by Keith Fenske November 2006 to July 2007

This archive file contains the following stories that first appeared in "Bloggo - The Non Blog" between November 2006 and July 2007:

• All Froze Up
• Buy Bigger Disk Drives
• Convert Ye Office Mateys
• Lack of Courage
• Misfits in Cyber-Space
• MSIE6 Versus WIE7
• Re-Coding Java
• Roxio Bites Dell In The UDF
• Since My Last Tow
• Size Matters
• An Unfair Burden

The presentation here differs from the original because this file makes less use of cascading style sheets: font sizes and spacing are relative to the defaults chosen by your browser.  The contents are copyright © 2006, 2007 by Keith Fenske with all rights reserved.

"There are only two important things on a business card: who you are and what you're selling.  Everything else is just decoration to make yourself noticed or remembered."  (Keith Fenske, November 2006)

"It is far better to deal with problems directly than to dig yourself out of a hole later."  (Keith Fenske, November 2006)  Written for certain sellers on eBay, or retailers in general, who feel that blaming the buyer is good for business, until the store's reputation goes bad and no more buyers can be found.

Roxio Bites Dell In The UDF

Tuesday, 7 November 2006
by Keith Fenske

The first symptom of this problem is of course seeing an empty directory for a disc that you know contains valid data.  Older versions of Windows, all the way back to MS-DOS, may have no trouble showing the files, if the default Windows (or DOS) file system is being used without added packet-writing software.  The second symptom is that the Properties item for the CD drive shows the file system as "UDFRDR" instead of "CDFS" or "UDF".  A third symptom is that the drive is not identified as a CD-R/RW, DVD-RAM, or DVD-R/RW drive but as "UDF Drive Letter Access".

I first encountered this problem on a Dell Dimension tower about four years old and running Windows XP.  Several CD-R discs were received containing photos.  Some could be read, most could not.  All discs could be read on two newer computers running Windows 98, 2000, or XP.  I thought it was the hardware, so we replaced the DVD-ROM drive on the Dell with a brand new combination CD/DVD reader/writer similar to the two newer computers.  (We kept the original CD-R/RW that was the second drive on the Dell.)  The same problem occurred: we could not read most of the UDF-formatted CD-R discs.  That's when I noticed the unusual labels for the file system, started searching on the internet, and eventually discovered that Roxio drivers were still running even though DirectCD itself had been disabled in the system registry.

Obviously, the best solution would have been to properly write the discs in the first place, but your friends aren't likely to believe you that there is a problem, especially not when they can read the discs on their own computer.

A second solution is to uninstall any packet-writing software using Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs.  With Roxio, you may need to uninstall all of Easy CD Creator and then re-install it with a custom setup where you unselect DirectCD.

If you can't do that on a packaged system like a Dell, for example, then prevent the unwanted drivers from running.  Their location and names vary depending upon the version of Windows and the software installed, but for Windows XP and DirectCD, look in the \WINDOWS \SYSTEM32 \DRIVERS folder.  You shouldn't delete these files while the system is running, but you can rename them so that Windows won't find them after the computer restarts.  Append ".disabled" (without the quotes) to the end of the following file names, if they exist on your computer:

• udfrdr.sys
• udfreadr.sys
• udfreadr_xp.sys - CD-UDF NT Filesystem Reader Driver

• cdudf_xp.sys - CD-UDF NT Filesystem Driver
• dvd_2k.sys - DVD-RAM AddOn Driver
• mmc_2k.sys - CD-R/RW AddOn MMC Driver (W2K)
• pwd_2k.sys - Win2000 Framework for Packet Write Driver

"When someone exhibits the very same behavior they are decrying, then there's not much point in talking or listening."  (Keith Fenske, November 2006)  A general comment for self-appointed arbiters of right and wrong.

"She is generous with things that don't belong to her."  (Keith Fenske, November 2006)

Sunday, November 19th.  I have seen the new Windows Vista (RC1) and all I can say is that early adopters will be greatly disappointed and/or frustrated.  Over the next few months, if you have a choice between Windows Vista and Windows XP Professional, go with the XP Pro.

"He is one of those people who think that none of their difficulties are caused by anything that they do."  (Keith Fenske, November 2006)

All Froze Up

Tuesday, 28 November 2006
by Keith Fenske

I was making a couple quick stops on the way to work.  First, at the Save On Foods grocery store to pick up zipper freezer bags that we use for organizing computer hardware and software.  Then to Canadian Tire to replace a snow brush that I broke before I even started the car this morning.  Then to nowhere at all.  After running well on two trips, my car wouldn't start the third time.  The engine would turn over fine, but it wouldn't fire.  I thought it might be flooded; it wasn't.  (It's hard to flood a fuel-injected car in normal use.)  Draining the battery by repeated attempts was not a good idea.  The automotive service desk at Canadian Tire couldn't help me; they were polite but too busy.  The customer service counter at Office Depot lent me their store phone when I asked for change for the pay phone.  Long delays at the auto club forced me to do a little thinking.

Why tow the car to a mechanic, or wait for a day at Canadian Tire, when it's probably something simple?  The car had been running well.  The ignition system wouldn't have suddenly failed; more likely the problem was with the fuel system.  A trace of water in the fuel tank would freeze up at this temperature, blocking the delivery of gasoline.  I'd never had this problem before with this car, but that didn't mean it couldn't have happened after being parked overnight with the rear end and hence the gas tank facing into the wind.

I went back into Canadian Tire, bought some Heet gas-line antifreeze (mostly methyl or wood alcohol) from the same cashier and made a joke about this repeat visit, dumped the whole container into the fuel tank, waited a few minutes, and tried again.  No luck.  That car wasn't startin' for nobody*.  At least, not anybody in a hurry.  Then I had my second good thought before brain freeze set in.  Since waiting for a tow truck would be a long wait, maybe the gas-line antifreeze will work given some more time.

