporary relief they may bring from pain, won't prevent or reverse the damage, because they don't address the cause.

TulipGirl's entry about computer exercises brought back to mind something I've been meaning to write about for some time. A little over a year ago I had a pain in the neck, aches in my shoulders, which sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies when I moved, headaches (especially behind the left eye), and occasional pain down the left arm. An MRI showed a bulging disc, probably impinging on a nerve root, and I was prescribed a course of physical therapy to help keep the disc in place and to stabilize my upper spine to avoid further problems.

I came into therapy believing that my shoulder muscles were too tight and needed to be relaxed, but the real problem was that they weren't tight and toned enough. The physical therapist explained that the problems had to do with a loss of the tone and stability of my upper back and shoulder muscles and the overstretching of back ligaments, all the result of spending far too much time with head craned forward and shoulders rolled inward, the natural result of working on something in front of you and below your line of sight.

One of the more notable reactions to the Tulsa World's legal threats against BatesLine came from Michael Gorman, the incoming president of the American Library Association (ALA). His response was not a defense of fair use and its role in public discourse, but a knee-jerk reaction, which, as it turns out, reflects a deeper lack of respect for blogs, the Internet, and the electronic availability and searchability of the written word. Karen G. Schneider has documented Gorman's reaction to the World controversy, along with his other controversial statements, on the blog Free Range Librarian.

Dan Lovejoy has been all over this story: The Federal Department of Homeland Security has put veterans of some of the most invasive software and Internet companies in responsible positions overseeing the department's privacy issues. Nuala O'Connor Kelly, formerly Chief Privacy Officer for DoubleClick, is now Chief Privacy Officer for the Department of Homeland Security. And an executive from Claria (neé Gator) is on a Homeland Security privacy board. Many websurfers, myself included, installed Gator because it promised to help us more easily manage all the different usernames and passwords one acquires in the course of registering for this newspaper's website and that online banking service. It also would hijack your browser and pop up windows for its advertisers based on the site you were currently browsing. Dan reminds that Gator has been the subject of a number of lawsuits.

Dan has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out all he can. If the Cornyn-Leahy OPEN Government Act (S. 394) gets through Congress quickly enough, the FOIA request might not be too expensive:

Dear Fry's Electronics, please, please, please open a store in metro New York. Tomorrow would be nice. Tonight would be nicer.

If any of my dear readers knows where I can find electrically-conductive tape for sale in the metro New York area, I would love to hear from you. If you can even tell me where to find the kind of electronics store that has every conceivable potentiometer, resistor, capacitor, and diode -- a mecca for electronics hobbyists, repairmen, and tinkerers -- Nerdvana, in other words -- that's the sort of place that is most likely to have what I need. E-mail me at blog AT batesline DOT com

It is a point of common knowledge back home that in New York you can buy anything imaginable from anywhere in the world. Don't let me down, Gotham.

Another excerpt from Angle of Attack by Mike Gray:

Like all power-plant engineers, the [NASA] Lewis [Research Center] people labored in obscurity; glory in the airplane business went to the pilot or the builder, and nobody ever remembered the guys who designed the engines that made it all possible. One Lewis engineer, Herman Mark, tells the tale of an aviation banquet he attended shortly after World War II where people were asked to say what they did in the war. As other men talked of dogfights over New Guinea and night raids on Schweinfurt, Mark braced himself for the mortification of admitting that he had never left Cleveland. When his turn came, ge stood, embarrassed, and explained that he had been working on engines out at Lewis during the war and all he had really done was to design a little metal vane that redirected the airflow in the B-29 engines and eliminated overheating in the bottom cylinders. He sat down, and the ripple of applause built to a roar as the audience came to their feet. This happened to be a crowd that could fully appreciate the meaning of the term "engine fire."

That's the verdict on my Dell Inspiron 4000 -- the motherboard has failed in some way. They tried swapping everything that could be swapped, but the system continued to freeze during startup.

