|
|
|
|
 May
16, 2008: A Gunk Issue with Eraser 5.7
I'm over at my sister-in-law Kathy's house, taking a look at her
Dell SX270 computer, which I installed here last summer. She asked
me to look at it because it had suddenly gotten sluggish, and I
was prepared to find viruses or spyware. Instead I found a 40 GB
hard drive that was 98% full, when the last time I was here it was
less than 50% full. That was mighty suspicious, and I ran TreeSizeFree
to tell me where all that file space had gone. It had gone into
a single folder under C:\ called ~ERAFSWD.TMP, which was hogging
a staggering 21 GB of disk space in many hundreds of very large
files.
The ~ERAFSWD.TMP folder, as it turns out, is created every time
the free Eraser
file shredder app begins an erasing run, and is deleted when
Eraser finishes. A week or so ago, the machine's video driver crashed
for reasons unclear, and had the bad karma to crash when Eraser
was doing its default daily scheduled run erasing unused disk space.
So Eraser had never released the temp space it allocated while it
was running.
The solution is simple: Exit Eraser (it's a tray app) and delete
~ERAFSWD.TMP. Then (to make it less likely to happen again) remove
the scheduled erase run, which is set up by default when Eraser
is installed. Eraser is most useful when emptying the Recycle Bin,
and installs a Recycle Bin context menu item for that purpose. Unless
you work with a great deal of confidential information, daily scheduled
free space erasing is massive overkill. I do a free space run on
demand every few months.
It was my own damned fault, as I had installed Eraser on this machine
last summer without removing the daily scheduled run. Sometimes
even a master degunker generates massive gunk. Mea culpa.
|
May
15, 2008: UltraDefrag
As part of my research for Degunking Essentials (basically
a condensation and updating of my three Degunking titles) I happened
upon a free disk defrag utility that's worth trying: UltraDefrag.
It's open source and hosted on Sourceforge, meaning it's safe—at
least if that's where you get it from.
The defrag utility built into Windows 2000 and XP is a crippled
version of Diskeeper.
It defrags but does not compact—that is, it does not
consolidate the defragmented files toward the low end of the hard
drive, and sometimes leaves a large number of contiguous files scattered
around on the drive. The commercial version of Diskeeper is quite
good and I bought it years ago, but UltraDefrag seems to do everything
Diskeeper does, and it's free. UltraDefrag compacts files, separating
files and free space. As an option it can also defragment the page
file at boot time, something I've never done. (I don't perceive
any increase in responsiveness having done it, though. I doubt it
has to be done very often.) The UI is less whizzy, but results are
what you're looking for, not flashy graphics. UltraDefrag is small,
simple, reasonably fast, and easy to use. Get
it here. Highly recommended.
|
May
13, 2008: Odd Lots
- Sorry for the recent quietude here; the weekend was a whirlwind,
and it took all of yesterday just to catch my breath.
- Scott Kurtz' PvP webcomic celebrated its first ten years by
showing us that Brent
Sienna actually has eyes. Wow.
- Allan Heim sent me a pointer to a
nice article on the Fermi Paradox that expresses a position
I have been drifting toward for most of my life: That we are probably
alone in the universe, perhaps not only as intelligent, tool-building
beings but also as living things, period. The author makes a case
that being alone in the universe would be very good news, but
not for the reason you might think. Read it.
- Borland
is apparently selling their CodeGear division (which develops
and supports Delphi) to Embarcadero
Technologies, a database tools company. This was not unexpected,
and to be honest with you, I can't tell if it's a good idea or
not. One of Delphi's most serious problems is that it got so good
after five or six years that most people stopped upgrading; I'm
amazed at how many people are still using Delphi 6. The cost of
the product was also an issue—there is no ~$100 starter edition—and
the Turbo Delphi Explorer experiment demonstrated how important
the ability to install components was. An amazing number of people
wrote to me to say that they downloaded the free product, installed
it, fooled with it for a week or so, and then went back to Delphi
6.
- From Mike Sergent comes a pointer to a
NYT piece indicating that most people do not have the training
to discern the level of subtlety in wine flavor that they
claim to, and that a lot of it may exist mostly in our heads anyway.
This is not news (to me, at least) but it's nice to see it going
mainstream.
- Michael Covington posted a
fascinating graph of changes in home prices from Q4 2006 to
Q4 2007, suggesting that the "housing bubble" has not
been evenly distributed. The coasts have suffered, as have most
major cities and trendy places like Colorado's Front Range, but
flyover places like Nebraska and Wyoming have posted solid increases
in that time. In addition to that, sharp differences by state
suggest that state-level housing and banking policies have more
to do with housing cost changes than most people are willing to
admit.
- Also from Michael is a
graph demonstrating that the US economy is not as much of a disaster
as Big Media has been hammering on. (I won't invite all the
usual hate mail by explaining in detail why this is, as it's pretty
obvious if you think about it.)