In a sense, I was avoiding doing anything by walking home.  A ten-minute walk where my legs didn't feel cold by the time I got home -- never a good sign in cold weather.  (A warm feeling is actually one of the first signs of frostbite.  No feeling is worse.)  I borrowed another car, made it to work several hours late, and left early.  My car started.  The borrowed car started too, of course, in a parking lot side-by-side and with me as the only driver.  I drove the borrowed car home.  A neighbor and her daughter were shovelling the snow from their driveway, so I told them my story, which was starting to be funny.  Awkward and inconvenient, but funny, because nothing really bad has happened.  Then they told me their story: they were going to Zellers in the same shopping center as Canadian Tire.  I got my ride; I got my car gassed up and back home at a normal time of the day, having actually accomplished everything that I set out to do, just not in any way that I would have expected.

(* Deliberate grammatical error.)

"The more you do for other people, the less they do for themselves."  (Unknown, possibly original: Keith Fenske, December 2006.  See also May 13th and the revised June 2008 comment.)

"born-again hypocrite": a person with strong almost fundamentalist religious beliefs that uses those beliefs to justify their actions, while not affording others the same rights and privileges.  (The precise definition is original; however, the phrase itself is entering common usage.)

Saturday, December 23rd.  Finally, a reasonable opinion on Windows Vista, quoting myself from a news group.  "Well, like, 16-bit is so yesterday.  All my best friends have 32-bit, so I'm going 64-bit in January.  Do you think it makes me look phat?"

Saturday, December 30th.  I can't believe how much money people are spending on digital cameras.  For me, the whole idea of photography is the pictures, not the toy that produces them.

"Your words change nothing, and so mean nothing."  (Apology not accepted.)

Saturday, January 13th.  There are 242 ways of making change for one dollar using pennies (1-cent coins), nickels (5 cents), dimes (10 cents), and quarters (25 cents).  Now you know.  You're welcome.

MSIE6 Versus WIE7

Tuesday, 16 January 2007
by Keith Fenske

One consequence of improved compliance with various standards for web browsers is that some things which used to work on MSIE6 (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6) no longer work on WIE7.  New features don't always work as expected; for example, the pop-up blocker may block web sites even when told not to.  The overall appearance of WIE7 has changed considerably, with the menu bar gone until you right click on the toolbar and restore the view settings.  Oversized buttons and tabs have appeared.  Most of this can revert back to the previous MSIE6 style, with some patience and prodding, but having your browser suddenly look different is upsetting to many users.

Of more concern are things that don't work in WIE7.  Many software applications use features that are serviced directly or indirectly by Internet Explorer.  One of these is "scripting" as in the JavaScript used on interactive web pages.  Older programs were tested against older versions of Internet Explorer, and if they worked, the developers may not have strictly followed the standards.  In other words, they may have been a little sloppy in their programming, or they may have used tricks that are not supported in WIE7.  You can get scripting errors when trying to run a program or view a help page that appears totally unrelated to Internet Explorer.  The errors may be minor, and you might be allowed to continue with the application, or they may prevent the application from running.

In the past two months, I have found several systems with conflicts related to WIE7, so much so that I don't recommend WIE7 for Windows XP computers despite Microsoft's targeting this as a critical update.  (Older computers with Windows 98/ME/2000 can only run Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1, so none of this applies to them.  Windows Vista starts with WIE7, so removing it is not an option.)  I suggest that Windows XP computers should continue to run Internet Explorer 6.0 SP2 along with all current updates for that version.  Web sites will generally stay at the MSIE6 level until Windows Vista becomes the dominant operating system for Windows computers.

If WIE7 is causing problems, and if those problems weren't present two months ago with MSIE6, then you can remove WIE7 as follows:

1. Click the Start button, Control Panel item (which appears as Start button, Settings, Control Panel in classic menus).
2. Double click on the "Add or Remove Programs" icon.
3. Scroll down in the program list until you find "Windows Internet Explorer 7".  Click once on that name.  Click the Remove then the Next button.
4. You will be warned about other programs that were installed later, which may or may not depend upon WIE7.  Click the Yes button when asked, "Do you want to continue?"
5. Once WIE7 is removed, Windows will want to restart.

1. Click the Start button, All Programs, Windows Update item (which appears as Start button, Windows Update in classic menus).
2. You will be shown two buttons: Express and Custom.  Click Custom.  (You may be required to validate your copy of Windows XP at this point.  Continue only if you have a legitimate copy.)
3. In the list of high-priority updates, you will see "Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP".  To the left of the name is a check box and a plus sign.  Clear the check box and click the plus sign to expand the description.
4. At the bottom of the description is another check box for "Don't show this update again".  Click this check box so that it's selected.
5. Click "Review and install updates" to install other high-priority updates, if any.
6. Click the "Install Updates" button.
7. Windows may want to restart your computer.

"Yeah, but she'd build a swimming pool in winter."  (Keith Fenske, January 2007, a comment about poor planning)

Convert Ye Office Mateys

Tuesday, 23 January 2007
by Keith Fenske

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Personally, I find it hard to justify the purchase price of a new copy of Office 2007, so I'll continue using my $100 copy of Office 2000 for a while longer.  The overall cost of computers continues to decline, while relative prices for Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows continue to increase.  You can pay as much for retail boxes of Office and Windows as for the hardware.  In US$, suggested list prices for Office 2007 haven't changed much from Office 2003, although the packages are somewhat different.  In Canadian dollars, Office 2007 is available as follows:

There are too many choices.  Without some advice, those choices are meaningless:

• The most important applications are Word (the word processor) and Excel (spreadsheet).  Anyone who pretends to do real work needs these.  They are the world-wide standards for exchanging documents.
• A third application is PowerPoint (presentations).  Not everybody needs this.  If you never make PowerPoint presentations, perhaps only look at some that friends send you, then you can download the free PowerPoint viewer.  There are free Excel and Word viewers too, but you should have the full versions of both Excel and Word.