From Dell's support website, I gather that this freeze-up problem has afflicted many Dell systems, which is why I probably won't make my next system a Dell. And I have to wonder at the problem reasserting itself so quickly and dramatically after I had the laptop in for replacement of the video cable.

I will give Dell credit for one thing -- I have already received my replacement power supply -- less than a week after I learned about the recall. Now if I only had a healthy laptop to plug it into.

Thanks to readers K. A. Hruzer and Steven Roemerman for writing with tips on diagnosing my poor laptop's problems. It was reassuring to see that both had similar thoughts on what could be wrong. I've tried reflashing the BIOS to no avail, as well as disabling everything in the BIOS that I can find to disable. I replaced the memory. It passes Dell's diagnostic suite. The next thing to try is replacing the reserve (CMOS) battery, which powers the clock, the BIOS, and the NVRAM. I will keep you posted.

Still battling this freeze-up problem on my Dell laptop. I may do grievous bodily harm to the next person who suggests I just need to reinstall Windows. I am seeing freeze-ups occur when the BIOS is loading, long before Windows is even touched. To prove that Windows could not possibly be involved, I removed the floppy drive, the CD-ROM drive, and the hard drive, and as the BIOS was loading, the thing still froze for several minutes before unfreezing. I'm running Dell diagnostics right now -- it boots to DOS from a floppy -- and it's frozen up six times already, but has only failed one test so far. (The serial port was too speedy, it says.)

In the extended entry, you can see blurry screenshots of the boot screen, where it consistently freezes up -- maybe someone out there can give me a clue:

I just learned today that the AC adapter for my Dell Inspiron 4000 (vintage 2002) has been recalled. In fact, any Dell laptop shipped between September 1998 and February 2002 may be affected.

Q. What is the issue with the Dell C-Family AC Adapter?

A. The adapters could overheat, which could pose risk of fire or electrical shock.

Q. What are the symptoms of the issue?

A. Customers could experience smoke emitting from the AC adapter. Customers could also experience the housing of the AC adapter melting or, in some cases, a flame.

Dell has set up a special website so you can find out if your adapter needs replacement.

In the meantime:

While awaiting a replacement adapter from Dell, customers should unplug the adapter from the wall electrical outlet when unattended. If an adapter shows any sign of overheating, customers should immediately unplug the adapter at the wall electrical outlet and notify Dell.

It's bad enough having to worry about the AC adapter deciding to execute the deprecated HCF instruction, but my Inspiron has started having seizures again. After several months in remission, which seemed to be the result reinstalling an older version of the video driver, the machine has begun again to freeze, sometimes for a fraction of a second, sometimes for several minutes -- the display remains unchanged, typed keys and mouse movements aren't buffered, and the system clock stops, and does not catch up when things start moving again. The only recent change has been replacement of a video cable, but that happened several days before the seizures began again. This can happen at any time, even before the operating system (Windows XP Home) has started to load.

(By the way, the cable was replaced by Wholesale Computer Supply at 5727 S Garnett -- they got it done quickly and for a reasonable price.)

A bit of wisdom found in an unexpected place -- page 2-1 of the Harris NightHawk Series 1000-4000 Maintenance Guide.

Why keeping a problem log is essential to troubleshooting:

"Remember that facts which are not written down have a habit of adjusting themselves to fit the theory of the moment."

(I promise I'll get back to ugly, nasty, brutal city politics shortly, but I need a break, and you probably do, too.)

Back in the early days of electronic calculators, there were books of calculator tricks -- calculate a certain formula and the result, when viewed upside down, spelled something. For example, on those primitive LED displays, 7734 upside down looked like H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

Programmers play similar tricks with numbers in hexadecimal notation. Hexadecimal notation is the base-16 representation of a number, unlike the base-10 notation you humans use, and in addition to 0 through 9, the letters A through F are used to represent 10 through 15, respectively. Hexadecimal notation is the usually the most convenient notation to represent the way data is stored in the memory of a computer. In the C programming language and its derivatives, hexadecimal numbers are differentiated from decimal numbers with a leading "0x". For example, 0x100 (hexadecimal) is 256 (decimal):