- The other day I found myself thinking something remarkable (for
me): I would rather buy a Mac and run my essential Windows apps
in a Parallels window (or in a compatibility box like Crossover)
than move to Vista.
|
May
8, 2008: Meeting Juliana Leigh Roper
Bill & Gretchen returned home from Madison yesterday
with their new baby, Juliana Leigh. They were a little ragged from
the stress of the adventure and spending almost a week in a hotel
room, but the payoff was difficult to calculate: the little girl
sleeping on Gretchen's shoulder. Mission accomplished: Julie is
home.
Gretchen dropped her in my lap and I held her for
a little while, Gretchen
having made sure that her diaper was correctly applied and (as best
she could tell) tight. Julie looked around for awhile and squirmed
a little, but mostly she wanted to fall asleep. Like her sister
Katie before her, she is a very placid and un-fussy baby. I heard
her cry some when Gretchen changed her diaper a little later, but
apart from that she took it easy on Gretchen's shoulder. She lay
quietly in her magic stroller (magic in the way it folds down to
nothing and slides behind the seats in their van) while we had supper
at Sweet Baby Ray's, even with all the fuss that the waitresses
were making over her. Being six days old, she still has the ruddiness
of complexion that one expects of newborns, and the pale blue eyes
that most infants have before their pigment develops. Bill has blue
eyes. Gretchen's, like mine, are very brown. Julie's could still
go either way.
Nothing more to offer this morning than that. I'm
working on Degunking Essentials as I have for the last few
days, and will rejoin Carol later today. Tomorrow we launch south
to Champaign to witness our younger nephew Matt graduate from the
U of I, and with no crisp idea of my free time or connectivity,
it's hard to know when I'll post again, but don't despair if you
don't see anything before Monday.
|
May
7, 2008: Odd Lots
- Here at the condo this morning, I can't bring up squat on the
Web because everybody's out there trying to figure out who won
the Democratic primaries last night. So I did an absolutely unheard
of thing: I went down to the White Hen, got some of their great
coffee, and picked up a newspaper. What a notion.
- I'm hearing more and more people say that Wi-Fi doesn't work
as well as it used to, which is weird because microwave physics
hasn't changed recently. But...look at how many APs Windows can
see from wherever you are. From my kitchen table here, NetStumbler
sensed twelve APs...and walking around inside our dinky
little condo picked up four more. Three of the strongest signals
were on default Channel 6—and five out of sixteen were cleverly
named "linksys." I don't think it's the physics, folks.
- After Meetup.com went all-paid (and highly paid) I investigated
an alternative called Gatheroo, which later (in response to another
damfool lawsuit from somebody) became Zanby.
The
site's been redesigned and is worth a look if you want to
start a meatspace social network where you live. There are both
free and paid levels of participation, and it's certainly not
as expensive as Meetup.
- Matthew Reed
(and lots of others after him) sent me pointers to articles about
the
recent implementation of memristors, which are a species of
passive electronic component postulated in 1971 but not actually
implemented until HP researchers made some earlier this year.
Whether this interests you varies directly by the strength of
your passion for electronics, and whereas I understand the concept
now, my head is still spinning trying to figure out what it implies.
Everybody's talking about better computer memory, sure...but what
could this do in simple analog circuits?
- Jim Strickland sent me a pointer to a
YouTube video about a flame triode amplifier/oscillator lashup,
and guys, you gotta see this. It's basically a vacuum tube without
either vacuum or tube: When the electrodes get hot, it starts
amplifying. I don't fully understand the physics yet, but this
would be one fantastic high school science fair project.
The question arose in our local group as to whether this could
be considered steampunkish, and I'm not sure. People in the steampunk
era had no problems generating reasonably hard vacuum and blowing
glass envelopes. What they had problems with was understanding
electrons. Nonetheless, with a big enough flame and some honkin'
batteries, you could have done some impressive things back in
1888.
- Global Cooling adherents have been sending me pointers to Watts
Up With That, and Icecaps.us.
Fascinating reading, including numerous facets of the climate
change discussion that you won't see in Big Media. F'rinstance:
Weather monitoring installations that were built sixty or seventy
years ago out in the leafy countryside have recently become surrounded
by new development, buildings, pavement, etc., and as a result
are now in the middle of heat islands. What might that do to long-term
temperature data? Hmmmm....
|
May
6, 2008: Josef Fritzl, Evil, and Dumb Luck
Most of you have probably heard by now of Josef
Fritzl, an Austrian psychopath who created a custom dungeon
under his home, kept his daughter a prisoner there for 24 years,
and sired seven children by her. I haven't been this disturbed by
a crime since the boggling case of John Wayne Gacy, right here in
NW metro Chicago, who tortured, murdered and then buried 33 young
men under his house back in the 1970s.
Like it or not, crimes like this prompt one to ask an ugly question:
If evil like this is possible, why are we still here? Why are we
not already extinct? (Those who have studied the history of the
20th Century might say it was a very near thing.) I have a theory,
though I admit it's a little thin to hang the future of humanity
on: It's difficult to be brilliant and evil at the same time.
Evil as we define it generally comes with limitations, primarily
the limitation of not being able to see yourself and your own situation
very clearly.