• Outlook is Microsoft's corporate e-mail program, for use with Microsoft e-mail servers.  Very few people at home use Outlook unless they want the same program as at work.  There are much better and free e-mail programs.  Do not confuse Outlook with the free Outlook Express that comes with Windows (called "Windows Mail" in Vista).  Trusting Outlook to manage all your information about other people is questionable; typing the same details into a Microsoft Word document is much more reliable.
• Publisher is a desktop publishing program suitable for booklets, flyers, posters, etc.  Almost everything Publisher does is non-standard, so it's quite an orphan in the publishing industry.  It's fine if you have control over the whole production process, up to final printing, and if you are collaborating with someone who has the same software.  Just don't expect to share documents with anyone else in the graphic arts business.
• Access is a database program.  If you don't already use it, then you probably don't need it.
• Groove, InfoPath, and OneNote carry on a long tradition of having a really expensive version of Microsoft Office loaded with extra programs that may not survive past the next release.  In a corporate setting, they may be useful; in a home setting, I doubt it.  Large companies often purchase software in volume licensing agreements that greatly reduce the unit cost, and employees never have to pay these bills.  At home, you pay from your own pocket, if you have more money than brains (MMTB).

Here are Canadian prices for Windows Vista:

Not all editions and packages are listed above.  The need for so many is based on marketing, not on utility.  By offering lower-priced editions, Microsoft can claim that base prices have not increased.  By confusing the selection, they encourage people to buy higher-priced editions, because nobody wants to choose the wrong one and miss some essential feature.  Dare I say it ... get an Apple Macintosh!  I'm joking.  Maybe.  I do like their Mac-versus-PC advertisements on TV (QuickTime required).

Wednesday, February 7th.  Today's date has only twos and sevens: 2007/2/7.  It looks even better with leading zeros: 2007/02/07.  I've recently completed a documentation product for my Java games and utilities.  Some I wrote as sample Java code; some I wrote for my own use.  Those that are suitable for public release are now linked on my home page or my "Java Programming Assignments" page.  Most are as ZIP archives with the executable Java class files and documentation in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.  The Java source code is included for ones previously released as examples.  Not all programs are earth-shattering in their significance.  They are fun or useful to me and other people may enjoy seeing them or using them.  A few are older, such as games written for the obsolete Java 1.1 AWT applet class, but I'm not going to rewrite history.

Thursday, February 8th.  The television series "Lost" started up again last night, after being off the air for a couple months (see the IMDb page or Wikipedia).  I didn't watch.  The show has gotten so far away from its beginning, padded with unnecessary characters and flashbacks, that it became a parody of its own title.  How many TV shows have died this way, by being extended and extended until the ratings drop, and end up with no conclusion?  There will be no answer to the questions, only more questions about the answers.

Sunday, February 18th.  I found an ashtray in the snow beside the road.  It was clean, in good shape, like the one that was in my car.  The doors were unlocked, so I put the ashtray back in the dash where it belonged.  The glove compartment was open and disorganized.  I re-arranged that, finding nothing missing.  The rest of the car seemed untouched except for a small, unexplained dent in the hood.  The windows weren't broken.  There were no scratches on the doors or damage to the door locks.  I can't tell you how a thief got inside my car.  This could have been done in several ways, the strangest being with a tennis ball.  Someone was looking for loose change, coins for parking meters, which of course there are none.  I tell myself that this wouldn't have happened if the doors had been locked.  It's easier to rationalize that I made a mistake than it is to think that persons unknown can enter my car without my permission anytime they want.

Monday, February 19th (Family Day).  Today is a provincial holiday.  I celebrated by sharing unwanted items from my closet with family members that weren't quick enough to run away (joke).  Several good shirts were too small; more were ugly, worn, or faded.  One winter jacket, one long coat, and two warm vests aren't quite big enough around the middle anymore.  Way in the back, I found regional clothing from overseas that needed to be carefully folded and stored away with matching souvenirs of where I once was.  Now I have spare hangers, or as someone has suggested, room to go shopping.

"He's like a person that sees a train wreck happening and runs towards it."  (Keith Fenske, February 2007)

A small joke.  One person says, "I'm Jewish and get it from my mother!"  The other person says, "So what?  I'm confused and I get it from everyone."  (Keith Fenske, February 2007)

Thursday, February 22nd.  I sold my first item on eBay today, after two years of being only a buyer.  There was some difficulty with eBay and PayPal procedures, which is to be expected the first time (lack of experience on my part).  Otherwise, the sale sent well.  The buyer was polite, friendly, knew exactly what he wanted, and paid immediately.  I sent the package by express post and it arrived halfway across Canada the next day.  That's faster than local delivery inside my city!  Everyone seems happy with this purchase.

Saturday, March 3rd.  Minus 21.2 degrees yesterday morning (Celsius or -6.2 degrees Fahrenheit) and plus 9.9 degrees this afternoon: a 31.1 degree rise in temperature (56.0 Fahrenheit degrees).  Must be springtime in Alberta!

Sunday, March 11th.  Windows XP computers switched over to daylight saving time (DST) today; Windows 2000 computers didn't.  They both supposedly had updates several months ago to recognize new DST rules....  It wouldn't be so bad if Windows 2000/XP didn't have a built-in assumption that affects how it reports file dates and times (see the annoyance page).  Until DST kicks in on the Windows 2000 machines, I'll have different machines reporting different times (off by an hour) for some but not all files on the local-area network.

Update (Sunday, April 1st - April Fool's Day).  Windows 2000 computers switched over to daylight saving time on the old schedule.

Re-Coding Java

Thursday, 15 March 2007
by Keith Fenske

In software design, you must recognize the target for any particular program: who will be using the program and what they will be doing with it.  If the target keeps changing, then the project is doomed to failure.  Too often, good software is gutted and refurbished to add features that nobody cares about, and which force the elimination or downgrading of features that people do want.  An often-quoted maxim is that 95% of the time, people use less than 5% of the features in a word processor.  The same could be said about most software products.  This five percent must be the easiest and most direct portion of the program.  Any feature that interferes with the five percent should seriously be considered done another way.