1 x 16² + 0 x 16¹ + 0 x 16⁰ = 2 x 10² + 5 x 10¹ + 6 x 10⁰

As a way to help debug software, programmers will create bogus values to be able to differentiate between uninitialized memory and memory initialized to 0. Any pattern will do, but it's more fun to use the letters of the hexadecimal digits to spell something. IBM engineers based in Austin programmed the AIX operating system to initialize memory to 0xDEADBEEF (must have been a Sooner that came up with that). Other examples (and they must be 8 digits long) are 0xBEEFCAFE and 0xf00dd00d (using 0 for O). Here are some examples, which also use decimal digits to represent numbers.

I recently came across a clever hexadecimal word that was unfamiliar to me. It's used as a domain name -- I found it while looking for information on how to stop referrer spam -- and in eight hex digits it sums up an important programming truth.

0xDECAFBAD

I couldn't agree more.

The site is worth a look around for those interested in creative ways to piece together different web tools to make interesting new things happen. And if you don't mind a couple of bad words, he has some sound advice for bloggers trying to figure out what to write about:

I haven’t been writing a lot here, but things have been percolating in my head. I’ve gone through phases of wanting this place to be a bit of a techie zine, I’ve been in a funk, and lately I’ve been telling myself that I should blog like no one’s watching....

The way I perceive this whole blogosphere working, long term, is for bloggers to read some Joseph Campbell and “Follow Your Bliss”. You could serve the whims of “traffic” for awhile, but if it’s not following your bliss, you’ll get tired of keeping up. But if you hook into your bliss, there’s bound to be traffic-a-plenty coming just to watch you do your own funky breakdance on that piece of cardboard you threw down on your domain name.

I hereby give myself permission to write about whatever the heck I feel like writing about. (But don't worry, I will still keep you up-to-date on Tulsa news, although lately that's less like dancing and more like a slog through the Slough of Despond.)

Usually, I'm the guy people ask for help with their home PCs, but lately I've run into a few strange things, and for all the googling I've done, I can't figure out what's going on.

1. A Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop, running Windows XP Home, will freeze up for minutes at a time. Everything stops -- the clock stops updating, the video screen freezes, keystrokes and mouse inputs are ignored. The display stays on, unchanged. If the disk access light is on, it stays on; if off, it stays off. Eventually, it seems to come back to life. I thought it might be CPU throttling -- slowing the CPU to keep the temperature down -- but the CPU is staying cooler than 45 degrees Celsius. The computer is not just busy -- if it were busy, then the keys I type would be buffered and displayed when the CPU yields time to other processes, but in this case the keystrokes are lost. It's as if time stops and the CPU is in suspended animation. It isn't consistent -- it's very bad some days and hardly happens other days. Seen anything like this before?

2. At home we have a remanufactured Dell Dimension 2400, which we bought from the Dell Outlet online for pretty cheap. This too is running Windows XP Home. The kids use it, so we've tried to run some of their older games. The games from Broderbund won't run unless we set them to run in Windows 95 compatibility mode. The games will then run, but the video display for all programs appears upside down as long as one of the games is running. Stop the game and the video returns to normal color depth and resolution and is back to right-side up. Anyone seen anything like that before? The monitor is about 10 years old, a NEC Multisync 4FGe.

3. Norton Internet Security (NIS) 2002 was interfering with the Internet. I had to reinstall Norton Anti-Virus, and apparently it reinstalled NIS 2002 at the same time. It had an effect on my ability to view websites with anti-bandwidth-theft devices installed. Sites like Ephemeral Isle and AllahPundit are set up to prevent other sites from linking directly to their graphics -- a graphic can only be viewed if the referrer is a page on the same site. With NIS 2002 installed, even though not activated, I could not see the graphics on the pages on these sites. After I used Symantec's removal tool to get rid of NIS 2002, I could see the images. Oddly enough, I still can't do a live update for Norton Anti-Virus from that machine, although it gets further in the process than it did when NIS 2002 was still installed.