Right
Men (as described by A. E. Van Vogt and Colin Wilson) are the
best example: They just cannot conceive of the possibility that
they are wrong. A huge number of Right Men thus never get very far
in life. We see through them easily, recognize them as egomaniacal
psychopaths, and do our best to avoid them. They have a bad habit
of getting injured or killed in conflicts with others. Even when
they somehow succeed in society to a degree, they are almost invariably
humbled at some point, which is unbearable to them and often causes
them to die young.
This is a good thing for us, as truly brilliant evil is extremely
dangerous. What most "ordinary" evil people (like Fritzl) have that
isn't often remarked upon is simple, dumb, statistical luck.
Most criminals get caught eventually, and the worse their crimes
are, the more likely they are to get caught. Some vanishingly rare
few end up skating past justice for years and years (like Fritzl),
and we only see a couple per century who are so lucky that they
end up in command of armies. (Think Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.)
There are a lot of Fritzls out there. Most try evil things and
get caught very quickly; you see them on the news all the time with
their coats over their heads. Some get by for awhile, through a
combination of luck and unusual intelligence. Only a handful are
lucky enough to get away with the sort of depravity that John Wayne
Gacy or Josef Fritzl got away with. Choosing an easily concealable
form of evil is part of that luck, and sometimes there is a lot
of cunning hard work involved. (Like creating a custom dungeon with
flush toilets in the basement, or burying 33 bodies under your house
without stinking up the neighborhood. I still don't entirely understand
how Gacy managed that.)
As for where individual evil itself comes from, I think (against
all political correctness) that it's primarily genetic. We're born
along a bell curve, with Mother Teresa on one end and Stalin on
the other. The optimist in me would like to think that the curve
is biased toward the good. But whether or not we're evenly distributed
across that bell curve, good and evil as success strategies are
not symmetrical. Good is outward-looking, cooperates with others,
and is generally supported by society as a whole. Evil handicaps
itself in various ways. (Read Colin Wilson's A Criminal History
of Mankind for hundreds of pages of examples.) Evil overestimates
its chances, isolates itself, picks fights, and operates within
a seriously distorted view of reality. This is fortunate, otherwise
we'd long be extinct. But every now and then an evil individual
gets catastrophically lucky, and we witness crimes that make us
gasp. Given the huge number of moving parts in our seriously overstuffed
world, this is inevitable, and the real astonishment, perhaps, lies
in the fact that evil remains as rare as it is.
|
May
5, 2008: In the Port 2525...
Finally got out to Chicago and spent a mad few days visiting family
and running errands, after presenting two sessions at the annual
conference of the American Society for Indexing in Denver last Friday.
I gave the keynote talk and it was well-received—my position
that pages are essential and reflowability is a fetish that carries
a lot of subtle dangers—but the other talk, which was basically
a how-to on getting Windows to work tolerably well, was SRO. People
are still struggling with Windows, and when I asked, their reaction
to Vista was basically unprintable. I got the impression from their
questions after the session that something like Degunking Windows
needs to be done again, but covering both hardware and software
in the same volume. We did a separate book a couple of years ago
called Degunking Your PC, and if I do something again, it
will draw on both books. I'm taking notes. We'll see if and where
it wanders.
Computer crankiness always seems to erupt as soon as I kick my
shoes off and get to work at my Chicago-area satellite office. When
I tried to answer some email here, I found to my supreme annoyance
that ATT/Yahoo had changed the game again: Simply blocking port
25 and requiring that all outbound mail pass through their SMTP
servers was not enough. Now they require that every From: address
has to be explicitly registered on their Web site or the SMTP connection
to their servers will be blocked.
Screw that. I did a little research based on a fleeting memory
that some hosting services listen on ports other than 25 for outbound
email, and voila! My hoster listens on port 2525, and after
90 seconds' worth of tweaking Thunderbird's settings, I was able
to answer mail again.
Ructions didn't end there. About ten minutes after booting up,
my video signal started going crazy. I took the SX270 apart, determined
that the insides were squeaky clean and not especially hot, and
was scratching my head after seeing the problem persist after a
couple of reboots. In frustration I gave the Samsung 204B a hard
whack on one side, and the video signal fell immediately back into
line. Because the cables were quite tight, I can only assume that
the damned thing has a loose connection somewhere internally.
Anger sometimes works, heh.
|
May
1, 2008: My Last Brin. Really.
Not ten minutes ago, my brother-in-law Bill
Roper called to let us know that they had gotten The Call, and
he and my sister Gretchen
were on their way to Madison, as their second and last child had
just been born there.
Those who haven't been following Contra for very long may not know
precisely
what's going on here, and I still boggle a little myself, SF
guy though I claim to be. Recapping: For medical reasons, my sister
cannot carry children to term herself. After conceiving in vitro
years ago and storing the embryos under liquid nitrogen, Gretchen
and Bill went off to find a gestational carrier to bring their children
to term. It wasn't exactly easy, but mission accomplished: Katie
Beth Roper now has a sister, born at 8:10 AM this morning, central
daylight time. Nine pounds nine ounces, no problems reported.
Deo gratias.
My immediate family is complete. We'll be on a plane Saturday to
head out there and celebrate.
|
|