My Java programs are mostly hybrids of console (command line) and graphical applications.  I'm not ready to give up on command-line applications, and there are numerous situations where a simple status result from a program with a minimal interface is the best choice, such as needing to know if two distribution folders contain identical contents (CompareFolders) or if a downloaded file matches a known checksum (FileChecksum).  Because of this, my graphical interfaces (GUI) aren't as sophisticated as they could be.  It's not a sign of laziness or programming inability, although there are days when that's not entirely untrue!  The reason is that I always want the most important features to be available for either console or graphical applications.  Once you start adding critical features that only work in a graphical interface, then you may as well abandon the console interface.

Java applications tend to have three components: a graphical interface, a portion that does the real work, and the data obtained from the real work.  Console applications are a shortcut to the real work and its results.  The graphical interface is usually similar for different programs produced by the same author or part of the same application suite.  (This is a desirable trait, because it reduces learning time for the users.)  A few graphical buttons or menu items may move around, but the best way of updating multiple applications is often to do a very good job of rewriting one application with core features, and then dropping the working parts of other applications into copies of this rewrite.  This can be much faster and more reliable that trying to copy-and-paste small changes into each and every application, if the applications are cleanly separated into the three components of interface, processing, and data.

In my particular case, I have several applications that process one or more files, and display the results from the processing in a scrolling text area.  The text directly corresponds to standard output when run as a console application.  Many of the applications need or should process subfolders (recursive search).  For some, this is the obvious or expected behavior.  For others, it's optional.  A few probably don't need this feature, but having it won't hurt, so all of the applications were given the same core for searching files, folders, and subfolders.  All of them accept file or folder names on the command line, or can select one or more files or folders in the graphical interface.  Whether or not subfolders are searched recursively has a default value (on or off) for each program, depending upon the most likely usage.  Running as a console or graphical application produces essentially the same result, with graphical applications having more interaction (running status, background processing threads, a "cancel" button, etc).

You may download the programs and documentation, free for personal use.  I reserve the right to limit features and/or charge money for programs that have commercial potential.

Size Matters

Wednesday, 28 March 2007
by Keith Fenske

Judging from the hundreds of web pages that offer icon editors for Microsoft Windows, this is one of those projects that can be done fairly quickly.  An icon is a small, bitmapped image.  We all work with image editors when we edit photos, such as with Adobe Photoshop and others.  Those image editors often don't do icons.  They have hundreds of tools for hundreds of purposes, but they won't produce an icon file, because icons aren't a single image.  Icons are "resource" files containing multiple images in multiple sizes or color depths.  Image editors can read and write dozens of file formats, but with the assumption that one file contains one image.  To create icon files, you need a program with some tools from an image editor and the ability to keep track of multiple variations of the same or a similar image.

The size of icons makes them attractive to budding graphics programmers, starting with 16x16 pixels for the smallest icons, 32x32 for desktop icons, up to 64x64 for fancy Windows XP icons, and reaching perhaps 256x256 for Windows Vista.  That's pretty small as far as pictures go.  You can create decent icons with a simple color palette and mouse clicking each pixel on or off.  Reading and writing icon files involves reading and understanding the documentation for bitmapped images in Windows, which will complicate your life once you realize how many ways a picture can be stored (mostly to do with color depth).  From there it's a matter of what features you want in your program, and to be honest, what features you can implement.

When I made a FAVICON.ICO file for bookmarking my web pages, I tried a few icon editors, wasn't happy with how they worked, and wrote a new editor in Java following my own advice about design versus complexity.  You may download a ZIP archive with the program and documentation.  It's free for personal use, subject to the usual legal disclaimers and restrictions.

The program must be able to read most properly constructed icon files.  That means, monochrome color (1-bit color with 2 possible colors), 4-bit color with 16 possible colors, 8-bit color with 256 colors, 24-bit RGB color with millions of red-green-blue colors, and 32-bit color with RGB and alpha channels.  However, the program doesn't need to write such a wide array of color formats.  Monochrome icons aren't particularly interesting; their files are small, but 4-bit icons are already small enough and have a color selection.  Alpha channels require photo-realistic images, a level higher than I'm willing to put in a mostly free program.  That reduces the number of color depths to three: 4-bit, 8-bit, and 24-bit.  That's all the user needs to see, and that's all my program needs to support.

Color depths of one bit, four bits, or eight bits use a color palette of two colors, sixteen colors, or 256 colors.  Palette entries can be any RGB color.  The icon selects the appropriate color with a 1-bit, 4-bit, or 8-bit numerical index into the palette.  Since each palette entry can be any RGB color, there can be any number of palettes.  How many of those palettes should be supported?  On input, the palette is included in the icon file, so that's an easy decision.  On output, a choice must be made: the original palette, a standard palette, or a newly optimized palette?  Do you really want to write the tools for this, and the dialog boxes, when 24-bit RGB color is a perfectly good option, and computers have so much video memory that the total size of the icon image data is insignificant?  Choose standard palettes, like the 8-bit "web safe" colors, and switch to 24-bit color if the icon's data goes beyond the standard.  This is the first decision that means your icon editor isn't going to be a full-blown one-size-fits-all application.

The second big decision is the range of the drawing tools.  Basic tools are needed: setting a pixel to a particular color, erasing a pixel to make it transparent, and ... that's about it.  Flood filling a region?  Blending?  Overlays?  Go back a minute and re-read the second paragraph.  We all have software for editing photos, except that software has difficulty generating the icon file format.  Since it has no trouble generating the individual images, let your full-featured photo-editing program do the hard work; then copy-and-paste into the icon editor.  The icon editor takes care of packaging multiple icon images into one file, and details like transparency.

In two short decisions, you (acting as me) have identified what the program must do, and what can best be done by other software.  You have limited the scope of the project to what can be accomplished in all your spare time for a week or so.  Or, in my case, a little longer, as I added and removed features much like a mad scientist re-creating Frankenstein's monster, then redid a beautiful new version with what I knew would work.  I'm not adverse to a little experimentation; I just don't want the final result to look like it was cobbled together ... even if it was.  Hi, Frankie!

Saturday, March 31st.  Wherever you go, if you make an attempt to speak the local language, you will be much better received, even if it's only to say please, thank you, hello, good bye, and enough numbers to count money.  This is a very understandable reaction if you think about how you are when approached by someone who doesn't speak your language.  Equally understandable is the reaction you'll get if you behave as the ugly tourist, speaking louder and slower, as if to an idiot.  (Ugly tourists come from many countries, so there is no need to identify any particular country.)

Wednesday, April 4th.  I went to see the movie "Night at the Museum" today.  I had waited because the reviews were not good, even though I liked the preview.  Well, guess what?  It's the reviewers that are bad; the movie is fine.  It's a fun movie, with the pacing and editing just about right.  No scenes go on too long, and nothing seems cut short.  Sometimes movie reviewers should just shut up and have a good time.

Friday, April 6th.  One amusing result of some artificial intelligence (AI) applications: the more data they are working from, the less accurate they become.  You can tweak an OCR (optical character recognition) application to give 99% accurate results for ASCII text, but if you want Unicode text, good luck.

Tuesday, April 17th.  Announcing the preliminary release of the "HexEdit" Java application.  Read the PDF documentation if you know what hexadecimal is, and if you really want to really see what's really inside a file.  Download the application or peruse others.  In tune with my previous article ("Size Matters"), this program has 2900 lines of code and took about two weeks of effort.  Right now it's a bit of a memory hog.  If I think of a brilliant way of reducing the memory requirements while maintaining fast insertions and deletions, I'll make the changes.  Real soon now.  Yeah, RSN.

Update (Thursday, April 19th).  I added about 300 lines of code to improve the buffering of data inside the hex editor.  It can now handle files that are ten times bigger (for the same memory size), and runs two to three times faster in typical usage.  Well worth the effort!  The nice thing about Java is that I wrote my own data class to replace the standard Java Vector class, so very little else in the program needed changing, or even knows that the data is being managed by completely different routines.

Saturday, April 28th.  Is it just me, or is the quality of prints and enlargements from digital photo labs worse than old film labs?  I have better pictures taken years ago with cheaper cameras than I'm getting today from "state of the art" digital photofinishing.

Update (Friday, May 25th).  I went to a different store, one with less attitude and better equipment, and got better results.

Saturday, May 5th.  We finally got some rain: a slow, steady falling that was everything we could hope for.  One normally thinks of snow melting and providing moisture for the ground, and this may be true on flat farm fields, but in the city, most of the snowmelt just runs away, downhill, lost into streets and sewers.  A day like yesterday does much more, with 26 mm of light rain (one inch).  The previous record for May 4th was 21.1 mm in 1933.  Today looks to be hazy sunshine and warm.  Spring is a very pleasant time of year around here.

Buy Bigger Disk Drives

Sunday, 20 May 2007
by Keith Fenske

Windows Vista can't be installed on a disk drive or partition smaller than 10 GB.  It can't be installed on a drive formatted as FAT32.  It has to be NTFS format and it has to be big.  A bare installation of Windows Vista Ultimate occupies 5.30 GB, plus paging and hibernation files, both of which depend upon the amount of system memory (RAM).  Select all files in the root folder, except for hibernation and paging, and ask for their properties; you will be told that something like 39,915 files in 7,274 folders are using 7.75 GB.  The difference between 5.30 GB and 7.75 GB is compression: obscure system folders are compressed to save space (hence, one requirement for NTFS, along with being able to create fake folders that redirect elsewhere).

So far, all this tells you is that Vista is big.  You would have known that from the DVD it came on (4.7 GB capacity, or 4700 MB), instead of the CD for Windows XP (700 MB capacity).  What it doesn't tell you is how much space is occupied by duplicate files.  Many if not all system setup files are stored at least twice on your hard disk drive: once in the original setup format, and once as the actual running file that you'd expect.  This has advantages.  Should a file get damaged, such as by spyware or a virus, the system can bring back the original file.  This has disadvantages.  All setup files become important, even features that you never use, never asked for, and don't want.

I was torture testing my Java applications.  They are intended to handle large amounts of data, so what better test than a disk drive full of thousands of files?  The duplicate file finder reports that Vista has 14,094 possible duplicates using 3,794,717,250 bytes of disk space (3.53 GB).  That's 45% of the total size of all uncompressed files.  Of course, many of those duplicates are necessary.  What is interesting is some of the largest:

• PINTLGT.IMD (63.9 MB) appears twice in \Windows\IME\IMESC5\DICTS and \Windows\winsxs and has something to do with East Asian text input, probably Chinese.
• L2057.NGR (54.7 MB) in \Windows\Speech\Engines\SR\en-GB and \Windows\winsxs does spoken words for British English.
• "Apollo 13.dvr-ms" (47.8 MB), "Jewels of Caribbean.dvr-ms" (44.8 MB), and "Vertigo.dvr-ms" (50.6 MB) in "\Users\Public\Recorded TV\Sample Media" and \Windows\winsxs are movies.  You really need two copies of sample videos, don't you?
• followed by more video clips, speech engines, multiple copies of East Asian fonts (the biggest of which is the Chinese MINGLIUB.TTC file at 32.2 MB and which may not work on non-Chinese systems), up to four copies of East Asian input methods, and games.

Now that you know how much space is wasted, forget about it.  There is nothing you can do.  You have lost all control over your own computer.  Applications will install themselves, and squirrel away a copy of their setup files.  This has been happening for quite some time, most noticably with Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages that linger even after applications have been removed.  The fact that Windows Vista itself duplicates most files is a bonus or a curse, depending upon your point of view.  The East Asian fonts and input methods are the biggest files that most people in North America never use.  However, anyone that recognizes more than the 68 or so characters on a standard English keyboard is very glad that you can do most languages on any edition of Windows.

Buy a bigger hard drive.  Buy more memory.  Oh, just buy a new computer!  Don't try to upgrade older computers to Windows Vista.  I'd give Vista at least 60 GB for the system partition (the C: drive).  If you have a bigger hard drive, and you want to partition it into system and data areas, keep the system partition at least 50 or 60 GB.  Whatever partition you install Vista on becomes the C: drive, and Vista doesn't share well with previous versions of Windows, so give Vista lots of space on the first partition on the first disk drive.

"Some of the most uncharitable people I've met have worked for charities.  It's as if they found their good cause in life and everyone else can just shut up and do what they're told."  (Keith Fenske, May 2007)

Friday, May 25th.  In today's business news, Dell has announced plans to sell some models of its computers at Wal-Mart stores.  Considering how Wal-Mart endlessly squeezes suppliers on each round of purchases, I don't see how this can make money for Dell -- and to compete in the "lowest price is the law" marketplace (Zellers), their machines will have to get even cheaper to produce.  The internal components of most mass-market PCs are already somewhat strange.  For months/years, I've been joking about Dell wanting to be like HP (Compaq), and gosh darn, they've gone and done it!  How the mighty have fallen.

Thursday, May 31st.  From an e-mail conversation:

FM:  Weather here is not as interesting as yours, but still very hot to very cold, sometimes several times on the same day, seemingly at the click of some insanely programmed celestial thermostat.

KF:  Damn, that's where I left it!  Please dial it down a couple degrees, too, because this global warming is getting out of hand.

Monday, June 4th.  Two unusual things happened today: I bought a floppy disk drive, and someone asked for permission.  It's been almost three years since anyone has actually asked to use my sample Java source code in another application.  Of course I said yes.  What else am I going to do?  The code is on my web page for anyone to see or copy, and I have no way of knowing who does what with it.  A person with the courtesy to negotiate a license is someone that should be encouraged.  It's the ones that don't ask that are a problem; however, I'm having much too good a day today to dwell on such a potentially negative subject.  I'll play with my new floppy disk drive.  It makes a different sound, because it's a Mitsumi instead of a Panasonic, more of a whoosh sound than a chunk sound.  The old drive was worn out from heavy use, many years after floppies supposedly became obsolete.  That's okay; I don't mind.  IBM PC computers at their very hearts still look for a floppy disk when they start up.  We order them on custom-built towers, especially servers.  Setup and diagnostics are easier from a real floppy than from a silly CD image of a floppy.  Where do people think those CD images come from anyway?  Oh, right, milk comes from a store.

Update (Friday, October 4th).  The new Mitsumi D359M3D floppy disk drive became unreliable after a couple months and was replaced with a newer Panasonic JU-256A738PC drive.

Lack of Courage

Wednesday, 6 June 2007
by Keith Fenske

Windows Vista is Windows XP with the "Aqua" interface from the Apple Macintosh but called "Aero" by Microsoft.  Both feature transparent or semi-opaque elements that fade in and fade out like a child's game of peek-a-boo.  Apple did this first, by a couple years, so it's their idea, no matter how much Microsoft dresses up Vista and claims credit.  Microsoft can take credit for renaming many things that were fine just the way they were.  Do you really care whether your files are in a folder called "My Documents" or in a folder called "Documents"?  Scratch the "My" prefix from all personal folder names in Vista.  Does it matter whether account profiles are stored in subfolders of "Documents and Settings" or in a root folder called "Users"?  These decisions were made for Windows 98/ME and Windows 2000, and were equally valid in either direction, but now after several years of going one way, we are reverting back to what Windows NT did previously!  Some changes in Vista serve no purpose other than to confuse people who are already uncomfortable with their computers (i.e., Windows Internet Explorer 7).  These cosmetic changes are like the Aero interface: you can stare at it all day, but you'll never see through to what's underneath.

Windows has experienced two major changes, and both to do with hardware.  Up until Windows 3.1 (1992), memory was addressed with 16-bit segments and offsets, a real pain to program unless you learned tricks from the days of Intel 8086 processors.  Later versions, including Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5, switched to linear 32-bit addresses for memory.  Windows NT did this thoroughly and provided only limited support for well-behaved 16-bit applications.  Windows 95/98/ME tried to keep MS-DOS alive as well as supporting old 16-bit Windows applications "better and faster" as the advertising said.  Windows 95/98/ME ultimately died, replaced by Windows 2000/XP based on Windows NT, because 95/98/ME had a memory model that was already dead.  The real question is why it took so long to die, and why programmers were tormented for so many years to support two styles of Windows that weren't really the same.

A 32-bit address is enough for 4 gigabytes (GB) of memory.  The most common memory size today on new computers is one gigabyte; the preferred size is 2 GB.  The maximum of 4 GB will be easily reached by next year.  A 32-bit processor can't go any further, ignoring system-level tricks that are about as ugly as the old 16-bit segmented addresses.  In other words, 32-bit processors and software have reached their memory limit now, before Windows Vista even begins wide-scale acceptance!

So why is Microsoft selling 32-bit editions of Windows Vista?  For the same reason Windows 95 was sold to replace Windows 3.1.  Lack of courage.  Rather than make a clean jump to the next generation, Microsoft holds onto the past.  The result is a compromise that pleases no one.  Many old programs don't in fact work.  Many new programs are limited by historical debris that no longer serves a purpose.  Vista should have been released as an entirely new 64-bit product.  A typical upgrade for many people is to buy a new computer with 32-bit Vista, only to find that there is no support for their old printer and scanner, so they buy new peripherals, only to find that many of their old applications won't run, so they also buy new software.  In the end, they have replaced their entire computer, with equipment that is already obsolete because it's based on the 32-bit version of Vista.  Just like people found when upgrading from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, over ten years ago.

The solution is to make the new product new, and to support the old product for the remainder of its normal lifetime.  Windows 95/98/ME should never have been.  A cleaned up version of Windows 3.1 (with some clever name such as Windows 3.2) could have been maintained for people that were unwilling or unable to upgrade.  Then the jump would have been to the Windows NT/2000/XP path.  In the same way, a cleaned up version of Windows XP should be kept as the final 32-bit edition of Windows.  Microsoft promised to support Windows XP for eight years from its introduction (late 2001), so what's a couple more years?  Especially considering that the best anyone could buy in January 2007 was Windows XP Professional with Microsoft Office 2003.  A new computer lasts about five years, so by 2010 or so, almost all Windows computers would be based on 64-bit Vista, with no need for continued 32-bit support.

(The Apple Macintosh went through similar hardware shifts when it upgraded from Motorola 68000 processors to PowerPC chips, then to Intel chips.  This didn't hurt Apple's sales, but never seemed to improve their low market share either.)

Update (April 2008).  Unbelievably, the successor to Windows Vista (called "Windows 7" for now and expected in late 2009 or early 2010) will be released in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.  D'oh!  Some mega-corporations never learn.

Since My Last Tow

Monday, 11 June 2007
by Keith Fenske

The next day, a call to my auto club (Alberta Motor Association) got an immediate answer from a real person: no recording, no waiting.  Estimated time of arrival for the tow truck was up to an hour.  Actual time was five minutes, a friendly fellow named Aaron.  The car started and ran long enough for us to position it farther away from the curb, which was better for Aaron to hook it up using a special lift for front-wheel drive cars.  I didn't have to go with him to the shop, because I'd already made an appointment.  Another neighbor stopped to tease me briefly as they drove by.  Part of the towing distance was free (with my club membership), and I paid a few dollars for the extra kilometers.

The shop called a couple hours later to explain the damages, mostly a bad alternator along with a few important repairs such as a new muffler (the throaty sound was fun in the beginning, but getting loud), spark plugs, and a tune-up.  The car was done by the end of the afternoon.  Not the end of the week, but the very same day.  At a price I could afford.  It's been a good two days, other than stalling in traffic.  I drive a 19-year-old car and a sense of humor really helps.  Of all the things that could go wrong, replacing an alternator is fine.

My neighbor who pushed is giving me a ride to the shop to pick up my car.  Thank you, everyone.  You've been great.  My gratitude will be heard in a muffler that doesn't shake your windows.  (Joke.)

Tuesday, June 19th.  A work day out at the church camp getting everything ready for the children's summer camping program.  I painted boards, in the middle of the grass, with a brush and lots of paint.  For a break, I painted a hand railing on some steps.  Then I painted more boards.  A nice shade of medium gray, the "trim" gray found on many houses and industrial buildings, not quite battleship gray and not quite light gray.  I also painted my pants and my gloves.

"When you can't breathe, nothing else matters."  (This phrase is a registered trademark of the American Lung Association, c.1992.)

Wednesday, June 27th.  The TV show Traveler, another open-ended conspiracy that will play for as long as there are viewers, lost its way after the fourth episode.  Maybe writers could learn something from The Prisoner, which was broadcast on British ITV about, oh, forty years ago today.

An Unfair Burden

Friday, 6 July 2007
by Keith Fenske

Your internet service provider (ISP) pays its supplier (usually a telecom) based on line speed and network traffic.  You pay a fixed monthly fee; the traffic details are hidden from you.  You couldn't afford the cheapest ISP line (T1) at several hundred dollars per month, even though it has the same approximate speed as residential ADSL at thirty dollars a month (around 1.5 megabits per second, or Mbs, for downloads).  Your ISP makes money by buying a high-speed line and renting access to thousands of subscribers, on the assumption that most subscribers won't use their access most of the time.  You may think you make frequent use of your "always on" internet connection, checking for e-mail and surfing the internet, but the total network traffic generated (amount of data transferred) for most people is very small.

A typical residential ADSL agreement has a monthly fee of around thirty dollars, and allows you to upload or download one gigabyte (GB) per day, or perhaps 30 GB per month.  More than that, you pay $2 for each additional gigabyte.  (All numbers are approximate, and vary by region and provider.)  How much can you download in one day at 1.5 Mbs?  About 15 GB, the equivalent of several full-length DVD movies or over 5,000 MP3 songs.  If that were important to you, then I'm sure you wouldn't mind paying an extra $30/day or $900/month for your internet access.  No?

Peak usage is not really a problem for an ISP, because they already have a surcharge mechanism in place, as explained above.  It's typical usage under the "free" limit that troubles them.  During a light day of business, I will download about 10 megabytes (MB), which is 0.01 GB.  Some people do more; the average is much less, because many subscriber lines are idle.  For the sake of argument, accept 10 MB as typical daily usage for all subscribers.  Then in one month, a typical subscriber will generate 10x30 or 300 MB or 0.3 GB of internet traffic.  At $2 per gigabyte, that's not even a dollar.  Even at ten times the traffic for someone who likes to download big files, only $6 of the $30 per month that the subscriber pays the ISP goes to network usage; the rest goes to areas such as infrastructure, operations, employees, profit, etc.  At full usage, up to the "free" limit, more network traffic is generated than is paid for by the monthly fee ($60 versus $30).  There is nothing left over to pay for the ISP's other costs.

The traffic generated by voice or internet telephone depends upon the sound quality, which in turn depends upon compression ratios, network overhead, etc.  To simplify the argument, assume that voice traffic is equivalent to the maximum produced by a telephone modem at about 50 Kbs (kilobits per second).  Then six solid hours of talk would be 100 MB.  Calculate this as 50 kilobits/second x 0.1 bytes/bit x 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour x 6 hours x 0.001 megabytes/kilobyte.  Talk is about one order of magnitude (ten times) more traffic than typical e-mail and web surfing; video is two to three orders of magnitude (one hundred to one thousand times), depending upon image size.

A few customers making strong use of the internet is not a problem for an ISP; many or most customers doing the same thing is a problem.  An ISP can't afford to operate this way.  The ISP has two choices: increase the basic monthly rate, or charge extra for traffic.  Fixed monthly rates are a strong selling point to the consuming public.  Dropping the "free" limit and increasing surcharges would be an administrative and public-relations nightmare.  A third but less likely alternative is for the ISP to provide more service for less money, on the hope that increasing technological capacity will somehow satisfy demand.

The aggressive push to sell internet telephone and video is based on the assumption that someone else will pay for the cost of upgrading the infrastructure to support these services.  Consumers are told that these features are free with their internet account, plus a small fee to the company offering the services.  They aren't free.  We all pay for equipment upgrades, and we all wait longer while heavier traffic delays our relatively light requests.  There is a suggestion that the internet be restructured into "priority" and "regular" traffic, with additional fees for faster response needed with voice and video.  However, when one service generates more income than another, the lower service receives progressively less support until it becomes unusable.

The internet will eventually move towards a higher level of traffic for all the multimedia toys, but voice and video may be what breaks the existing model, forcing us into a more "pay as you go" pricing scheme.  The companies pushing multimedia would be happy with that.

Monday, July 9th.  I made a whole new section

clematis flowers

on my web page with desktop wallpaper from my own photographs.  Then I deleted it and the links.  I wasn't happy with how it looked or the size of the files.  There are too many screen resolutions to support.  Standard "square" monitors have resolutions such as 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high, which is an aspect ratio of 1.33 to 1 (width to height).  The next bigger "square" size is 1280x1024, a ratio of 1.25 to 1.  Wide-screen monitors are typically 1.6 to 1.  Windows XP and later are happy to stretch or squeeze BMP or JPEG images to fill the screen.  Windows 2000 and earlier accept only BMP images, won't squeeze large images to fit smaller screens, and some versions won't stretch small images to fit larger screens.  To support all versions of Windows back to Windows 98, I would need files for several resolutions in BMP format, and to support non-Windows machines, I would need many of those same sizes in JPEG format.  I could assume that wide-screen monitors are on newer computers (Windows XP or later), and so provide only JPEG files for wide screen, but I would have to supply several different aspect ratios or further assume that most are 1.6 to 1.  BMP files take a lot of disk space, about five times as much as a JPEG with minimal compression.  The result is a dozen files and several megabytes of web space for each distinct image.  Too much space and too much work, for something that is given away for free.

One of the hardest things for the children of recent immigrants to understand is how important education is in North America or Europe, because their parents usually work very hard but don't have good jobs.  (Keith Fenske, July 2007)

Friday, July 13th.  The first honest review I've seen of Microsoft Office 2007, courtesy of thehankster on eBay:

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
A big step backward from Office 2003!

You are bidding on an almost new Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007.  This suite contains Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and OneNote 2007.  I bought it at Fry's last month for $149.99 [USD].  I installed it to replace my Office Student and Teacher 2003 version.  I found it so difficult to use that I removed it and reinstalled 2003.  You can't return opened software, so here it is.  If you're into pain, this is your chance to pick up the 2007 version for a very good price.  And you can put this big step backwards on three (count 'em, 3) PCs.  I don't think I "registered" it -- I was having Internet access problems when it was installing.  It is complete with CD, COA [certificate of authenticity], and Product Activation Key -- everything that came in the original box, in the original box.  So, if you win, don't blame me if you don't like this new "landfill" version.  I told you up front!

Misfits in Cyber-Space

Saturday, 14 July 2007
by Keith Fenske

My saying "Floating Papers on the Sea of Japan" doesn't actually refer to a body of water, but to the story that I was writing while in Japan....  It's a literary allusion: think of sheets of paper as floating over the country of Japan.  The papers are the water; the country is the sea.

Did this web site contact me before publishing information about me?  No, and putting anyone's e-mail address on a public web site without permission is troubling.  Did they investigate or do they understand what my words mean?  Obviously not.  This complaint has been listed for over two years (since 2005/3/18).  Somebody with an axe to grind probably searched on Google for "Sea of Japan" and reported every page that disagreed with their preferred view of the world.  In one of those ironies so common on the internet, a web site devoted to exposing the mistakes of others has failed to apply the same standards to themselves, in effect, producing and distributing their own misinformation.

These are hardly diplomats in cyber-space.  Confused and pretentious children would be more accurate.

Thursday, July 19th.  The movie giants Cineplex Entertainment bought four locations from Cinema City and promptly shut down the cheap theaters near my house.  They had been showing second-run movies for a couple bucks admission, at about the same time movies were released for home sales/rental.  A lot of movies aren't worth $12 regular admission, and although I'd rather see them in a real theater, even an old theater with cheap seats, I probably just won't see them at all.

(The Edmonton Journal newspaper reported this news on August 1st, citing July 13th as the closing date.  The report appeared on the same page as the movie listings, suggesting that the newspaper took more than two weeks to notice there weren't any listings for the missing movie theater!)

Monday, July 23rd.  We were discussing the psychology of dogs and came up with the following list of motivational factors:

1. food;
2. eating food;
3. looking for food;
4. sleeping;
5. playing; and
6. looking for more food.

Tuesday, July 24th.  I had the misfortune of getting a new clerk today at the post office.  I was sending a mid-sized envelope to England by air mail.  The clerk charged me $7.60 for 92 grams.  When I questioned this, pointing out that letter mail for 100 grams was only $3.60, she insisted that air mail meant "small packet" (parcel) and there was no "air mail" category for letter mail.  I explained that all overseas letters go by air mail.  She didn't believe me, and showed me in an officious tone how she selected the product category on her computer (press F2 for this, press F8 for this, and see, it's $7.60).  I said try the letter mail category, for which the computer displayed the lower price.  She still wouldn't admit that anything was wrong; I could talk to her manager in a few minutes.  The manager looked at the envelope, measured it on the standard letter template (the envelope was well within range), and said "letter mail" for $3.60.  The manager and I then had a more reasonable conversation outside in the hallway.  Of course, next time I'll either get the same clerk and the same attitude, or a different clerk and the same problem.

Wednesday, July 25th.  This year's winner for the earliest back-to-school advertising goes to last year's winner: Staples, an office supply store.  July?  Less than a month after school finished?  Two calendar months before school starts again (September)?  At this rate, I'm sure they'll have their Christmas advertising ready in October....  Only five more shopping months until the big marketing event called December 25th!

This portion of "Bloggo - The Non Blog" is copyright © 2006, 2007 by Keith Fenske.  All rights reserved.